Amazon, Elastra and the New Enterprise Data Center

Last week Amazon made an investment into Elastra. Some see this as Amazon's enterprise play. Others see it as move towards the viability of private clouds. I see it as a natural step towards cloud computing as a mainstream datacenter option.

In a whitepaper titled "From Cloud Computing to the New Enterprise Data Center" IBM has positioned cloud computing as precursor to the new enterprise datacenter model.

"The new enterprise data center will be a virtualized, efficiently-managed center, which will
employ some of the tools and techniques adopted by Web-centric clouds, generalized for
adoption by a broader range of customers, and enhanced to support secure transactional
workloads. With this highly efficient and shared infrastructure, the ability for companies to
respond instantaneously to new business needs, to interpret large amounts of information in real
time, and to make sound business decisions based on moment-in-time data becomes possible.
The new enterprise data center is an evolutionary new model to provide a new scale of efficient
and dynamic approach in helping to align IT with business goals."

From another point of view, Gartner analyst Lydia Leong while commentting on Rackspace's recent IPO said that "we expect to see the majority of [corporate] IT infrastructure move into the cloud" over the next two decades.

If all this is true, cloud computing is how enterprises will managed their IT infrastructures. No wonder then that Amazon has made this early bet.

If you're interested in learning more about Amazon's plans, join us at the cloud computing education event on September 11th when Amazon is currently scheduled to present.