When Virtualization will mean "Management"

It's been awhile since I last blogged.  Have been busy at a new job, where I'm handling the marketing launch of our new integrated storage management product.  Surprisingly, though, it was my team leader who insisted that blogging needs to be something where you, "see an article and you write about it then".  So I'm following that advice.

I just read a CNET story, "Enterprise storage gets interesting again", which quoted a VM storage company exec as saying, "100 percent virtual deployment is a when, not an if, at this point. In the virtualized datacenters 20 years from today, all aspects of computing will be virtualized, including servers, networks and storage."  It's tough to argue this.  Analysts and consultants are putting server virtualization adoption at anywhere from 20% to 80% depending on the research and whether they were measuring systems, workloads or companies. The trend towards "virtualization as the default" is something we continue to hear from customers. 

The downside, however, is the complexity.  According to one survey, "...only about half of around 200 respondents find virtualized systems easier to manage or help them meet their SLAs."   Virtualization has become another complex layer of 3rd party management added on top of the physical IT resources in the data center.  It has spawned its own type of administrators (i.e. "VM Admins") as well as management frameworks.  And, if you really love complexity, you can even add on an additional "Cloud" layer of management (director software, portal, API, licenses, etc.), to further abstract, your abstracted management! 

Before I'm accused of being some Ludite, let me say that server virtualization has been a good trend. Similar to storage virtualization, network virtualization... heck, memory virtualization. I mean, when was the last time you had to specify which module or page of RAM to use for your application?   Virtualization shields the end-user from the details -- and dare I say complexity -- of the underlying physical resource.  And as a result, typically scalability, utilization and availability are improved.

So I agree that virtualization "is a when, not an if".  But the "when" will remain a long way off until the complexity is addressed. What is needed is for server virtualization to become part of the server management, not yet another thing to install, license and manage.  Just like how Storage arrays present volumes externally, while masking the internal complexity of cache memory, RAID levels, tiering, etc., servers will have to quickly get onto this same evolutionary path.  The "when" of prevalent server virtualization will arrive when the virtualization is embedded within the server hardware itself.

Cloud Fabrics

My recent absence from this blog was a result of work-related dynamics as well as involvement in another blog effort, EthernetFabric.com.  I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone seeking info on how the new generation of Ethernet switch products create savings and new capabilities within the data center.  And, not surprisingly, form an intelligent foundation for virtualized and cloud infrastructures.

On that note, one of the things I wrote recently was a position piece on "Cloud Fabrics" or in other words the network infrastructure required to support a dynamic cloud environment.  Here are the key elements:

1. Provide security to the resident applications, users and resources, including network access protection, user authentication, data in flight encryption, data at rest encryption, and logging;

2. Provide the data transport availability needed to ensure continuous packet delivery between the user and the cloud resource, through continuity capabilities such as link trunking and automatic failover;

3. As much as possible outside of the physical effects of distance-imposed latency, make a connection between users, applications and distance resources perform comparably to a traditional local connection through the use of data compression, acceleration, de-duplication, QoS and advanced routing capabilities; and

4. Provide transparency and control for the data traversing between users, applications and resources, through enabling management, monitoring and compliance capabilities that track data flows to the packet level, while also preserving the service-level context.

Let me know what you think of this "Cloud Fabric" concept.  I feel there's a lot of this already encompassed within the Ethernet Fabric efforts in the industry, whether Brocade VDX , Juniper QFabric, Cisco Unified Fabric or Arista Cloud Networking, to name a few.  But there are still missing on not-quite-integrated aspects of security, availability, acceleration/optimization, and especially management.  It's an exciting work-in-progress to watch -- how the vendor solutions are evolving to meet emerging customer needs.  I expect we'll continue to see more pieces of the puzzle from Spring industry events, more product announcements and the inevitable M&A activity.  Enjoy the ride.

2011 Cloud Predictions

Happy new year to fellow Cloud technologists, vendors, capitalists and enthusiasts!  There are almost too many Cloud year-in-review and Predictions to keep track of, and I apologize for adding yet another to the list, but these three predictions were inspired by a variety of sources, including smart work colleagues, respected industry voices and random online sources.  I've tried to give credit where it's due.  I look forward to sharing another very exciting year in the cloud community with you.

