TAP Update: Getting Private Cloudy November 30, 2012

There has been a good amount of acquisition activity over the last couple of weeks in the Converged Infrastructures/Private Cloud space.  First Cisco whose UCS blade compute platforms and Nexus switches are a crucial component of both a FlexPod as well as Vblock announced the purchase of Cloupia then Dell picked up Gale Technologies.  What is interesting about both these small startups is how they enable the deployment of private cloud infrastructures by automating and simplifying the provisioning of the storage, compute and layer 2 networking in for each of these platforms.  One of the significant Achilles heals of these infrastructures has been the lack of a real provisioning and management software product for these stacks.  This is in conflict with the whole benefit of deploying a private cloud, being able to rapidly provision storage, compute and networking components to support an application.  This ‘on demand’ requirement for infrastructure provisioning is crucial to broader adoption of these infrastructures, better cross-functional usability (i.e. network, storage and compute) and a more predictable and compelling TCO.

Of the two recently acquired organizations perhaps Gale technologies understands most clearly that  network provisioning extends beyond layer 2 and a complete application deployment requires and ADC to ensure availability, improve user experience and provide unified access for an increasingly mobile world. We recently worked closely with Gale to integrate the LTM into their provisioning and management suite via iControl and would like to congratulate them on their success.