How a Private Cloud Goes Beyond Virtualization Management
1/19/2012 10:40:51 AM
At first glance, private clouds can look a lot like virtualization, but when you dig a little deeper you will see how truly different these categories of software really are. There are two ways of looking at these differences:
- Approach to IT operations
- Specific features and capabilities
When you consider the big picture first, virtualization provides the “underpinning for cloud,” while cloud goes “beyond virtualization to focus on services and consumption,” according to Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP of Enterprise System Management Software at IDC. Essentially, what this means is that there is a shift from framing virtualization expansion goals based on footprint and consolidation metrics to offering business-optimized services. When services meet user needs, it will drive adoption which will drive cloud economics.
This drive of adoption is done by designing a catalog of standard services, or applications, that are offered to consumers through a low-touch self-service interface. Virtualization management by third-party management products adds a degree of order and process to virtualized environments.
It is not surprising that virtualization management is the most common current or planned technology reported by IT decision makers, present to some degree in about 70 percent of cases. The next most common building block was automation/orchestration and self-service portals. A certain amount of automation and self-service can be put in place to augment virtualization, but it’s with service management that IT operations begin looking like a cloud provider.
Virtualization management solutions will continue to add features over time, and they will often overlap with what private clouds do on an individual feature basis. But after looking at both the underlying approach to IT and management capabilities, you see a clear distinction between virtualization and cloud.
Source: Gordon Haff, CNET
0 Comments
Leave a comment