Hybrid Clouds: are we there yet?
by Johan De Gelas on October 18, 2010 2:05 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
The best of two worlds
Most existing companies have already invested quite a bit of money and time in deploying their own infrastructure and building up expertise. Also, thinking smartly out of the box in infrastructure land pays off in most cases. And lastly, few people will place their sensitive IP related data somewhere in an external datacenter.
It will be no surprise that the "hybrid cloud" is the ideal model for most companies out there. Just like in the business world, you outsource some of your processes (HR, Facility management etc.) but things related to your core business stay inside. If you are an engineering company, your engineering data should stay inside the walls of your own datacenter.
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vSphere 4.1 and vCloud Director, one of the possible building blocks of a hybrid cloud"
The Hybrid cloud model means you should be able to move VMs from your own datacenter to a public cloud and back. The reality is that it is not that simple to upload a VM to a public cloud service, and that it pretty hard to import the work that you have done in a public cloud back in to your own datacenter. If you want to get idea what it really involves, look here and here.
Many public cloud vendors, formely hosting providers, are now adding up and download capabilities to their self service portals. Being able to quickly download and upload virtual machine between your own infrastructure and that of a hosting provider is the first step towards the "hybrid cloud". Let it be clear: the fully automated hybrid cloud where you manage all your VMs through one interface, moving VMs easily and quickly from your private to a public cloud is not here yet.
So what do we need besides management software such as vCloud Director? You have probably guessed it already: a storage and networking bridge between datacenters.
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chusteczka - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
This author needs to submit his work to a proofreading editor before it gets published.akocsis - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
There are absolutely no words about Microsoft's offering - Azure - in the article. Why do you think they are not in the game? Azure is a totally different approach, as you buy computing "blocks" (which are VMs in the background), not the VM's itself. You don't want to maintain VMs, you want computing capacity without the need of OS maintenance...Exelius - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Azure is not flexible enough for general purpose loads. Great if you're developing a .NET web app; not so much if you're trying to run an ActiveDirectory backup DC. It's nice to be able to ship a .vmdk across the internet to clone a server.JohanAnandtech - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Remember, we told you in the first lines that we would focus on Infrastructure as a Service. Azure is PaaS and is only natural that it does appear in an article about IaaS.billt9 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
speaking solely from a personal computing viewpoint - unnecessary; expensive; insecure. The whole PC revolution was AWAY from central computers with dumb terminals.landerf - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 - link
A note on the negativity towards cloud computing. A lot of it ignores the situational benefits in favor of fear, fear of losing freedoms and being vulnerable to centralized security targets. I can understand that, as it may be a valid concern. Companies using clouds will inevitably force the tech on the general consumer in a more and more invasive way in the decades to come. Cloud computing certainly has it's uses, but I'd never want it to take over. Even in a future where we have absurd bandwidth and nil latencies the idea of centralization is always a bad one. With "clouds", power plants, or the forever proposed wireless electricity grid, you're always setting yourself up for failure. Decentralization and redundancy are by far the best solutions. Every neighborhood in the future should have it's own power plant, every person should have all of their personal data embedded in their body, only sharing what they want when they want. On mass identity theft would be obscure, fear over catastrophic accidents or attacks would be averted. At the end of the day, decentralization is always better, including with the backbones used to share data.