It’s been a great VMWorld so far, and today’s announcements only add to all the buzz amongst the attendees.  I’ve always seen VDI and application virtualization as a way to extend the security, compliance, and availability of the data center out to the end users and VMware’s announcement of VMware View 4.5 with enhancements to security, “check in/check out” and an improved user experience helps further that vision.  Security and compliance has long been a key driver for the adoption of virtualized desktops and VMware delivers with the ability to combine RSA enVision, SecurID and DLP with guidance from an updated RSA SecurBook into your desktop solution.  I think that a ubiquitous and consistent end user experience is vital to the realization of Private Clouds regardless of whether the user is  on campus or not.  It’s not just about a product of course, although EMC and VMware together provide a very robust stack to build upon, you’ve got to approach your virtual desktop infrastructure as a transformation of the desktop, taking the design of the desktop, the virtual infrastructure acting as the delivery mechanism, deployment and migrations, application virtualization, security and systems management all into consideration for your solution.

Desktops have been a growing nightmare for IT organizations, so many different hardware profiles, OS builds, application portfolios, user communities, deployment methods, sprawl, process confusion and dubious security, not to mention spotty backup and recovery capability.  Security has long focused on the end-points as a way to control risk, I’m willing to bet we’ve got more laptops and desktops than we do routers.  And we hire very smart people and give them tools that may or may not meet their needs, a recipe for disaster really.  Desktop and application virtualization affords us the opportunity to do a global reset on a lot of that, pulling back data, applications, and profiles to the virtualized data center or Private Cloud giving your users a secure and compliant set of tools to do their work.  You’ve got to provide an environment that’s not only trusted, but also predictable, IT needs to understand the performance, scalability and interoperability of their virtual environment and application portfolio.

Layer into all of this the fact that many organizations are looking to move to Windows 7 and want that process to be easier than Vista and XP iterations were.  A holistic approach to desktop virtualization can leverage VMware View 4.5 to provide an easier upgrade path for the OS and the opportunity to do security right, building it in from the design of the solution rather than as a bolt-on after deployment.  The number of remote and mobile users is growing every year: security, compliance, systems management and performance concerns are growing along with them.  VMware View 4.5 and the tight integration with RSA’s security products running on top of EMC Proven Solutions for intelligent information infrastructure goes a long way in providing the foundation for an engaging, secure, and compliant end user experience, one of the key promises of cloud computing.

Taking a targeted approach for the implementation of a virtual desktop infrastructure to the most sensitive or highest change environments, like app/dev, is a good way to make use of the enhanced capabilities of VMware View 4.5 and the integration with RSA.  Providing access to a dev/test environment via VDI is a great way to amp up security and compliance if you’ve got a lot of development initiatives always underway or you’re working with offshore resources.  You can extend the security and compliance of a cloud service by making it accessible only via a VDI client, all data now lives in the cloud, secure and available.  Developers, or consultants, working on multiple projects?  Multiple VDI sessions rather than multiple laptops or desktops.  Gain successes and efficiencies and continue to expand the deployment of your VDI solution on their strength and ever important word of mouth.  At EMC we’ve talked about the concept of Information Lifecycle Management for a long time: get the right information, to the right people, at the right time, with an optimized cost structure.  Well RSA takes that concept and extends it with their integration with VMware View 4.5: allow the right people access to the appropriate data via a trusted infrastructure.

The first two days of EMC World 2010 have been that familiar and welcome mix of hectic and inspiring. This is my fourth EMC World and I continue to get to increase my level of participation year after year. I started with on presentation, then a presentation and a BoF session, then added participation in the analysts section and the inaugural blogger’s lounge and this year all of that plus the media session and the executive track. I am continually amazed by the level of participation of our executives, customers and partners. This year I’m lucky enough to share in the experience of having the area I spend the most amount of my time and energy on, the Private Cloud, be the organizing theme for the entire conference. Talk about feeling front and center. I’ve heard from analysts, the press present, customers and our partners that our messaging this year has incredible cohesiveness and vision. I certainly can’t take credit for that but am happy to hear that it is enabling those attending to get even more out of the event. The continued integration of our social media efforts into the conference as a whole is really paying off from what I can tell, an incredible number of hits to the micro sites, tons of Twitter traction, live blogging and even Joe taking part in a video blog from the Cube! Very cool stuff.

