Virtualization or Cloud? How About Both
By: Momchil Michailov
One of the things I have looked at for some time is the storage aspect of virtualization. We have witnessed virtualization completely revamp the datacenter. Customers have virtualized their servers, operating systems, and applications yet their storage infrastructure and storage management is stuck back in the early 1990’s. Where management and provisioning of the Hypervisors and virtual instances is pretty well carved and established, storage utilization is extremely low, storage performance is a black box, and management and operation cost is so high that customers are starting to complain that it almost exceeds the savings provided by the server virtualization layer.
Then I look at the cloud, and there are a few platforms in play already. In the public cloud we have Amazon, Akamai, Google, and Microsoft’s Azure to name a few. Some of them have made progress and some not so much. The private cloud space is heating up quite rapidly as well, but in both cases a major obstacle is the fact that you would most likely have to port your existing applications. And that begs the question: why do companies spend millions and millions every year to maintain their existing infrastructure all the way back to mainframes? One could say its because they have proven solutions that work and their businesses depend on them, so the idea of taking them apart and placing them in the cloud with all of the unknown aspects of that process and potential catastrophic affect on the business would automatically block any notion of move into the cloud.
Now what about merging the idea of proven virtualization technology with sophisticated dynamic storage platform and a web interface to create a cloud? That would provide the customer a datacenter with a virtualized infrastructure on the back end and a cloud front end at the same time. This kind of platform would allow them to keep their existing proven application and server platform, and dramatically reducing their operation cost, while providing agility and scalability required in today’s IT environment.
This kind of architecture would allow a scalability and availability to address both the public and hosted as well as the private cloud space, and remove the barrier of porting to the cloud.
Stay tuned for more on this topic!
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