Can we say carrier or vendor hosted VMWare farm?
Ok, I’m sure IBM et. al. could define it better, but for me that’s all it amounts to. Big deal. I’ve been using hosted internet web services for years.
It amounts to essentially this;
- I host my applications on someone else’s equipment.
- That equipment is shared (i.e. not a dedicated server); and
- I don’t need to worry about maintenance, renewal or provisioning.
It is all part of the hosting fee.
The challenge, is a little loss of flexibility (can’t just put anything on that server), and not being able to go and reboot it when I want.
Giving up that level of control, or being dependent on a 3rd party and your WAN connection can be intimidating. It’s not for everyone, but if you don’t have the square footage, are growing dynamically or just don’t want to have to deal with the complexity of building your own data center, I’d say yes it is the right way to go. For shops that are already completely virtualized… well you are already 99% there, just get a decent link to 2 or more Tier 4 carrier based data centres, turn on VMWare HA and you are done.
Overall, I agree with Don Sheppard’s post calling cloud computing not much more than marketecture. It’s basically a marketing departments way to present an old idea.
