Cloud Computing Gets a Jolt With Broadcom-VMware, Google Cloud, Akamai
Summer often means a slowdown in important news. That’s not so this week in the world of cloud computing.
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As anticipated, the regulatory arm of the European Union on July 12 approved Broadcom’s $61 billion purchase of VMware — although Broadcom must fully comply with the commitments it has offered, the Commission said.
The long-awaited thumbs-up came after months of an in-depth investigation. Authorities were concerned Broadcom might try to corner certain parts of the server and software market with VMware in hand.
Indeed, the July 12 press release reads, “The Commission’s preliminary market investigation found that, by acquiring VMware, Broadcom could have restricted competition” in markets related to Fibre Channel Host-Bus Adapters, storage adapters and Network Interface Cards. As such, Broadcom would have the power to essentially foreclose its only rival in the FC HBAs market, Marvell Technology.
The European Commission also found that Broadcom’s position is not strong in storage adapters or NICs, and that it would not be able to bundle VMware’s virtualization software with its mainframe and security software. That’s because the products are purchased by different divisions within customer organizations, and/or at different points in time, the Commission said.
To resolve the FC HBA concerns, Broadcom, as we reported on July 11, has agreed to make its technology interoperable with Marvell’s. The concession includes giving Marvell access to Broadcom’s source code for its current and future FC HBA drivers through an irrevocable open-source license.
“This would allow Marvell and any potential entrant to ensure interoperability with VMware’s server virtualization software and allow them to reuse and modify Broadcom’s drivers for its own use,” Commission members wrote.
Another condition to which Broadcom agreed includes reorganizing so the team that works on FC HBAs and the team in charge of third-party certification and technical support operate separately. Broadcom also will protect Marvell’s confidential information, as well as that of any other company that might enter the FC HBA sector.
Throughout their investigation, Commission members talked with Marvell and server manufacturers, they said.
“In view of the positive feedback from market participants, the Commission concluded that the proposed acquisition, as modified by the commitments, would no longer raise competition concerns and would maintain competition on the market for FC HBAs, ” the press release stated.
Broadcom must meet its comply with its commitments for 10 years, though the open-source licensing appears to be separate from that, given its “irrevocable” status.
“Broadcom holds a very strong position in the market for the supply of certain hardware components,” said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy. “VMware is a key server virtualization software provider. By acquiring VMware, Broadcom could restrict or degrade interoperability between VMware’s leading server virtualization software and some competing hardware components. But the commitments offered by Broadcom will enable its only rival Marvell, to continue competing on equal footing and ensure a similar protection for any future entrants.”
Broadcom has been eager to expand its expertise from legacy hardware to also include software. It’s already started doing that with CA Technology and parts of Symantec, and now is relying on VMware to up the ante — as well as contribute that all-important cloud computing capability to the company.
Next, we look at the sudden departure of a key Google Cloud executive.
Dubbed “Employee No. 8,” Urs Holzle is leaving his role as head of technical infrastructure at Google Cloud.
According to CNBC, which broke the news, the move comes as CEO Thomas Kurian shakes things up. Kurian told employees in an email that making technical decisions more quickly is more important than ever. (Perhaps Kurian is tired of Google Cloud perennially ranking as the third-largest global cloud provider?)
Holzle now becomes an “individual contributor,” per CNBC. That means he’ll work independently, no longer managing employees.
In an email to staff, and viewed by CNBC, Holzle said he’ll now take on technical assignments and do some advisory work.
Ben Treynor Sloss, vice president of engineering at Google Cloud, will take over in Holzle’s stead, reporting directly to Kurian.
Next, we take a look at how Akamai is treating its 2022 Linode acquisition.
Akamai seems to be putting its money where its mouth has been as that concerns the Linode purchase.
On July 12, Blair Lyon, head of cloud experience at Akamai, posted a blog detailing some important advancements.
