Big Dogs Weigh in on Cloud: IBM and HP Show the Goods

CIO - Serendipitously, both IBM and HP held events this week to describe their cloud computing initiatives. Their presentations offered insight into what they're doing and provide some food for thought to IT organizations assessing what cloud computing means to their future-as well as some information that might give pause as well.

IBM announced a number of separate things as well as doing an actual demo of cloud capability. First, it's created a Cloud Computing division that reports directly to IBM's head-equivalent to the software, sevices, and hardware divisions. Second, it announced a raft of cloud computing offerings, including services relating to cloud strategy, transitioning current data centers to cloud-enabled data centers, and IBM facilities to enable testing of cloud solutions. Third, it announced a capability to allow IT organizations to use external clouds to migrate workloads from internal cloud data centers to external clouds. The demo showed how an application with multiple systems running software could have some of those systems live migrated to an external cloud. This capability is done through Tivoli, which manages all the systems. Juniper participated in the event, with Juniper networking underlying the application migration with MPLS-based connectivity providing high-bandwidth communication between the internal data center and the public cloud data center.

HP's event was more focused on illustrating HP's approach to cloud computing with presentations by several different groups. HP locates its cloud computing technology efforts within its Technology Solutions Group rather than breaking it out on its own. However, there is a CTO for cloud computing and each group within TSG has cloud offerings. HP also provides a range of services like helping clients develop cloud strategy, creating agile data centers that enable fast resource provisioning and repurposing, etc., as well as hardware and software designed to assist the operation of agile data centers.

So what does this mean for you, the IT practitioner?

First, the two biggest players in IT believe in cloud computing-and that means they believe that it's important to you. While there was some mention of cloud hype at both events, companies like these don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars in something they see as an IT fad. I've seen how big companies like these treat IT trends they view as fads: they put together a mid-level group, buried deep within a main business structure, headed by somebody without a lot of clout within the organization. That person is chartered with going to second-tier conferences and describing a rag-tag bunch of minor initiatives. What IBM and HP presented doesn't have that feel at all. They're dead serious about cloud computing and view it as the next beachhead of computing, akin to the rise of the PC or the arrival of the Internet. If it's important to them, it will be important to you.