Floyd Strimling's Cloud Predictions for 2013

By Floyd Strimling

Google challenges Amazon AWS for public cloud supremacy

With far too much attention being placed on an OpenStack competitor to Amazon, Google Compute Engine will emerge as the clear alternative. Google’s secret sauce includes a complex mix of datacenters, virtualization, breakthrough software, a comprehensive fiber backbone, and the use of new technologies that are crucial to Google’s own core business and the public cloud. The challenge with the hoisters jumping into cloud is they have no skin in the game nor any learning from years of struggling to make the infrastructure work. Google’s secret weapon is SDN as they’ve been doing pieces of this for years while its relatively new for everyone else on the OpenStack front trouble is a brewing…

VMware’s control of SDN has already triggered responses from Eucalyptus. It is not the only way to do things. Additionally, this stack idea without a common platform is troubling. Rackspace is effectively using OpenStack but has to do a lot of dev on their own to make it remotely competitive to Amazon meanwhile the enterprise has no idea what an Openstack is. With VMware (possibly) and Red Hat ready to launch distributions, the game is going to change big time.

Imagine the headlines, VMware saves OpenStack…marvelous. Also, Openstack is becoming a brand which is problematic as is.

OpenStack stumbles under the weight of its commercializers

Speaking of OpenStack, in 2013 we will see the first signs of cracks in the OpenStack Foundation as competitive commercial offerings from both Red Hat and VMware threaten this promising open source project. As altruistic goals meet the brutal reality of capitalism, customers/prospects and not technologists will appoint the winners and losers.

Converged infrastructure led M&A shakes industry to its core

Cisco’s successful UCS platform has spawned a few copycats but they continue to dominate the market.  In 2013, we will see the ante upped considerably as trusted partners become bitter enemies and the likes of Juniper, Brocade, Mellanox, NetApp, Citrix, WhipTail, Coraid, Big Switch, and more become delectable takeover targets.

Floyd Strimling is Vice President of Community, Technical Evangelist at Zenoss. He enjoys creating, debating, and following technology trends with the goal of making them a reality. With a background spanning hardware and software, he’s been actively involved in Networking, Security, Datacenter Infrastructure, Automation, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing for 17 years.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *