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The truth about Cloud computing

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:18

Steve Cassidy attends this year's annual VMware convention in Cannes, and is beset from all sides by the magical c-word.

Get offa' my Cloud

It wasn't until Jon Honeyball and I met up with an honest-to-goodness networking guru that the clouds began to part a little. Shekar Ayyar is looking after VMware's relationship with the broader church of network kit makers, service providers and standards bodies, and he had a far more realistic outlook about Cloud computing.

The problems he foresees aren't a matter of signing a few contracts and encouraging companies to virtualise their servers to some external service. Instead, he grapples with problems that our entire industry doesn't even have the words to describe, those problems involved in forging an easy route between your own private Cloud and this nirvana-like ideal world of freely movable replicas of your internal resources.

I asked him first about the simple two-body problem. Both Jon and I have servers at home, so if we want to gain the benefits of the Cloud where should we start from today, right now? His answer wasn't read off the virtualisation roadmap, either inside VMware or anywhere else. It sprang instead from his observation that if you think about steering traffic to find a host then you'll have to take advantage of the extra features and smarter designs made possible by IPv6.

That's just as true whether it happens inside your own network, or on a nearby Cloud system provider's servers, or on some completely different provider several thousand miles and tens of network hops away. That's if you want to do it without a complete bottom-up architecture overhaul.

Any casual observer of the world's internet service providers will agree that this starting requirement, on its own, is a bit of a showstopper. It was very ably pointed out to me by the technology director of a global property company (as he described his efforts to roll-out VMware VDI as a desktop delivery platform) that it's exceedingly rare to find an ISP that can support even the simplest sort of global roll-out, but it's orders of magnitude harder to maintain an environment that promises steerable, freely tradable Cloud-based computing services.

My guess is that we'll have seen the London Olympics come and go before the kind of general-purpose Cloud being touted by VMware becomes reality. Which leaves us with a serious jargon management problem, because over the intervening years we're going to be beset from all sides by vapourware tagged with the magical C-word.

Fortunately, there's a neat way to minimise the mayhem that can ensue when your superstitious, fearful boss comes scampering back from the golf club bar armed with a Cloud computing questionnaire. We can start referring to our internal VM server farms as private Clouds, which will tick the correct emotional box and send him back to his leather chair for a peaceful nap. Even the guy from Deutsche Telecom, whose VM setup runs into thousands of servers, was happy to agree that his was a private Cloud.

The activity on the floor of the show was all about private Clouds too: guys with new "thin terminals" to front-end your virtualised workstation; guys with services and custom hardware to track your performance bottlenecks in fibre-channel SANs; guys only loosely linked to VMware, such as Red Hat Linux and Novell. I even got some action outside the show, by talking to NxTop (see www.virtualcomputer.com), which thought there was enough activity to make their outright competitor to VMware Workstation and Player into a worthy demonstration.