White Paper: A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building

February 4, 2011

A while ago, as a follow-up to our white paper “Laying the Groundwork for Private and Public Clouds” Dell and Intel worked with CIO magazine to put together a Tech Dossier that picked up where our previous paper left off.

“A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building” consists of an upfront white paper and four related articles:

  • Intel Builds a Private Cloud — CIO Magazine
  • Cloud Computing: The Future of Application Architectures — CIO Magazine
  • How to Build a Hybrid Cloud Computing Strategy — Forrester’s James Staten
  • Cloud Computing Shopping List: 4 Key Ingredients — CIO Magazine

You say you want a Revolution

Here are a few paragraphs from the white paper to whet your appetite:

For many enterprises, building a private cloud is simply the next step on an evolutionary path that began with data center consolidation. When a company has established a strong virtualization underpinning and is working with traditional enterprise applications, an evolutionary approach to the private cloud makes perfect sense…

In some instances, however, taking what Dell refers to as a “revolutionary” approach to private clouds will be more efficient and much more appropriate. The revolutionary approach makes use of “new world” applications that are written for and deployed in the cloud. These cloud-native applications are designed from the ground up for greater scalability and use across a multitude of servers…

The revolutionary approach requires a new way of thinking about the cloud, but one that Van Mondfrans says enterprise IT executives should undertake sooner rather than later. “This is where the application paradigm is going,” he says…

You can access the document here (no registration required :).

Pau for now..

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Posted by Barton George

Private Clouds: Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary

March 23, 2010

Yesterday I wrote about how IT’s portfolio of compute models will shift over the next 3-5 years.  I ended by saying that the line between virtualization and private cloud will blur and that there are two ways of getting to private cloud: Evolutionary and Revolutionary.  Intrigued?  Well then press on dear reader…

The Evolutionary Approach

The evolutionary approach starts with virtualization and is appropriate where large investments in that area have been made and when you are talking about traditional enterprise applications.   With virtualization serving as the foundation (see the graph below), additional capabilities are then layered on, such as usage-based-billing/chargeback, workload lifecycle management, dynamic resource pooling, a self-service portal for users etc.

One of the key aspects of the Evolutionary approach is that every step along the way, every capability added, brings greater efficiencies and agility.  You do not need to wait until you meet the full definition of a private cloud to derive value and you can stop anywhere along the way.

You say you want a Revolution?

The other way to get to private cloud is the Revolutionary approach.  This is appropriate for Greenfield opportunities within organizations, and is targeted at non-traditional, web 2.0 applications that are “cloud-native” (i.e. applications written in the cloud for deployment in the cloud).   These revolutionary solutions will often be delivered as an integrated, turnkey unit (see graph below).

You don’t need to choose

Rather than adopting one or the other, most organizations will use both approaches to get to private cloud.  While at this stage the evolutionary approach will be the predominate way of getting to private cloud, as more and more “new world” applications are developed in the cloud for the cloud, the balance will begin tip in favor of  the revolutionary approach.

Tune in tomorrow for a specific example of a revolutionary cloud solution (and a whole lot more 🙂

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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