Cloud Computing Starts to Get a Little Foggy

A plethora of applications are being considered for the cloud, nevertheless it may take until further notice another year previously cloud computing goes mainstream in the enterprise.

Whether that stems from a lack of understanding or a calculated effort to appease demands from the board of directors, equating virtualization with cloud computing only serves to slow down the pace of technology within the IT organization.

According to Barton George, Dell cloud computing evangelist, unless a private cloud provides self-service capabilities, dynamic orchestration and support for multitenancy across two or more data centers, it's not actually an instance of cloud computing. Finally, that which does not mean all the characteristics of cloud computing as defined by the National Institute for Standards and Technologies should not be called a cloud.

Unfortunately, many IT organizations have started referring to anything that runs on shared infrastructure as a private cloud. That may reduce some of the external political pressure on the IT organization, however ultimately all it does is slow down the pace of much-needed research. To illustrate, an IT organization may think it is doing so then by leveraging virtualization to go from 300 servers per IT administrator when other companies that fully embrace cloud computing will be in the near future approaching 3,000 servers per administrator, says Mark Bilger, CTO for the Dell Services organization.

Dell, says George, is offering two primary paths to the cloud. The first is the Dell Virtual Integrated System platform in other words a more evolutionary approach in terms of how most IT organizations are structured today, during the PowerEdge C Series is aimed at IT organizations that want to radically change the way IT is managed across servers, storage and networking. In either case, adds Bilger, the goal is to dramatically increase the scale of computing in the enterprise without having to make a corresponding increase in the size of the IT staff.

Bilger notes that, by definition, that means embracing more IT automation, which he concedes IT organizations have not uniformly embraced. However without, cloud computing simply will not scale.

Obviously, Dell sees cloud computing as a seminal industry moment through which it hopes to usurp rival server vendors. Whatever the outcome, it's pretty clear that the way enterprise IT is managed is being transformed. The only real question is to what degree does your IT organization want to lead that transformation today versus being forced to react to it tomorrow.

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