1.   Cloud becomes the default IT platform – We’re seeing growth estimates of 20-30% for public cloud offerings, and anywhere from 10-15% of IT spending being redirected to the cloud, so it should be a safe bet that Cloud will continue to grow in 2011.  But 2011may be the tipping point where for most companies, IT Project leaders will have to start considering a cloud option for every new project, and perhaps will be required to present the more demanding business case for On-Premise deployment versus the default of using Amazon, Azure or a SaaS provider.

2.   Hybrid cloud becomes the key battlefield – For now, most investment has been clearly either internal ‘private’ cloud or external SaaS, PaaS or IaaS, and never the twain shall meet.  IT teams in 2011 will have an epiphany that it all needs to connect together, whether because of performance, compliance or manageability.  Expect to see wide adoption of heterogeneous cloud management tools, continued investment and growth in the WAN optimization and cloud gateway space, as well as the convergence of SAN/LAN/WAN capabilities within underlying networking gear.

3.   Cloud M&A Peaks – Fueled by a low growth environment and cheap capital, we can expect to see a number of acquisitions across the IT landscape, including mega deals like Oracle buying Salesforce.com and/or CSC, IBM buying NetApp, HP buying SAP.  And specific Cloud-related deals will also rise, with vendors filling networking and capabilities gaps, such as Cisco buying Riverbed, Dell buying Brocade, and Cloud management tools like Rightscale, Abiquo and Joyent being snapped up and folded into the IT management suites of IBM and HP.

Special thanks to: Brook Reams http://brook.reams.me/, Datapipe http://www.datapipe.com/, IDC www.idc.com, Channel Buzz Canada http://www.channelbuzz.ca

Newest Cloud Storage Enabler

I was fielding an inquiry from one of my engineers and thought I'd share it, as it's probably a common question, esp. as we continue to see Cloud awareness spread, while the network barriers to external Cloud service adoption remain. Enjoy.

-----Original Message-----

Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 5:30 PM
Subject: Cirtas

Hi Mike,
I'm interested in Cirtas, because a user asked me. What do you think of this kind of storage?

-----Original Message-----

From: Mike Harding
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 9:36 AM
Subject: RE: Cirtas


This is a very valuable solution. Much of 'Cloud storage' is not useful for companies for at least a few key reasons:

1) Security -- It's the #1 inhibitor to using external cloud services. Customers are worried that their data will be compromised either in transit outside of the corporate firewall, or after it's been stored, especially within a multi-tenant hosting environment.

2) Performance -- The second biggest problem with hosting your data in the cloud is that it's far away from the applications and users. So the distance between you and your data creates latency as well as other common WAN issues such as jitter, lost packets, etc. This is why we've seen much of cloud storage being for deep archiving or uses where you don't care how long it takes to either put or retrieve your data, such as email archiving for regulatory reasons.

3) The need to change your application -- Many providers, even those using brand name enterprise-class storage hardware such as EMC Atmos, are only allowing access via a RESTful API. This means that the customer needs to write an application that uses this API in order to store and access the data, and for all intents and purposes, limits the use of that cloud storage for web application media and data.

Cirtas, which just launched publically, is a great example of what I call a Cloud Storage Enabler in that they allow customers to overcome these barriers to adopting the external cloud. Their product, Bluejet, encrypts your data so it's secure both in transit and at-rest. It accelerates the transit with data compression and deduplication. And it emulates local storage, so it looks like any NFS/CIFS target to your applications and users. Cirtas is one of a number of companies with similar Cloud Enabler solutions - you should also consider Nasuni, TwinStrata, Panzura and StorSimple.

Thanks, and good luck,

Mike Harding

Hybrid Cloud: The Preferred Approach

I've been a big believer for awhile now that 'Hybrid cloud' was where the industry needs to be going.  It's the big idea that truly allows companies and their IT organizations to seamlessly knit together their internal resources with those of their technology vendors.  And I'm a little biased these days working for a networking company, where it has been painfully obvious for some time that the Network is the key to unlocking a lot of latent demand in external cloud computing... with concerns over data Security, Availability and Performance as the biggest barriers to adopting externally-based Cloud services.

But aren't these insurmountable barriers, only leaving companies able to do 'Private Clouds'?  Well what is a Private cloud?  Some would say it doesn't exist - it's just a new label for what a lot of companies have been trying to accomplish within their data centers for some time now, with key capabilities being Server Virtualization, Automation, Self-service provisioning, and Chargeback for usage-based cost allocation.  Gartner called this Real Time Infrastructure. Others termed it Data Center Automation.  Others Utility Computing. 

