Beyond virtualization in the private cloud

Last week, InfoWorld’s David Linthicum made what I think is a very astute and long overdue observation: The term "cloud computing" has approached the point of being meaningless. As he points out, that’s not because nobody can agree on what the cloud is or has been created to do, but because every vendor in the IT space is falling over themselves to tell you just how "cloudy" they are — and spending a mint in marketing dollars to do it. Along the way, they’ve diluted the term to the point where it’s hard to tell what anyone’s really talking about anymore.

Far from being an exception to this, the increasing popularity of private clouds has made the problem even worse. Whether it’s a server vendor hawking blades and automation software as an all-in-one cloud solution, networking vendors pushing next-gen converged networking gear as a foundation for the cloud, or storage vendors selling you "cloud storage," it’s difficult to get any of them to describe how their gear fits into the bigger picture.