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Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs
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"Fundamentally, our goal with Spring has always been to maximize portability," Johnson says. But this also requires cooperation from developers.
"As a developer, you shouldn't be writing any code that knows about a particular hypervisor," he says. "You shouldn't really be writing code that knows about the infrastructure-as-a-service layer, period. If you're going to write a platform-as-a-service application, you absolutely don't want to have any knowledge in your application of hypervisors, or provisioning, because if you do that, firstly your application will end up more complicated than it was in the traditional enterprise, and secondly you do couple yourself to a particular technology stack."
So far, the major cloud platform players are Microsoft, with Windows Azure, Google App Engine, and Salesforce.Johnson says Google's App Engine contains various restrictions regarding "what is possible with Java applications," and promised that VMforce will allow a broader variety of Java apps and be more suitable for the enterprise.
VMforce "will be more appealing to enterprises who really want SLAs, who really have more stringent requirements, whereas App Engine is going to be very appealing to a lot of developers, maybe smaller businesses who don't have the same requirements or expectations," Johnson says.
Despite that mild criticism, VMware and Google have teamed up to let Spring Java apps run on the Google App Engine. While VMforce runs only Java applications, Google's platform supports both Java and Python.
VMware acquired SpringSource specifically to bolster its platform-as-a-service strategy, but the SpringSource products are still sold separately and Johnson says his team has retained some level of independence within VMware.
"We essentially have a great deal of control over our own destiny [at SpringSource] and also I'm quite heavily involved in the [VMware] company strategy overall," he says.
Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin
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