Posted by Winston Bumpus
Director of Standards Architecture, VMware

I’m Winston Bumpus, director of standards architecture at
VMware and president of the Distributed
Management Task Force Inc. (DMTF). I want to share some thoughts on the
ever-evolving cloud computing environment, specifically around open standards
and open source software.

You might have seen an announcement this week on OpenStack, and I wanted to take this
opportunity to shed light on VMware’s opinion on the value of open source and
the need to view it differently from interoperability. OpenStack, an initiative
between NASA and Rackspace, a VMware service provider partner, seeks to
accomplish some interesting standards work similar to other open source cloud
projects like Nebula, offering customers another choice in cloud platforms.

We
love providing customers choice of hardware, operating systems, management
platforms and cloud computing platforms. We expect to see all sorts of cloud
computing implementations that will provide customers a range of price points,
features, benefits and specs based on their requirements.

But what’s most important to us as it relates to these
various implementations – those that currently exist and those that are still
to come – is that the interfaces work together so that true choice is possible.

When we look at cloud computing, we approach it from a
customer-centric point-of-view. We’re in a new era of computing and we see
three key issues with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing that
currently concern customers:

• Interoperability
  (common APIs)
• Portability
  (standard packaging and deployment formats)
• Security
  (standards-based security infrastructure)

We’re working on all three of these issues through:

• Our
  support of the Open Virtualization Format, which is currently the key cloud standard for
  interoperability
• Our
  participation in cloud
  standards development within the DMTF and working with other industry
  leaders including AMD,
  CA, Cisco,
  Citrix, EMC,
  Fujitsu, HP,
  Hitachi, IBM,
  Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, Rackspace, RedHat, Savvis, and SunGard.
• Our
  work with the Cloud
  Security Alliance to develop cloud security best practices based on
  existing standards and technology.

Additionally, we don’t confuse open standards with open
source. Open source is a collaborative development process for creating an
implementation of a product or service while open standards are developed by a
collaborative process to ensure interoperability among various competing
product offerings.

We’re huge supporters of open source software efforts,
having placed major bets on Spring and RabbitMQ, among others. And while open
source makes sense for some product offerings, open standards provide
interoperability between open sourced, shared sourced, and private sourced
implementations. 

We believe that customers should be able to choose the best
products at the best prices and have the flexibility to migrate to a better
solution if and when it becomes available. That’s why open standards are
critical for both open sourced and other sourced implementations.

We partner with numerous companies, some of which are
developing open source cloud computing environments, and we expect those
partnerships to continue to grow. But when it comes to interoperability, we
encourage customers to judge technologies on performance, not how they were developed.