It would seem that having the conference in Boston has really amped up the media and analyst coverage, which I think is great. I had so many good, thoughtful conversations with the media this afternoon and am grateful for all the time they dedicated to my little corner of EMC. We really had some top notch reporters and thought leaders engaged with us from the press, I’m looking forward to seeing the output from the sessions this afternoon.

I’ll be dedicating a future post to some of the key announcements soon, I’m really excited about the possibilities they open up for cloud enablement and how our portfolio continues to grow. All in all I think this has been the best EMC World yet and I hope to get to run into you at the remaining sessions or to get your feedback via the comments or Twitter.

Later this week I’ll be presenting as a part of our EMC Live! webcasts on Building Strategies for Private Cloud Initiatives. I’ve been thinking more about what EMC’s Private Cloud vision means and how it is being implemented by our customers.¬† The initial idea of Private Cloud being a destination, part of a linear progression does a bit of a disservice to the whole concept of cloud computing and the control and choice offered by these new models.¬† Many companies are already thinking about Private Cloud as an approach to balancing their IT Service portfolio across internal and external resources based on criteria like cost and risk.¬† In my opinion, and I think EMC’s strategy and approach on Private Cloud bears this out, Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) is what makes the Cloud private.

Organizations have had a portfolio approach to IT for quite some time, now the various components within that portfolio might have started out as Mainframe, Open Systems and x86 in their own data center, or it could’ve been App Dev/Test and Pre-Prod in their data centers and Production at a hosting facility, and many, many other permutations.¬† Until recently there have always been pretty significant differences between those IT Services in the Portfolio and usually different management interfaces, organizations, reporting, etc. associated with each of them.¬† I posit that an integrated GRC framework with a Unified Service Portal not only bind the portfolio together and provides commonality in terms of how IT’s customers provision, manage and report on their services, but that they provide the framework for efficiency, control and choice which are the hallmarks of EMC’s Private Cloud vision.¬† This allows, as the portfolio matures and the GRC framework becomes more integrated, the CIO to deliver against the CEO’s expectations of cost reduction, the CISO/CLO’s expectation of a secure and compliant environment and his or her own expectation for more automation and transparency.¬† The goal then becomes not having only one method of computing achieved via a linear transformation of IT, but rather a portfolio of services delivered via several methods that is balanced for cost and risk with the ease of consumption and transparency of the public cloud and all the security and compliance associated with the data center.

I’ve geared my presentation for Thursday to address some tactical approaches to implementing such a strategy with achievable early successes to build momentum for the adoption of the model.¬† I’d welcome discussion, questions, another perspective via the comments, engagement via Twitter or on the webcast session.

Please feel free to register here and join in the conversation:

EMC Live Webcast:
Create an Architecture and Roadmap for Your Private Cloud

Thursday, May 6, 2010
8:00 am PT / 11:00 am ET / 15:00 GMT

Register Today!

The private cloud vision has captured the attention of enterprise IT leaders and strategists because it promises unprecedented economies of scale and dramatically improved business agility.

EMC Consulting experts can help you find the best path to the private cloud by leveraging virtualization, pooling enterprise resources, and adopting a service-oriented model.

Attend this webcast and learn how to:

• Identify the key attributes of a private cloud architecture
• Establish a business case for private cloud
• Develop a high-level architectural plan for private cloud
• Transform operations into a service-oriented, self-service model

Everybody’s talking about Private Cloud these days, and I think that’s great. There have been a number of really good posts and articles about it lately and I think the more people writing and thinking and implementing Private Cloud strategies and ideas the better. An informative and frankly tactically -in the best sense of the word-focused article I’ve enjoyed is A Private Cloud is Called IT by Mike Fratto over at Network Computing.

