If you spent any time on the Solutions Exchange floor this week at VMworld 2009 there was one thing that was pretty clear. The Cloud has come.
What is a Cloud? It’s Cloud Computing that a lot of vendors have jumped onto whole heartedly, and with good reason, as this is where a lot of growth potential can come from.
But for the nerds on the ground, what makes cloud computing any different from a hardware perspective than the computing we’ve been doing for the last ten years, or longer?
In my sarcastic ‘been there done that’ view of the world, I say not a whole lot.Now certainly there is a lot of new software layers being implemented here with all sorts of fancy new features like provisioning and a host of other features, but at the end of the day, there is still a computer with a processor, memory, and I/O doing something. What becomes more important now is how hard or how easy it is to remotely manage this computer. This is where hardware makers are going to have to improve & implement new designs that allow for as much remote access as possible, because one of the key features of Cloud Computing is that the source of the cloud is not where you are.
From the perspective of hardware management there is a few areas where Emulex based technology will be used to work ‘in the clouds’ However one of the key features of cloud computing where I think Emulex’s value add will be strongest is in our remote management capabilities using HBAnyware, or it’s forthcoming converged management tool of OneCommand.
While stand alone is great, so is remote scripting capabilities to allow you to integrate into larger class management practices. This is something HBAnyware/OneCommand has excelled at for years with such tools as PowerShell in Windows or through your standard scripting capabilities in the *nix operating systems.
So while the marketing guys are dancing around talking about clouds and what not, keep in mind that the remote capabilities of the components in the servers – just like always – are important.
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