Is the Cloud Too Much of a Good Thing?

Is the cloud too much of a good thing? Virtualization and Cloud Computing have been one of the biggest technological advancements of the twenty first century and it continues to grow at an amazing pace. Cloud computing has started to obtain mass appeal in corporate data centers as it enables the data center to operate like the Internet through the process of enabling computing resources to be accessed and shared as virtual resources in a scalable manner. Each day there seems to be a new announcement or press release about a new product or service that has been released utilizing some form of cloud computing and I do not see this trend changing anytime soon.

The Many Faces of PaaS

By now, enterprises understand the value of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but there still is much confusion about Platform as a Service (PaaS). This confusion is one reason why enterprises have been slow to adopt PaaS. Why is there so much confusion? Because PaaS is still in its early days of maturity, but it is growing up really quickly right before our eyes.

The Pros and Cons of Private and Public PaaS

I just returned from attending the Cloud Expo in New York City this week. The conference was dominated by private and hybrid cloud topics. There were several private Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors attending whom I spent a great deal of time talking to as I walked the floor. It seems these days that many enterprises default to private and hybrid clouds and therefore insist on private PaaS as well. It is critical that consumers of PaaS services understand the pros and cons of both public and private PaaS before making a commitment to a PaaS deployment model.

Public Cloud Use Cases

There are different public cloud use cases. Here at The Virtualization Practice we moved our datacenter from the north to the south part of the country and utilized the cloud to host the workloads during the transition. Edward Haletky, yesterday posted about Evaluating the Cloud: Keeping your Cloud Presence and presented the question and his thoughts of is it worth staying in the cloud or bringing the data home.

What is the Future of Virtual Storage in a Software Defined Data Center?

What is the future of virtual storage in a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)? As more and more technology gets moved from hardware to software in the SDDC, I have to wonder which direction virtual storage will go.

If we use networking as an example, the technology has evolved from setting up local virtual switches on each of the hosts to a virtual distributed switch (VDS) model where all the individual host-level virtual switches are abstracted into a single large VDS that spans multiple hosts at the Datacenter level. In this design, the data plane remains local to each VDS, but the management plane is centralized with VMware vCenter Server acting as the control point for all configured VDS instances.