SOA, SaaS, Cloud Computing – all point to utility computing architecture

Utility computing has been a goal of the IT industry for as long as I can remember. It is almost the elusive “holy grail”. But now it’s almost a necessity. To process it the cloud, you must deliver software as a service. To effectively deliver software as a service, you need a service oriented architecture. And a service oriented architecture must provide capacity on demand, or utility computing. Virtualization is the essential underpinning to this approach.

But there seems to be slow adoption of virtualization beyond server consolidation. I believe this is specifically due to the lack of mature systems management tools. VMWare is agressively acquiring and developing additional capabilities, but M$ is purporting to have intrinsic management advantages buit into it's Hyper-V. But Hyper-V lacks network migration for workload balancing; VM shadowing; or remote replication for disaster recovery. While Hyper-V is lacking some of the more sophisticated capabilities of VMWare, it certainly has the advantage of price, and with better management capability, it may compel many IT decision makers to choose it from a manageability standpoint. Regardless of the hypervisor of choice, it is only one component of the overall architecture required to reach commodity infrastructure. Storage and network virtualization and mature tools to manage all three components seamlessly will also be needed.

Of course, I speak as though the data center is nothing but x86 machines (I've been reading too much of VMWare glossware lately), and we all know that while it is a large presence, there is still a quite a bit of it's bigger brothers UNIX and mainframes. Each of the leading vendors in the UNIX arena have their own virtual strategies which are quite mature although bound to their respective operating systems. Before you will be able to manage the entire computing environment seamlessly as a cloud, there will need to be way to manage them all. I dont think it would be possible with the array of tools that would be required today to manage all these disparate environments. Unfortunately I believe it's up to the systems management vendors to develop more robust tools that can adapt to dynamic environments, manage the various vendors products, and do so in an efficient manner before cloud computing can become a reality. Until then, those seeking to deploy cloud computing, will have to rely on homogeneous infrastructure, very highly skilled systems engineers, and a collection of tools from many sources (possibly some home grown) to do so.