Mike, thankfully, begins by defining terms stating that a Private Cloud is one which is “wholly hosted in your data center”. I think this is the most realistic definition at the moment and my hope is that soon we will be able to extend that to be one that is managed, provisioned, secured and is compliant as if it was wholly hosted in your data center. I think he’s underestimating some of the benefits of the Private Cloud at this point versus an IaaS solution primarily because I’ve yet to see an apples to apples IaaS offering. The service levels, availability, performance, etc. just don’t exist to compete against a Private Cloud. The cost savings associated with Private Cloud are dramatic when done at scale, and I certainly haven’t seen many organizations doing IaaS at similar scales, it’s just not realistic at the moment. That being said the savings disparity between the solutions is a temporary one, the Public Cloud solutions will catch up, as will the bandwidth capabilities to allow massive migrations to them. In the meantime, the next 18 to 36 months in my opinion, Private Cloud certainly is the way to go, better savings, better security, better compliance, and more easily implemented and more importantly more easily migrated to. Let me add the caveat again, at scale! Taking 1 application, a set of call center users, a dev environment, etc. is not at scale. I’m talking entire lines of business, entire data center, or class of applications. Mike is absolutely on in regards to the steps required to get you to an automated data center, or Private Cloud and nails the reason for doing so: “leaving you with more time to work on more interesting tasks”. Or to put in my vernacular: allowing your engineers and architects to work on innovation and new offerings for the business rather than keeping the lights on. There are many studies out there that show that IT spend is focused mostly on keeping the lights on, some estimates are as high as 75%, and not on innovation and new services for the business.

Private Cloud is the new paradigm of IT, it’s not a sea-change, or a bolt from the blue, but I believe the next evolution of enterprise IT. Mike does a great job listing out several key steps specific to his realization of an automated data center that help enable the Private Cloud. His are very focused on the Infrastructure component of the transformation required. I think that there are two other key components in the transformation to Private Cloud: Applications, what is my right-sized Application Portfolio, what is my cloud sourcing strategy for those rationalized Applications, and how can I develop new Applications that benefit from the new paradigm; and Governance, what are the policies and processes required to manage the new paradigm, what do I automate, how do I secure the environment, what is the fewest number of IT controls I can implement to be compliant and what is the unified console that provides be the transparent insight into my environment from resource management, risk and compliance perspectives. It’s important to make progress against the Application, Infrastructure and Governance components in a relatively lock step fashion, getting too far out ahead in the maturation and implementation of one of the components leads to poor benefits realization efficiency and can actually cause the other areas to regress.

The most recent edition of EMC’s ON Magazine contained a whole series of articles and musings celebrating the Web at 20 years and imagining what the next 20 years will bring for it. The EMC Community of bloggers has taken this meme and shared a number of very cool stories and ideas. I’ve been tagged by Christine Christopherson, one of our very talented user experience designers, to contribute my story and ideas for the future of the Web. Like my fellow EMC’ers I’ll be addressing the following three questions:

How has the web changed your life?
How has the web changed business and society?
What will the web look like in 20 years?

How has the web changed my life?
I was a research assistant in the Physics Department at the University of Notre Dame during the summer of 1991 working with Prof. Carol Tanner’s team researching Optical Atom Traps. The lab I was working in was not too far away from the computer lab with the recently acquired NeXT workstations. These things were exceedingly cool as up to that point I’d only been exposed to Apple II’s in my rudimentary programming classes and rather clunky IBMs that my Dad got through work. There was a team at CERN that was doing very similar work to the ND team and they were publishing their notes and results to an internal system utilizing the CERN httpd server, which funnily enough ran very well on NeXT. At this point I’d never heard of Tim Berners-Lee or his grand vision, it was simply regarded as the next wave of Physics documentation management. I remember being a little dismissive of it at that point, mostly because I was just in love with lab notebooks and couldn’t see how a computer would be better than that.

