Amazon, Elastra and the New Enterprise Data Center

Last week Amazon made an investment into Elastra. Some see this as Amazon's enterprise play. Others see it as move towards the viability of private clouds. I see it as a natural step towards cloud computing as a mainstream datacenter option.

In a whitepaper titled "From Cloud Computing to the New Enterprise Data Center" IBM has positioned cloud computing as precursor to the new enterprise datacenter model.

"The new enterprise data center will be a virtualized, efficiently-managed center, which will
employ some of the tools and techniques adopted by Web-centric clouds, generalized for
adoption by a broader range of customers, and enhanced to support secure transactional
workloads. With this highly efficient and shared infrastructure, the ability for companies to
respond instantaneously to new business needs, to interpret large amounts of information in real
time, and to make sound business decisions based on moment-in-time data becomes possible.
The new enterprise data center is an evolutionary new model to provide a new scale of efficient
and dynamic approach in helping to align IT with business goals."

From another point of view, Gartner analyst Lydia Leong while commentting on Rackspace's recent IPO said that "we expect to see the majority of [corporate] IT infrastructure move into the cloud" over the next two decades.

If all this is true, cloud computing is how enterprises will managed their IT infrastructures. No wonder then that Amazon has made this early bet.

If you're interested in learning more about Amazon's plans, join us at the cloud computing education event on September 11th when Amazon is currently scheduled to present.

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Does anybody really know what cloud computing is?

Less than 2% of the CIOs in an Infoworld survey said that cloud computing was a priority. The surveyed indicated that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. Following these two are cost cutting, application integration, and datacenter consolidation. At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open source software, content management, and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey).

Since cloud computing is all about virtualization and server consolidation these kind of numbers really concern me? Last week during the SOA-R education session, Bob Lozano of Appistry actually talked about how enterprises are integrating public and private clouds today in order to meet virtualization, consolidation and cost cutting goals. His full presentation is available in the SOA-R Interactive Networking Group wiki.

Elastra is also addressing this enerprise need. They are working on a version of Cloud Server for data center VMware environments, their "private clouds." The company's pitch is that IT departments need better tools to specify requirements and configure software to run on physical or virtual servers, regardless of whether the underlying systems are on premises or out in the public cloud. See John Foley's blog on Information Week in The Rise Of Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing.

Sam Charrington is even more definitive in the Open Web Developer's Journal:

"We're still relatively early in the cloud computing hype cycle but I strongly believe that in the future, most if not all server-side software applications will be deployed in a cloud-computing-like manner. That is not to say that all applications will be run in one of exactly five global clouds. On the contrary, every enterprise will have one or more 'clouds' into which they deploy applications."

CIO's should really re-think their views on cloud computing.

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