Successful lift-off:
Achieving cloud computing in the enterprise J.P. TEEKENS
Product Marketing, Senior Consultant, Dell
With the right solution in place, an enterprise cloud can help to significantly lower administrative burdens, reduce costs, and ultimately deliver the greatest value to the business: excellent customer satisfaction.
Much has been said about the role of cloud computing in the future of IT. Public, private, hybrid, and community clouds merge together into a utopian future of seamless, unending capacity and unparalleled customer service. Although such a goal helps focus activity, IT leaders today recognise that this end is easier described than built. Still, in the short term, there are real and tangible cost and flexibility benefits that can be reached with cloud computing.
Defining the cloud
A brief definition helps frame the challenge: a cloud is a pool of resources from which users can request a service to be automatically and rapidly provisioned for their needs. The abstraction layer of cloud management obscures the location, hardware, and sometimes even size of that resource from end users, providing the service without the burden of managing systems. Meanwhile, on the back end, a cloud should be intelligent enough to optimize the use of the underlying
hardware for cost savings, flexible enough to reallocate resources to meet service-level agreements, and (in some cases) elastic enough to seek resources from third-party clouds when needed. That’s a lot to ask from an IT environment that, until very recently, sat in one spot and ran a single OS and workload day in and day out. Of course, there are a whole range of IT components that come into play with cloud computing.
A discussion of the cloud necessarily begins with the servers: without scalable processing power, there is no cloud. Companies need servers that provide a scalable, manageable, and flexible foundation to the cloud architecture.
The servers must in turn be augmented by storage, because the data and virtual machines in the cloud must be stored somewhere. Storage is often an afterthought of the cloud architecture, which can be dangerous given that the portability of the workload is often strongly tied to the portability of the
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