Panel - Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step

Its great to see people discussing cloud in a really constructive way. At the Structure 09 event "Put Cloud Computing to Work" in San Francisco there has been lots of cloud discussion.

I recommend you watch this video of a panel discussion moderated by George Gilbert from TechAlpha.

Toward Cloud Computing: Private Enterprise Clouds As A First Step
Enterprises are cautious about migrating their most demanding applications to public clouds. Public cloud infrastructure can’t run all existing enterprise applications, particularly the most mission critical, without some modification and more advanced management software. IT also faces concerns about security and control. Yet the lure of self-service provisioning and usage-based pricing is still strong. The solution? Build your own cloud with your existing infrastructure investment as a first step. This panel will explore how enterprise clouds are likely to take shape, building on the evolution of virtualization infrastructure and systems management technology as a foundation.

The people were

• James Urquhart from Cisco
• Chuck Hollis from EMC
• Stephen Herrod from VMware
• Scott Morrison from Layer 7
• Kia Behnia from BMC
• Brandon Watson from Microsoft

Thats a great bunch of smart people. The only person that surprised me within the space was Scott from Layer 7, so I had to go and dig around to see what they are all about, interesting.

Some of the things discussed

• Where Cisco Unified Compute System (UCS) fits in to the private cloud and virtualisation
• VMware and providing isolation in the hardware layers
• Virtualising storage and where/when is it appropriate to use it at the hypervisor, in the fabric or in the storage array.
• Moving storage around with clouds. Its easy to move a virtual machine but try moving the TB of data behind it.
• Management platforms, traditional versus the cloud with virtualisation.
• Its all about the services.
• The complexity of administraiton of all the different layers and having works who can understand them all.
• The impediment of rewriting your applications and data compliance.

To be honest I did not think the moderator did a great job of driving the questions and/or understanding the panels answers. Some of the questions were just hard to understand (maybe its just me). But the comments from the panelists are great.

Be warned, watching this will make you think. You can find the video at LiveStream and it should also be embedded below.


Rodos