I forgot about httpd for two years until I was a software engineering student at the Illinois Institute of Technology and got reacquainted with the very nascent Web. I discovered Yahoo and all this new content that was coming online and played around with the W3C httpd server more, learning about HTML and UNIX administration in the process. The Web changed my life because it was the gateway drug to Solaris and Irix I must be honest. I became a UNIX snob, thrilled by the power of the Sun Sparcs and SGI Indys running their server daemons and databases. The Web and the openness of its communication lured me away from the closed systems that I had been programming for, after seeing the power of the Web there was no way I was going to sit in a cube and code 1 function or class for some humongous software package for three years. I became a Web administrator at Chicago Kent College of Law supporting the Circuit Court and the paperless law school and from there I went into consulting for first the Web, then intranets, then Data Centers until finally I was running operations for MyPoints.com, one of the top 10 web properties in 1999 and 2000. I learned a lot along the way about connecting people and ideas and have been able to develop a much more expanded vision of the power and purpose of systems and I am very grateful.

How has the web changed business and society?
Let me count the ways, they are legion. The power of the web to bring people and information together is exactly what drew me to it. It’s changed the way that I do just about everything, from shopping and learning about new products to finding information, teaching my daughters, watching movies and TV and interacting with my friends and peers. I think it is great the way that many companies are expanding their use of the Web, engaging their customers, learning what they expect of the products and services, how they’re being used, how they could be improved and allowing customers to get together to share even more about themselves around a shared passion or interest facilitated by that company. The Web has even changed product design, more and more companies crowdsourcing their designs or creating contests via the Web to develop new products. Nike has done a great job of this allowing everyone to design their own custom shoes and hosting design competitions online. Awesome stuff. Web-enabled customer forums help people get answers, best practices, unvarnished opinions and new contacts all in one place. EMC has done a ton of work in this area and I’m proud of the communities we’ve built for our customers. Gina Minks blogs often about our communities and has done a ton of work setting them up and managing them.

What will the Web look like in 20 years?
Well there certainly has been a lot written about the future of the Web and Technology but I’ll add my 2 cents. I am very much in the school of Neal Stephenson and his views presented in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. The Web will become more immersive and more pervasive, if that’s even possible. I’m not sure if Virtual Reality will really take hold, but there certainly is a lot of potential there. I think the biggest differences we’ll see is around search and the ability to federate searches and be able to more quickly integrate and analyze the results a la Wolphram|Alpha on steroids. We’ll also see a lot more integration of location aware and other context based integration into search and content presentation. I’m especially excited by the possibilities of more integration of open-source and crowd-source design like that at Local Motors and in the Makers by Cory Doctorow. I guess I’d sum it up by saying ubiquitous access, high bandwidth, context aware natural language search and analytics with data privacy and even more by the way of integration of social networks and academics etc. Needless to say I am excited to be a part of the continued transformation.

At this point I’d like to tag that font of information Christopher Kusek aka CXI and Kathrin Winkler who I hope will talk about the Web and sustainability in 20 years!

I’ve spent a lot of time talking with my clients and partners lately about what makes a Private Cloud a cloud. There are many schools of thought on this, no end to the opinions really, but I think it comes down to a few differentiators between “just” virtualized infrastructure and a cloud. For me those differentiators are less about technology and more about how you manage and provision things. A virtual infrastructure is still managed and provisioned on a resource or asset basis, where a cloud is managed and provisioned as a service or by policy. A service being some aggregation of resources to deliver something meaningful to your customer. An integrated approach to Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) is required to accomplish management as a service or by policy. It’s not enough to have a Dashboard that shows you the status of your environment, you need a console that reports and allows you to interact.

