First Step on the Roadmap to the Cloud
Many of you are no doubt considering some aspect of Cloud Computing in your Business and IT strategies for 2010. I’m sure you’re taking an incremental approach as you identify the best opportunities and the best approach for realizing the benefits that Cloud Computing can offer.
I’ve just posted some guidance for developing a Cloud Computing Roadmap on my Strategic IT Architecture Web site. Obviously, it’s a complex topic and there are many, many variations on the routes you might map out.
One approach that I didn’t mention in that post – space is limited in a blog posting – was an approach that mitigates and contains risk, while still delivering a solid foundation for internal Clouds and near-term ROI and operational benefits. Server platform virtualization.
Virtualization is a mature and proven platform architecture that greatly improves asset utilization and can significantly enhance operational efficiency. Clouds are based on a virtualized platform.
In order to fully evolve into a Cloud, and provide all of the benefits that Clouds offer, you will eventually need to enhance the virtual environment with some additional capabilities – e.g., self provisioning, dynamic resource allocation, measured/metered usage. You’ll also want to make some enhancements to the platform architecture to better accommodate multi-tenancy, elasticity and other powerful Cloud capabilities.
But as a solid first step toward a Cloud Computing target, and as a means of containing risk – including the risk of moving core applications to an external, still unproven commercial Cloud – consider implementing a virtualized computing IT ecosystem.
One additional technical point: As you develop your implementation plan for a virtualized platform, you do need to consider what kind of “Hypervisor” you’ll use. The most critical decision is whether to use a Type 1 (bare metal) product or a Type 2 (hosted) Hypervisor. Type 1 provides maximum performance because it executes on the hardware (bare metal) and provides its own operating system support. Type 2 is installed as a guest operating system on a hosted system, so it sacrifices some performance because it’s running in a layer above the native OS.
