Ken Fogarty, writing for CIO, comments on a panel on virtualization at MIT last week that included Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and VMware founder Mendel Rosenblum.

“The good news is that virtualization will become a critical part of an even larger part of most IT infrastructures as time goes on.

“The bad news is that it will do so as part of a larger movement toward cloud computing and will, in large part, disappear as a separate discipline.”

This trend started a year ago and IMHO is new happening faster than most folks expected. Perhaps this explains why so many vendors seem to need to claim they are in the cloud computing space.

This week, something quite miraculous happened.  Those of us whose vision of the future is in the Clouds have seen our crystal balls start working.

Months ago, 3tera unveiled our Cloudware architecture.  But rather than try to convince the world that there is only a single architecture that works and ours is it, we emphasized that Cloud architectures need to be open.  Not only need they interoperate with all sorts of hardware and software as virtual appliances, they need to interoperate with other Clouds and Cloud components as well.

So, what happened this week?

The two undisputed leaders in virtualization, VMWare and Citrix/Xen announced suites of products in support of Cloud Computing, vCloud and Citrix Cloud Center (C3), respectively.  Undoubtedly, Microsoft and Red Hat and more will follow.

The anticipation that drove our Cloudware architecture is proving spot on.  There will be multiple global Clouds, they will not all be the same, and the ones that will get the brass rings will be the ones that interoperate rather than stand alone.  Cloudware is designed so that it will, in the not too distant future, have the ability to incorporate elements from any Cloud.

You will note that both VMWare and Citrix, in their Cloud announcements, emphasize the need for API-based interoperability among Clouds.  3tera agrees.  The development of this interoperability will make the vision easy to accomplish.

3tera intends to take this direction to the nth degree by not only enabling applications in one Cloud to interoperate with applications in others, but to enable elements from multiple Clouds to coexist in the same application.

There’s been a lot of music to our ears this week.  The huge install bases of VMWare and Citrix are becoming part of the eco-system that we have been participating in the definition of, designed for, been building for and support - the eco-system we’ve been predicting was coming.

So, if this is music to 3tera’s ears, it’s a multi-media extravaganza that should tickle all the senses of information technology users of any size   Combining a continued direction of open Cloud Computing where anything can operate in the Cloud with this new direction of interoperability among Clouds will leave all IT users at their own mercy.  Vendors will have less ability to manipulate and dictate what hardware you run your applications on, what operating systems you use, what software you deploy, what type of infrastructure components you rely on, what databases you use and where your applications run - and in how many places.  This will ALL be up to you and you’ll be able to change it all at YOUR will with just your little old browser.

Continuing on yesterdays theme of vrtualization supplanting operating systems,
I came accross an article today on Information Week titled
Hypervistors May Replace Operating Systems as King of the Data Center.

I’ve written for some time now that the role of the operating system is changing, as I noted in yesterday’s post. However, I have trouble with the author’s premise in this story. As I commented there:

“Hypervisors possess neither of the two factors make the OS strategic. First, software applications are not written directly to APIs specific to the hypervisor. Instead applications still run on Windows, Solaris, Linux or FreeBSD. Since all the development tools come with the OS, that seems unlikely to change. Second, users are beginning to understand that managing a data center full of VMs is a nightmare, prompting one blogger to refer to virtualization as the ghetto of the data center. This has created a market for VM management tools as the acquisition of Xensource yesterday points out.”