Diamanti, a container infrastructure company backed by Goldman Sachs and
other major VCs, recently commissioned a survey of more than 135 channel partners on the state of containers in their industry.
To get some context on the findings, I recently spoke to Diamanti CEO Jeff
Chou.
VMblog: I think this is the first survey I have seen about the channel
perspective on containers vs VMs. What did you think were the key insights?
Jeff Chou: It's clearly still early days when it comes
to all things containers. And yet, the survey finds two-thirds of solution
providers are already employing Docker containers on behalf of their customers.
Just under half are also making use of Kubernetes, which has emerged as a
de-facto standard for orchestrating and managing containers. At the same time,
only 17 percent of solution providers today say they expect containers to be
deployed on bare-metal servers. And yet, 35 percent noted they expect
containers to be deployed on everything from public clouds to bare-metal servers.
While that platform uncertainty may not be surprising given the relative
immaturity of containers, it's worth exploring how 2018 will likely be the year
we see exponential growth in the number of organizations deploying containers.
We think it's a great opportunity for channel partners to help customers
realize the benefits of containers on bare metal. And we offer a solution to
help resellers and systems integrators get their customers up and running
containers in production at scale in minutes compared to months with DIY.
VMblog: What are the benefits of running containers on bare metal?
Chou: Many organizations deploy containers today
on virtual machines or a PaaS running on-premises or in a public cloud by
default. They rely on these legacy platforms to provide tooling for managing
virtual machines that most IT organizations lack today. There are also benefits
that stem from the ability of hypervisors embedded in a virtual machine to
provide higher levels of isolation between containers. But marrying a modern
emerging technology with any legacy platform always comes with cost. It's
possible to run hundreds of containers on a bare-metal server, an order of
magnitude more than on a VM. The number of containers that can be deployed on
top of virtual machine is limited by the availability of memory and other I/O
contention issues. And if you don't need a VM, well then you don't need to pay
a vendor like VMware to license their technology. You get performance
improvements, more application density per server, and lower operating costs if
you eliminate that annual VM tax.
VMblog: With the rapid rise of commodity hardware, open source software and
the cloud, what can the channel do to remain profitable and relevant in this
new IT modern world?
Chou: Most channel partners generate much higher
margins for the services they provide than they ever do reselling a commercial
product. Managed service providers, much like cloud service providers, loathe
to have to pay for commercial software simply because the scale of their
operations often make commercial software in the form of a "VMware tax" cost
prohibitive.
And today most enterprises have adopted an "open
source first' mantra when it comes to software for similar reasons. Not only
has the quality of open source software substantially improved in recent years,
well-governed open source projects tend to innovate at rates that no one single
vendor relying on a commercial alternative can keep pace with over an extended
amount of time.
If the end customer is spending less money to
acquire software, it stands to follow there is more of the total available IT
budget to be allocated to either acquiring additional hardware or higher-margin
services provided by the channel partner, even though overall IT budgets are
generally shrinking. Regardless of the outcome, the channel partner winds up
with a larger percentage of the available IT budget.
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