The virtual infrastructure is a key enabler of the cloud, but it’s not the cloud. At EMC we’ve developed a product and services portfolio that enables the Private Cloud vision of any device, anywhere accessing your information and your applications regardless of the infrastructure it happens to live on. Our Virtual Computing Environment coalition extends that enablement by including the components of unified internetworking and compute with the cloud operating system. Private Cloud is more expansive than VCE and the first technology solution offered by it in the form of the VBlock. The real differentiator between the virtual infrastructure and the Private Cloud is any device, anywhere is able to access your applications and information with your governance controlling it regardless of the underlying infrastructure, be it internal assets or those provided through the public clouds.

It’s the integration of GRC into the environment that delivers on the Private Cloud promise of all the agility, flexibility, scalability, multi-tenancy and automation associated with cloud computing tempered with the security, availability, resiliency, and control of the data center. This means that getting to a Private Cloud has to be about a lot more than deploying new technologies, it’s a wholesale transformation of IT and a new way of interfacing with the Business and your customers. A lot of what has been promised and demanded by frameworks like ITIL, SOA, MOF, COBIT, etc. is now able to be delivered through the infrastructure and toolsets supporting it. It’s possible to implement the Service Catalog and things like automatically approved changes into the resource management infrastructure to begin to provide real self service of IT where appropriate. The appeal of many existing public cloud solutions are the ease with which users can consume them: a credit card; a few clicks; and bam you have storage, or a server, or a CRM system. An integrated approach for GRC can provide this same user experience, plus the enterprise necessities like Service Levels, Business Continuity, Data Protection and the like for enterprise IT. This is the stuff that gets traction with the people I talk with about cloud and to me is the real promise of Private Cloud, a promise that is actually deliverable today.

I argue, frequently and with just about anyone who will engage, that Cloud Computing is the model and there are several different types of instantiations.¬† This certainly isn’t a new or controversial idea, and not a sea change in and of itself.¬† The same could be said for Web 2.0, SOA, N-Tier, Client-Server and back to the Platonic Ideal.¬† The blogosphere and twitterdom is filled with talk of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS &c. as various forms of Cloud Computing and those are interesting forms but not necessarily new ideas or modes of computing.¬† EMC has laid out the vision for a Private Cloud, it’s rather well defined and we have gathered together a number of partners to help us enable our customers in the creation and operation of private clouds.¬† I’m certainly a proponent of Private Cloud, believe in the model and think that it is innovative and a new mode of computing, but I come here not to praise private cloud, but to enable it.

I’ve spent the last few months talking with customers all over the world about Cloud Computing in general and what EMC means by Private Cloud in particular.¬† I’ve been fortunate enough to get a lot of feedback from the CXO level down to the managers and administrators that will be tasked with running these clouds.¬† A few common themes have emerged in these conversations.¬† Rarely does the question, “Why Cloud Computing?” come up, it’s almost as if Cloud is a foregone conclusion, hyped into the mainstream.¬† I am almost consistently asked by people at every level, “So now what?”.¬† EMC and our partners, and the market in general, has done a good job of laying out the groundwork and vision for Cloud Computing and its benefits and a hardware and software portfolio to enable it.¬† The question becomes how do I actually execute against the vision with the products to make it reality, as it does with most paradigm shifts.

It seems to me that a lot of IT organizations are positioning themselves for Private Cloud, knowingly or unknowingly.  The virtualization of the data center, not just of servers, but real enterprise virtualization is a key milestone on the path to Private Cloud.  Not only does it provide the framework to build a Private Cloud on, it brings real benefits to the organization in terms of reduced Capital Expenses, Operating Expenses, time to provision, mean time to repair and improved customer satisfaction for internal and external customers.  These benefits are core to the allure of Private Cloud and IT is keen to realize them as quickly as possible.

I’ve often seen, and industry analysts seem to weekly report, that virtualization efforts seem to hit a wall when around 20-30% of the workloads in the data center have been virtualized.¬† There are many reasons for this, ranging from applicability of previous virtualization solutions to enterprise workloads, and insufficient application owner and line of business buy-in to the transformation leading to lack of approved downtimes and applications not being approved for P2V.¬† We’ve helped a number of customers push through this wall and drive towards their goals of 80-90% of workloads being virtualized through the development of enterprise virtualization programs, acceleration services, documenting the activities and processes surrounding the virtualization of servers and applications, training and comprehensive communication and marketing plans to get the buy-in of the stakeholders and application owners.

