Cloud starts within a datacenter

Nowadays we cannot live without the user friendly apps on our smart phones. Within a couple of days the Appstore will contain 500.000 apps, used by millions of people everyday. To bring all these beautiful services at your fingertips an overwhelming amount of data has to be crunched and transported towards your mobile devices.

Consumers count on continuous 24/7 cloud services and expect comfortable high security levels. They don't like disasters like the recent hacking of Sony's Playstation customer database. We demand high qualitative services against competitive prices. Most of us don't realize that you need a highly specialized supply chain that starts with 'cloud ready' Data Centers.

The new 1 billion Apple Data Center in Maiden, North Carolina will open its doors one of these days. 50.000 square feet contains the newest technology in order to improve the Apple quality of cloud services. Besides data processing technology, Apple is focussing on improving the energy efficiency and cooling technology. Besides the big players like Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, HP and Microsoft there are a lot of initiatives to build big computer factory's.

Cloud Supply Chain
We expect 24/7 availability, but as a consumer we experience most cloud services as a black box. The supply chain consists of a big number of specialized services. We don't know who is responsible for what. When there are problems, we even don't know who will solve the problems and within what time. With other words we don't know the content of the SLA's.

If we only use our apps for pleasure, there is not a big problem when the services are not available for sometime. If this happen to often, we will turn to another provider to satisfy our needs. But in the case of Sony, we as consumers, do have a nice problem when our personal data are stolen. In business and personal life the use of cloud services become vital for our society. Therefore transparency in the supply chain is needed. A good example of this is given by Salesforce.com. Salesforce publish the status of each component real time on the public website trust.salesforce.com. A beautiful example for many providers to follow. The weakest link determines the strength of a supply chain. So it is important to know all the different steps, to know who is responsible for what, who will solve which problems and what kind of guarantees are given by which provider. There is a lot of work to be done to make the SLA data available to the users.

High quality Data Centers
Back to the basis of Cloud Computing. As we stated before a Cloud starts in a high quality Data Center. Are your Data Centers ready for Cloud Computing or are you still in the virtualization phase?

Read the full blog on the blog Drive the cloud.