Josh's Blog

C-L-O-U-D: a four letter word?
These days it seems like all we hear is talk and marketecture around the "cloud.” I can't even count how many times I have been in a room of IT peers and, when the word cloud is spoken, I’ve witnessed eye rolls and gasps of air. The word today seems almost like a four letter word.

I myself have started to warm up to the idea of the private cloud for organizations (public clouds I will cover a little later). My process of warming to the idea was really stepping back and evaluating how could a cloud be used. So what is my idea of the Cloud, you ask?

Private vs. Public Cloud
The Private Cloud to me is creating a pool of resources that provide an infrastructure where applications can easily be deployed in an automated fashion. A Private Cloud also gives organizations the ability to monitor and bill back based on resources that are used. Public Cloud is the ability to take your Private Cloud and push it to a third party to rent or outsource resources.

It's a Journey
Today we see many vendors pushing the "Journey to Cloud"—two of the leaders are VMware and EMC, both of which have emerging technologies that enable organizations to build private clouds. VMware will be releasing their cloud platform later this year, which will be an added layer of automation on top of the vSphere platform.

Storage Challenge
To me one of the bigger challenges to the design/architecture of the cloud in most customers’ environments has been the storage. VMware has enabled organizations to take computing power and put it into a large pool of resources, but storage has been a barrier to the ability to move your resources outside of a single datacenter.

At EMC World last week in Boston, EMC announced the release of their VPLEX platform. Chuck Hollis, EMC Global Marketing CTO, describes it on his blog as “a new platform to build these new storage pools -- big, hardware-agnostic storage pools that can stretch over distances.”

Image courtesy of kevindooley on Flickr