Well, it is my blog day. This is my 3rd blog in
two 2 days and the first one on Cloud. The other two are on – “Say It’s Your
Birthday! ”.
Last year, people put everything under the sun in the cloud
umbrella. NetApp’s Chief Marketing Officer Jay Kidd’s blog
on Scattered Clouds described the situation in 2008 extremely well. In the last
3-6 months, however, there is a consensus that’s emerging with regards to
what’s cloud for the enterprise.
I am going to revisit a definition of Grid Computing from
2002 and propose a definition of Cloud Computing. I think that this could be a
reason for Larry
Ellison’s rant although Larry may have his own reasons. I believe this
offers a vision and opportunity for the future.
In an Oracle Grid white paper from 2002 (also referred in my
book: Enterprise
Grid Computing with Oracle), Benny Souder and I proposed the definition of
Grid Computing as:
“At the highest level, the central idea of grid computing is
computing as a utility. The user of the grid should not care where the data
resides or what computing resources process the requests. Instead, the user
should be able to request information or computing from anywhere and have them delivered
according to his or her needs and in a timely fashion.
From the perspective of a provider of the grid within an
enterprise, grid computing is about providing a shared IT infrastructure that
addresses the demands of business while utilizing the IT resources most
efficiently and cost-effectively.”
Think about it.
I believe the concept of the cloud computing is exactly the same. I
propose the following definition with some minor changes to the above
definition:
“At the highest
level, the central idea of cloud computing is computing as a utility. The user
of the cloud should not care where the data resides or what computing resources
process the requests. Instead, the user should be able to request information
or computing from anywhere and have them delivered according to his or her
needs and in a timely fashion.
From the perspective of a provider of the cloud within an
enterprise, cloud computing is about providing a self-service
shared and dynamic IT infrastructure that
addresses the demands of business (i.e., meet the
demanded service-levels) while utilizing the IT resources most
efficiently and cost-effectively. “
If you agree with the above definition, you can understand
why Larry Ellison calls cloud computing another marketing propaganda for
something that industry has been talking about for many years. I think this is
also where the opportunity lies too. We are now at the inflection point for the
adoption of the cloud. Virtualization played a strong role in creating this
inflection point. The current economic climate only accelerates the pace of
adoption of cloud computing.
If you notice, the second part of the definition talks about
how the data center delivers cloud computing services. This service can be
delivered internally within the same enterprise or delivered externally to the
customers. I believe the management problems of measuring service-levels
delivered and managing self-service driven shared and dynamic infrastructure
share key common problems irrespective of the consumer. I call this the private
cloud.
The first part of the definition is about the needs of the
consumer. If the consumer is sitting outside, then this becomes the public
cloud. The public cloud adds some more key requirements from security and
mobility perspective. Consumers would like their environment to be isolated
from other consumers and they would like their stuff to move seamlessly to and
from provider and consumer premises.
There is a lot to be done to achieve this vision. Well, I
work for a storage company – NetApp. So you can expect my friends and I to
write more about what we are doing for our customers to realize this vision!!
cheers,
Brajesh.
