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Private Cloud is Moving Forward and has the Greatest Promise
Contributed
Article by Aaron Suzuki, co-founder and CEO, Prowess
2012 will only be slightly different than this past year. No
monumental break-through is going to happen nor amazing tipping point reached.
In fact, it will probably be a really uneventful year. But some trends are
evolving and maturing and the associated opportunity is really exciting.
The move to the private cloud, whether it is hosted in your
datacenter or at a hosting service provider (our ISPs of old), is happening but
not with much success. And private cloud migration fell short of even my own
conservative predictions
last year. Why? The required degree of automation just isn't there yet.
Most solutions are fragmented so it becomes very complicated to create a
complete solution. Yes, you can make an elastic fabric out of storage, compute,
and networking resources. But it is much more challenging to make that into
something that can both systematically and reliably provide a service, and
still more effort to make it on-demand for application owners. It's frustrating
because the hardware is there: you have big SANs that have reliable high speed
interconnects and servers designed for virtualization that scale well and
networking optimized for high density virtualized workloads. We can reliably
and relatively easily cluster virtualized workloads for high availability and
move them around in real time.
But a bunch of stuff is missing. The next gap to be filled
in is the "stuff" -- advanced automation, template capabilities and management
and monitoring tools -- to turn those assets and capabilities into tiered services that transcend the hardware and
software infrastructure. In short, we currently lack the tools to deliver full
"cloud-ification" of the infrastructure. IT needs more than servers on demand;
and more than a platform on demand. We want complete services on demand.
This is creating a whole new category of IT management and
redefining many IT jobs. In the past couple years, many IT workers have
expressed concerns that their jobs were at risk because of cloud computing. No
human likes change and this change is a huge potential threat on the logic that
the infrastructure is "in the cloud" and IT has less to do. But it is
increasingly clear to me that private cloud computing will create a wave of evolved
demand for IT; there will be new entire categories of IT that emerge. Moreover,
in time we will see more convergence and easier hybridization of private and
public cloud capabilities. This will create even more new IT worker roles and
create significant new opportunities for software companies to build smart
tools on top of and across platforms. This won't all happen in a year, and it
certainly won't be in 2012, but the private and public cloud picture, and more
importantly the path to getting there, is clearer. That clarity is creating
massive wave of opportunity.
IT teams within large organizations have an increasingly
clear idea of how to implement the private cloud given their unique setting and
requirements. 2012 will be a year of big planning and some doing, but it will
take another generation to pull everything together and synthesize solutions in
a way that makes them easier to deploy and manage, which will then make it
accessible to mid-size companies, too.
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About the Author
At Prowess, Aaron
Suzuki is an active manager for both the service and product development
initiatives of the company.
Aaron has spent his
entire career as an IT consultant. Rising at the age of 26 to the role of
President for a regional Internet application development firm, Aaron led the
company successfully through the economic downturn of the early 2000's. Aaron
then moved to a broader technology business opportunity, taking on the revival
of an ailing Seattle-based IT firm where he acted as the Director of Business Development.
Aaron is the Chief
Executive Officer and co-founded Prowess in 2003, where he helps create and
instill process in production and management. Aaron is responsible for the
ongoing operations of the business including day to day management, he drives
the strategic direction of the company, and he is the primary liaison to the
Advisory Board. Aaron holds a Master
of Science Degree from the University of Iowa.