All Coming Together
A recent press release about VMware’s cloud compute technology caught my eye. Centric has been involved in Cloud computing for some time. Our Cloud practice has experience with the major public cloud platforms (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) and has been helping businesses of all sizes figure out how they can benefit from the cloud.
One of the gaps typically present in public or private cloud deployments is the lack of a good, commercial grade, administrative management console or portal. So it was with some excitement that we learned of VMware’s recently released vCloud Director designed to work seamlessly with VMware’s vSphere. You can go to VMware’s web site to get all the details, but in a nutshell the product:
- Exposes virtual datacenters completely decoupled from the underlying hardware,
- Allows end users to define and expose a catalog of IT services that can be virtually deployed,
- Simplifies management tasks such as troubleshooting, change management, provisioning, etc., and
- Automates select provisioning tasks via policy-based workflows allowing authorized users to deploy preconfigured services (how cool is that!).
Note also that Microsoft continue to make great strides with the Azure platform’s administrative interfaces. Look for great product announcements around Microsoft’s upcoming PDC.
Cloud computing continues to get closer to a true compute utility.
I welcome your comments.
Mike Brannan