It’s not just driving enterprise virtualization that will help IT realize the benefits of Private Cloud, however.¬† A lot of outsourcing companies operated for years on the concept of “Your mess for less”.¬† For this to be a real transformation it can’t just be the same old problems running on a shiny new architecture.¬† A key component of the journey to Private Cloud has to be the rationalization of the application portfolio.¬† We are constantly adding new applications and features and functionality into the environment, and for every “server hugger” out there I’d argue there’s an “application hugger”, we all have our babies and we’re certainly not going to let them be torn from our arms.

A systematic review of the existing application portfolio to identify opportunities for retirement, feature\functionality consolidation, replatforming and virtualization on proprietary unix systems provides the roadmap for how many of the promised savings can be realized.  If you want to embrace x86 as the chosen platform you have to figure out how to get as much of your application portfolio as possible onto it.  Coupling this portfolio rationalization with a comprehensive business case for Private Cloud provides the framework for driving line of business and application team compliance and for a realistic timeline of how quickly you can actually realize Private Cloud.

So that accounts for the infrastructure and the applications, now for the trifecta, governance!¬† A new model of computing requires a new model of governance and the associated tools and processes.¬† Thousands of virtual machines crammed into a small number of cabinets dynamically allocating and deallocating resources is a daunting environment if your key governance tool is Microsoft Excel.¬† The identification of appropriate services to provide, service levels to achieve, and a chargeback model to allocate costs are required, absolutely required, to have any chance of successfully building and operating a Private Cloud successfully.¬† This requires transparency into what you have, what you’re using, where it is, who owns it, what it requires, how it is to be measured and monitored, backed up, replicated, encrypted, allowed to grow or shrink, &c.¬† Sounds scary, I’m sure.

The service catalog, an integrated management tool framework and automated processes allow you to monitor, maintain, provision and recover the costs of such an environment.¬† Your administrators, engineers and operations teams need to be trained on the technologies, service levels, communications plan and have their roles and responsibilities well documented to empower them in this kind of model.¬† New tools and proactive methods for communicating with your clients have to be developed and integrated to ensure they understand what services you are providing them, how they are being charged for them and what service levels you guarantee.¬† I personally think that self-service plays a key role in the development of a Private Cloud, or most cloud models for that matter, and integration of Change, Release and Capacity Management into a self-service portal can make the difference in your client’s adoption of this new paradigm.

We’ve packaged these services up under the umbrella of Accelerating the Journey to Private Cloud and have integrated our Technology Implementation Services, and several new EMC Proven Solutions into a holistic stack to enable our customers. It’s not a light switch or a silver bullet, it still is a journey, but we’ve worked hard to take the lessons learned from many years of data center consolidation and migrations, process automation, custom reporting and dashboards, building innovative solutions and architectures, product training and managing transformative programs and integrate them into an effective services and solutions stack to accelerate the journey to Private Cloud and realize real benefits today.

I thought I’d post a few thoughts and get back into the swing of blogging on the occasion of my five year anniversary with EMC Consulting.¬† The last five years have brought a huge amount of change for me both personally and professionally.¬† I joined EMC Consulting two weeks after finding out my wife was pregnant with our first child, and the changes have just kept coming from then on.¬† I had spent the previous ten years working for small organizations and then growing with venture backed start-ups.¬† This new transition in many ways was my graduation into “adulthood”, first time working for a large company supporting well established products.¬† I was very hesitant at first, but haven’t regretted the decision once in the last five years.

