Tough questions and fear of failure

April 27, 2011, 11:46 AM — Network World's Jon Brodkin ably makes the point in a story today that I tried to make in a post about it last week that probably came off as sounding more like No-Duh sarcasm than an actual point:

No matter what guarantees cloud-computing service providers offer, how much better their research is than yours or how miraculous the whole new generation of virtualized computing seems, they're for all that based on the same laws of physics and boxes of human-built, error-prone hardware as your data center.

Data centers, clouds and even big virtual infrastructures are inherently multivendor – in fact they're whatever "multi" would mean if it were possible to add a zero to the end of the numerical version of it. Data centers are a mesh of systems or networks each of which are built of products from several vendors and enough software to create a computing environment in other words very near unique.

That requires, at minimum, using a "private cloud" service from a public-cloud vendor – meaning you're after all using the same platform, however you're paying extra to make sure your apps and virtual machines run on hardware, networks and storage dedicated only to you and that you can control – very much like a co-location agreement in other words than stereotypical "cloud," he said.

The cloud business

The cloud business, lucrative and rapidly growing as things now stand, poses big problems for the companies providing it, of which Amazon is only the best known – which Brodkin's story points out.

It has driven even technically capable companies just as Iron Mountain to back away from general-purpose cloud-computing services to focus on their own specialties.

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