Internal clouds make enterprises feel comfortable
No enterprise is going to put anything important in a public cloud for a very long time. If you run the IT infrastructure for any significant-scale enterprise your current reality tends to be a bit sobering if not downright depressing.
Your data centers are a mix of many different server flavors, operating systems, application platforms, and even virtualization technologies that no cloud provider can currently support without major expense and disruption.
To consider an internal cloud, CIOs are going to have to get over a few hurdles.
- First, they need to know what they have in their data centers and what it's currently doing (or, as is often the case, not doing).
- Second, they have to find a way to start incrementally, on a project that will show sufficiently strong payback to warrant the next project, and the next.
- Third, they can't disturb what's already working.
- Finally, they have to be able to work with their current security and compliance systems.
So what do you do to get in on the benefits of cloud computing without security or economic risk? You build an internal cloud to reproduce some of the benefits of cloud computing inside your own firewall. Even Gartner believes internal clouds will become a reality.
This week, Cassatt announced software and a new service that it says can transform an organization's existing IT infrastructure into an internal compute cloud.
Cassatt is one of several companies now talking about "internal" or "private" or "on-premise" clouds. (VMware certainly did at VMworld a few weeks back).
The thing that makes Cassatt's pitch a bit different is this: it says you can use what you already have.
As every CIO girds for recessionary IT budgets, doing a "rip and replace" to move a few steps toward cloud nirvana will be a non-starter. If you can begin to get cloud-like behavior from that complicated morass of infrastructure that your real-world data centers actually have, you're giving yourself a big head start.
In any case, an internal cloud done right represents an attractive and practical alternative to external clouds. At least until the promised nirvana of secure, interoperable cloud computing available at five 9s finally appears.
Dave Rosenberg dishes up "Software, Interrupted" with nearly 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs to open-source enterprise software companies. He is co-founder of MuleSource and currently serves as the general manager of Hardy Way. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can contact Dave via e-mail at softwareinterrupted@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @daveofdoom. 
Why: This Cassatt announcement appears to be about an upcoming product... but 24 hours prior, Scalent Systems, Red Hat, and NetApp announced a -deployed- large enterprise cloud at Blackboard.
http://www.scalent.com/html/company/News/company_news_111108_blackboard.htm
Seems to me that customers are already deploying Scalent V/OE to do what Cassatt is only now proposing, no?
Though perhaps I'm biased...
I think this product announcement, plus our new Active Profiling Service, and your story are *all* news, in fact. They all point to the fact that there is a change going on -- there is a new way to run a data center. That?s the interesting bit. Whether it?s policy-based automation like Cassatt provides or something lower level, in the end it comes down to this: the static, inefficient way data center resources have been managed is not the way they need to be handled from now on. It doesn?t make sense any more. What Cassatt?s doing is giving customers a simple, incremental way to move from here to there, starting with delivering a baseline + recommendations about out what the stuff in their data centers is actually doing and what steps they can take to improve. More here: http://www.cassatt.com/svcs_caps.php