What cloud?

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What on earth – or above it – vision of cloud computing did techs originally have in mind, one wonders? It’s a foggy metaphor anyway and certainly any child’s eye view of fluffy white clouds and blue sky is long gone. In fact some of today’s branded clouds practically merge into the global sky, with Azure from Microsoft and Big Blue.

IBM deserves some credit for having the courage to extend the metaphor with CloudBurst, but then we come across its Storage Cloud and any mental vision enters weird dream territory. Those oxymorons ‘cloud infrastructure’ or ‘cloud platforms’ hardly need comment, while it is interesting to question whether any proponents have allowed ‘storm clouds’ to enter the terminology.

Almost all IT people including cloud visionaries now accept that the metaphor is now embarrassingly past its original and notionally plain language use as a term to describe the new kind of distributed computing shared across the Internet. Back in the Dark Ages at the beginning of the Nineties, Internet Computing was just not going to cut it as a persuasive concept. But now we’re effectively stuck in a cloudy environment and having to distinguish between public clouds and private clouds and a certain amount of confusion from that industry veteran vapourware. Internet Computing is a perfectly valid term today, is it not, and arguably an even simpler technology concept than ‘cloud’ – Server-Based Computing, just writ very large.

Dependencies
It all depends on virtualisation, which enables the sheer flexibility that allows cloud computing to disperse the workloads and data across as many hosts as required. So does server-based computing, that sturdy traditional architecture that harks back to the mainframe. It has come into its own in a 24×7 web world with anytime, anywhere mobile working because it replaces distributed computing with centralised computing supporting distributed functionality. Sound a bit like that fluffy cloud vision?

“Virtualisation ultimately allows the organisation to deliver a service or functionality, standardised and automated to a very high degree,” says Frederik Sjostedt, VMware EMEA director of products and solutions. “All of that has now reached a stage where the types of underlying hardware are irrelevant and virtual resources serve mission critical applications and the demands of business continuity more economically. Availability of its resources is the fundamental ICT requirement for any organisation. But for most organisations, the decisions are about services to users before answering any questions about which architecture to use.”

In that context, Sjostedt believes, those organisations are not looking for any single architecture or solution. “The users can be given the required functionality in a hybrid and flexible infrastructure, linking internal resources, say a private cloud, with one or more external resources. That could certainly involve applications in the cloud, the obvious example being Salesforce.com which has been used for years alongside internal applications. VMware has played a part in dramatically reducing the complexity in managing all of this, both for internal resources and for the cloud service providers and bridging all of the resources.”

Different scale
What distinguishes cloud computing above all else, he says, is scale on demand for any workload. “That is where managed services from world class data centres and trusted service providers will become a major market option, with a huge range of providers and specialist niches. At the top end, IBM or Accenture or EDS can take and run an organisation’s entire ICT, on-site or in a cloud or in fact in any appropriate mix. The SLAs and the security and all such concerns can be guaranteed beyond anything all but global organisations could look to provide for themselves.” At a level just slightly lower, he points to the example of T-Systems, the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, which is the biggest provider of SAP hosted systems in the world and can provision a complete new instance of SAP in about eight hours.

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