The new facilities will be "a seamless extension" of customer facilities where they will be able to shift workloads at will with a few virtualization management console commands. VMware is building commands into its vCloud Director product and the modules in its vCloud Suite to automatically provision a designated virtual machine with networking that connects between the customer's premises and a remote Hybrid Cloud Service data center.

VMware is not about to build a global chain of cloud data centers on the scale of a Facebook or Google. It's more likely to lease space in existing third-party facilities, equip them with its own hardware and software, and operate them as public cloud facilities. CEO Pat Gelsinger said VMware, in making such a move, is not backing away from continued use of channel partners and existing data center partners, which include Bluelock, CSC and AT&T in the U.S. That list formerly included Dell as well, but Dell announced Monday it would no longer try to provide public cloud services.

In an interview after the announcement Tuesday of Hybrid Cloud Service, Gelsinger said that VMware was creating model VMware public clouds in the four data centers -- locations unspecified -- that its many regional service providers could emulate.

As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger explained to partners Feb. 27 in Las Vegas: "We all lose if [enterprise customers] end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud ... Own the corporate workload now and forever."

Maybe the event will even get underway with COO Carl Eschenbach repeating the exhortation he made to partners Feb. 27. Don't get beaten by a competitor "that sells books." He misspoke, of course. What he meant to say was don't get beaten by "a mere bookseller."

It's already known that VMware will say the hybrid cloud will include its own version of infrastructure-as-a-service, a public cloud that customers may turn to if they want to migrate into a large-scale version of what they've already got on premises. As a plus, their existing management tools will see workloads in either place, giving them an extension to their data centers.

That interpretation comes from Forrester Research analyst James Staten, who on March 13 posted a blog reporting what he heard from VMware executives as they told investors what they intended to do next: "Yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others."

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that this Ursa Major at Facebook is the founder of the Open Compute Project and has ended up as chairman of the Open Compute Foundation's board of directors. He's the de facto leader of the world's first open-source hardware project.

His official title at Facebook is VP of hardware design and supply chain operations, which means he's responsible for ensuring that Facebook has all the hardware it needs when it needs it. That's no small order, and over the last several years it has forced a rethinking of what data center builders were doing.

Anyone who has been to Facebook's data center complex in Prineville, Ore., can see the first phase of Frankovsky's work. Server motherboards sit on open sleds that slide in and out of the server rack for easier maintenance; components are arranged in channels that allow continuous air flow down the rack. Temperatures are a little higher than expected in the data center because Facebook servers are designed to run at 85 degrees and Facebook doesn't use giant air conditioner chillers to cool the air. The result of revamped server and data center design is a facility that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive than predecessor data centers, said Frankovsky in a recent interview at Facebook offices in Menlo Park, Calif.

The Enstratius Cloud Management Platform interfaces to 23 specific cloud infrastructure offerings, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, HP Cloud, AT&T Synaptic Cloud, IBM SmartCloud, VMware vCloud Suite and OpenStack. The most recent addition was CloudCentral's Cloud Platform hosted in Australian data centers; it was added to the list May 3.

The Enstratius platform provides cloud suppliers with an employee self-service catalogue and design and management tools to help users create workloads and deploy them into a cloud environment. The platform is noted for the major cloud suppliers that it supports. Unlike competitors, it reaches deep into the ranks of secondary suppliers as well, such as GoGrid, Bluelock, Joyent, CloudScaling, CloudSigma and the Apache Software Foundation's CloudStack.

That means Dell can start to realize more of its ambition to be the link to and management agent between many cloud users and their service supplier. Dell can also start to integrate more of its recently acquired cloud technologies with those service suppliers, as well as be a large, data center-oriented supplier of servers and network switches.

The invitation directed me to call an 800 number, to agree to Google's unprecedentedly restrictive terms of service, and to choose a color: Charcoal, Tangerine, Shale, Cotton or Sky. For the fashion-challenged, that translates to black, orange, gray, white or light blue.

I opted for black because it goes with everything and it's less likely to attract attention, which appears to be difficult to avoid if you wear Glass in public.

The invitation asked me to choose between picking up Glass at a Google office in Mountain View, New York or Los Angeles, or having Glass shipped. As a resident of San Francisco, I opted to for the in-person pickup experience at Google's sprawling headquarters in Mountain View.

]]> On Friday, 10 months after signing up to join Google's Glass Explorer program at Google I/O 2012, I received my invitation to purchase and pick up Google Glass.

The invitation directed me to call an 800 number, to agree to Google's unprecedentedly restrictive terms of service, and to choose a color: Charcoal, Tangerine, Shale, Cotton or Sky. For the fashion-challenged, that translates to black, orange, gray, white or light blue.

I opted for black because it goes with everything and it's less likely to attract attention, which appears to be difficult to avoid if you wear Glass in public.

The invitation asked me to choose between picking up Glass at a Google office in Mountain View, New York or Los Angeles, or having Glass shipped. As a resident of San Francisco, I opted to for the in-person pickup experience at Google's sprawling headquarters in Mountain View.

]]> http://www.networkcomputing.com/quickview/google-glass-first-impressions/3190?wc=4 http://www.networkcomputing.com/quickview/google-glass-first-impressions/3190?wc=4 http://www.networkcomputing.com/quickview/cloud-computing?wc=4 Thu, 02 May 2013 09:19 EDT