Virtualization could easily be called the most critical enabler of cloud computing.  After all, it decouples applications from hardware, freeing up companies from being tied to specialized hardware and enabling new mobility potentials for processing power.  Those potentials could allow servers to be spun up and moved on demand from one data center to another, dramatically reducing the electricity requirements for IT services.

Yet underneath the headline-grabbing buzz about cloud computing, another perhaps more mundane yet almost equally strategic shift is taking place in how networks are managed.  While the trade press has covered this in the form of various IPAM (IP address management) and other related product announcements (including other core network services, from DNS/DHCP, NTP to RADIUS and more now commonly managed by spreadsheets, committees and legions of network administrators) they hav emissed the point: automation of the network (especially core network services) is becomming a necessity for enterprise IT.

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A few weeks ago I talked about the coming cloud computing war by discussing the formation of multi-vendor cloud-driven alliances and their implications for the IT industry.  Now that Cisco has announced its unified computing initiative which includes Nehalem blade servers and IBM is now in discussions with Sun Microsystems, I think its time to take a step back and explore the implications of these alliances for enterprise IT pros.

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Whether you’re a small business considering cloud services or an enterprise contemplating public or private cloud services, it pays to understand some of the technical challenges and players likely to have a significant impact on the availability, security and costs of those services.  Cloud computing is a game changer, and it may also pay to know who could win or lose as IT services are decoupled from specialized hardware in specific locations.

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One of the oft cited reaons in surveys that enterprises aren’t flocking to the cloud like lemmings off a cliff is “lack of control”. Problem is that articles and pundits quoting this reason never really define what that means.

After all, cloud providers appear to be cognizant of the need for users (IT) to be able to define thresholds, reserve instances, deploy a variety of “infrastructure”, and manage their cloud deployment themselves. The lack of control, however, is at least partially about control over the infrastructure itself and, perhaps, complicated by the shallow definition of “infrastructure” by cloud providers.

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We think of a dynamic infrastructure as a key building block for a smarter planet, delivering more intelligence, automation and efficiencies to the systems that power the digital and physical world. A dynamic infrastructure is one that enables businesses and governments to better respond to and manage challenges encountered under ever-changing economic conditions. Some of the key requirements include: the convergence of digital and physical resource management; the ability to extract value from the 15 new petabytes of information the world will generate this year (8x more information than in all US libraries combined); and greater efficiency and resilience in IT systems. Given the scale of these requirements, it should be no surprise that cloud computing will play an important role in the realization of the dynamic infrastructure vision.

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