VMware Enriches vcloud Air Services with Object Storage

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1 VENDOR PROFILE VMware Enriches vcloud Air Services with Object Storage Amita Potnis IDC OPINION In today's mobile world, managing and maintaining data has become a top concern for IT departments. Businesses are also storing data for longer periods of time due to regulatory compliance purposes as well as to mine the data for insights to improve products or services. Timely retrieval of data and maintaining data integrity are extremely important considerations for businesses along with key emphasis on budgets associated with these activities. Adding manpower in the form of storage administrators is no longer a viable option for businesses of any size. According to IDC's Digital Universe study, 44ZB of data will be generated by Businesses large and small are and will continue to be impacted by this insurmountable data growth. Today, businesses demand that their storage infrastructure is agile, flexible, and easy to manage all at an affordable price. As businesses look to upgrade or augment their storage infrastructure, vendors have brought new storage technologies to market that are designed to tackle the modern day requirements agility, flexibility, and manageability. Many modern day technologies such as scale-out storage, software-defined storage (SDS), and cloud-based storage support the requirements mentioned in the bullet list. Cloudbased storage offers customers a "pay as you" go approach that appeals to many businesses as it removes the burden of massive up-front investments in storage technologies. Many businesses are integrating public cloud storage as a tier in their storage strategy. Most cloud-based storage offerings are based on object-based technologies, which promise to balance scale, complexity, and costs. Modern day businesses are looking for: Scalability not just from a hardware perspective but from a throughput, file size, and file volume perspective Management through advanced metadata, indexing, and analytics to mine existing data Efficiency using deduplication, thin provisioning, compression, and so forth for management and data reduction Resiliency via replication or erasure coding to protect against component failures IN THIS VENDOR PROFILE This IDC Vendor Profile assesses VMware's vcloud Air, a public cloud service offering computing, storage, and disaster recovery (DR) and more for businesses of all sizes. VMware vcloud Air's cloud service along with several technology partners allow businesses to adopt public cloud with ease and at low costs. SITUATION OVERVIEW There has been a dramatic change in the way storage is consumed and supplied in recent years. An increasingly digital world is driving adoption of new technologies faster than ever. Object-based December 2015, IDC #US

2 storage (OBS) is one such technology that has seen increased adoption in recent years. What makes OBS platforms (appliance/software/cloud delivery models) so attractive is that they are designed specifically to deliver unprecedented scale at reduced complexity and reduced costs over the long term. Initially, OBS platforms suffered from slower adoption due to the lack of access standards and also caused platform lock-ins due to their proprietary access mechanism. In recent years, as Amazon's S3 and OpenStack Swift became the de facto access mechanism, many platforms are embracing these standards, making them more ubiquitous. As businesses move toward petabyte-scale data storage, they start considering implementation of OBS platforms. But what is object-based storage? OBS employs a flat tenant-account-container-object namespace designed for multipetabyte environments. OBS solutions use flat structures to organize data. Such structures are higher-level structures in which data is often organized using an "account, container, object" approach wherein "objects" are analogous to "files" in FBS solutions. Accounts, containers, and objects are referenced by a metadata repository that stores and manages attributes of data stored in that structure. The level at which OBS solutions operate varies from platform to platform. Many OBS solutions operate on a per-object level (i.e., allow each object to be treated independently as far as policy management is concerned), whereas others operate at a container or account level (i.e., only allow policies to be applied at a container or account level). Several OBS solutions also leverage NoSQL databases as metadata repositories and persistent data stores (instead of storing chunks in the file systems). Because of the need to manage objects with a comprehensive set of attributes, most OBS solutions use a different set of data interfaces than their FBS counterparts that mostly leverage NFS, SMB (CIFS), or FTP protocols. It is common for many OBS solutions to support HTTP/REST, CDMI, Amazon S3, and other object-specific interfaces. Even though OBS platforms (software) are part of the SDS-CS functional market and OBS appliances are part of enterprise systems market, they are called out separately because of their importance in large-scale cloud and noncloud deployments. Market Context Many cloud-based storage service providers that have implemented object-based storage in their hyperscale environments' deployments prefer to procure hardware directly from suppliers. Understanding the importance of this trend, beginning with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, December 2014, IDC has added a new set of vendors that are grouped into a single "vendor" much the same way IDC groups smaller OEMs and white-box suppliers into "other suppliers." This new group of vendors is called "ODM Direct" (ODM). With the rise of the hyperscale datacenter, many ODMs now serve large owners of hyperscale datacenters such as Google or Facebook directly without any involvement from a server and/or storage OEM. Examples of ODMs include Quanta, Compal, and Wistron. As shown in Figure 1, ODM Direct accounts for 12.1% of the total enterprise storage systems market in 2014 and is the only segment that has seen double-digit growth. OBS solutions are particularly suited for large multipetabyte-scale data environments. As stated previously, many cloud-based storage services are built on object storage. A representation of OBS capacity in comparison to storage capacity deployed across all technologies is shown in Figure 2. Although the OBS market is a fairly large market, it is expected to grow faster, at 11.6% CAGR for (estimates are based on preliminary findings, FOBS forecast report to be published in 2015 IDC #US

