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Is VMware's Project Mystic Emerging From Behind a Cloud?

Speculation from various sources point to the mysterious MARVIN being VMware's Project Mystic.

• By Michael Domingo
• 06/11/2014

A picture on Twitter is worth a few thousand words and an equal number of rumors. One rumor in particular is gaining traction and that's that the mysterious photo of MARVIN is the debut of Project Mystic, VMware's rumored project tying together compute, networking, storage and orchestration into a converged infrastructure appliance.

If Project Mystic is a converged infrastructure, MARVIN, as the tweeted graphic points out, is a hyperconverged infrastructure solution. What differentiates the former from the latter is the idea that each layer of services works in concert with each other and is not bolted on as an afterthought, and can be provisioned for scaling up or down without hesitation among the pieces. A good piece to read on this is "In the Cloud Era, The Era of Convergence Is Upon Us," by Arun Taneja, which goes into detail about the discrete pieces of a hyperconverged infrastructure.

Computer Reseller News blogged about Project Mystic in early March, calling it an "EMC branded converged infrastructure" that may have a number of VMware's hardware partners a bit miffed that VMware would directly compete with some of them. That Project Mystic and MARVIN have converged infrastructure elements is too much of a coincidence, so if the rumors that these projects are one and the same, it's likely to fuel the fire under hardware partners once again. A story in relation to the tweeted graphic posted by The Register alludes to competitors who might be affected by any resulting fallout of VMware getting into the hardware business. VMware's response to The Register in short: "VMware is not in the hardware business, we are a software company ... ."

We'll know if the picture gets clearer come August, when VMware holds its VMworld Conference in San Francisco.