However, Enterprise Misty Computing is a definite, and all of Cisco’s recent moves are for that market. Of course, if a few service providers spend some bucks as well thats a bonus but it isn’t the endpoint.

Service Providers are big, slow, stupid and low profit. Enterprises are big, fast, clever and profitable. Which market would you attack ?

Greg, I personally feel that Cloud computing and cloud storage via service providers can potentially be just as horrific as utilizing outsourced vendors in terms of the company data being in someone else’s hands.

Dennis, you nailed it on the head when you said that “the cloud virtualizes geography…underlying requirements for application performance (tied to latency and jitter), reliability (tied to physical redundancy), and data integrity (tied to data base replication) can also be achieved by linking multiple data center facilities over a shared large-scale network, all controlled through a common portal.” This is one of my key factors in selling my quasi-proposal.

Thanks for all your comments, and Greg, thanks for your article… I agree, but will someday disagree, and not just to ensure that you feel right.

Erin

Hopefully some more cloudy thinking soon, appreciate your feedback

Sophistry on this scale must be addressed.

“now does it make sense why VFrame was not front and center,” No. In fact, I am willing to bet that the VFrame product management wasn’t holding back either and trying to sell their little hearts out to an audience that didn’t care. Cisco selling VFrame made no sense in the current market, after all Cisco didn’t “do” VMWare and customers didn’t believe it. VFrame hasn’t been “front and center” because it was unsellable. Thats why it wasn’t front and centre.

If VFrame is an integral part of DC3.0, it hasn’t been announced. Oh sure, I can see the vision, but no fire there. Smoke all you like though.

Nexus (in any form) is still 12 to 24 months from practical maturity. Measure my excitement in a years time.

See that, yep, that comment just above this, now _thats_ Social Networking.

Idiot comments on twitter, and poncy wiki’s don’t count diddly.

This is no accident. The business goals of an outsourcer are not aligned with customer and usually causes friction. Its an unhappy affair at best.

One day I might find a personal experience of a happy outsource, but it has not happened in the last seven years.

The external hosting cloud thing is temporary. The concept of Amazon/Google clouds will suit some people (mostly low cost startups making a lot of smoke but very little fire), but it isn’t going to change the world anytime soon. It’s hype today, some deployment and then….. just another IT choice.

One final comment…the existence of a global outsourcing industry would seem to refute the comment that outsourcing generally doesn’t work. The only way to scale the technologies that Greg’s working with is through large infusions of capital which can either be provided by the enterprise or by a service provider who shares that investment across enterprises. There is an entire industry serving the needs of enterprises that is thriving between the DIY IT manager and the likes of Amazon/Google.

Great stuff!

Thanks for your insightful posting on building ad-hoc compute based clouds with Cisco’s VFrame Data Center offering. This product does have a significant development team behind it with good marketing material as you have read. While it may not appear that Cisco is heavily selling this product, Cisco is working with several large enterprise and service providers customers on the adoption of this technology.

As you speculated this is a non traditional product offering from Cisco and we are learning how to position and sell this to customers. There is a lot of device integration required when you think about tying the provisioning of servers, network and storage devices together as a set of malleable, virtualized cloud resources. Every week we add more devices to the VFrame DC compatability matriix. As you stated we encourage customers to try this product.

Thanks for visting our web site.

Bill Erdman, Senior Director, Cisco Data Center Technology Group.

I liked your post and wanted to let you know that I referenced you and your post in a Cloud Computing Examples post today. My thought is that a lot of the larger organizations with network and server support staffs will look at building their own Cloud Infrastructure as opposed to moving their data into the cloud.

Thanks for the post – Kevin Mullins

Yeah, we’re not yet quite the size of Cisco. Working on that.

But we’ve actually got quite a reasonable EMEA presence, direct and through various resellers — and recognition, see here:
http://awards.techworld.com/winners2008.asp?m_pid=0&m_nid=29322 (“Virtualisation Product of the Year”)

EMEA contact phone number on our site…

I have never heard of Scalent so I guess you don’t have much of presence outside the US. Let me know when you get global.

No problem with plug, disclosure is the key to making it acceptable.

Check out slide #5 in Network World’s “10 Must-have Virtualization Tools”

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2008/081808-ndc-virtualization-tools.html

(Yes, shameless plug!)