First, Akamai has launched three new Linode cloud computing sites — one in Paris, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Chicago. Additional sites in Seattle and Chennai, India, will go online later this quarter, Lyon wrote. In total, the expansions “more than double our global capacity,” Lyon said.
Next, Akamai, via Linode, has released new premium instances for consistent performance, predictable resource and budget allocation, as well as simpler SKU management for larger commercial workloads.
After that, look for doubled object storage capacity, Lyon said. That amounts to one petabyte and 1 billion objects per bucket, he added.
“The upgrade allows you to access higher data volumes to build scalable, performant, and low-latency cloud-native applications and analytics solutions,” Lyon said. “Clusters with the increased limits will be available in the new sites announced today.”
As for what else is in the works, go to the next slide.
Finally, Akamai still plans to launch its Global Load Balancer later this quarter. Lyon said that’s the first of several planned integrated services following Akamai’s acquisition of Linode.
“The new global load balancing capabilities ensure no single point of failure, routing traffic requests to the optimal data center to minimize latency,” he said. “Akamai Global Load Balancer bridges existing functionality of Linode NodeBalancers for local traffic load balancing, with existing Akamai Global Traffic Manager and Application Load Balancer services. The resulting integration allows you to select between local and global load balancing across Akamai’s network.”
All in all, the changes come based on feedback from channel partners and end users, Lyon said.
“They are also key pieces of our vision to challenge industry norms by opening the door to a distributed design that meets the needs of modern applications that increasingly require higher performance, lower latency and true global scalability current cloud architectures were not built to provide,” Lyon wrote.
OVHCloud, which recently kicked off its Startup Program featuring $120,000 in free credits and 20 hours of technical consultations, also has changed up its VMware product line.
Citing the needs of system integrators, SaaS providers, SMBs and enterprises, the Europe-based hyperscaler competitor said its new approach to VMware on OVHCloud aims to address the challenges of moving legacy apps to the cloud, developing modern apps or setting up a multicloud strategy.
In specific, VMware on OVHcloud, built on VMware vSphere, now supports application migration to the cloud without refactoring. This reduces risk and saves time, the company said, and performs infrastructure migration in lift-and-shift scenarios. Furthermore, it allows organizations to assess the best performance-to-price ratio so they can stay within budget.
OVHCloud, which recently kicked off its Startup Program featuring $120,000 in free credits and 20 hours of technical consultations, also has changed up its VMware product line.
Citing the needs of system integrators, SaaS providers, SMBs and enterprises, the Europe-based hyperscaler competitor said its new approach to VMware on OVHCloud aims to address the challenges of moving legacy apps to the cloud, developing modern apps or setting up a multicloud strategy.
In specific, VMware on OVHcloud, built on VMware vSphere, now supports application migration to the cloud without refactoring. This reduces risk and saves time, the company said, and performs infrastructure migration in lift-and-shift scenarios. Furthermore, it allows organizations to assess the best performance-to-price ratio so they can stay within budget.
Not long after we reported that the European Commission was about to approve the long-pending Broadcom-VMware pairing, the agency did just that. While Broadcom still has some regulatory hurdles to jump, it has cleared one of the biggest. In this latest cloud computing news roundup, we look at the European Commission’s rationale for giving Broadcom the thumbs-up to buy VMware.
After that, we skip over to a key leadership upset at Google Cloud. “Employee No. 8” is moving from his executive role to one more focused on projects, and no people management. Find out who it is and what CEO Thomas Kurian had to say.
Then we look at how Akamai is handling the 2022 acquisition of indie cloud computing provider Linode. So far, it seems, so good. This week, Akamai unveiled a series of upgrades that partners will want to get their heads around.
Finally, we share a little ditty from Europe’s OVHCloud, a rising rival to the hyperscalers and a firm that sells through the channel. The company is big on its recent changes to its VMware capabilities for moving legacy applications into the cloud, an area where many partners work.
Click the image above to get started on this latest cloud computing news roundup.
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