Featured White Papers

• What Developers Want: The End of Application Redeploys

Sponsored Links

• Career opportunities at Harman- Careers That’ll Rock Your Socks Off.

  Learn More!

• Developer-friendly Java PDF libraries by Qoppa Software

  Live Demos

• Stop blaming your app! Diagnose Java performance issues.

  Free tool >

• UrbanCode: Go From Continuous Integration to
  Continuous Delivery

  Learn More!

Sponsored Links

Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs

Battle in the (private) clouds

Cisco and Sun could go head-to-head over next-generation private clouds

By Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service, 01/20/09

Enterprises seeking to make their data centers more efficient are weighing the benefits of a private cloud computing infrastructure. Companies like EMC, Cisco Systems, and Sun Microsystems, meanwhile, are lining up to compete for, and capitalize on, the bigger share of data-center spending.

On Sunday EMC Vice President and Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis wrote in his blog about the merits of private clouds, and then on Monday Cisco Systems' Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior addressed reports of an impending data center push in a Cisco blog.

EMC (with VMware in tow), Cisco, and a number of other vendors aim to position themselves as the vendor of choice for building next-generation data-center services, with the intent of grabbing a larger portion of data-center budgets, according to Andrew Butler, vice president at research firm Gartner.

Both Hollis and Warrior wrote of the potential new architectures, virtualization, and automation hold for improving the effectiveness of IT systems.

However, while they hold out the benefits of a private cloud, vendors will also use this as an opportunity to lock customers into their own solutions, Butler said. The message is that only by tying yourself to one vendor will you achieve the full benefits of a private cloud, according to Butler.

"What you've got are these big system vendors who are increasingly reluctant to share the spoils," he said.

The emergence of private clouds -- which work in the same way as public cloud services, but are run by the enterprises themselves -- will play an important part in this evolution of IT systems, according to Hollis.

They have all the advantages of public cloud computing for enterprise IT without the downside, because IT departments retain control of security and legacy applications won't have to be rewritten, Hollis said.

The concept of private clouds is gaining prominence, according to Butler.

Just recently Sun acquired Q-layer. Its NephOS will allow enterprises to create and manage their own private computing clouds by linking facilities operated by different divisions of the enterprise.

So far the nascent private cloud arena has been dominated by smaller companies, including Elastra, 3Tera, Cassatt and ParaScale.

ParaScale, which develops software for cloud storage clusters, has seen increased interest in private clouds.

Now, especially the larger companies are thinking that they can leverage their scale to provide cloud services to internal customers, instead of placing data and applications in the hands of external parties, said CEO Sajai Krishnan via e-mail.

Warrior doesn't use the term "cloud computing" when describing Cisco's vision of "Unified Computing", but "building a next generation data center that links all resources together in a common architecture" isn't far off being just that. There is a lot of symmetry, according to Butler.

"When you get to Cisco's level of domination, unless there is significant organic growth in the market, it becomes difficult to sustain success, and you have to start looking elsewhere. I think what we have here is a recognition on Cisco's part that it has to influence decision making at a higher order in the data center," said Butler.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.