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Next step: Cloud Management to Commoditize the Compute

Posted by Justin Nemmers

11/27/12 10:02 AM

Proprietary hardware and processor architectures have been outpaced and eventually replaced by commoditized Intel and AMD x86 and x86_64 hardware platforms. Along the same lines, Linux and other open-source operating systems fully commoditized the operating system, ensuring that the underlying architecture really isn’t too important anymore. The next logical step in this was to further commoditize the operating system and hardware platform together—which is what server virtualization does. Server virtualization makes the hardware the ultimate commodity. Often the management layers of the best virtualization platforms are intelligent enough to even appropriately handle differing processor specifications and memory configurations on the hypervisors.

Commodity Cloud x86 CPU

The Intel-based x86 chip revolutionized IT.

A fully server-virtualized environment, however, is still reliant on several things:

  1. The administrators are still required to know and understand where and what is being deployed virtually. 
  2. When a user makes a request for a resource, it’s got to be put somewhere, and that underlying virtualization technology is something that has to be dealt with, understood, and eventually manipulated in a manner to deploy the requested resource. 
  3. The idea of IaaS and PaaS disrupts this a fair amount, but there’s still a choice—a implicit understanding that your requested compute resource is dependent on a single underlying technology, be it from EC2, Google Compute Engine, VMware, RHEV, Xen, Hyper-V, or anything else.

The next step in organizational IT maturity has to be the full commoditization of that compute layer. Just as organizations can now procure commodity servers and storage from a variety of vendors, and abstract that hardware choice using virtualization, so must the actual virtualization technologies be abstracted from the end user. In the end, this makes sense. Users don’t need to know or care where their compute is coming from. They just want access to the resources and services they’ve requested when they requested them. Just as administrators have the ability to choose amongst various hardware providers without affecting users, they should be able to choose amongst differing physical locations, virtualizations technologies, and even cloud providers.

This is where CloudBolt steps in. CloudBolt C2 commoditizes the compute layer. Regardless of the virtualization or cloud technology present, CloudBolt C2 makes compute resources available to users. This is regardless of what the underlying virtualization technology is, where the resources are located, and increasingly, without concern of what that underlying hardware architecture is.

A commoditized compute layer is interesting, but when coupled with end-user self-service, an IT organization has the ability to introduce a tremendous amount of IT agility into the organization.

Give us a call and let’s chat about where your organization is along the path of providing automated self-service infrastructure, applications, and services to your users. We’ll show you how CloudBolt C2 can revolutionize how you look at compute and manage your resources, wherever they are located.

 

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Topics: IT Challenges, Virtualization, IaaS, Compute

Cloud is really a verb? Stop cloud washing.

Posted by Justin Nemmers

11/5/12 9:35 AM

There’s a new-ish term that I’ve been hearing a lot of lately:  Cloudwashing.  Have a product that has nothing to do with Cloud?  Need to make it sound fresh?  Just say it enables Cloud!  I’ll take this a step further, though.  There are a lot of vendors out there that are talking about cloud, but in my opinion, a great many of them are really using it as a verb:  

  • Cloud the issue
  • Cloud the truth
  • Cloud the judgment
  • Cloud a decision

CloudWashing Windows

Here’s an interesting challenge—the next time you’re talking with a vendor about cloud, why not ask them for their definition of just what cloud is?  Any vendor that can’t—or won’t—answer that question is likely hiding something. 

The reality is that while there may be an actual definition for the term, each organization’s perspective does allow some flexibility on what it means to really be “in the cloud.”

Here at CloudBolt, the formula is pretty simple.  For years we’ve see vendors tout that their ability to enable private cloud in your environment.  The truth is that very few of those pricey technologies really accomplished that.  WhyBecause those technologies did nothing to make internal resources more consumable.  If you have technology that your end users cannot directly request and consume at some level, with accountability, you may have great virtualization, but you don’t have a real cloud.

Our path is to make the resources visible, make the resources consumable, apply a generous helping of accountability and reporting, and start really recognizing the value offered by driving out costs from your environment.  When it comes to IT resources, it feels like vendors forget the S in IaaS.  Without the service, you just have Infrastructure.  And that's no different than how this has been done for decades.

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Topics: Consumability, IaaS, Cloudwashing