The cloud community faces industrial scale challenges

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence.  Author: James Walker.

No one group has all the expertise needed to create a perfect cloud environment – it needs expertise in application behaviour, datacentre design, network and machine virtualisation, wide area networking and so much more. Getting this all working together calls for collaboration, and the CloudEthernet Forum is the way to do it, says CEF President, James Walker

Sometimes society needs to pause, waiting for one single word or symbol that encapsulates its fundamental need, before moving on. Like a seed crystal dropped into a super-saturated solution, the word “cloud” has become the rallying cry for a range of “as a service” business models now spreading like wildfire. And yet the basic idea – that it makes economic sense to invest heavily in central resources and save money on cheaper access to those resources – has been around since the days of the mainframe computer…


The personal computer almost destroyed that model, as people discovered that they really liked holding their own resources, but it re-emerged with client-server and the savings made possible by allowing a “thinner client”. While the rise of the web revived the idea of centralisation, with a truly thin client accessing services from the Internet, early moves in this direction gathered little momentum. This was partly because Internet access in the 1990s was still too slow, but also because people still cherished the autonomy of having all their assets in their own PC.  Smartphones cause a surge in cloud takeup…

Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputingintelligence.com/index.php/resource-centre/articles/featured-articles/918-the-cloud-community-faces-industrial-scale-challenges