VirtualInstruments

Gartner Datacenter 2011: Clouds and more clouds

Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Tom Bittman’s opening comment, “Welcome to the peak of the Cloud hype cycle”, was very appropriate.  Tom covers virtualization and cloud computing environments, and questions like: What to do about them, how to implement them and how to manage them dominated the session topics. Gartner Datacenter is an interesting conference, because it is where the IT community comes to get an update on what is going on, find out what’s new and to see what everyone else is up to.

One session I particularly enjoyed was “Private Cloud Computing at Bank of America – One Year Later”, presented by Bank of America. The room was full, and the audience was engaged and generating questions on an insightful success story. A year ago, Prentice Dees from Bank of America presented on the company’s plans to create a private cloud. . This year, he came back to declare victory and report on their success. They had successfully built and were operating a basic private cloud that could deploy VMs with applications installed automatically in 3 hours or less. This was a compression down from 60 days using the old manual processes. Prentice did admit that this was only 1/3 of the problem. Figuring out what to do and how to use it took just as long as before and were still the dominant costs of getting a new service deployed in a business unit. It was a good reminder that, in spite of all the technology, the key factors for success are still people and process.

I think I have some reading and listening to do so I can better understand what customers need from cloud computing.   I see hints of things to come in fabric computing and the DevOps methodologies. As always things are moving faster and the abstractions are becoming greater, but sometimes customers  need to be able to dive deep into the infrastructure and see what is going on. That is what Virtual Instruments is here for.