The reality is that Hybrid cloud computing is already the preferred approach for organizations as seen in this chart from The Info Pro.  Almost 60% of companies expect to be using Both external cloud services as well as developing internal cloud capabilities.


Hybrid computing is getting top vendor support from the likes of Intel, Microsoft and others.  So we can expect to see the ability to connect across data centers -- safely, efficiently and in a manageable way -- becoming an embedded capability within the component resources that we purchase in the future.

The move to Cloud computing is happening today and the only question is at what rate. A recent Brocade study showed that 60 percent of enterprises expect to have started the planning and migration to a cloud computing model within the next two years, with key business drivers being to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).  Other interesting Cloud findings included:

• More than a quarter of large organizations are planning to migrate a cloud model within the next two years; 11 percent within one year
• A quarter of organizations stated that the ability to consolidate the number of data centers was also a critical driver
• The availability of bandwidth was also a deciding factor amongst 14 percent of respondents

Conclusion: Embrace the concept of the Hybrid Cloud, and team with technology vendors that are delivering a roadmap allowing you to execute on that vision as soon as possible.

Cloud Network Optimization validated

With the explosive growth of the Cloud Services market, exceeding $68 billion this year, it was obvious to expect lots of innovation in and around this space.  I had been mostly blogging about efforts in the Cloud Infrastructure and Storage space, and was seeing a microcosm of this opportunity with new classes of optimized gear to speed and secure the links from the customer to the cloud.

We recently have witnessed the emergence of Cloud gateways that appear as local NAS but act as intelligent controllers that cache, optimize, encrypt and convert data from the LAN out to the Storage cloud. Along with TwinStrata, Cirtas, StorSimple, and Nasuni, we can now add Panzura to this vendor list.

But I still expected to see a pure-play Cloud Network product in this area.  A device that performed the caching, dedupe, and encryption of a WAN opt. appliance but specifically aimed at datacenter-to-cloud traffic, where the protocols and acceleration are tweaked for storage data and larger pipes. It would be a network device, not a storage device, thus complementing new products such as EMC VPLEX to speed storage virtualization between data centers and enabling use cases such as VMotion over distance.  I had assumed an established network player would be first to meet this need, but a new player, Infineta, took the brass ring.

Infineta has been very distinct in their positioning, focusing on datacenter to datacenter and not branch office traffic which is the established realm of Riverbed and traditional WAN optimization.  And they released a cool new video on youtube. 

It's ultimately up to the analysts as to how the markets get defined, but with this latest product entry, I'm considering Cloud Storage Networking to be a validated market.  For IT organizations, now's the time to start thinking how you can use these new products to safely and cost-effectively transition archival and nearstore data out to the Cloud.

Cloud Storage Optimization market

A new product category is shaping up in direct response to a new customer need.  As seen in recent stories like "What's keeping Data Storage Out of the Cloud?", companies want to use new Cloud Storage services from providers such as IBM, but they are concerned about the security, availability and cost of the required network connection.  Enter Cloud Storage Optimization.

To bridge this network gap customers face a number of sub-optimal alternatives:

1. Don't worry about it -- probably the most popular approach, which only works if you don't care about your job, or the value of the data going across the wire is so low that it's not a big deal if it takes forever for the transit, or it's hacked, or both.
2. Lease a private connection -- this is an option for 'too big to fail banks' or other major organizations where cost isn't an issue.  But for most companies, the incremental cost of the circuit eliminates the economic savings of the Cloud service.
3. Use a generic WAN optimization box -- Not a great solution as these are software-based appliances designed for lower-bandwidth branch-office connections and a broad mix of transactional data.  The Cloud Storage connection is really a SAN-like 'channel' which will be very data intensive, and will benefit from hardware-based compression and offload processing.  And similar to the private circuit, the cost of the WAN optimization appliance that supports the higher throughput needed for the Cloud storage will cost you more than your annual Cloud storage bill.

What we're seeing in response is an initial first step towards closing this market gap: a new category of Cloud Storage Optimization solutions, or Cloud Storage Gateways.  Representative companies include Cirtas, Twinstrata, Nasuni and StorSimple.  These are all start-ups who seem to be quickly gaining awareness and traction with companies and Cloud Service Providers.

