Cloud Computing in the Enterprise: Enabling the Foundation with the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center

This lecture was about the Dynamic Infrastructure toolkit for System Center, basically providing the tools to allow an enterprise to build their own private cloud and manage it. Deliver the service, manage the fabric.

They went through a lot of the same background that had been covered in the keynote which was a bit of a waste of time.

The toolkit is designed to help with:

1. Self service (provisioning, not pw)
2. Greater failure resilience
3. Greater scale
4. Consumption based charging
5. Service catalog
6. Service orientated (faster delivery)

They plotted the journey from traditional data centre <15%>50% utilised (moving from physical to virtual machines) to private cloud - IT as a service, Chargeback and significant decrease in management costs to public cloud - capacity on demand, global reach.

They envision public/private clouds co-existing which I agree with. I cannot see this changing in the next few years whilst we have limiting legal regulation around data/user accounts or suspicion around the solutions. Once vendors have built up trust in the marketplace I can see the swing beginning where feasible.

The stage stage of data centers is IT PAC (Pre assembled components) this is a modular data center built as needs dictate, think of examples like the World Cup or Olympics, significant need that ramps up until the launch of the event, then suddenly not needed.

The toolkit derives from their learning from managing their environments (Azure/Bing etc). System Center v.Next suite will cover all aspects of private cloud management.

Azure is PAAS (Platform as a service)

BPOS is SAAS (Software as a service)

New for the Cloud is IAAS - Infrastructure as a service, the foundation the cloud is built on.

The toolkit is available from Summer 2010 and will contain:

• Architecture roadmap, Infrastructure planning guides (these are generally great), best practices
• Out of the box capability for self service portal, provisioning engine.

Then a few demo's.

The licensing question was bugging me - how do you manage licensing or costs when anyone can self provision and scale up an environment. Unfortunately the answer was not great - that's down to another product SCVMM, which a)isn't quite true and b)not good enough.

I have a feeling the truth is that it has not really been thought about yet, so will be interesting to see if it gets documented/included at release or a later stage.