Josh's Blog

My last blog post I rambled on about the Private Cloud and how I think it can be beneficial to IT. When I start thinking about Public Clouds, though, my forecast doesn't look so positive.

I will start by saying all applications and organizations are not equal. I think there are many applications that are a good fit for Cloud applications. If you look at email, it has been in the cloud since almost the beginning of the Internet. I think for many IT organizations it does make a lot of sense to put email in the cloud. If you have ever had to manage an email infrastructure, you have to have dedicated hardware, licensing, spam filters, admins, etc. dedicated to email. The operational and infrastructure costs can cost IT a ton. There is a definite argument that you can reduce costs with the offerings Google, Microsoft Exchange, or VMware's Zimbra.

Okay, that was my pro Cloud pitch. Here is the not-so-positive spin on the Cloud and why I am not on the Public Cloud bandwagon.

The only one you can trust is yourself
The biggest concern/question that I have is when we starting putting secure information that we once had within our own corporate walls into the Cloud is, Do we gain or lose security? It is just like the feeling I got when I hired my son's first babysitter: I know I trusted this person, but do I really trust this person? And are they going to take care of him like I would? With the public cloud we just don't know what we are getting into. We do not KNOW what the methods are that are taken, we just know what we are told.

IT as Utility
This is the conversation that I have had with many of my customers: We just put our applications and data into the cloud, and we've just turned our IT department into Comcast Cable. What happens when the $99 a month triple play promo runs out and we are now paying $180 a month? We now do not know what our early IT utility bill is going to be and as businesses grow so does the IT utility bill. Also, what about customer service? Nobody has the urgency for our applications and data as much as the people who own it—which is a good segway for my final point.

Coming down from the Clouds
The one issue that I see and have discussed with other colleagues in the industry is I am not happy with my current cloud provider and I want to move my data from one cloud provider to another or even back into private infrastructure. How do I move my data? Can I move my data? What will it cost me? How long will it take? The answer is we just don't know yet. VMware is going to be making a push in the second half of this year to be the standard platform for both the Private and Public Clouds, which will help some. But what about the other Cloud providers?

So, yes, I am a bit of a Negative Nancy on the Public Cloud, admittedly not one to jump on the latest buzz or technology that jumps in the game. I tend to be a late adopter of technology and my biggest fear with the Public Cloud is the recreation of the Dot Com Fallout. If we remember back in the late 90's with the explosion of hosting providers and ASPs, how many of those companies are around today? Are we recreating history?

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