I just enjoyed a few days at VMWorld, walking the booths and meeting other vendors.    I go to see what technologies should be incorporated into ENKI's services but also to learn where the trends in the industry are moving.  As it often turns out, those are the same things, since ENKI is always striving to provide the best in cloud computing.

Of course, the theme of the conference is Cloud Computing.  And the big star of the show - not a surprise considering who sponsors it - was VMWare's new vCloud Director product, known to many as "Redwood."   Director for the first time enables end customers of cloud providers to have self-serve access to the majority of VSphere's features, as opposed to the far less capable VCloud Express product which anchored VMWare's cloud infrastructure offering so far.   We've been playing with Redwood in beta, and are impressed.  ENKI plans to release it to our customers as soon as possible after its general availability in October.   Director will allow our customers to combine self-service for their casual applications (test, staging, development) with our traditional fully managed services which are aimed at reaching the highest reliabiiity levels.

However, what interested me even more at the show was new technology that was being delivered to solve two of the cloud's persistent problems: high performance storage and security.   

Storage has always been a challenge for us, since the wide variety of loads and huge working sets presented by cloud customers in a computing cluster overwhelms traditional storage solutions.   Vendors have responded by simply beefing up their solutions, at best a stopgap.  ENKI currently uses Sun's Open Storage 7000 systems because we felt they are the best of the stopgap solutions.   However at this show a number of vendors are solving the problem in a cloud-centric fashion.  I've always maintained that storage caching should happen at the point of use, not in the storage system.  One vendor, Amplidata, has come close to the perfect architecture by relying on local storage - including SSD - in each compute node to do the caching, as well as scaling the storage by adding new independent units in a network infrastructure to meet increasing demand.  This effectively removes the central bottleneck in storage that Dave wrote about in his recent ACM paper, "Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free" (available on request.)   We're going to be taking a much closer look at Amplidata.  

Security has been a continuous concern for our potential customers saddled with compliance requirements.  ENKI's position has always been to provide a cloud datacenter that is built as much like a corporate data center as possible to allow the same type of security measures to be used in our cloud as our clients would normally use in their own datacenters.  However, the multitenant nature of the cloud has always raised the specter that despite such design, data sharing and cross-customer security issues will get in the way of HIPAA, SOX, or PCI compliance.   One vendor I saw at VMWorld, Catbird Software , offers a suite of products that will scan your cloud implementation once or repeatedly to verify compliance with regulations.   It can also be used to compare compliance in your traditional datacenter with that in your cloud implementation.  Obviously, it isn't going to validate the people-processes that make up many of the compliance concerns, but by validating the configuration and setup of customers' virtual private data centers, it goes a long way towards making cloud a viable alternative to the long, slow, expensive slog through implementation with your own staff and infrastructure.  We're looking forward to deploying it for our customers concerned about compliance.

In the next weeks I'll talk a bit more about some of the other products - especially storage - which I saw at VMWorld