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baremetal

Briefing Notes: RackN Launches In Beta

Krishnan Subramanian · October 13, 2017 · Leave a Comment


RackN
, the startup based in Austin, had launched their platform in beta last week. RackN aims to simplify infrastructure provisioning through a layered approach which decouples provision, control, and orchestration, giving users more flexibility without losing simplicity. In this research note, we will analyze their platform.

Market Overview

Data center infrastructure provisioning is an old trade helping enterprises provision data centers to meet their IT needs. However, with the advent of cloud, large enterprises and data center providers want to provision their data centers just like how Amazon and Google are provisioning their own data centers. The flexibility and speed enjoyed by the web-scale cloud providers give them a unique advantage in ROI which traditional data centers cannot match. However, for the past few years, there are tools (some are new, and others are an evolution of the traditional provisioning tools) that are enabling seamless provision of data center infrastructure leading to a new category called Bare Metal as a Service. This is partly due to the evolution of data center priorities to match the web-scale cloud providers and also due to the success of containers in the enterprise. Baremetal is a more natural fit for containers than virtualized environments (which are more of a stop-gap arrangement to fill a gap) and the success of Kubernetes has brought new found interest in Baremetal as a Service.

RackN Offering

RackN platform is focussed on infrastructure automation but takes a more layered approach to automation. It decouples provisioning, management, and orchestration into different layers, thereby simplifying the processes while also giving customers flexibility on the orchestration tools they want to use. This composable approach to automation coupled with a powerful workflow feature based on their library, helps anyone get started with provisioning in 5 minutes and realizing tremendous ROI in the process. RackN platform brings a level of automation to underlying infrastructure that makes data center provisioning more competitive in this cloud world.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

  • RackN team has vast experience in the infrastructure provisioning and they have put their expertise in building this powerful platform.
  • Decoupled approach to automation makes the platform lightweight and simple. Keeping orchestration separate helps users use any tool of their choice whether it is Ansible, Terraform, Puppet or Chef
  • The success of Kubernetes and the hooks offered in the recent versions helps RackN platform provide the bare metal infrastructure for the containers and Kubernetes clusters can be deployed without the additional overhead of orchestration tools
  • They have distinct advantage over the competitors with the powerful workflow automation feature

Weakness

  • They have to overcome the resistance to change. Most data center people are used to tools like cobbler and foreman. They need to convince them of RackN’s value. Essentially, they will be fighting against the human inertia
  • In this era of cloud, they need to make a convincing case that Baremetal as a Service offers competitive ROI

Opportunities

  • Containers are getting big and their integration with Kubernetes is going to give them an opportunity to emerge as the infrastructure for containers
  • We have seen evidence that companies move back to their own data centers from the public cloud when they reach a certain scale (think Dropbox). RackN, with their competitive ROI, can emerge as a strong player in this trend
  • Infrastructure companies can easily find a partner (or a potential acquisition target) in RackN

Threats

  • Companies like Red Hat and Canonical with their server provisioning platforms will compete hard against RackN. But RackN has an advantage in terms of heterogeneity in the operating systems they support
  • Public cloud market could grow big putting pressure on companies in the datacenter space

Competitors

Cobbler, Foreman, Canonical MaaS, Matchbox

Conclusion

RackN is in an interesting situation with tremendous hype in containers and the performance advantage of Baremetal as a Service in the container dominated world. Their advantage with simplicity puts them in an advantageous position compared to all their competitors. But they need to gain mindshare (and eventually market share) to compete effectively

Disclosure: RackN was Rishidot Research client in the past

Briefing Notes: Oracle IaaS

Krishnan Subramanian · January 20, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Oracle announced their IaaS offering late last year and they briefed analysts of their offerings and roadmap. Rishidot Research makes a quick analysis of the briefing to highlight our clients and readers on the status of Oracle IaaS offering from our vantage point.

Market Overview

Ever since Amazon announced public cloud infrastructure services, the IaaS market has been growing steadily with increased enterprise adoption in the past 3 years. Amazon Web Services is leading the pack with annual revenue of close to $13 Billion as per the latest financial results. After some initial missteps, Microsoft is investing heavily on Azure making them a credible competitor to Amazon. Google Cloud and IBM Cloud are the distant 3rd and 4th place vendors in the public cloud infrastructure landscape. In spite of the threat for lock-in and open source efforts to enable a federated market place for cloud infrastructure providers, public cloud infrastructure market is tending towards oligarchy with Amazon, Microsoft, Azure and IBM as key players. After a delay, Oracle is finally taking steps to enter public cloud infrastructure market (IaaS).

