Three “Cloud Strategies” Every CIO Should Consider

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 NetApp Dynamic Data Center) along with workshops and services that help customers transform their data centers.

 

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.

Comments

[Walter Mozy]

The small business is a reluctant Cloud Customer for data storage because the learning curve is too steep.
This group figures their architecture can straddle the gap between casual data storage use for SMB and the large Cloud Storage infrastructure purchase:

http://www.datasentinel.com/privacy/technical.php

Is it just hype, or are they on to something?

[Dan Brown]

Okay, so tech vendor of choice for cloud-compute, but what about cloud storage? Given that the bulk of data that will flow to the cloud from commercial entities and consumers is unstructured it seems a tremendous opportunity. However, the sheer volume of files (I prefer the term objects) will go into the billions and capacity at massive scale doesn't seem to be optimally addressed by file-based storage. I realize NetApp announced something related to object storage is coming (2010?). Am hoping for more detail sooner than that to see how it will fit with existing NetApp on the floor. Unstructured data is a major pain point (volume and capacity) and I'm really interested to see what NetApp has in store. As the leader in file-based storage (NAS) I think the object approach is the right path to take for NTAP by expanding its product set and cover everything unstructured. From files to objects.