Bernard Golden wrote a very interesting VMWorld wrap-up for CIO this week. Basically his take was that cloud is here to stay…it is real and “the delivery of these second-generation product indicates that customer acceptance of cloud computing is moving to the practical stage.” I was struck by his observation about how much storage was emphasized as well as the desktop in comparison to network.
Maybe it is because cloud computing is still in the early stages but many continue to underestimate the complexity the network brings to the cloud. The network was not designed to support cloud services, it is complex and it is cumbersome to re-provision every time there is a change in resources.
Greg Ness stated, “A VP cloud for a larger enterprise told me that his networking team had more than 30 steps to simply provision a server to the network. There were close to a dozen highly-skilled network pros involved in the process. He discovered via audit that the cost to move a server was more than half the cost of buying a new one,” in a recent Blog post that Network Automation is Inevitable.
Network and cloud automation has to happen before the cloud can truly be cost-effective.