The anatomy of a Cloud Storage Gateway is made of software that either resides within an x86 server (i.e. an appliance) or completely as software that can be deployed within a VM.  They typically are asymmetric (i.e. single-device) solutions often positioned as a NAS filer.  Typical capabilities include NAS-to-Cloud API emulation, WAN Optimization, Caching, In-transit Encryption and Data management features such as snapshots.  As software-based solutions they are flexible, and meant to be affordable and targeted to a more mid-market customer.  Similarly they are intended for not-overly-demanding throughput needs, as there is no purpose-built processor offload. 

For mid-market companies looking to add a Cloud tier of archival or similar offline data storage, these are products to consider.  For enterprises or companies who want to leverage Cloud storage as a nearstore alternative, you will want to wait for next-gen 'Cloud Networking' products built for high-throughput, hardware-assisted optimization, symmetric caching/network de-dupe capabilities, and that integrate with your existing network management framework.

Thank goodness for Twitter

Not sure about you but life is moving pretty fast these days.  And though I have a deep-seated bias against blogs as a medium for serious, thoughtful communication, versus let's say a written letter or a conversation.  Yet, most of the time I can't even muster the time required for a half-way decent blog entry.  

Enter Twitter.  140 characters provide an adequate if staccato means to share an update, a heads up on an event, an interesting Cloud article or just a passing thought.

So if you aren't finding many postings here, then be sure to look for me on Twitter. I'm @mhardi01, and am often posting #cloud related tweets.

One Year in the Cloud

The other day I had the epiphany that I've been working on my company's Cloud effort for a year now.  It was around this time a year ago when a few of us, holed up in a room, were doing some next-gen data center planning with a topic being 'clouds'.  I hadn't given the subject too much thought with regard to our product set up to that point.  But a few promising concepts came out of that meeting and the larger effort took off. 

It's all shaping up to be a big inflection point in the IT business, in some ways a lot like server virtualization, ASPs before that, and the web before that.  Hang on for another great ride.    :)

Share any interesting anecdotes of your experience to date with the Cloud. 

How to Calculate an Accurate Cost of Cloud vs. Cost of Inertia

There was a very helpful article written recently on the 'hidden' costs of using external Cloud storage services.  This is important information when you are sitting down to determine the business case for moving data outside your data center.  The article correctly points out the basic cost for storage from someone like Amazon Web Services can be as little as $0.15 per GB per month, and that volume discounts can bring this down further.  However, additional features to support WORM or information lifecycle management, will increase the pricetag towards $1.00 per GB.

Some services charge to upload data, some to download, some for both.  And if you have too much to send over the wire, you are welcome to send a tape.  But that will cost you, too.

And then there's connectivity costs.  If you are already max-ed out on your internet connection, then moving data to the cloud will require incremental bandwidth.  Some enterprise-class services actually require bundled bandwidth or even direct circuits, in order to provide an SLA.

So if all this sounds daunting, let's look at your current cost of storage.  The rule of thumb is that for any IT capability, the direct cost (i.e. what you buy and deploy) is only 20% of the total cost: the rest is the cost to maintain it.  This indirect cost % appears to be increasing over time -- both a function of improved value in IT products, but also an increase in wages, facilities, energy, etc.  And this is also true for storage.

TCO components of your storage base case need to include the cost of the hardware -- either the entire cost if looking at a 3-year period, or an annual depreciation.  I'd assume you're looking mostly at Arrays, but you may also have servers involved for some supporting application.  Make sure you're comparing apples to apples with the complete outsourced offering.  If this is a decision to buy another NAS filer vs. a contract with someone like Rackspace, then you need to factor-in the complete deployed cost.  Include any installation, training, and related on-site switching expense like for instance local data migration.

Then add system software and/or array-based software licenses.  Add annual maintenance and support fees.  Add the allocated Server Administrator cost for the devices: the annual burdened wages (i.e. salary + 15% or more for taxes, benefits).  This should be a big line item: staff costs are consistently 40% or more of total costs in the data center.  Each admin can manage just so many TBs of storage.  You need to figure this out for your current environment; even if an analyst or vendor study says that one admin FTE can handle 10TB in an ideal world, what really matters is what you are running in your data center today.

