Emerging specs for hybrid clouds and converged datacenters promise to interrupt vendors’ proprietary hold.
The word “standards” evokes images of combative committees taking six months to choose where to carry a gathering after which letting dominant industry players hold down superior technology.
Vendors blamed delays with the 802.11n spec for his or her going rogue with proprietary implementations that always didn’t interact; eventually the Wi-Fi Alliance needed to expend money and energy on a certification program. And while the Open Networking Foundation begs to vary, Cisco CEO John Chambers recently asserted that advanced networking “cannot be done in software.” His unstated pitch: “Why anticipate messy SDN standards to gel? Just cut a check for Cisco ONE.”
Going with proprietary technology is tempting. But standards remain important, especially within the era of convergence and cloud, with its “just make it work” culture. Particularly, standards are critical for shuttling workloads between on-premises and multitenant systems. A well-considered design that uses stock components, protocols, and interfaces wherever possible will improve efficiency, lower costs, and maximize flexibility and scalability.
Crack the code
In many ways, the cloud is becoming a normal in its own right. Accenture forecasts that cloud services will grow at seven times the speed of in-house IT between now and 2016, at which period 46% of all IT spending would be cloud-related. A KPMG survey finds that for 14 major enterprise functions, from email and office productivity to HR and provide chain, 60% to 90% of respondents may be using cloud services within 18 months.
While the general public cloud garners the foremost attention, enterprises will deliver most IT services from private and hybrid clouds for the foreseeable future. In our 2012 InformationWeek Private Cloud Survey, 21% of respondents had built private clouds, with one more 30% starting projects. Our 2014 survey, in an effort to debut later this month, shows 47% of respondents with private clouds in production for some or most in their applications and 30% testing or starting private cloud projects. Most of these shops need to integrate private and public cloud services in a hybrid architecture — actually, just 19% of these using or planning to apply the general public cloud aren’t going to supplement that usage with a personal cloud setup.
Our take: Most enterprise IT teams shall be tasked with integrating cloud services with on-premises infrastructure and applications. Sounds to us like a choice for standardization.
Public-private chasm
Standards have to be in play both inside the datacenter and on the interface between private and public services. For a converged private cloud architecture, borrow from the merchant playbook and use a typical set of server and storage components on a converged Ethernet backbone. That is the only thanks to lower costs and improve versatility, by letting workloads migrate (often automatically) from system to system without worrying about configuration or hardware compatibility.
The notion of using standardized building blocks which might be quickly deployed is the idea of the “Superpods” that Salesforce.com is operating on with Hewlett-Packard. Essentially, if a customer doesn’t share application infrastructure, Salesforce can plop down a conventional set of hardware, spin up its software stack, and deliver a service a twin of its public-cloud software-as-a-service suite.
As for the interfaces between private and non-private clouds, standards come into play for workload orchestration, application image packaging, infrastructure management, and user authentication. In place of seeming like separate services, where workloads and resources exist of their own bubbles, standard interfaces using corporate identities help shuttle applications among private and non-private clouds. it may well also manage everything from a single console.
All of this could be possible without locking your organization right into a proprietary stack, but watch out. To date, cloud technology advances have outpaced the industry’s ability to craft comprehensive standards for interoperability, management, auditing, and knowledge migration.
download this InformationWeek December 2013 special issue on hybrid cloud standards.
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