3 1H16), than the worldwide enterprise storage systems market, which will grow at 0.4% CAGR for the same period. FIGURE 1 Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Revenue Share by Product Category, 2014 Source: IDC, 2015 FIGURE 2 Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Capacity Share: Object-Based Storage Versus Overall, 2014 and 2019 Source: IDC, IDC #US

4 Company Overview Founded in 1998, VMware for long has been a leader of virtualization software and services. Since then, the company has built a rich software portfolio including desktop and server software, cloud management software, virtual desktop infrastructure, backup software, and application management. Most recently, VMware has extended its portfolio to include cloud-based storage services. There's no question that VMware has the compute virtualization part of SDDC well in hand. Today, VMware is looking to extend into software-defined storage and software-defined networking. VMware's first SDS offering Virtual SAN (vsan) has been updated to support all-flash setups as well as provides significant increases in performance and scalability. But the major storage announcement with vsphere 6 is around Virtual Volumes, a fundamental re-architecting of the interface between hypervisor and storage. Virtual Volumes will offer new levels of storage integration to make third-party arrays natively aware of virtual machines, and VMware has worked with the storage industry to ensure that all major vendors will support these APIs in their arrays. Storage is a major pain point in virtualization deployments, and this new fundamental approach to VM storage holds a lot of potential to help VMware customers with managing the ever-growing storage for virtualized environments. On the networking side, VMware announced VMware vcloud Air hybrid networking services powered by NSX. The goal behind the hybrid networking service is that customers will now be able to bridge VMware's vcloud Air public cloud service and VMware vsphere-based private clouds to enable a single, secure network domain through a gateway appliance. With the tight networking integration, VMware is continuing to make vcloud Air as seamless as possible extension of customers' onpremises VMware environments. Company Strategy: Cloud Air Object Storage In January 2014, VMware announced a vcloud Air partnership with Google, where Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services would be made available to vcloud Air customers. This new service is called vcloud Air Object Storage. Often associated with a leading-edge infrastructure and applications, Google's partnership with vcloud Air can be strategic for VMware as it seeks to enhance its capabilities around next-generation applications. On the other hand, this partnership can benefit Google too as it will allow the company to penetrate into the enterprise. vcloud Air Object Storage will run on Google cloud infrastructure and will be accessed from the vcloud Air cloud. VMware has announced that vcloud Air datacenter locations will be strategically placed near Google's cloud and that there will be a special high-speed interconnect to address issues of distance and latency. Beyond this interconnect, the current partnership is more of a resale agreement, allowing central provisioning, billing, and SLA support for VMware customers that wish to use Google services. Currently, this service focuses on three primary use cases, backup, file share, and Web 2.0 applications. VMware's vcloud Air Object Storage has created strategic partnerships with Commvault, Geminare, and CloudBerry to offer specific backup services for its clients. This backup and archive service is targeted at both the SMB market (allowing IT departments the ability to use Cloud Archive on VMware vcloud Air Object Storage) and the midlevel to enterprise market (that would use Google's cloud infrastructure for DR in addition to data archiving). VMware vcloud Air Object Storage claims that policy-based data movement gives users added granular control. File share partnerships include CloudArray and Panzura. With these partnerships, vcloud Air Object Storage claims that backups and file shares can be configured efficiently and quickly. This service claims to offer commercial simplicity IDC #US

