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More enterprises are looking to the cloud compute model — both public and private — to efficiently support myriad applications and data workloads. Platform Computing, a pioneer in high-performance computing (HPC), is now jumping into the fray with a private cloud management platform: Platform ISF.

Platform ISF, which becomes the centerpiece of the company’s cloud computing strategy, creates a shared IT infrastructure from physical and virtual resource pools, to deliver application hosting environments, according to automated workload and resource scheduling policies. The Markham, Ont. company said its new offering will be released in beta this week, with general availability planned for the fall.

An article talking about cloud computing and the enterprise, it will be interesting to see how this moves forward particularly as we look at those multinationals, where we have many shared infrastructure services, each with local infrastructure, local services, standards and ‘ways of doing business’. Could we not move to the present, work on the basis for example, (if we’re an American organization), that America runs the email, runs the Active Directory systems, that we might locally deploy servers in geographical locations, but the remote support, the management is done by one team, one business line, that I might internally pay £5 per month for email and Active Directory and that’s it. If we go on the basis that we have lights out, that we have remote rebuild infrastructure, is there a reason I need 10/20 email server support guys per geographical region? If we worked on this basis would one set of standards not in effect become default, would we not see the change from “Paris don’t work that way”, to more adoption of global standards, global ways of doing things technically, using the same type of server, of storage and network, so when I deploy an application I jsut say 3x DL380’s with 900GB of storage 1GB attached and that’s it, without the debate is it Emulex or QLogic cards you wanted, and on Hitachi, EMC or HP/IBM or Dell storage? When you said DL380, in Paris we buy the AMD ones with one power supply, did you want the Intel ones, that will need sign off or escalation for approval.

Granted within an enterprise there will be those specific business lines with operating requirements, those operational walls that need separate infrastructure, but we can accommodate that within the cloud, you select the email platform, the shared storage platform that you subscribe to for your business, there’s no reason America cannot run a centrallized email system with the UK email on UK storage running on UK servers, but do the power on, the power off stuff, backups and restarts from the US, esclating to UK operations where necessary, meeting our obligations, to do so though might be seen as going against that old viewpoint of London specific, London IT, London Networks, London Windows/Unix and London database, that old challenge of not knowing who my New York counterparts are, never speaking to them or discussing common issues, common strategies and common platform innovation or transformation.

Cloud will be the vehicle to standardize applications, services, but could we not use it as the vehicle to standardize our business, to standardize the way we work with each other, working around global differences, global regional specific requirements? Could we not centralize the top level of the infrastructure and then have it managed remotely for that region? End the duplication of roles, of workload, the people that we no longer need can be re-deployed to meet our existing workload, our existing help desk calls, production issues and requirements.

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