I sometimes split my longer articles so that they don’t take up the complete page.

Great comment…

Unfortunately “cloud computing” is the best we got for describing this. Kind of like Web 2.0 it becomes a language term that we can all sort-of agree upon to have the discussion.

IMO, A the holy grail cloud has only two primary characteristics and five secondary add-ons.

Primary

1) It uses comodity based hardware as it’s base. Hardware can be replaced at anytime and have no effect on the cloud.
2) It uses commodity based software containers. For example an image should be able to be pulled from one cloud provider to any other cloud provider.

Some secondary characteristics are:

1) Virtualization
2) Abstraction layer for the hardware, software, and configuration of systems.
3) Pay as you go with no lock-in
4) Dynamic horizontal and vertical scaling
5) Flexible migration and restart capabilities

Under the primary characteristics in my definition then yes an in-house 3Tera implementaion would be, IMO, a cloud. By definition you could take the 3Tera image and move it to any other commodity hardware infrastructure and it will start right up.

Thanks
John

John, “cloud computing” like many other terms in IT is getting polluted rapidly. I already am not sure what it means anymore.

For example, is it “cloud computing” if corporate IT sets up virtual environment inhouse, say using technologies like 3Tera? or does it have to be somewhere out on the web? I think this is a distinction worth analyzing.

I see much more possibility for penetration inside corporate walls than outside. Most of the customers I work with are going the opposite direction of using anything in the cloud. Security is the dominant force (admittedly customers I work with are financial institutions and service providers), much more powerful than any cost cutting initiative. We are asked to isolate the systems/applications even from the internal users, etc.

Are the clouds white or gray