Page 39 - GCN, May 2017

TOMORROW’S DATA CENTER
+
+Not everything is
moving to the cloud.
He+re’s how on-premises options are evolving.
BY MATT LEONARD
Ever since cloud computing be- came a realistic option for large operations, it has dominated the data center conversation. Efforts to consolidate centers and cut the related operations and maintenance costs have often pointed to cloud as a potential solution. There are, however, instances when on-premises comput- ing can be beneficial and necessary.
The terminology has so much over- lap that agencies refer to some on- premises sites as clouds. So what ex- actly is a data center?
Dell Federal CTO Cameron Chehreh said the federal government will often call a couple of servers in a closet a data center, but the commercial defi- nition is a centralized location that houses an organization’s computing resources, storage and applications.
David McClure, chief strategist at Coalfire Federal, said a simple defini- tion is a big building full of servers.
A cloud, meanwhile, might be de- scribed as someone else’s servers. There’s more to it than that, of course, but it is a remote data center that is usually managed by someone other than the company or agency storing its data there. That is the space filled by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and many others.
“I think of cloud as locationless computing,” McClure said. It is on de- mand, as needed and priced according to use.
Blurring the lines further are private clouds, which can mean a few differ- ent things. “If you put three cloud spe- cialists in the room, you may get 12 separate answers” to the question of
what a private cloud is, Chehreh said. Christian Heiter, CTO of engineer- ing at Hitachi Data Systems Federal, agreed that there is a lack of agree- mentonwhataprivatecloudis.“This is where the definition gets a little
fuzzier — it’s a term of art,” he said. The glib definition is that a pri- vate cloud is just a data center with a fancy name. McClure, however, said that isn’t necessarily accurate. For an on-premises data center to truly be a private cloud, it must use modern technologies such as virtualization and scalability, he said. A private cloud could also be a remote data center
with a single tenant.
The Army, for example, has begun
working with IBM to build a consoli- dated private cloud solution at Red- stone Arsenal near Huntsville, Ala. IBM will create and manage an on- premises facility devoted to the Army’s needs. The first phase of the project seeks to put 38 applications into the cloud and meet the Defense Informa- tion Systems Agency’s Impact Level 5 — the highest security level for unclas- sified data.
A GOVERNMENT WITHOUT DATA CENTERS?
McClure was working in the federal governmentduringtheObamaadmin- istration when the push to cloud be- gan. Federal officials, including then- U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, recognized the opportunity to lower operations and maintenance costs by consolidating on-premises data centers and moving some operations to the cloud.
A decade later, “we’re still in the
GCN MAY 2017 • GCN.COM 35