The future of corporate IT is in private clouds, flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon yet built and managed internally for each business's users, the analyst firm Gartner says.
Cloud computing hype centers largely around the outsourcing of IT needs to cloud services available over the Internet. While this trend is expected to accelerate, Gartner predicts it will also become standard for large companies to build their own highly automated private cloud networks in which all resources can be managed from a single point and assigned to applications or services as needed. "Our belief is the future of internal IT is very much a private cloud," says Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman."Our clients want to know 'what is Google's secret? What is Microsoft's secret?' There is huge interest in being able to get learnings from the cloud."
Bittman discussed Gartner's predictions in an interview with Network World, and will detail them again next month at the analyst firm's annual Data Center Conference in Las Vegas in a presentation titled "The Future of Infrastructure and Operations: The Engine of Cloud Computing."
While Bittman says it will take years for private clouds to develop, some early adopters are already "Google-izing" their own data centers. Bechtel, for instance, is using the software-as-a-service computing model internally to provide IT services to 30,000 users, in a project that relies heavily on server and storage virtualization. (Compare storage products.)
Server virtualization is key to building internal as well as external clouds, Bittman says, noting that Amazon hosts applications in Xen virtual machines. But server virtualization is only one of several necessary layers.
A meta operating system -- similar to VMware's recently developed Virtual Datacenter Operating System -- will be necessary to manage an enterprise's distributed resources as one computing pool, Bittman adds.
Specifically, the meta operating system is "a virtualization layer between applications and distributed computing resources … that utilizes distributed computing resources to perform scheduling, loading, initiating, supervising applications and error handling."
But the meta operating system only provides the muscles of a distributed environment, Bittman says. Another layer, which Gartner calls a service governor, will have to provide the brains, making decisions about where to allocate computing resources.