Welcome to our new corporate blog

I’ve joined Platform at an exciting time—where our 17 year history and experience in HPC is meeting the market demand for a new IT delivery model—cloud computing. Industry announcements and pronouncements about “the cloud” are happening at a breathless pace, technologies are evolving quickly and experimentation is happening daily. The goal of this blog is to help Platform participate more meaningfully in these industry dialogs.

My role is to help engage customers and partners in defining what cloud computing means:. What it means to each individual organization, the technology industry, IT architecture and models, the marketplace, and the bottom-line. With that in mind, I’ll try to articulate a few of Platform’s points-of-view on what’s happening to get the dialog started.

Clusters, grids, clouds, whatever. I’ve been in the industry long-enough to have seen many cycles and the reality that follows them —good and bad. As always, change is sparked by a revolution and becomes mainstream through evolution. Amazon and Google have put a bright light on the deficiencies of current IT models through their so-called “public” cloud computing offerings. Similarly, the emergence of “private clouds” as a term reflects the immaturity of those services. The point is that cloud computing is real, despite its hype, and will borrow heavily from today’s cluster and grid environments. Like all trends and terms, cloud will eventually give way to “whatever” comes next and leave in its wake the fundamental technical and business challenges that remain constant.

Let’s gets beyond the hype. At Platform, our goal is to discuss the “whatever” that is your unique and heterogeneous environment and “whatever” you envision as its future state . Specifically what are the application workload, resource pool and service level management lessons that cloud computing will teach us again?