Cloud... Cloud computing... Cloud storage... // Virtual... Virtual machine... Virtual storage... Virtual networking... Virtual data-center...

Cloud... Cloud computing... Cloud storage...
Virtual... Virtual machine...  Virtual storage... Virtual networking... Virtual datacenter...

Terms we are throwing around to confuse the world and sell them more software.

We did what we did some years back when mainframes where in all the big companies. New on premise computing. The power on your desktop. And it sold like nothing else and small companies got big and big companies got bigger.

Now that we all had this, we moved to that hand computer. Smart phones and tablets. And they sold like nothing else.

So now what is next?
As movies scripts, we are starting to recycle old ideas. Only now with the new actor's starting to play old rolls and some old actor's trying to keep up.
Beautiful how amazon and other providers are using the software that is based upon the old mainframe Unix to do it.

So what are your options?
SaaS is the term that they are throwing around for some years now. SaaS is where you do not buy and own a peace of code. You rent to right to use it and run it from the servers of the company that builds it and hopefully maintains it. Your data mostly will live on their servers and so security and lock-in are challenges.

A few levels down we have IaaS. First I go to this, because it is the cloud time frame. VMware is one of the first to start building IaaS. Or at least the platform to do this on. We talk about consolidation and the running of multiple OSes next to each other on one piece of hardware. Here the problem is when your hardware stops working and you have a single point of failure. So we introduced another old old term and we start a cluster. Multiple machines working as one. If one fails, the rest take over. We start calling this the cloud. All resources in this cluster are cloud resources. Memory, CPU,  networking and storage are what IaaS runs on. This is what I see as virtualizing Windows. You still need a OS to run on top of the virtual instance to communicate between the hypervisor layer and software.

Next option is PaaS. Platform as a service. You rent space on a platform that is like an OS. On this, you can run your own software and services. So rather then SaaS, you run your own flavor of software and don't have to care about the OS anymore. And here we are back at the mainframe. More powerful, better GUI and accessible from everywhere. You no longer buy the server hardware or maintain the OS.

It is in the end about the end user. The person that produces for you and needs to work to make the company money. You should not care about what operating systems you run or what hardware you need. You need a solution where you just tell us what your company does to make money and we give you the software and help you with the processes. If you need more capacity in any part, we grow or shrink your environment. Or better, we give you the monitoring tools and management tools to do this yourself. Backup, disaster recovery, access for your global workforce, we take care of it.