Where Virtualization Meets the Cloud

By Wendy Perilli
published: Thursday, January 29 2009

What's all the buzz about? Cloud computing is one of Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2009 - #2, right behind virtualization. Analysts say the economics of cloud for customers are compelling, with expected savings for business applications of 3-5x. That's not chump change - particularly in today's recessionary economy. But the biggest benefits of the cloud aren't just cost-savings. They're the increased flexibility, elasticity and scalability available to optimize efficiency and best serve the needs of the business.

What is Cloud Computing?
Whether you're an enterprise or small to medium business, you'll soon be benefiting from the cloud.  But what is cloud computing exactly?

Cloud computing is essentially the ability to acquire or deliver a resource on demand, configured however the users choose, and paid for according to consumption.  From a supplier's perspective, including both internal IT groups and service providers, it means being able to deliver and manage resource pools and applications in a multi-tenancy environment, to deliver the user an on-demand, pay-per-use service. A cloud service can be infrastructure for hosting applications or data storage, a development platform, or even an application that you can get on-demand, either off-site at a provider, such as SunGard or Salesforce, or built onsite within IT.

It's important to note that while many view cloud computing as services consumed externally, innovative CIOs have taken the steps to transform their IT groups into internal service providers.  This strategic shift gives them control and accountability for usage and resources, while providing a dynamic, self service model to accommodate the needs and SLAs required by the business units.

For those of us who remember the good old dot com days, before the bust, we saw the concept of hosted services emerge.  Everyone jumped on the ASP, ISP, MSP (application service provider, internet service provider, managed service provider, respectively) bandwagons and built offerings to deliver online services or variants thereof, such as on-demand software and software-as-a-service (SaaS). 

Remembering back to the xSP days, however, we must also remember that there were issues with the services hosting model. One issue was that few were comfortable with the concept of having their information hosted outside of their immediate control, as well as the fear of being locked into a relationship with particular vendors.

So, as the new concept of the cloud emerges, many are asking how it's different this time around and what should we expect?   Unlike those previous hosting models, we see well-established companies diversifying their business models to offer new services, based on established core competencies. This fundamental difference will help shape and stabilize the new concept of the cloud. 

But even more importantly, we have seen new technologies evolve over the past decade that are essential to the notion of the cloud.  The key technology is virtualization. In addition to some amazing cost savings and goodness for the environment, virtualization's ability to separate the OS and application from the hardware give it ideal properties to best deliver these on-demand cloud services. Charles King, Principal Analyst at Pund-IT put it succinctly: "Without virtualization there is no cloud- that's what enabled the emergence of this new, sustainable industry."

Challenges of the cloud

Today, new and established vendors are vying to deliver cloud services.  The challenge for users becomes choosing the right offering.  Many of the offerings are designed to encourage development on the vendor's proprietary platform, limiting switching abilities and propagating the offering through applications built for the external cloud only.  This is appealing to the development community as it enables quick access to infrastructure and development platforms on which to create a cloud application.  But this can become a nightmare for IT when the application has to come back into the enterprise for production-level support, as well as dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and IP risks. The viability of this solution is potentially the unearthing of a more significant problem: the inability of IT to deliver infrastructure on demand to meet the dynamic needs of these groups.  However in many cases, unless you're building an application from scratch, most businesses don't have the time or resources to rewrite their production applications to work in the cloud on a proprietary platform.  

Users should choose a cloud strategy that enables the fastest development time for new applications, with the broadest support for various OSs and development environments, as well as the ability to support production-level applications on- and off-premise as needed.

The other challenge is mobility and choice in location for running applications, internally in a private cloud or externally in a public cloud.  Another approach we see in the market is the "superstore phenomenon." Organizations such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google all plan to battle it out over whose superstore datacenter will be the place your developers will build and house their cloud applications. It is true that these are all stable brands and their infrastructure will likely be a safe place to run your applications; however, in the event of outages, downtime and the inability to access your applications, what options will you have? Additionally, how will you manage these instances, where they live long term and what risks will be imposed by keeping them off site?  Users should be able to move their applications at will from one cloud to another, whether internally or externally.

Obviously, the encapsulation offered in virtualization and the mobility found in technology like VMware VMotion - which enables a live virtual machine to be moved with no downtime for the application - increase a user's ability to move virtual machines as needed. VMware's approach to the cloud is not about vendor lock-in, but is about enabling its ecosystem of partners to build and deliver services on a common platform, allowing users to simplify the federation of clouds, on or off premise as needed, to a broad base of service providers.

Lastly, you'll want to look at innovation and stability in providing the technology to leverage your virtualization investments into internal or external cloud options. If your production environments are running on VMware software and you chose that platform due to the robust innovation cycles, reliability and technology advancements offered today, you want nothing less in a cloud services provider off-premise.  Say you want to establish a relationship with a service provider to offer some flex capacity at the end of the quarter for financial reporting activities.  You'll still want the reliability of your production system, control of that environment and the ability to move your VMs when and where you want. Also, as you build your internal clouds, look for vendors that are building for the future and whatever new technologies and application infrastructures might come along, visionary vendors that are future-proofed for new trends and have proven that they can deliver technology innovation in a timely manner.