Cancer Research UK: VMware is the only option if you want more than virtualisation

VMware is the only virtualisation provider 'that has thought about the future of the cloud' according to Cancer Research UK's head of infrastructure

When Cancer Research UK picked VMware to virtualise its infrastructure, the organisation's head of infrastructure, Mick Briggs, believed that "there wasn't really much other choice".

"If you want to run virtual machines and you want to do more than simply virtualise them - which we do - then there is only one choice and that's VMware," Briggs told Computing.

"I've used other virtualisation technologies, and I can virtualise servers and run them, but that's about it, there isn't the thought of how cloud is developing in anybody else's product," he said.

Cancer Research UK started using VMware before a full virtualisation strategy was put into place in 2007/2008. This led to the organisation being almost 95 per cent virtualised by 2011.

It now has 500 to 600 virtual machines on a permanent basis, with another 100 that spin up and down at any given time.

But Briggs believes that the work with VMware has more to it than virtualising machines.

"What we're doing and where we're moving to is capturing the possibilities of what cloud is good at developing, and we want to extract our infrastructure layer to the point where VMware is our infrastructure, and then we can work with the V-Cloud suite to hook into other vendors' clouds," he said.

"From our business's perspective [the user and development community], they don't need to worry about what we're connecting to, what infrastructure I'm using on the backend, I can put servers where I need them, as long as it follows a set of standards, and in our case that's VMware," he added.

Briggs explained that if any business had all of its equipment stored in a co-located data centre, and it couldn't hook up to other people's clouds, then it would inevitably means that those data centres would have to hold an overhead of infrastructure that the organisation doesn't need.

With VMware, Cancer Research UK can ensure it is using its infrastructure to its maximum capacity.

"I want to be able to squeeze every hour out of the machines that I buy," Briggs said.

Cancer Research UK: VMware is the only option if you want more than virtualisation

VMware is the only virtualisation provider 'that has thought about the future of the cloud' according to Cancer Research UK's head of infrastructure

He gave an example of Cancer Research UK developers wanting to spin up five machines for a few months, and said that the organisation would have to hold the infrastructure to be able to deal with that short-term need, and that this in turn would be an overhead of infrastructure.

With VMware Connector, Cancer Research UK can put that infrastructure in someone else's cloud, spin it up for three months and pay for it on an as-use basis. Then, once the organisation has got the development cycle up and running, it can decide where it is most efficient to run that infrastructure - be it a decision to buy more physical equipment or whether to stay in the cloud.

Developments in the cloud

Briggs said he does not believe cloud vendors' claims that organisations should virtualise everything and put everything into the cloud.

"It's nonsense, we've heard all of this before. We've been through the internet bubble bursting and survived. There is apparently an 18 per cent shift of firms moving into co-location data centres and that is no surprise to me; I want to control my core infrastructure, which is VMware, so that if I choose to put my stuff into someone else's cloud, I want to be able to move it to another person's cloud and play the commodity compute market - VMware enables us to do that," he said.

"I don't really care what's happening in these cloud-hype discussions as they will inevitably result in the next cloud bubble burst, I just want to have my hooks in the water waiting to catch the big fish that wins this argument," he added.

By this Briggs hopes that organisations can sign short-term contracts with the cheapest and most reliable cloud vendor, and if that vendor then raises its prices then the business could take its servers to another vendor that is equally reliable and ticks all of the boxes, at a cheaper price.

"While all the vendors are fighting about who can be the cheapest to provide servers, the consumers are going to win - let it play itself out and then we can be the winners," he said.