We're not done: you can't forget the allocated cost of the data center space.  This includes the rent of the space, and the power, the heating and cooling, and if you need to pay for a set of hands within the facility when changes are made.   I wish I could offer a rule of thumb here, but it depends on whether you have your own data center and what 'tier' of DC it is, or whether you are using a co-lo.  There are variables in terms of wattage density per rack, efficiency of the cooling system, and probably other key variables.  For many companies their problem is that their space is either obsolete or they are out of power, or space, or both.  Anyway, this may take a little work to get to, but you need to add a cost to reflect the data center operations.

Now look at the numbers.  Assuming you are one of the lucky ones who still have the ability to add more storage internally, the business case for using the Cloud should be more compelling, especially where you are talking about a smaller amount of storage, have a smaller (i.e. less scale-efficient) operation, and especially if your needs are more temporary or at least not expected to be consistent over the life of the hardware (e.g. you don't need to use all the storage for all that period of time).

IT is definitely moving thier resources to the cloud, and it's all about the economics.  Sharpen your pencil and make sure you're taking an accurate picture of your internal vs. your expected Cloud storage costs.  Good luck!

Early Cloud Investment makes for a Buyers Market

The $250mil HP-Microsoft deal announced a couple weeks ago speaks to how quickly and seriously the big players have converged on the Cloud opportunity.  Literally before the market has even come to understand what 'Cloud' means, we've seen Cloud deals involving many of the top global IT players including Cisco, EMC, VMware, HP and Microsoft.  Only Oracle-Sun is dialing back their cloud investment.

This is different than the uptake around ASPs many years ago.  Small pure-play start-ups like Corio and Jamcracker were prominent in the market for years with little competition from top IT firms, who instead chose to sit out the market wave and acquire ASP capabilities after the bubble burst. This early involvement of larger players means more vendors with capabilities and expected staying power; in effect two Savvis' for every one GoGrid.  So customers don't have to choose between start-ups who "get it" and dinosaurs who don't.

With more investment, sooner, we can expect the life cycle of the category to be similarly accelerated.  It bodes well for customers looking for validation and future-proofing from leading vendors.  It will probably also shake out the smaller players sooner, as they find themselves competing with established tech brands touting seemingly less-risky solutions.  Perceived security and 'trust' will be key aspects of success, especially in the hosted cloud space.

So with more M&A and investment expected relating to the Cloud, take your time before making big investments, plan with an eye towards federating your external Cloud services with your internal data center environment (rather than creating a hodge-podge of cloud silos), and enjoy a developing buyers market in all things Cloud.

Best Practices for Choosing an External Cloud Vendor

The idea of Cloud is catching fire.  One vendor recently shared that half of their customers are considering external Cloud storage providers. (As this was from a backup software vendor, I'm not sure this is such good news for them). 

The good news for you is that every IT vendor out there is delivering products or services to meet this growing Cloud interest. And the bad news is... every IT vendor out there is delivering products or services to meet this growing Cloud interest. Many are the same products that were last year's "Green IT" solutions. Some are enterprise-class utility computing products aimed at your data center. Some are public web-based services for SMBs.

I've been working now for some time on new External Cloud product efforts, and am seeing the potential confusion just in this one area of Cloud computing. So I thought I'd share a few tips I've picked up that may help you as you are considering new projects in "the Cloud".

1. Like any outsourcing decision, start with projects and applications that are not mission-critical or performance-sensitive.
2. Spend time to develop an architecture to address the linear scalability, parallel processing and distributed data aspects of cloud computing.
3. Understand how your management, monitoring and policies will accommodate external storage and compute resources especially in terms of security, availability, utilization and compliance.
4. Compare Cloud subscription costs with your burdened total costs of ownership -- Cloud should deliver savings for short-time horizon projects, where specialized admin staffing would otherwise be needed, and where large fixed investments may not be fully utilized.
5. Stick to annual contracts especially as Infrastructure as a service will become commoditized over time.
6. Expect that only a few leading ecosystems will emerge once the hype passes – choose your vendors carefully looking for a track record, customer references, a documented SLA and top quality infrastructure.

Good luck with your projects, and feel free to share what you're learning in the Cloud.

