Hello

Welcome to my first blog.  My name is Gary and I've run IT for companies like Covalent Systems Corp, The Santa Cruz Operation and StorageWay. I have BS in EBusiness from University of Phoenix and an MBA from Santa Clara University.  

Over  the last seven years, I've been a member of NetApp IT's leadership team.  I've lead IT Operations teams, IT Engineering and Portfolio delivery.  These days I work as a member of "The Office of the IT CTO"  at NetApp.  This means I get to work on IT strategy, learn from NetApp's customers and influence NetApp's product managers.

This really is a great place to work, so I though I'd share some of the insights into the industry you have given me. 

To kick things off, I'm quite interested in Cloud Computing but want to discuss it from a slightly different angle.  What does all this cloud stuff mean to the IT practitioner?

    Cloud Stuff

Much has been said about Software As A Service (SaaS), Platform As A Serivice (PaaS) and Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) and how these "Cloud" initiatives will change the way we consume information.  As an IT practitioner, I have an invested interest in what this means to me .

I'd like to offer some thoughts in FIVE parts.

     0. Introduction and  Dimensions of the Cloud

     1. What the cloud means to the corporate data center

     2. What the cloud means to the role of corporate IT

     3. What the cloud means to the role of the developer

     4. What the cloud means to the consumer

How I know it's a Cloud

I've listened to and read many peoples explanation of what a cloud is.  Many of these explanations confuse me because there are too many pieces mixed into one description.  I'm a simple guy and don't like being confused, so I try to put the pieces into different compartments- what the cloud is and some dimensions that tell me what kind of cloud it is.  So my defining criteria have to be general-  I offer them to you and I'm quite interested to learn if you find this useful.

First, I assume that the "Cloud" describes IT becoming a service that is delivered like a utility.  With that assumption, I determine that in general, a cloud service has these attributes:

• It is Scalable          (The service can get bigger  or smaller)
• Multi Tennant   (It has the capability of serving more than one "customer" at a time)
• On Demand     (If you want it now, you get it now)
• Pay as you go (<-- what that says)

These definitions all point to one thing.  Thinking about this for a moment, we can also conclude that Cloud computing is an economic move that is enabled by technology.  New technology is context to cloud computing and the economic model is the core of the movement.

Dimensions of the Cloud

The whole cloud discussion reminds me of a book I read on Physics.  There are more dimensions than you thought and nothing works the way you imagined.  But eventually evidence accumulates and you have to concede that things work a certain way.  I've come to the conclusion that the cloud has three dimensions.

Dimension 1: Flavor

The Cloud  comes in flavors including  SaaS, PaaS, IaaS. We covered those already, but there are many more including Games As A Service (GaaS), Storage As A Service (STaaS), Desktop As A Service (DaaS). 

Dimension 2: Public and Private

Reading the blog-o-sphere you might think that all clouds are public.  This is absolutely not the case.  There are many companies out there who will take your private infrastructure and run it for you.  They make money by migrating your applications from a traditional hosting architecture to one that is scalable, allocated on demand, multi-tennant in that it can host more than one workload and pay as you go.  They migrate infrastructure into a cloud that is efficient to operate and therefore gives them greater margin.  NetApp storage, incidentally, is a big win for these companies because of all the storage efficiencies they can leverage.  Suffice it to say that there are a lot of private clouds out there that you might not read about because they are... private.

Dimension 3: Internal and External

I've heard vigorous debates where one person claims that if it's hosted in the corporate data center, it isn't a cloud.  If you've ever been to a really big company, you know that IT is like an external provider to many different divisions.  It doesn't really make sense to say that if an IT practice were to build an infrastructure that was scalable, on demand, pay as you go and multi-tennant then they weren't offering a cloud service.  Remember, the cloud is ultimately IT as a service, so if the big guys can build an internal cloud, I say anyone who can leverage the benefits of multi-tenancy can build an internal cloud if they want.

Next Up:

That's all I can summon on a Friday afternoon.  My next blog will cover the impact of the cloud on the corporate data center.

Now it's your turn.  You get to tell me if I'm understanding this thing called "the Cloud" in the same way you do!

Bonus

Cloud initiatives seem to be fertile soil for new ideas.  There's an interesting company called g.ho.st.  It's a collaboration between engineers in Isreal and Pakistan, who, for obvious reasons, don't get to meet very often.  The have an interesting virtual desktop cloud offering.  Check them out here.