Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Blog: Mix-and-Match Trouble with Virtualization, Cloud Computing

Page:

A group of virtualization and cloud-computing experts gathered at MIT's Emerging Technology conference last week had good news and bad news for people who have committed large parts of their IT budgets and career ambitions to virtualization. The good news is that virtualization will become a critical part of an even larger part of most IT infrastructures as time goes on.

The bad news is that it will do so as part of a larger movement toward cloud computing and will, in large part, disappear as a separate discipline. It also makes the competition and snipesmanship between Microsoft and VMware more obviously counterproductive for both their own efforts and the interests of their customers.

"What virtualization has done is decouple all the software from the hardware in an enterprise," according to Mendel Rosenblum, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford, who spoke at the conference less than two weeks after resigning as chief scientist at VMware, which he co-founded in 1998 with his wife, former VMware CEO Diane Greene.

"Once you have things decoupled, people can provide you with a virtual appliance, rather than your having to build everything yourself, and you can think 'maybe I want to run this on someone else's machine, not necessarily one I own,'" Rosenblum says. "Here we're talking about the whole question of becoming comfortable with someone else running your software."

That's the kind of proposition that would have sounded phenomenally unattractive in the days when outsourcing meant selling a whole IT department to IBM, putting a contract-enforcement manager on the case and hoping for the best.

Now, between managed services, co-location services, software as a service, Web-based applications and Web-based storage, security, disaster recovery and other services, it's an unusual IT project, system or application that isn't considered a target for outsourcing at least once in a while.

"The cloud" to a certain extent is just an umbrella term to add some consistency and legitimacy to what might otherwise seem an undisciplined, confusing mass of functions, vendors and changes in the nature of what it means to be an IT provider.

Amazon, for example is a book store. But it's also a Block Store, or at least that's one of the services available through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Amazon got so good at building highly reliable, dynamic data services to support its own business it only made sense to make that capability itself into a business, according to Werner Vogels, VP and CTO, Amazon.com, who spoke on the same cloud-computing panel as Rosenblum.

Page:

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Amazon, Amazon.com, C2, etwork, Google, IBM, IBM Australia, Microsoft, MIT, Salesforce.com, VMware
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: cloud computing, Microsoft, MSP, SaaS, virtual server, VMware
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Cost Effective Security and Compliance with Oracle Database 11g Release 2
    Information ranging from trade secrets to financial data to privacy related information has become the target of sophisticated attacks from both sides of the firewall. Built upon 30 years of security experience, the Oracle database provides defense-in-depth security controls that enable organizations to transparently protect data. By leveraging these controls, organizations can safeguard data, ensure regulatory compliance, and achieve business goals such as consolidation, globalization, right sourcing and cloud computing while still maintaining scalability, performance and availability. Read this whitepaper.
    Learn more »
  • Oracle x86 Rack Servers Optimized for Rapid Deployments and Operational Efficiency
    Business-critical and mission-critical workloads — demanding applications and databases — require stable and secure environments. When these types of workloads are deployed on x86 servers, the need to ensure business continuity, maximum uptime, and consistent processing means that IT managers and business unit managers are looking at enterprise x86 servers in a new way: They realize that the business depends on these servers and that x86 server platforms for the enterprise are no longer expendable, as they might have been when servers were dedicated to a single application — or when they were deployed as small Web servers that could be easily taken offline and replaced.
    Learn more »
  • 10 Essential Steps to Web Security
    This short guide outlines 10 simple steps to best practice in web security. Follow them all to step up your organisation’s information security and stay ahead of your competitors. But remember that the target never stands still. Focus on the principles behind the steps – policy, vigilance, simplification, automation and transparency – to keep your information security bang up to date.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments