Beyond the buzz of leveraging the hot button marketing word "cloud", internal or private cloud infrastructure is no more than converged utility infrastructure rebranded. Think of this infrastructure as a three layer birthday cake. This peculiar cake includes:
- Servers Layer Blade servers and likely blade servers employing Intel’s Xeon 5500 architectures.
- Network and Storage Layers A consolidated network storage layer, typically a storage area network array and switch. 10 Gigabyte Ethernet Networking. 10 gig enables convergence of a variety of network traffic on one cable/switch.
- Virtualization is the Icing Virtualization is the icing that surrounds and binds the layers into a consolidated cake.
This note will examine the current state of each of these layers and what needs to happen next. Why does all of this matter? Vendors increasingly want to sell the whole cake. IT will no longer be able to compartmentalize datacenter infrastructure management, or vendor relationships, into neat categories like servers, storage and network.