Cloud: Evolutionary or Revolutionary ?

For many the cloud has been a marketing term with no real products and just a lot of vaporware. But the cloud is finally becoming real and cloud discussions are becoming more mature. On the Gartner hype cycle the cloud is beginning to emerge from the `peak of inflated expectations` and heading to the `trough of disillusionment`  (find more information at: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gartner_hype_cycle_2010_cloud_computing_at_the_pea.php ). With this maturity have come some real questions, Is the cloud an evolutionary or revolutionary step? Does the cloud mean 'net new' or is it just another step in the evolution of the data center?

Tell us more about your journey to the cloud, share with us how you are implementing your cloud, are you taking evolutionary or revolutionary steps to the...

For some organizations, the idea of virtualizing their mission critical applications is perceived to be more riskier and its advantages are not yet compelling to make the switch.  In fact, according to Symantec's latest Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey, 40% of CEOs and 42% of CFOs are reluctant to make the leap to virtualization.  Some of the cited reservations are around downtime and the lack of visibility into virtualized environments.  However, IT users can get around these challenges by making sure that they deploy virtualization tools that are suited for their particular needs. A foolproof virtualization plan can deliver cost savings, efficiency, increased productivity, high availability, disaster recovery, etc.  Recently, Dan Lamorena, Product Marketing Director within Symantec's Storage and Availability Management Group authored an article in the Virtualization...

Most experts agree that moving to the cloud provides organizations with cost savings, flexibility and other efficiencies.  At the same time, CEOs and CFOs are showing concerns with moving business-critical applications to the cloud fearing complications including reliability, security, availability and performance.  Symantec recently commissioned  a survey to examine how organizations plan to use virtualization and private and hybrid clouds in their computing environments amid these conflicting views. The 2011 Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud survey is based on more than 3,700 respondents from 35 countries worldwide.

Our intentions were to observe how organizations plan to use or are already using virtualization and cloud. The survey looked at several aspects including server, client and storage virtualization, storage-as-a-service, and hybrid/private cloud technologies. We also aimed to uncover disparities between expectations and reality of the...

Data centers the world over are struggling to address many challenges today. These challenges center on keeping costs down, reduced resources whether it be capital or people resources, increasing storage costs and demanding SLAs. For many data centers the answer is to move to a private cloud or a private cloud like model.

We at Symantec have been talking to you, our customers and have been trying to understand and address some of the challenges in implementing a private cloud. These challenges can be broadly categorized into servers, storage and cloud management. On the server side availability for business services in a heterogeneous environment is an issue, one that could potentially be very expensive. On the storage side there is a need for a 'Storage as a Service' model that works across heterogeneous storage. Finally, we need a way to tie it all together and manage it such that you have visibility in a single pane.

In this white paper, Symantec, Storage...