Broadcom's price increases and policy changes have led many VMware customers to look for other options. Nodeweaver is positioning itself as an alternative for customers running computing workloads in far-flung edge locations, from cruise ships to solar farms in Sub-Saharan Africa, and it is taking cost out of the hardware needed as well.
Founded in Italy but headquartered in Florida, Nodeweaver sells a platform that installs directly on off-the-shelf x86 servers and runs virtual machines and containerized applications without the layers of separate software some competing products require.
The company is pitching its approach as a lower-cost, lower-maintenance option for businesses rethinking their infrastructure after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware triggered sharp virtualization price increases.
"Broadcom's as-a-service offering for VMware at the edge, it's not only cost-prohibitive, it is so hyper-limiting, it isn’t worth the effort," NodeWeaver’s CTO Alan Conboy told The Register.
The pitch is resonating in edge markets, where the compute happens outside traditional data centers at the physical locations where businesses actually operate. That includes retail stores, oil rigs, manufacturing floors, and, as it turns out, cruise ships.
Carlo Daffara, NodeWeaver's co-founder and chief executive, told The Register that the company was built around a deliberately narrow focus.
"We only do edge. We are not trying to make a platform that runs every workload in the world," Daffara said. "Customers don't buy features. Customers want to have a service. They just want their software to run and forget about it."
That design philosophy, Daffara said, came from watching edge projects stall at other companies.
"When you have 14,000 locations, or when you have hundreds of ships, you cannot go ship by ship, checking things. That's simply unfeasible, and that's why a lot of edge deployments fail," Daffara said. "Everything works in the lab because you have experts, cables, spare parts. At the edge, or in a fast food restaurant where everything is covered with a layer of grease, you may not have an IT technician there."
The platform's distinguishing features include the ability to run on nearly any mix of x86 hardware, new or old, from any manufacturer, and a perpetual licensing model that breaks from the subscription pricing that has become standard across enterprise software. NodeWeaver also updates clusters of servers automatically without taking workloads offline, the company said.
Conboy, who joined NodeWeaver as chief technology officer after more than a decade at edge vendor Scale Computing, said the combination is unusual in the market.
"If it's x86, it'll run on it, and it's a pure software stack," Conboy said. "I've got a 15-year-old Opteron at the bottom of the rack. It drops right on and runs great. Right next to that, I've got a 10-year-old three-node cluster of Dell gear, and I can add that AMD to my Intel gear, mix and match to my heart's content."
Conboy said that flexibility separates NodeWeaver from VMware and from other edge-focused alternatives, which he said typically require specific certified hardware and charge licensing fees based on the number of processor cores or workloads.
"The competitive advantage of coming in with an incredibly low number, perpetual license, buy it once, own it forever, can't be overstated," Conboy said. "When I go in against pretty much anybody out there and they're quoting per core, per this, per that, the impression that they're giving the entire world is: you're nickel and diming me forever."
He said that users can cut costs from 60 and 80 percent by eliminating what he called “the Broadcom tax."
“So suddenly you've got radically lower cost of software acquisition and support, and optionally zero hardware cost. I mean, hell, I think you can run this thing on a potato,” Conboy said.
Carnival Corporation, the parent of Carnival Cruise Line and several sister brands, has been running NodeWeaver on its ships for three to four years. The deployment spans at least 29 Carnival vessels, with additional installations across sister brands, the company's employees said. Each ship can have 5,000 guests, 2,000 crew and upwards of 15,000 end points running on a NodeWeaver cluster.
Adebisi Adesanya, principal engineer – network, connectivity operations governance for Carnival Cruise Line told The Register that their switch from VMware was driven in part by the Broadcom acquisition and the licensing changes that followed.
"The number one factor will be cost," Adesanya said. "Most companies are actually moving away from VMware because of the cost and licensing. So many things were introduced which weren't favorable."
Adesanya said that the network team now runs firewalls from Palo Alto Networks, load balancers from F5, SD-WAN equipment from Versa and authentication systems from Aruba on NodeWeaver clusters aboard each ship.
David Arndt, senior architect, who works on Carnival's satellite communications team, said his group uses NodeWeaver to replace racks of individual PCs that outside vendors previously needed to manage their onboard equipment, a use case that overlaps with the corporate virtual desktop market VMware has long dominated. Arndt said Carnival has deployed roughly 100 NodeWeaver servers for that purpose over the past two years.
"NodeWeaver makes it very simple to launch VMs, put it on several different interfaces. You can direct traffic any way you want," Arndt said. "You could have 10 different vendors, 10 different PCs, 10 different networks, and you can do it just super quick and easy. So that way we're not putting a PC down for every single vendor that's going to touch the equipment out there, and we can also segregate it by VLANs and things like that. So it's basically just creating, like, a broad interface of many different PCs, we can segment it together and have it work together in a small, simple, easy package."
Arndt, who said he does not consider himself highly technical, said that he was able to build and ship 10 to 15 servers a day after only a few weeks of training.
"The ease of use is just crazy," he said. “It didn’t take me more than three or four weeks to be able to set down a server, build it up, launch VMs and take care of that in maybe an hour to an hour and a half.”
Adesanya said that he had previously scripted deployments of NodeWeaver across all 29 ships in under two hours using its cloud-based automation tools.
NodeWeaver executives said that the company is targeting large enterprises and government customers with thousands of locations — retail chains, gas stations, hospitals and manufacturers — as its next phase of growth, along with managed service providers looking to offer edge computing to their own customers. ®
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