The physical structure of real cloud doesn't have a fixed border and it can easily change. This design characteristic should also be applied to a compute cloud.
If the "Cloud" isn't a fixed location, or shape, how then does it fit in today's overbuilt data centers? The simple answer is, it depends. In many cases the "Fort Knox" or "Maginot line" data center of today doesn't make sense in a cloud enabled world. So what should the strategy be, I suggest that flexible, highly sensored, relatively low cost, but geographically dispersed data centers are where we should all be headed.
Data Centers should be built low cost but very well monitored and measured. Your application availability protection will be designed into the "Cloud" platform. This means you can build two data centers for less than the price of one high availability facility. It also means that with two facilities you can enable geographic diversity to help protect against disasters.
Now for the cool part. I believe our next step in the evolution of the Operating Environment or Cloud platform will be the integration of the "Platform" with the building management systems. The benefits of tying the two things together is that now your Data Center team will have visibility into the entire system and the system can be trained to protect itself. That's right, when the data center facility is failing it can tell the "platform" to move critical applications to a sister facility. This strategy of tying the building and the IT platform together will create a number of opportunities. The opportunities associated with an "Aware" data center are higher application availability, lower staffing requirements, much lower cost of ownership, and a system that can support and protect itself much faster than a person who has to be woken up at home.
I'll be talking more about this "system" approach to a cloud data center in the near future.
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