With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...| By James Urquhart | Article Rating: |
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| December 30, 2008 04:55 AM EST | Reads: |
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James Urquhart's "Wisdom of Clouds" Blog
Comparisons between Scale-Out and Enterprise clouds, while sometimes tempting (especially in the Google vs. Microsoft case), are rather useless. They serve different purposes, often for completely different audiences, and enterprise IT organizations would do better to focus their efforts on the specific facet of cloud computing that applies to a given project.
One of the fun aspects of a nascent cloud computing market is that there are "veins" of innovative thinking to be mined from all of the hype. Each of us discover these independently, though the velocity of recognition increases greatly as the effects of "asymmetrical follow" patterns take effect. Those "really big ideas" of cloud computing usually start as a great observation by one or a few independent bloggers. If you are observant, and pay attention to patterns in terminology and concepts, you can get a jump on the opportunities and intellectual advances triggered by a new "really big idea".
One of these memes that I have been noticing more and more in the last week is that of the two-faceted cloud; the concept that cloud computing is beginning to address two different market needs, that of large scale web applications (the so-called "Web 2.0" market), and that of traditional data center computing (the so-called "Enterprise" market). As I'll try to explain, this is a "reasonably big idea" (or perhaps "reasonably big observation" is a more accurate portrayal).
I first noticed the meme when I was made aware of a Forrester report titled "There Are Two Types Of Compute Clouds: Server Clouds And Scale-Out Clouds Serve Very Different Customer Needs", written by analyst Frank E. Gillett. The abstract gives the best summary of the concept that I've found to date:
"Cloud computing is a confusing topic for vendor strategists. One reason? Most of us confuse two fundamentally different types of compute clouds as one. Server clouds support the needs of traditional business apps while scale-out clouds are designed for massive, many-machine workloads such as Web sites or grid compute applications. Scale-out clouds differ from server clouds in five key ways: 1) much larger workloads; 2) loosely coupled software architecture; 3) fault tolerance in software, not hardware; 4) simple state management; and 5) server virtualization is for provisioning flexibility — not machine sharing. Strategists must update their server virtualization plans to embrace the evolution to server cloud, while developing a separate strategy to compete in the arena for scale-out clouds."
Get it? There are two plans of attack for an enterprise looking to leverage the cloud:
- How do you move existing load to the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers?
- How do you leverage the new extremely large scale infrastructures used by the Googles and Amazons of the world to create new competitive advantage?
Around then I started seeing references to other posts that suggested the same thing; that there are two customers for the cloud: those that need to achieve higher scale at lower costs than possible before, and those that want to eliminate data center capital in favor of a "pay-as-you-go" model.
I'm not sure how revolutionary this observation is (obviously many people noticed it before it clicked with me), but it is important. Where is it most obvious? In my opinion, the three PaaS members of the "big four" are good examples:
- Google is the sole Scale-out vendor on the list...for now. I hear rumors that Microsoft may explore this as well, but for now it is not Mr. Softy's focus.
- Microsoft's focus is, on the other hand, the enterprise. By choosing a .NET centric platform, Azure, complete with Enterprise Service Bus and other integration-centric technologies, they have firmly targeted the corporate database applications that run so much of our economy today.
- Salesforce.com is perhaps the most interesting in that they chose to compete for enterprises with force.com and Sites, but through a "move all your stuff here" approach. Great for the Salesforce.com users, but perhaps a disadvantage to those wishing to build stand-alone systems, much less those wishing to integrate with their on-premises SAP instances.
The point here, I guess, is that comparisons between Scale-out and Enterprise clouds, while sometimes tempting (especially in the Google vs. Microsoft case), are rather useless. They serve different purposes, often for completely different audiences, and enterprise IT organizations would do better to focus their efforts on the specific facet of cloud computing that applies to a given project. If you are a budding PaaS vendor, understand the distinction, and focus on the technologies required to meet your market's demand. Don't try to be "all cloud to all people".
Except, possibly, if you are Microsoft...
[This post appeared originally here and is republished in full by kind permission of the author, whp retains copyright.]
Published December 30, 2008 Reads 8,860
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By James Urquhart
James Urquhart is Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Computing and Virtualized Data Centers at Cisco.
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2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where ...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to public and unmanageably immature cloud services?
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Hans van de Koppel, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Capgemini, will take Cloud Expo delegates to the developing world of clou...
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