Red Hat slams VMware's 'flawed' cloud strategy

Red Hat claims VMware's latest OpenStack announcement 'limits' cloud technology

Open source firm Red Hat has branded VMware's new One Cloud strategy "fundamentally flawed".

At its Partner Exchange (PEX) conference in San Francisco this week, VMware talked up its new "one cloud, any application" mantra as it unveiled a trio of new product updates which it claims back up the new strategy.

VMware's new EMEA channel boss Scott Dodds said articulating the new strategy to partners was one of his key priorities in the new role, which he started last month after moving from Microsoft.

One of the new products the firm unveiled was VMware Integrated OpenStack – an open source technology which integrates with its cloud-management platform. The virtualisation giant claimed the move means IT departments with little or no open source experience can be up and running "in minutes".

But in a blog post this week, Red hat disputed the claims.

"VMware's vision for 'one cloud' and OpenStack sounds appealing – one unified cloud for running both cloud-native and traditional applications – but it is fundamentally flawed in implementation because these two classes of workloads have quite different requirements for infrastructure," said Bryan Che, general manager of Red Hat's cloud product strategy. "And, by attempting to mash these two worlds together, all 'one cloud' provides is one limited cloud that is not optimised to run any workload."

Integrated OpenStack is available free to customers running its top-end vSphere Enterprise Plus technology. But Red Hat said this was not the best value for customers.

"While this offer is free, it doesn't come without a cost," it said. "You have to purchase VMware's most expensive virtualisation product [and] you have to purchase production support."

It added that its own Red Hat infrastructure was much better value.

"What is better than free? How about negative cost? For less than one sixth the cost of VMware's equivalent vCloud suite, you could buy Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, which includes... virtualisation, Linux OpenStack Platform and Cloudforms."