NetApp launched a collection of cloud initiatives today, but I want to step back and ask what cloud means to CIOs. Every CIO I meet seems to want a “cloud strategy,” but the words mean different things to different CIOs. I have discovered that cloud strategies fall into three broad categories:
- Cloud Provider: Sell IT services over the Internet. Companies often consider this strategy when they have especially strong IT capabilities. Telephone companies, for instance, know how to run large, reliable data centers, so providing IT services to others is a natural fit. Data centers that provide cloud services typically use virtualization to host many customers in a single shared infrastructure.
- Cloud Customer: Buy IT services over the Internet. These CIOs don’t necessarily want to eliminate existing data centers, but they wonder whether—for at least some of their IT services—it would be possible to let someone else build the data center, buy the hardware, and run the applications.
- Internal Cloud: Build shared, virtualized infrastructure for internal users. These CIOs want to continue operating their own data centers, but they would like to use the same virtualization techniques as cloud providers to make IT more efficient.
In some ways cloud providers have it easy, because most are designing a new data center architecture from scratch. In fact, much of today’s launch focuses on what we’ve learned from working with large cloud providers like Oracle (for its Oracle On Demand business), Yahoo! (for email), and T-Systems (for its hosting business).
Most CIOs don’t have the luxury of redefining their IT architecture from scratch—they must make incremental changes to an existing strategy. A hybrid model often makes sense. They build an internal cloud and begin migrating less mission critical applications onto it. Or they identify a set of applications that can move to the external cloud. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. It’s perfectly reasonable to build an internal cloud to host the random “garbage applications” that most business seem to accumulate while at the same time outsourcing Oracle infrastructure to Oracle’s On Demand cloud.
As I described in this blog entry, NetApp’s goal is “to be the storage technology partner of choice for companies building cloud-compute environments,” and our launch today describes how we do that. There are many technology components, like Data ONTAP 8 and NetApp Data Motion, but to me what’s most important is that we have defined an effective cloud architecture (the
We have learned an amazing amount by partnering with many of the largest cloud providers in the world, and our goal now is to help others take advantage of this experience.

