By Joe McKendrick, April 22, 2010
This blog was reposted from the “ebizQ.net” site
At this week’s Cloud Computing Expo in New York, there was a notable absence of European attendees — except Icelanders.
(In case you’re reading this post sometime in the year 2015, this was the week that European air travel shut down due to the volcanic eruption and ash plume coming out of Iceland. Ironically, Icelandic airspace and connections to North America remained opened.)
At a highly interactive and chatty session led by Jeremy Geelan, a group of Icelanders in the audience quipped that they had delivered their first instance of cloud architecture to Europe.
(I’ve flown IcelandicAir to Europe, which makes a stopover at Keflavík International Airport, giving passengers an opportunity to shop for Icelandic wool sweaters. It’s a great way to go!)
So, we’ve had a very public cloud in recent weeks wreaking havoc. But the host topic of discussion in New York was private cloud computing — something that caters to enterprises more than smaller shops or individuals in the consumer space.
(Of course, many would dispute that “private” clouds really exist — check out the recent raucous debate here at ebizQ on the topic.)
Speakers at the cloud show, however, were pretty excited about private cloud computing, and say they are the hot thing. However, being an enteprisey thing, they need to address concerns such as scalability and security.
In a keynote session, Brian Wilson, VP of Surgient, described the essential ingredients needed to make a private cloud successful. The best scenarios for developing private clouds arise out of data centers that already have a virtualization layer (such as VMWare or Microsoft Hyper-V), as well as management software such as IBM Tivoli or BMC). These assemblage needs to be topped off by a cloud automation platform that enables integration and automation to make it all work. This is key for many IT shops, which typically service end-user requests in a manual way. This won’t scale in a private cloud environment, Wilson said.
To effectively build an infrastructure that makes the most out of both private and public cloud, Tony Bishop, founder and CEO of Adaptivity, recommends looking at the way buildings are built — that is, with sound planning and architecture. That’s not the way information technology systems have developed over the past few decades, he pointed out. He recommends a “blueprint” approach, since “IT has become the new supply chain of the business.” Echoing Surgient’s Wilson, he points out that enterprises need to get rid of their hard-wired approach to systems and virtualize: “If you’re not virtualizing your systems at the application tier, you’re not going to be able to move to cloud,” he said. Just as important as business intelligence at this stage is “IT intelligence,” to help the enterprise learn what’s happening in their infrastructure. IT process automation is another missing link needed to move to cloud — “you can’t wait a week to approve a process that took three minutes to build,” he said.
