My Digital Life

I’ve read a few posts over the last few days which try to answer the question ‘what is the cloud’.  Not conceptually ‘what is it’, but physically what is if made off, what servers, data centres etc.

To my mind the point of the cloud is that as a customer you don’t need to know how many servers it uses, over how many data centres, supported by how many people.  All you really need to be sure of is what services you will receive, or the overall service effect that you have agreed with your provider.

By using cloud services, especially in business, you’re abstracting yourself from all the details of running the service.  Sure it’s interesting from a geek perspective but ultimately you’re acknowledging that those guys can do it better and maybe cheaper than you.  That’s a good thing, you get get on with new stuff and taking the credit! :)

Seeing as I’m involved in getting a new Data Centre at the moment this post over on ZDnet could my eye.  Looks like HP is to target a ‘data centre as a service’ product at enterprise customers. 

I’ve heard bits about this for a few years now - HP account managers will bore you silly with stories of renting computing time to Shrek - but this is the first I’ve heard about an actual product.  It sounds like there are four favours of service on offer initially:

1. A compute intensive service for number crunching applications (the Shrek example!)
2. A SAP 6.0 optimised service
3. An Exchange optimised service
4. A more generic Windows and Unix application server service

From what’s described it looks like a decent start, it’ll be interesting to see whether they start offering additional specific configurations.  Something for SharePoint would probably be a good start.  As it takes off within bigger companies more people will start grappling with the infrastructure required to run SharePoint in a big way and look for service solutions.