2010 Prediction: Ravi Gururaj, VMLogix
Managing Private and Public Clouds
The past year has seen server virtualization win mindshare at the executive management level and rapidly accelerate growth and adoption across enterprises of all sizes and verticals. Several thousands of VMware, Microsoft and Citrix customers have embraced virtualization – first in the pre-production environment and now increasingly in the data center. In spite of the sluggish economy, companies have prioritized virtualization projects in their data centers. We have increasingly seen evidence of companies clearing and opening up their corporate budgets for strategic virtualization and cloud projects.
In 2010, we expect this growth and adoption to continue – this time with unprecedented acceleration through the adoption of multiple hypervisors. The data center and pre-production environments at companies will start to migrate towards multiple hypervisors as administrators and businesses apply filtering criteria based on price, performance capabilities and hypervisor platforms that are best suited for specific workloads (in the near and longer term). Clearly the newer entrants such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2, Citrix’s XenServer 5.X and even Red Hat’s KVM solution will start to give industry leader VMware a run for their money.
As companies build out their private clouds using a choice of hypervisor technology, selective enterprise workloads will start to debut on the public cloud. Public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are already building capabilities (e.g., the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud) to attract such early migrations of enterprise workloads. Companies will start to ‘dip their toes’ in the public cloud with workloads such as test and development, batch processing, processing power augmentation, web services and more. In 2010, we will start to see the demand for ‘hybrid clouds’ which will seamlessly marry together the best of private and public cloud infrastructures. In this scenario, companies will want to tap into the private cloud for steady state demand and then ‘burst’ to the public cloud for spiky demand requirements. Companies will fully expect to drive better utilization of their on-premise equipment and conduct more stringent capacity planning.
And as we see hybrid clouds emerge, the clamour for a unified management interface will grow into a crescendo during 2010. Administrators will start to feel the pain of managing multiple cloud infrastructures as separate islands (using disparate management tools) and will find the status quo unacceptable. They will demand a common management layer and interface to help them seamlessly manage both private and public clouds infrastructures, which administrators can use to manage aspects like cloud users, charge-backs and user policies and quotas. In addition, users will demand simplified end-user provisioning capabilities to front end these clouds (self-serve portals) combined with delegated admin, rich policy and quota-based resources allocation and secure access controls.
Clearly, 2010 will be the year that the cloud goes mainstream and private and public clouds merge. It’s safe to predict 2010 will be a wonderfully eventful cloudy year!
