Posts by Mitchell Ratner

The Cloud is not a new concept, but is finally gaining traction

We've heard about utility computing, autonomic computing, dynamic data centers, and the goals of each. Cloud computing is a convergence of the best concepts of each, and now is the time to actually begin implementation on a private scale, without interoperability standards, within the corporate data center. This will allow customers to begin realizing its value today.

Vendor of hardware and software, servers, networking, security, storage all have to come to grips with how interoperable clouds will change their product lines. It is a very exciting time to be in the industry, and it will take cooperation from all vendors to enable this vision to come to its complete fruition.

The design goals need to be simplicity, ease of use, built-in security, manageable service levels and interoperability. The gains to the end-user customer must be very tangible immediately upon deployment.

One can envision a day where datacenters are scalable enough with sufficient security to allow their own resources to be shared amongst a set of external users, publishing their capacity for sharing in a public manner, and when available, external users can rent the time and capacity needed to handle the "cloud bursts" of activity they cannot handle in their own private environment. Any data center can be available for rent, not simply external cloud providers. The technology will enable any data center to also be an external cloud provider.

Regards,

Mitch