Cloud is about more than cost savings

I just read an insightful blog post about Cloud and the recent Sidekick outage that got me thinking about a couple things:

1. Cloud is not about just cost savings. I remember when ASP sales guys would get asked by a customer about ROI. And as the ambitious marketer enabling them, I’d quickly assemble a tool kit of datasheets with financial illustrations, business savings solution write-ups, brand-name analyst TCO whitepapers and detailed spreadsheets with 3-year cost savings analysis. The industry has now moved on to slick web and flash-based ROI tools that do everything but the direct withdrawal from the prospect’s bank account.

But what we learned was that starting with ROI was the kiss of death. If the customer only cared about cost savings then they’d never buy. It would be too easy for the tech guy to raise the specter of technical bogeymen that would always trump the potential savings. There needs to be a perceived risk-adjusted net benefit of going out-of-house.

2. Cloud service levels will typically be better than you can deliver yourself.  Gartner traditionally put typical IT availability at 98% to 99.5%. 3-9’s of availability or better was reserved for ‘high availability’ applications. These were typically the most business-critical that got the clustering software, gold-tier storage, etc. If they say the Sidekicks were out for 4 ½ hours or so, and if this is the only outage they experienced all year, then this is still a respectable 99.95% uptime. Not bad for a service that appears to be based on IM-ing about concerts and adolescent hookups. I'm seeing many service providers building out with top-quality hardware, software and expertise that can only be afforded due to their large scale.

Going to the cloud has to be for more that just cost savings: It’s for avoiding the investment for infrastructure you don’t want to buy. It’s for getting services you wouldn't otherwise want to manage. And it’s for realizing SLAs, uptime, security, etc. that are typically tough to deliver yourself.

Same Cloud Different Day

A useful story on Cloud storage shows a real customer addressing the trade-offs of cloud computing, in this case around EMC Atmos storage. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston is balancing cost, performance, functionality, reliability and security. Despite some new aspects there's a familiarity to this "cloud" scenario: "It's a new buzzword for an old technology. It's up to you to define what it means to you and what it means to your business," said storage architect Michael Passe. Includes a helpful paragraph with key players by category.

Another article addresses this same balancing act, but along the local/remote dimension.  More from a user perspective, it illustrates that the decision to go to the cloud can be a logical one, based on a method of dividing your data into types, along the lines of access, application, performance and security.  In other words, high performance, high priority, high availability apps and data living in Oracle databases and the SAN should stay there.  And for things like archival file data, or less-business critical apps, you should look to the cloud to realize savings.

Speaking of Security, a new study from MIT and UC-San Diego has supposedly uncovered a new class of vulnerabilities in public compute clouds. This may become a bump-in-the-road for the vCloud and Compute-on-demand market.  Or maybe a basis of differentiation.

The cloud space is shaping up to be very similar to the ASP market a decade ago. Customers demanded that providers address all the tradeoffs and shortcomings that arose.  And vendors became squeezed between the cost of meeting these requirements and the slow payback of monthly usage fees.  As time went on, there were a handful of survivors, those that got exits with large IT players, and many more who faded away.  Keep this in mind as you make your Cloud vendor selections.

Having said all this, the outlook looks good for cloud when carriers like AT&T are seeing 35% growth in their network traffic in the midst of a global downturn.  We're all still doing more online, customers and users are expecting more web-based systems and thus, deploying more of your data, applications and compute into 'the cloud' seems logical and inevitable.

Welcome to Cloud Itch

According to Merriam Webster, an Itch is "to have a restless desire or hankering for something." This blog will share updates and insights on the "Cloud Computing" space, as well as my own restless desire to provide some clarity within a really foggy market... clouded mostly by disparate vendor messaging along with some emerging technologies and standards.

A very widely cited report from Berkeley defines cloud computing as having 3 key elements: the illusion of limitless resources, the elimination of upfront commitment, and the ability to pay-per-use. I'd offer these along with a couple other common criteria that help define what Cloud means: services connected-to over a network connection, typically the Internet, and Immediacy or fast-time to-solution.

For many managed service vendors, cloud computing is a circa 1999 ASP offering with new messaging. But there are many others who are incorporating completely virtualized infrastructures, offering new classes of web-based services and in some way delivering innovation that moves the industry forward. I'll do my best to take a moment now and then and share info on this latter group as I run into them during my work.

I'm eager to start this conversation - let's make this an active and mutually beneficial forum on Cloud Computing. Thanks! Mike Harding