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You're not familiar with the operational costs of most Fortune 100 data centers (and more importantly, basic services built on top of a reliable infrastructure)

You're not familiar with the operational costs of most Fortune 100 data centers (and more importantly, basic services built on top of a reliable infrastructure) if this sounds eye-watering expensive. Almost everyone I've ever moved to AWS is pretty bad at O&S and pays at least double the monthly costs of AWS for far worse systemic reliability. Add in AWS support being far, far better by every metric than whatever crappy offshore helplessdesk was contracted and it's a no-brainer. Delta's recent debacle just wouldn't have happened, for starters, and that's costing them more than a billion dollars in raw costs.

simonebrunozzi 10y ago
"helplessdesk" -> genius! :)
user5994461 10y ago
I am familiar enough with that. Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage. But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense. If you want to have special snowflakes, you go for SoftLayer + VmWare. You can be as exotic as you want with that. Otherwise, just use AWS. And you get the benefit of all the services that VMWare don't and can't provide. (servers, storage, load balancer, databases...). Better, go for GCE. It's the same as AWS for 20-50% cheaper. :D AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.
- sithadmin 10y ago
  >But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense. If you're my customers? AWS + VMware makes plenty of sense because you have gazillions of dollars sunk into vSphere management and automation that's narrowly tailored to the enterprise's needs. Making the case that all of that prior work should be abandoned or phased out in favor of going all-in on AWS is a difficult up-hill battle in these situations. >AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements. This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    The case is to go AWS or stay where you are. If a company has a HUGE VmWare legacy, we'd both make the case to stay on VmWare. > This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere. VmWare and AWS are both hugely complex (possibly among the most complex software on the planet). They have a different philosophy and they were never intended to fit together. The route to doing so will be filled with endless complications. We'll see how they execute. IMO they can't overcome their legacy easily, the result will be a mess.
- wmf 10y ago
  Nobody got fired for buying VMware + nobody got fired for buying AWS. Now if only they could add Cisco and EMC it would be perfect.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    Already done :D VmWare is owned in part by EMC (or the other way around).
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Say I have 30,000 VMs deployed in my VMWare infrastructure. I have a good licensing agreement with them and have thousands of applications. By just shifting workload to AWS without doing anything to the VM, I can save a ton of money. In my case, for every dollar I spend on AWS/VMWare, I could probably avoid spending $2.50 in data center buildout costs and $3 in application rationalization. With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile.
  - teepo 10y ago
    > With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile. Not a very accurate statement. SoftLayer is IaaS, everything is monthly or hourly on the compute, storage, and networking side. You pay SoftLayer monthly for VSphere 6 licenses with zero contracts.
- tw04 10y ago
  > Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage. This is 100% false. Unless you are running your infrastructure at less than 50% utilization 24/7, it will ALWAYS be more expensive to go to "the cloud".
- devonkim 10y ago
  VMware is the de facto private cloud incumbent and switching costs are incredibly high, and AWS is the de facto enterprise public cloud incumbent with perhaps even higher switching costs and the same kind of inertia as legacy on-premises systems. What this signals to me is that the "hybrid cloud" management voodoo software that's been peddled for years by various vendors isn't sufficient enough to keep VMware viable enough on its own, and VMware wants to partner with the incumbent enterprise public cloud for continued relevance rather than to risk partnering with anyone that's competing against AWS. GCE has so little of the enterprise compliance and security solutions engineering bureaucracy that enterprises love to spend tens of millions of dollars and years doing POCs with it's just not viable at this time.

simonebrunozzi 10y ago

"helplessdesk" -> genius! :)

user5994461 10y ago

I am familiar enough with that. Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage. But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense. If you want to have special snowflakes, you go for SoftLayer + VmWare. You can be as exotic as you want with that. Otherwise, just use AWS. And you get the benefit of all the services that VMWare don't and can't provide. (servers, storage, load balancer, databases...). Better, go for GCE. It's the same as AWS for 20-50% cheaper. :D AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.

sithadmin 10y ago
>But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense. If you're my customers? AWS + VMware makes plenty of sense because you have gazillions of dollars sunk into vSphere management and automation that's narrowly tailored to the enterprise's needs. Making the case that all of that prior work should be abandoned or phased out in favor of going all-in on AWS is a difficult up-hill battle in these situations. >AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements. This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere.
- user5994461 10y ago
  The case is to go AWS or stay where you are. If a company has a HUGE VmWare legacy, we'd both make the case to stay on VmWare. > This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere. VmWare and AWS are both hugely complex (possibly among the most complex software on the planet). They have a different philosophy and they were never intended to fit together. The route to doing so will be filled with endless complications. We'll see how they execute. IMO they can't overcome their legacy easily, the result will be a mess.
wmf 10y ago
Nobody got fired for buying VMware + nobody got fired for buying AWS. Now if only they could add Cisco and EMC it would be perfect.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Already done :D VmWare is owned in part by EMC (or the other way around).
Spooky23 10y ago
Say I have 30,000 VMs deployed in my VMWare infrastructure. I have a good licensing agreement with them and have thousands of applications. By just shifting workload to AWS without doing anything to the VM, I can save a ton of money. In my case, for every dollar I spend on AWS/VMWare, I could probably avoid spending $2.50 in data center buildout costs and $3 in application rationalization. With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile.
- teepo 10y ago
  > With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile. Not a very accurate statement. SoftLayer is IaaS, everything is monthly or hourly on the compute, storage, and networking side. You pay SoftLayer monthly for VSphere 6 licenses with zero contracts.
tw04 10y ago
> Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage. This is 100% false. Unless you are running your infrastructure at less than 50% utilization 24/7, it will ALWAYS be more expensive to go to "the cloud".
devonkim 10y ago
VMware is the de facto private cloud incumbent and switching costs are incredibly high, and AWS is the de facto enterprise public cloud incumbent with perhaps even higher switching costs and the same kind of inertia as legacy on-premises systems. What this signals to me is that the "hybrid cloud" management voodoo software that's been peddled for years by various vendors isn't sufficient enough to keep VMware viable enough on its own, and VMware wants to partner with the incumbent enterprise public cloud for continued relevance rather than to risk partnering with anyone that's competing against AWS. GCE has so little of the enterprise compliance and security solutions engineering bureaucracy that enterprises love to spend tens of millions of dollars and years doing POCs with it's just not viable at this time.