What Cloud Are You?
The Cloud…
With everyone and their mother force feeding the population with terms like “The Cloud“, “Cloud Services“, “IaaS“, it is so easy for us to forget what these companies and their marketing teams are trying to get us to sign up for. Most of us in the virtualization space understand what the Cloud is. But for the general public or your CEO who just had a round of golf with his CEO buddies bragging about how they can access their corporate data directly from the 9th hole via their newest smart phone, it can be very difficult to grasp in actuality.
The Cloud is not some magical alternate universe filled with Tree Forts, Candy Kingdoms, talking dogs, or Korean speaking Rainicorns, its just a datacenter at someone else’s office that usually has way nicer stuff than your datacenter has. That is it. Sure of course I have missed a few details here and there, but you follow me. And there is NOT just one Cloud like marketing materials can lead one to believe. There are many out there but most of the time we tend to hear more about the top players in that space such as, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure, and VMware’s vCloud Air (formally vCloud Hybrid Service or vCHS).
What Cloud Are You?
When we hear about these 3 players in the space we tend to understand who they are because we have been around these names for quite some time in our careers, but do we really know what they are offering? In my opinion, not always. Understanding or decrypting their offerings can be a full-time job, at least thats how I have felt before. For some, understanding the provider’s offering and how it can help solve a problem for that person or company comes very easy. For others, it can take much longer to really grasp the offering and how it can or cannot help.
Each of the 3 providers I have mentioned here have use cases that will fill someone needs. Some of these providers are considered Leaders, Challengers, or even Visionaries at times. But honestly I feel those charts & names do not do the provider much justice in the hands of those System Admins, Engineers, and Architects who plan, build, and support these solutions. These IT gurus have many things to consider when planning to move to the Cloud. They may require a need to develop apps that can be built fast and tore down even faster. Or a need to choose a solution that is easy to integrate with their current datacenter infrastructure and lines up well with licensing agreements. And some may be more concerned with reducing operational and capital expenses with additional focus on security of their corporate data.
What I am really saying here is, do your homework, ask questions, find answers, and execute. VMware’s vCloud Air OnDemand has many of the above mentioned requirements and can fit very well into a variety of existing VMware environments to help reduce costs, extend datacenters for DR/BC requirements, as well as integrate nicely with tools your IT department may already use. Again, I understand this solution may not be for all, but with that said, it might be worth a look as VMware is also offering a $300 service credit for giving a shot. What are you waiting for? Get our there and see what’s in store. I think you will be pleased with the results.