Making sense out of all of the components of cloud computing confuses even many of the major analysts. It's easy to understand how Google, Amazon, or SalesForce.com fit into the picture. But who is Eucalyptus and what do they do? Does CohesiveFT compete with enStratus or does it complement enStratus? And what is this vCloud thing anyway?
I've identified seven major components to cloud computing that I call "the seven pillars of cloud computing". I call them pillars because, as cloud computing evolves, they will form the foundation of a complete vendor cloud computing strategy. I'm not suggesting that you aren't a real cloud vendor if you lack one of the pillars—in fact, no one currently has a solid strategy for all seven pillars. The companies that end up seeing the most success as vendors in cloud computing, however, will not only develop strategies for all seven pillars, but also a strategy for integrating them into a comprehensive cloud offering.
The Seven Pillars
Seven Pillars of Cloud Computing.
The seven pillars of cloud computing are:
* Virtualization
* Storage
* Cloud Orchestration
* Data Center Systems Management
* Cloud Infrastructure Management
* Hybrid Cloud Integration
* Public Cloud Services
As I mentioned above, there's no company that has offerings in all seven areas. If you are an enterprise looking for the complete cloud solution today, you may have to talk to as many as seven different vendors—though most likely fewer—before you find your answer.
Virtualization
Virtualization is absolutely not a requirement for cloud computing. Google and many others offer cloud services without using virtualization to make it happen.
From the complete cloud solution perspective, however, virtualization absolutely must be a strategic tool in the cloud vendor's arsenal.
Virtualization makes it possible to dedicated the minimum number of resources to a workload as is possible so you can more efficiently share real processing power among different workloads. It thus forms the backbone of many services we think of as cloud services today.
The number of players in this space is quite small. The significant ones are Citrix, KVM (Open Source), Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware.
Storage
From the cloud perspective, storage isn't about making the media on which data is stored. Instead, it's about providing the hardware and software for turning that media into a massive, abstracted storage tier available over a network and impervious to failure.
The current key players in this space are Compellent, EMC, Flexiant, HP, IBM, NetApp, Oracle, ParaScale, and a number of other smaller players.
Cloud Orchestration
There's actually nothing "cloudy" about virtualization. It simply facilitates the programmatic provisioning and de-provisioning of resources necessary for a cloud infrastructure. To make your virtualized infrastructure cloudy, you need an orchestration layer on top of it.
Orchestration layers hide the nuances of the underlying virtualization tier and exposes them to on-demand provisioning through web services APIs.
Companies with a footprint in this space include Amazon, CA (via their 3tera acquisition), Citrix, Enomaly, Eucalyptus, Flexiant, Rackspace, VMOps, and VMware.
Data Center Systems Management
Data center systems management is something most people forget about or ignore today when examining cloud services. It's the main tool a traditional IT operations staff uses to monitor provisioned resources, manage the provisioning, de-provisioning, and other IT workflows, and handle emergency situations.
The traditional data center management offerings are painfully "uncloudy" and the extent of the integration between traditional Data Center Systems Management and the cloud is largely limited to:
* BMC monitoring of RightScale
* enStratus pushing cloud health into Microsoft Systems Center
* IBM's limited support for AWS in Tivoli
Everything else in this space is currently about supporting traditional data center management, provisioning, and monitoring activities.
This space is a well established space with some heavy hitting incumbents: CA, BMC, IBM, EMC, HP, IBM, and Microsoft.
Cloud Infrastructure Management
Cloud infrastructure management is really a specialized version of data center systems management. Cloud infrastructure management tools enable an IT staff to manage, monitor, provision, and de-provision resources in a cloud environment. In a few years, it likely won't be a pillar distinct from data center systems management. I break it out separately because there is almost no overlap between the two pillars today.
Cloud infrastructure management is dominated by start-ups today. The traditional data center systems management tools are poorly suited to the task of managing highly elastic cloud computing infrastructures. This gaping hole has enabled startups to come in and fill the need. On the other hand, there's very little overlap among the different startups in this space.
The cloud infrastructure management space is a very crowded space with a few major players: CA (via Nimsoft), CloudKick, Elastra, enStratus, and RightScale. In addition, CloudSwitch and CohesiveFT have elements of cloud infrastructure management, but generally fit more into the hybrid cloud integration pillar.
Hybrid Cloud Integration
Another pillar dominated by startups is hybrid cloud integration. Hybrid cloud integration services enable a company to glue together the different kinds of clouds supporting their infrastructure (public and private, multiple public, combined SaaS and Paas) into a single, coherent infrastructure. With hybrid cloud tools, you can manage and automate the movement of workloads among clouds as well as communications between components in different clouds.
This space is the least mature space with a very small set of players: CloudKick, CloudSwitch, CohesiveFT, and enStratus. Among these four players, there's almost no overlap in functionality. CloudKick provides a unified console for managing resources in multiple clouds. CloudSwitch enables you to securely lift your private data center/private cloud enterprise applications and drop them into a public cloud without changing IP addresses. CohesiveFT provides technologies for enabling virtual VPNs among clouds and managing virtual private clouds. enStratus provides governance, provisioning, auto-scaling, and auto-recovery across clouds.
Public Cloud Services
The public cloud services are what most people have in their head when they think "cloud". These are the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS vendors that leverage the other components of cloud computing to deliver a public cloud offering. As a customer, you procure public cloud services on-demand and stop using them when you no longer need them.
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