In The News: Cloud Expo Summary Blog

11/25/2011

Read the original article here.

Cloud Expo Takeaways: Cloud Confusion Still Exists

"Confusion still exists around the definition of a cloud deployment," says Gale Technologies' Garima Thockchom

By Jeremy Geelan

With 9th Cloud Expo at Silicon Valley's Santa Clara Convention Center now finished, Cloud Computing Journal asked a variety of industry stakeholders what their Top Three takeaways were from the event, now that the many thousands of delegates are back at their desks and their companies, leveraging the knowledge and the insights that they gained through the extensive technical/strategic program and the huge number of booths on the Expo floor.

Takeaway #1: Analyst projections re private cloud  were ridiculously off

There was widespread acknowledgment that analyst projections regarding the adoption of private cloud technologies were off by a ridiculously broad margin. Per most projections we should have been in the middle of active private cloud adoption. However, what most vendors see is a disconnect between CIOs who are sold on the cloud concept, and their IT managers and architects who are deeply skeptical and resistant.

Most environments are still coming to grips with broadening their virtualization deployments, re-architecting applications to take advantage of cloud and virtualization and redoing their processes to accommodate self-service and cloud concepts. Dynamic, automated and self-service IT is still a ways away. There is a pervasive perception of complexity and cost involved in migrating existing apps to the cloud – private or public. Many vendors are offering cloud-in-a-box solutions or build a cloud in a month/week/hour, but these have not yet made a dent in the skepticism around value and complexity of cloud deployments.

Takeaway #2: Cloud confusion still exists

Despite years of cloud-hype, there still exists confusion around the definition of a cloud deployment. Does cloud=virtualization as virtualization vendors would like us to believe; or does cloud=dynamic environments as many analysts and vendors advocate? Oracle took the stage at Cloud Expo with a bold claim that you could build a cloud out of 100% non-virtualized environment, turning the current definition on its head. This messaging tussle leaves IT managers feeling assaulted with aggressive messaging that doesn’t appear to be backed by measurable benefits, or a clarified explanation for how they can migrate from where they are today to the utopia of cloud.

Takeaway #3: Cloudbursting is not the answer...

The notion of a hybrid cloud as in “own the base and rent the peak” where a workload bursts seamlessly from a private to a public cloud has not yet been adopted. Most deployments are side-by-side private and public - where crucial workloads continue to live internally either in dedicated or shared private environments, and workloads that are transient or lend themselves well to public environments live in the public cloud. Many IT managers I talked to were comfortable with this arrangement much more so than cloud-bursting.