Watch out for fake clouds: Melbourne IT

Melbourne IT CTO Glenn Gore has warned that there are some vendors operating in Australia sporting the cloud badge without actually offering cloud.

Glenn Gore(Credit: Melbourne IT)

"There's a lot of hype around competitors who have simply gone out and bought a technology stack and are now going out to customers and saying, just because [they] have a service platform with some software running on top, [they're] a cloud provider," he said.

Many didn't have billing systems or customer management, or the operational expertise and processes to be able to pull off a "truly multi-tenanted" environment, according to Gore. Melbourne IT has done a lot of work and training to get to the level it is at, he said.

"It's been incredible watching other people a little bit naively acquiring technology, bolting them together and saying they're a competitor," he said, adding that there were already customers talking about the problems they were encountering with such vendors.

"Just putting your hands on some CPU, disk and a network doesn't actually mean anything if it's not being backed up, it isn't secure or you can't do basic functionality over and above that," he warned, although he wouldn't say which vendors were doing this.

Gore is in the midst of planning a migration of the customers on Melbourne IT's vCloud Express beta product to a beta product on the vCloud platform.

vCloud Express had limitations, according to Gore. "It really allowed you to either provision and de-provision a cloud service and not much more to be honest," he said.

However, Gore said, Melbourne IT benefited from the introduction of the product. Melbourne IT used the service's customers — a "healthy mix of enterprise, even government and small business" — to test billing cycles and to work out responsibility issues.

"For example: someone provisions a Windows server then suspends it for a couple of months and then re-activates it. It hasn't been patched in between," Gore said, adding that it had been a learning exercise to find out what would happen in such cases.

While vCloud Express had a very simple web interface, vCloud was meant for the enterprise datacentre and has a very complex interface, allowing the user to do much more. For example, the user could change resources on the fly, tune the network layer, access security services and request different storage tiers.

The closed beta of this service will have customers on it by the end of this month, Gore said. He then planned to start the public beta in August or September.

Though not all companies will want to battle with vCloud, as it is necessary to have a higher skills base in order to run it, Gore said. Therefore, the company would also run a tweaked version of vCloud Express, based on the vCloud platform. Gore intended to add a public network interface and the ability to modify a virtual machine once it had been provisioned to the express product.