The journey to the private cloud starts now. This was the theme of the tenth annual EMC World, which saw some 6 000 people converge on the Boston Conference Centre, last week.
In the opening keynote, Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC, provided an overview of cloud computing by answering two key questions: why now?, and, what is it?
Tucci suggested the IT industry is at the beginning of what will be the largest and most significant wave of beneficial change the industry has ever seen. One that will be centred on the evolution to private cloud computing.
The private cloud holds the promise of delivering unprecedented levels of efficiency, control, and choice in IT infrastructure, Tucci said. This shift will enable IT to focus more of its time on activities that truly differentiate and benefit the business.
Tucci noted that cloud computing is the 'fifth' major wave in the history of computing, which started with the mainframe regime of the 1960s, and was followed by the eras of the mini computer, the PC or microprocessor computer, and distributed computing.
Why now?
According to Tucci, the current computer infrastructure has become too inefficient, too complex, and too costly. He noted 72% of IT budgets was being spent on maintaining infrastructure, and only the majority of the remaining 28% on innovation.
digital universe move from 0.8 zettabytes (a trillion billion) in 2009 to 35.2 zettabytes by 2020 - a 44% growth factor. This will create a situation impossible to manage in the conventional manner, necessitating a completely new approach.
Examples of technologies causing this growth include the field of medical imaging, where MRI scan slices are becoming ever larger in terms of their storage requirements, and the growth in the number of mobile users transmitting image and video content.
What is it?
This new wave of computing will bring together the reliability and security attributes of today's data centre, based on multiple incompatible architectures, and the cost-efficient, on-demand attributes of cloud computing, based on homogeneous x86 architectures, to create the best of both worlds - ie, pools of storage, computers and network access.
In this way, the customer's internal data centre will become a private cloud, and those of service providers, public clouds, Tucci explained. This will create a federation of resources to which virtual users have access via virtual applications.
Tucci outlined the steps that need to be taken on the journey to the private cloud and the benefits for users that come with following such a strategy.
During the keynote, Tucci also highlighted his expectations for EMC this year, which suggested revenue would be about $16.6 billion, with net income around $2.5 billion. The company will spend more than 12% of revenue on research and development, and $4 billion on several small acquisitions of innovative technology companies.
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