Page 148 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

their company. One person who is in an excellent position to
observe the movement is Forrest Norrod, vice president and
general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions unit, which
builds custom servers for large Internet companies.
Norrod says that the public cloud “has hit an inflection
point where the early adopters are past the experimental phase

of kicking the tires and are moving noncritical workloads into
the cloud.” In addition to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2) and Rackspace Cloud supplying servers for use by the
hour in an Internet data center, several newcomers have shown
up, including AT&T’s Synaptic Compute as a Service, Verizon
Business Cloud, and Joyent.
The interest in public clouds is spilling over into the pos-

sibility of building a similar type of operation inside the cor-
porate data center. “We think the private cloud will start to
proliferate as well. Interest is spiking through the roof,” Nor-
rod said during a visit by an InformationWeek team to the Dell
campus in Round Rock, Texas, in early 2010 as the manuscript
for this book neared completion.
Asked to describe the private cloud, he replied in jest, “It’s
a panacea that solves all problems.” Nevertheless, he was able
to describe the private cloud in a brief summary. It’s a cluster

of virtualized servers managed as a unit inside a company data
center. The cloud cluster is able to scale up or down to meet
the needs of heavily worked applications.
Norrod’s business unit is a builder of customized servers,
ordered in large quantities by the Internet search engine
companies, such as Yahoo! and Ask.com; by Amazon Web
Services; by Microsoft with its Bing search engine and Azure

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