Continued from Part 1 

Governance and Security
With governance going hand in hand with Security, data centers (such as IBM's facilities) still give end users the sense of security that the 'cloud curious' CIO desperately wants.

Visitors to IBM's demo suites display doubts over governance of the cloud, which can only help the data center industry. Easton says the same questions persist: Where is the data held?  Under what controls is access to it maintained? Who does (and should) have access to it and under what circumstances? 

Using a remote data center, by contrast, is no less secure than holding data on-premise. It might even improve data security overall, unless a remote data center is in a country subject to a different legislative framework. Then again, this type of drift is more likely to happen with a cloud. 

As IBM Hursley's historians might testify, Cloud Computing is unlikely, at first, to simplify the ordering and delivery of services for enterprises. 

IBM Tivoli didn't 'cut the complexity' of computer management. It put it onto a larger software framework. In fact it could be argued that it initially made matters more complex, as history tells us that Tivoli took users months of training to master.

Nor will virtualisation simplify the management of x86 servers that are multiplying like Japanese knotweed across the globe or, to use a more apposite simile, like daisy chained PCs, during the IBM inspired personal computer revolution.

That uprising, like cloud computing, threatened to take away centralized control of IT from the data center (or data processing department, as it was known then). 

Mess for less?

Cloud computing could get messy, the only difference being that it will take the shape of software, with a tangle of hardware being replaced by a sprawl of virtual machines.

Not that virtualisation is all bad. Perhaps the biggest effect of the cloud on the data center will see its physical elements being managed with the same fluency and automation as the virtual machines.

At IBM's innovation centre the physical layer of a data center- the cooling systems, the heating, lighting and power units ÔÇô can now be integrated with virtual management systems.

 

This means processes can be automated by software. When a cooling fan fails, all the data and software on the server that could subsequently overheat could be moved elsewhere to another server in the centre. 

So choice remains and the type of cloud a user chooses to deploy will dictate whether the data center is dumped or not. For some the change might be that in  effect, the data center could be managed like a private cloud. But its still very much a physical entity. Not death of the data center exactly,  but a different kind of reality.