We've been talking a lot about the benefits of Infrastructure 2.0, or Dynamic Infrastructure, a lot about why it's necessary, and what's required to make it all work. But we've never really laid out what it is, and that's beginning to lead to some misconceptions.

As Daryl Plummer of Gartner pointed out recently, the definition of cloud computing is still, well, cloudy. Multiple experts can't agree on the definition, and the same is quickly becoming true of dynamic infrastructure. That's no surprise; we're at the beginning of what Gartner would call the hype cycle for both concepts, so there's some work to be done on fleshing out exactly what each means.

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James Urquhart has a thought-provoking post that seems to be an expansion on a recent post by Doug Gourlay.  The most interesting aspect of Doug's post was his explication of workload mobility when it is no longer restricted to migration within the confines of a physical datacenter; that is, when the bandwidth and traffic management requirements of workload mobility are no longer supplied by shared network storage in the datacenter. The implications of data migration, vm migration and the management required to optimally (or even sufficiently) choreograph this in "the cloud" is not yet smackin' folks in the face.  But it will.

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John Furrier chats with Cisco's Doug Gourlay immediately following the Infrastructure 2.0 panel at the San Jose Fairmont.  This is the first in a series of highlights from the event.

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Cloud computing has become the latest obsession in IT.  And regardless of the paucity of revenues relative to headlines, it has stormed into the collective tech imagination like a Texas flood.  As virtualization decouples applications from hardware, cloud computing promises to decouple IT services from hardware; and that threat alone is enough to send tech vendors scampering with slides, announcements and other forms of marketware.

Yet underneath the billowing vapor there are some interesting rumors, announcements and events.  Google is rumored to be introducing a router; and Cisco is reported to be working on a blade server.  I think there is a common thread between all of these developments, and cloud computing may be a mere mask for a core set of challenges facing enterprise IT and threatening the most well-intentioned and thoughtful initiatives.  For the moment let’s call it “Peak IT.”

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On January 15 2009 we had the opportunity to witness two visionary networking companies step up on stage and kick off the dynamic infrastructure era.  It was simply amazing.  

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