5 By that it means: Customers will be billed and metered based on consumption. Google Cloud Platform services will be integrated with My VMware. Customers can use Google's rich services portfolio while running vcloud Air. GCP services are available under VMware's vcloud Air terms of service, with full support from VMware's GSS team. Existing VMware customers can access GCP services under their existing contracts. While the partnership today is fairly limited, both parties bring very different capabilities and market segments to the table, and this could be the start of a deeper collaboration between the two companies that could bring very interesting offerings to the market. Currently, GCP is tightly integrated into VMware's vcloud Air providing its enterprise customers with greater access to VMware's hybrid cloud platform. The initial set of GCP services available via vcloud Air include Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Datastore, and Google Cloud DNS. In 2016, VMware is expected to offer additional object-based storage service powered by EMC, which will give its customers a variety of services to choose from depending upon its workloads and requirements. FUTURE OUTLOOK VMware's efforts with vcloud Air Object Storage validate the ongoing expansion of cloud-based backup as well as collaboration as an increasingly cost-effective go-to option for businesses that need guarantees of availability but do not have the financial resources for a colocated environment. VMware's extensive footprint in the enterprise datacenter and the company's cloud road map should make business continuity and collaboration-related services a logical upselling. The real question is whether there is enough overlap between the legacy virtualization and next-gen cloud application markets to create enough interest. Presumably, the primary use case would be to allow legacy enterprise applications that VMware hosts to use next-gen cloud services. If one is building a cloud-native application from the ground up, the entire application could be run in a single cloud such as Google's Cloud Engine, which has VM functionality. For now, VMware's hybrid cloud service model gives the company enough footing to extend its customer base in the enterprise and SMB market. ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE Advice for VMware While the partnership with Google gives VMware good backing for the services it intends to offer, the company must be cognizant of the fact that it is treading the market of experienced incumbents. In a segment where cloud service providers Amazon and Microsoft have already dug deep into the customer base and have extensive mindshare, VMware has to strategically differentiate itself to compel end users to subscribe to its services. For now, the company may work toward nudging its existing customer base to use vcloud Air Object Storage, but a strong game plan for potential customers that do not currently use VMware products is a must IDC #US

6 LEARN MORE Related Research Telco Giant Telefónica Deploys Caringo for Cloud Storage (IDC #256226, May 2015) NAB 2015 Showcases a Significant Mindset Shift Towards the Cloud, New Storage Strategies to Cope with Data (IDC #255772, April 2015) Data Storage Innovation Conference Highlights (IDC #255624, April 2015) Archival Strategies in Media and Entertainment: A Special Study (IDC #254651, April 2015) IDC's Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Taxonomy, 2015 (IDC #254078, February 2015) Content Delivery Strategies in Media and Entertainment: A Special Study (IDC #253923, December 2014) Postproduction Storage Strategies in Media and Entertainment: A Special Study (IDC #253275, December 2014) NetApp - Exemplifying Commercial Success with OpenStack (IDC #253105, December 2014) Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Forecast (IDC #251626, October 2014) Leading European Broadcaster Deploys MatrixStore from Object Matrix as Nearline Storage for Postproduction Video Content (IDC #249808, August 2014) 2015 IDC #US

7 About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA idc-insights-community.com Copyright Notice This IDC research document was published as part of an IDC continuous intelligence service, providing written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences. Visit to learn more about IDC subscription and consulting services. To view a list of IDC offices worldwide, visit Please contact the IDC Hotline at , ext (or ) or sales@idc.com for information on applying the price of this document toward the purchase of an IDC service or for information on additional copies or Web rights. Copyright 2015 IDC. Reproduction is forbidden unless authorized. All rights reserved.