In a discussion about the challenges of the enterprise cloud Pete Malcolm, Abiquo, CEO, Val Bercovici, NetApp, Cloud Czar, and Chris Weitz, Deloitte, Director of Tech Strategy & Architecture attack the issues.  Here are the live blogging notes from Gigaom Structure 2011.

This was most interesting panel of event so far.  It was put together by Wendy Perilli from Abiquo, she is a SiliconANGLE.tv alum.  Here is my conversation with Wendy at Citrix Synergy.

Notes

• Hybrid is trendiest buzzword for 2011
• Enterprise need an infrastructure where they an move existing apps into private cloud w/o reconfiguration

o    Public cloud issue is you are always constrained with how cloud operates, with AWS you have to write to how their cloud operations (e.g. storage)

• Serving complex, large, enterprise are never as easy as people think

o    One thing to do Farmville and movies but whole other issue when trains/planes need to run on time

• Enterprises are not games, they are moving money, weapons, public safety

o    Cloud computing has a much higher bar to jump over before it is ready

o    What is your mission? Is it angry birds or firing drones?

• It is about the specificity of the applications, the complexity or lack thereof

o    The category matters, but more important is the complexity behind the application or mission

• What is enterprise computing?

o    Whole new option set today

o    What fits, it is a fit for function, now just more options on the table

• Can application be broken up so components run in cloud and sensitive components maintained in house
• Abiquo = mgmt layer that sits above all this noise
• Challenges of cloud are very real and large and aren’t going away soon

o    Just b/c you can do something, doesn’t mean you should

o    A lot of these things have nothing to do with technology, things like taxes and audits

o    Reason why AWS employees can’t step into Illinois

§   Once they step into state entire Amazon.com subject to state of Illinois taxes

• You need HA no matter what, cloud does not change this
• Need to audit apps, workloads and systems and determine what belongs where

o    3 buckets…private, hybrid and public…question is how big each of these buckets should be

o    Cloud is just a technique

o    “if you think this problem is going to be solved any time soon you are just wrong”

• IT teams on reacting to cloud “pushed out of a plane and installing parachute on the way down”
• Private clouds

o    What you need

§   Key is 3 parts 1) mgmt of physical infrastructure 2) self service or the virtual enterprise 3) network provisioning

§   Storage can’t be just a commodity, users have to be able to provision across storage media

§   Have to also be able to provision networking

• Can’t g o to IT guys or you break the self service model
• Enterprise provide cloud = virtual machines at scale, pricing unit is the marginal cost of VMs at scale
• Very hard to understand what is for sale b/c no one will tell you what is for sale

o    McDonalds analogy = burger at mcdonalds versus cost of burger at home

• Toughest thing about enabling cloud for vendors is sales comp, need to incent them equally and pay them up front (tough to do as paid over time)
• CIO/CEO…they don’t care as much, it all looks like opex to them, capex is depreciated and look s like opex
• Biggest question right now

o    What is marginal cost of VM at scale from top 10 private cloud guys vs Amazon?

o    This is the real issue…but I am not sure there is a good answer right now

o    About quantifying cost of complete thing or historical evidence around what the price achieved is

• Mac App Store = what an enterprise cloud or self service portal should look like
• Self service portal = customers of portal are the guys that run the apps, they are the ones that need self service to avoid them going to amazon