Page 95 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

JUST O V ER THE HORIZON, PRIV ATE CL OUDS

at extending its product lines into successive technology evo-
lutions of business. At the very least, expect the Power proces-
sors to appear in a Big Blue version of the public cloud still to
come. Sun Microsystems also would like to see its hardware in-
corporated into cloud data centers, but its UltraSPARC server
line is now owned by Oracle. The uncertainty associated with

that acquisition will temporarily stall cloud construction with
UltraSPARC parts. Nevertheless, it’s imminent that “cloud”-
flavored servers will find their way into mainstream catalogs
and well-known distribution channels, such as those of Dell,
HP, Cisco Systems, and IBM.
It remains unlikely that CIOs and IT managers will start
building a private cloud as a tentative or experimental project

inside the company; few have the capital to waste on half meas-
ures. Instead, as the idea of cloud computing takes hold, small,
medium-sized, and large enterprises will start recasting their
data centers as cloud clusters. The example of public clouds
and the economies of scale that flow from them will prove
compelling.
This doesn’t mean that stalwart Unix servers and IBM
mainframes will be pushed onto a forklift and carted away, re-
placed by sets of, say, $2,400 x86 servers. On the contrary, pro-

prietary Unix servers and mainframes run many business
applications that can’t be easily converted to the x86 instruc-
tion set. For many years to come, applications in COBOL,
FORTRAN, RPG, Smalltalk, and other languages, written in-
house years ago or customized from what is often a product
no longer in existence, will still be running in the corporate
data center. But there are some applications running on legacy

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