Pay-as-you-go Computing

It's exciting to see as both vendors and customers become more evolved with this IT business, that the nature of our transactions change. The recent buzz about the expected explosive growth in Cloud computing has not-surprisingly coincided with continued IT cost reduction pressures. Some is certainly due to the current global economic crisis, but the trend has been in play for a long time. What has gone from an exercise in procuring something cool and breakthrough, has become buying something basic and vital, like milk. I've taken a stab at capturing some key aspects of this evolution to cloud computing.

What I'm seeing as especially significant is how we as infrastructure technology providers are going to have to package our solutions in a more pay-as-you-go fashion. Very much like how we all buy our power at home - it sounds like a no-brainer, but let's say you make your living selling network hardware. How does that work? And as the customer, what do you expect this utilization-based arrangement to look like? Or maybe the real takeaway is that you don't want the arrangement at all. You want email, a way to track your sales pipeline, and a means to do book-keeping, and don't want to have to staff experts to determine if the best way to do this requires Fibre Channel, Ethernet, FCoE, CEE, or M-O-U-S-E.

Bringing Clarity to Cloud Computing

There's a great deal of news out there on Cloud Computing. And a number of new innovators and recent deals show this to be an IT hot spot for '09. But as shown in earlier posts, the idea of running applications on a network fabric isn't new. Storage management apps have been running within the SAN fabric for sometime.

So, What fabric apps are on the market today?

If you're looking for a more efficient way to do Storage virtualization, Data replication or Data migration, to name a few, you can accomplish this Today with established, enterprise-class applications from brand name suppliers. Here's a focus on one:

EMC Invista -- this leading Storage Virtualization app runs on the SAN fabrics of hundreds of leading global companies, some with up to a Petabyte of data virtualized. Invista enables non-disruptive data movement, ILM, increases storage hardware utilization, supports server virtualization efforts, and does it all across a heterogeneous storage environment.

Invista has proven benefits: one company realized a 3:1 consolidation of storage equipment. Another saved 91% on storage provisioning time via pooling. And another reduced a 22-month migration plan to just 4 months. And being able to mix-and-match storage allows organizations to optimize on lower-cost hardware and reduce thier overall Cost/TB - a big deal in today's economy.

The hallmark of todays fabric apps is Enterprise-class functionality with very high-performance. If this is the space you're operating in, then you should definitely be looking into this quieter corner of cloud computing: SAN fabric applications.

Enjoy this very recent story on reducing storage cost through things like storage virtualization.