Oracle IaaS

Oracle is betting their IaaS on three factors that may be attractive for enterprise customers, performance, security/governance and lower cost than AWS. When it is compared with Oracle’s SaaS and other products, they can easily become the one throat to choke for enterprise customers. The performance and security claim comes from the fact that their IaaS is built with bare metal servers as building blocks and they are hoping that the physical isolation provided by bare metal servers will be attractive to enterprises worried about cloud multi-tenancy. With their marketing on better performance provided by bare metal servers, Oracle is betting on enterprises wanting to forklift legacy applications to cloud. The bare metal performance advantage becomes less important for cloud native applications unless it is in the niche area of HPC workloads but when you forklift legacy applications to cloud (an approach Rishidot Research strongly discourages but many enterprises are faced with situations where they cannot move some of their mission critical applications to cloud native architectures), compute and network performance matters. Oracle IaaS is pushing ahead with their marketing on better performance than other public clouds (an independent verification on this claims is needed at this point) and hoping that their enterprise customers will prefer Oracle IaaS over AWS or Azure. The cost advantage and governance are not big differentiators as it is easy for competitors to close the cost loop and many higher order services (including 3rd party services) can provide the necessary tools for governance.

SWOT Analysis

Strength

  • Oracle has the enterprise market power and they can leverage that position to push Oracle IaaS to their enterprise customers. This will clearly stem the bleeding that is happening as enterprises wanting to move to cloud look towards AWS or Azure for their cloud needs. With Oracle IaaS, offering a cheaper price (at least in the short term), can be a good carrot to dangle in front of their existing customers. If Oracle can get to $1 Billion in IaaS revenue by the end of 2017, I can confidently say that their enterprise cloud strategy is on a strong footing
  • With bare metal IaaS, they can easily target diverse workloads including high performance, virtualized and containerized
  • There have the necessary financial muscle to do whatever it takes to compete with AWS and Azure
  • Having a strong SaaS portfolio helps gain traction for custom apps on their cloud

Weakness

  • Lack of higher order services on top of Oracle IaaS is definitely a problem. Without these services, it is difficult to get developers to use Oracle IaaS for their needs. They definitely have a database service that will be useful in the enterprise app dev segment but not enough to make a play in the public cloud market. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all have a good set of services developers can tap and it is critical for any IaaS platform to not just succeed but also to lock in their users
  • The delay in entering the public cloud infrastructure market will definitely be a drag. How they ramp up adoption in the first year is going to decide the longevity of their IaaS ambitions
  • The success of AWS is solely due to the success they had with developers. Even though Oracle has the attention of Java developers, it is going to be a tough climb for Oracle to gain developer karma. It is going to depend on their community outreach in the first year to see how far they can go on this front

Opportunities

  • Their leadership in database market will help them gain enterprise interest in their IaaS.
  • By leveraging their Java platform to Oracle IaaS and making Java apps first class citizens on Oracle IaaS, Oracle can gain widespread enterprise developer trust
  • Oracle IaaS (and their strategy in the coming years for Oracle IaaS) is going to help them go head to head with Microsoft targeting enterprise customers. This puts them in a position where they can target Microsoft for the second place in public cloud market. It is not going to be an easy path but they are better positioned than Google to compete with Microsoft for enterprise customers

Threats

  • Lack of a rich cloud services ecosystem like AWS but this can be easily overcome once Oracle gives the trust that they are serious about their IaaS offering
  • With AI getting widespread adoption since 2016 and Google, Microsoft and Amazon investing heavily on AI services on their cloud, Oracle is at a disadvantage. Google is using AI as a way to compete hard against AWS and Oracle will need an enterprise AI strategy to make their IaaS stay competitive in the coming year(s)

Conclusion

Even though they are late by close to a decade, Oracle has moved into the public cloud space. They are clearly disadvantaged at this point in terms of richness of developer and other higher order services on top of their IaaS. But we expect them to fill the gap through acquisitions and compete hard with AWS. If they can take their IaaS revenue to $1B in 2017, I can confidently say that they will be a major force in enterprise public cloud market. It will be interesting to watch where they go from here.

Competitors

Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Bluemix

Document Source

Briefing Note: https://github.com/rishidot/Briefing-Notes/blob/master/2017/Oracle-IaaS-Jan.md
SWOT: https://github.com/rishidot/SWOT/blob/master/Oracle/Public-IaaS.md

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