In many ways the transition wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be, while EMC is a very large company the organization I joined was only a couple hundred back then.¬† We’ve both grown a lot in the last five years, I went from being a project manager to global CTO for my practice and the organization has gone from a few hundred people to a 2700 person global organization.¬† It’s been exciting and back breaking and fun.¬† While the consulting side has been growing the overall make up of the company has changed dramatically too, more than 50% of our revenue coming from software and services, a real sea change from where we were five years ago.¬† I’ve been lucky enough to watch our product portfolio morph into what I do truly believe is the most comprehensive in the industry for information management, we’ve accomplished much more than I would’ve hoped for in 2004.

This has been a real milestone for me, for ten years I hopped between jobs just about every year seeking new opportunities and challenges, constantly looking for the next organization I could help grow, not really wanting to grow stale in my role.¬† I can honestly say that hasn’t been a worry for me the last five years, constant challenges and new opportunities.¬† For a long time I never thought I’d find a place to settle down, but I can easily see myself working for EMC in 2014, and I couldn’t be happier about it.¬† So as I look back on the last five years I am grateful: for the work, the opportunities and mostly the incredible people that I have the privilege of working with.

Here’s to another five great years!

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about clouds and the future of IT across the blogosphere: Chuck is always good for a post or two; IBM spoke up the other day; and there are even reports that “Hey, this is real!”.¬† I can’t help but wonder if Cloud Computing is really just the marriage of flexible architecture, ubiquitous networks and IT Service Management?¬† As has been noted on this blog I am highly infrastructure biased, but I think it is apparent that fast, readily available networks are changing IT, your phone, laptop, Kindle, &c. are now viable end devices for application and content delivery almost anywhere on the planet.¬† Exciting times indeed!

If you scratch beneath the surface a bit the magic and mystery of the Cloud becomes a little more apparent: you have a high-performance, omnipresent network; a flexible delivery engine that is highly scalable and efficient; and a management framework that provides the appropriate Service Levels, security, compliance and communications the customer is seeking.  To truly deliver a cloud service you first have to identify and define a service that can be readily doled out to customers clamoring for it.  I can think of tons of services internal to an enterprise that would qualify for this designation, so I think the concept of a private cloud is a cogent one.  Take for example File Sharing, or Email, or Market Data, or Order Processing.

So why now?  The emergence of good allocation and resource management tools certainly makes the management of the service a lot easier, add adaptive authentication, identity management and role based access, couple that with the virtualization capabilities and infrastructure components geared to hypervirtualization and you have the recipe for easy to deploy private and public crowds.  The market adoption of frameworks like ITIL and ISO 20000 and their focus on Service Level Management provides the appropriate mindset for the IT organization looking to become service oriented.  Now ride all of that on a ubiquitous, converged, highly available fabric and you can provide these services to pretty much any client, via any platform, any where.

Suddenly Clouds aren’t so amorphous but really the next logical progression of virtualized infrastructure, Service-Oriented Architecture, and IT Service Management.

Ted’s post on utilization raises an interesting point: why don’t more storage admins know what they have?¬† To me there’s really only one answer:¬† the available tools suck.¬† Yeah, you heard me:¬† they suck.¬† They’re difficult to use properly, are not (or can not be) deployed widely enough within an organization to be useful, don’t report on competitors’ products fully, and sometimes even the same tool from the same vendor reports the same metric differently between products.¬† Case in point: one reporting tool I know of reports on two of the vendor’s own products, yet the metric is calculated differently for the two products.¬† Not only that, but you need to have access to a hard-to-find document that points this out and explains the calculations.¬† And good luck explaining the calculations or why they ARE different to anyone who hasn’t spent the last 5-10 years making a specialty of the topic.¬† It’s no wonder admins don’t know their utilization numbers when even the storage vendors can’t consistently tell them what they are.

If the tools performed as expected, they would be much more widely used and there wouldn’t be a need for a group of consultants (like me) to go around developing reporting dashboards and returning a year or two down the road because the next round of people to fill the admin posts don’t understand it either.¬† But, then, if the tools worked I’d be less valuable as a consultant, so I guess we should just keep the tools the way they are;¬† I like being able to pay my mortgage.