Irreverence

posted on 15 February 2008 08:44

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EMC VP technical alliances Chuck Hollis has blogged revealingly, we hope, about the company's upcoming Hulk and Maui cloud computing hardware and software products.

He writes: "We think that the delivery model will require multiple, logical service delivery locations that act as a single, logical entity. That's true for compute (e.g. cloud computing) as well as information (e.g. cloud storage)." He talks about the: "opportunity for a "virtualized container" model (there's our friend VMware again!) that allows customers to have a customized stack of application, etc. yet still get a vastly improved economy of scale as compared to dedicated infrastructure."

"Imagine a "virtualized IT stack" -- server, desktop, network, storage, etc. -- that presented itself as a single logical entity to the consumer, secured from others, service level managed, quickly provisioned, that could arbitrarily scale up or down as the case may be -- or -- be arbitrarily relocated from place to place as needs changed. Or even composed across multiple service providers, if you really want to think hard about it ..."

"... virtualized, orchestrated and relocatable IT resources (server, desktop, network, storage) will be key. ... How do you make sure this "virtual IT domain" is secured, wherever it might be? Hmmm, you're going to need a new approach, aren't you?"

"Or service delivery management -- given that everyone is sharing everything everywhere, how do you ensure that each consumer gets the service experience they expect? Not to mention other IT disciplines like provisioning, chargeback, etc. "

"Or let IT users manage their virtual piece without screwing up everyone else's?"

"And, if you want to share information and workflow between these "virtual stacks" -- as is becoming more the case as companies collaborate across boundaries -- won't you need something more than a shared file system?"

"Not to mention all the traditional information management functions: backup, archiving, retention, ILM, etc."

"Well, these are some of the problems that are going to have to be solved in the very near future. "

".... things are probably going to move really fast from this point forward."

We're watching and waiting Chuck, believe me, we really are.

Read his stuff here:- http://chucksblog.typepad.com/chucks_blog/2008/02/sap-and-emc.html#more