As VMware costs rise, Micron21 taps into its Tier IV capabilities to tempt defectors

mCloud offers an Australian VMware alternative for mission-critical workloads

A year after Broadcom completed its $69 billion acquisition of data centre virtualisation giant VMware, successive price increases are forcing many CIOs to revisit their data centre architectures as rising costs make Big Cloud’s status quo untenable.

Yet even as the new cost structure drives major customers like the Australian Taxation Office to get creative in renegotiating their increasingly expensive VMware licenses, other firms are taking advantage of the interlude to seriously consider an architectural migration from VMware to full-stack alternatives such as OpenStack.

“Many businesses are looking at getting away from the notion of vendor lock-in, but last year they weren’t ready to make the transition because they were watching the fallout from the Broadcom acquisition,” said James Braunegg, managing director with Melbourne-based Micron21.

“Now, with another price hike I’m sure most businesses are thinking about what they do going forward.”

Since it was already operating Australia’s only Australian-owned Tier IV certified data centre, Micron21 last year saw an opportunity to add value for local businesses that wanted to step away from VMware onto an open, high-availability platform built for mission-critical workloads.

The globally recognised Tier IV designation requires full redundancy of   infrastructure  – and since it had already provided that redundancy at its three geographically separate sites, and has boosted communications resilience with connections to over 2000 global networks, , Micron21 quickly saw an opportunity to use its more than   performance to build a viable alternative to VMware.

After nine months of market research and product development, Micron21 released the result: mCloud, a multi-site virtual data centre offering that delivers enterprise-grade performance, security, and scalability..”

Designing an open alternative

VMware’s broad range of capabilities set a high bar for the evolving platform, but Micron21 found a comparable proposition in OpenStack and the open source Ceph, a scalable storage service that uses an algorithm called CRUSH to track data across a data centre cluster.

Latency considerations on inter-site links generally prevent secondary and tertiary data centres from replicating data in real time – but because of the low latency of Micron21’s extensive fibre infrastructure, the team found that Ceph could be seamlessly ‘stretched’ to provide real-time replication of data across its three geographically distributed sites.

This provides Tier IV grade replication of customer cloud environments, enabling the firm to position mCloud as a mission-critical alternative to VMware that runs on highly configurable cloud servers based on Intel XEON Gold CPUs – and provides network services to link to customers’ own security and other equipment.

“We can get the latency right down so you can actually deal with the problem of data synchronisation and data rights across multiple locations,” explained Micron21 head of commercial Sheldon Dyer. “That was a big tick and competes head on with what vSANs can do through VMware.”

VMware-grade power at open-source prices

As economic uncertainty drives enterprises to scrutinise their spending on cloud platforms that are expanding faster than ever thanks to widespread adoption of generative AI, businesses are increasingly looking for ways to wind back their infrastructure costs.

Amidst an expected surge in Australian data centre spending that Gartner says grew by 14.9 per cent last year and will grow an additional 11.3 per cent this year, the firm predicts that half of all companies will be performing real-time cost or performance optimisation of their cloud-based workloads by next year.

That’s up from just 20 per cent of companies a few years ago – showing just how important awareness of cloud expenditure has become.

At the same time, Gartner believes service reliability will become so important that 30 per cent of businesses will create new executive roles specifically focused on IT resilience – helping boost end-to-end reliability, tolerability and recoverability by at least 45 per cent.

By thinking outside of the VMware box, Micron21 has been able to build mCloud as a viable alternative for reliability minded, cost conscious companies – providing a highly available, highly capable full-stack platform whose intrinsic Tier IV redundancy and low latency tick key boxes for enterprise customers of all stripes.

“Because it is open source,” Braunegg explained, “the price point that we can deliver compute at is much cheaper than what VMware is charging at the moment – and we’ve found tools and techniques that make it easy for us to pick up an existing VMware workload and port it across.”

“We’re able to deliver a high quality compute platform and virtualised services at a fraction of the cost – and all you need to do is flip the switch.”

Micron21 offers a free 30-day trial of mCloud; click here to sign up and find out how easy it is to switch.