Sunday, May 03, 2009

Clouds: differing views from Google and McKinsey & co on applications and firms that will use clouds and virtualisation

[Internet News] Apple might be the original "Think Different" company, but it has a close cousin in Silicon Valley neighbor Google. For example, the search giant has no qualms about stating something most IT vendors wouldn't be caught dead saying: "We expect the hardware to fail."

That statement was included in a detailed promotion of the benefits of cloud computing Google posted Tuesday that started with a polite jab at management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Last month McKinsey posted a report through the Uptime Institute entitled 'Clearing the air on cloud computing.'

Among other points, the McKinsey report touted virtualization as offering more proven, cost-effective benefits to IT organizations than cloud computing.

"Clouds already make sense for many small and medium-size businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises," the report said.

"Rather than create unrealizable expectations for 'internal clouds,' CIOs should focus now on the immediate benefits of virtualizing server storage, network operations, and other critical building blocks," the report added.

While Google isn't necessarily concerned with a firm's inner datacenter workings, its blog post argues that McKinsey's outlook on cloud computing focused too much on internal clouds and overlooked the potential of external clouds for supplemental computing.

"There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a 'private cloud' with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach," Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, wrote in Google's enterprise blog.

Google to McKinsey: 'Get Off of My Cloud'
see also McKinsey Clearing the air on cloud computing
and What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing

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