Structure 09: Private Clouds: “It’s About the Services, Stupid”

Celeste LeCompte on June 25, 2009

privatecloudpanelWhile it may seem that everyone and their mother is moving to the cloud, the truth is that many enterprises are still wary about moving into public, shared infrastructures. But there are undeniable business benefits to cloud computing, and enterprises are beginning to ask: How can we get the cost of IT operations and application delivery down? That’s where private clouds come into play.

George Gilbert, co-founder and partner for analyst firm TechAlpha, moderated a discussion among representatives from infrastructure/hardware, the infrastructure management layer, and public clouds — including James Urquhart, technology strategist for Cisco (s csco) (@jamesurquhart), Chuck Hollis, VP and CTO of Global Marketing for EMC (s emc) (@chuckhollis), Stephen Herrod, CTO and SVP R&D of VMware (s vmw); Scott Morrison (@kscottmorrison), chief architect of Layer 7; Kia Behnia, CTO of BMC (s bmc); and Brandon Watson, director of Microsoft’s (s msft) Azure Services Platform (@brandonwatson) — to discuss the question: What are the pieces that have to come together to make private clouds a reality? Read More about Structure 09: Private Clouds: “It’s About the Services, Stupid”

Private Clouds: IT Operations Finally Meet Moore’s Law

George Gilbert, Juergen Urbanski on June 24, 2009

structure_speaker_seriesMoore’s Law has enabled new applications by powering computing on an exponential price/performance curve. But increasingly, the proliferation of a new generation of large-scale applications is being constrained by another price/performance curve that hasn’t shown much improvement: IT operations and the cost of delivery. To create ever more sophisticated applications that can be delivered from public or private clouds, we have to ride a delivery cost curve that looks more like Moore’s Law. Otherwise, we’ll choke on our systems. Read More about Private Clouds: IT Operations Finally Meet Moore’s Law

Forrester Backs Private Clouds — Will Others Follow Suit?

Derrick Harris on April 28, 2009

Forrester analyst James Staten recently authored a pair of reports on cloud computing that do something increasingly rare in the world of cloud analysis: give useful advice. Rather than talk about cloud computing as an all-or-nothing proposition where the only options are the status quo or Amazon EC2, Staten actually recommends deploying an internal cloud, leveraging public clouds either as part of a virtual private (hybrid) cloud strategy or for cloud bursting. If cloud computing is ever going to take off at the enterprise level (Forrester shows enterprise adoption at only 4 percent), large companies need to know they can get almost the full cloud experience without throwing away the millions they already have invested in their data centers. In fact, they can squeeze even more out of those investments. Read More about Forrester Backs Private Clouds — Will Others Follow Suit?