Bridging Between Private and Public Clouds
Cameron Sturdevant is the executive editor of Enterprise Networking Planet. Prior to ENP, Cameron was technical analyst at PCWeek Labs, starting in 1997. Cameron finished up as the eWEEK Labs Technical Director in 2012. Before his extensive labs tenure Cameron paid his IT dues working in technical support and sales engineering at a software publishing firm . Cameron also spent two years with a database development firm, integrating applications with mainframe legacy programs. Cameron's areas of expertise include virtual and physical IT infrastructure, cloud computing, enterprise networking and mobility. In addition to reviews, Cameron has covered monolithic enterprise management systems throughout their lifecycles, providing the eWEEK reader with all-important history and context. Cameron takes special care in cultivating his IT manager contacts, to ensure that his analysis is grounded in real-world concern. Follow Cameron on Twitter at csturdevant, or reach him by email at cameron.sturdevant@quinstreet.com.
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Early testing at eWEEK Labs with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager shows what it might hypothetically cost to run our private virtual infrastructure on Amazon's EC2 public cloud.
"A divide as real as any weather front separates private, wholly owned data centers from public, capacity-for-hire cloud providers. There is a role for IT in creating a bridge across this divide as virtualization of all types enables more efficient application development, virtual machine provisioning and business continuity."
This is the start of my feature story on bridging private and public cloud computing at eWEEK.com.
I'm much less interested in the rancorous debate about private vs. public (or even more rancorous, the flat out denial of any such thing as a private cloud) and much more interested in organizations pursuing the most cost-effective path to competitive IT advantage. Enterprises with a legacy investment in large data centers can't just walk away from the investment. Virtualizing workloads, re-architecting flatter networks , and paying attention to seminal work from NIST and the newly formed Open Data Center Alliance will stand IT managers in good stead as they navigate the cloud computing landscape.
I'm especially interested in the work of the ODCA. After getting sidetracked by my regular editorial duties, I'll return tomorrow to blogging my way through the usage guides by taking up the security monitoring paper. I invite you to read my previous analysis blogs on the ODCA including an overview of the organization and their take on carbon footprint, and virtual machine interoperability.
As I concluded in my feature, "Even though the idea of using private and public cloud resources in concert is new territory, the technique has potential as fertile ground for organizations that are in the market for a IT competitive edge."
