Where the cloud meets the ground

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: for more servers.

So IDC thinks that many data centres will be consolidated and given a big makeover. The industry itself is taking the lead. For example, Hewlett-Packard (HP) used to have 85 data centres with 19,000 IT workers worldwide, but expects to cut this down to six facilities in America with just 8,000 employees by the end of this year.

Other large organisations are following suit. Using VMware’s software, BT, a telecoms firm, has cut the number of servers in its 57 data centres across the world from 16,000 to 10,000 yet increased their workload. The US Marine Corps is reducing the number of its IT sites from 175 to about 100. Both organisations are also starting to build internal clouds so they can move applications around. Ever more firms are expected to start building similar in-house, or ‘private’, clouds.

But to what extent will companies outsource their computing to ‘public’ clouds, such as Amazon’s? James Staten of Forrester Research, a market-research firm, says the economics are compelling, particularly for smaller firms. Cloud providers, he says, have more expertise in running data centres and benefit from a larger infrastructure.

As a result, says Staten, cloud computing has not yet moved much beyond the early-adopter phase. Stefan van Overtveldt, the man in charge of transforming BT’s IT infrastructure, thinks that to attract more customers, service providers will have to offer ‘virtual private clouds’, fenced off within a public cloud. BT plans to offer these as a service for firms that quickly need extra capacity. So there will be not just one cloud but a number of different sorts: private ones and public ones, which themselves will divide into general-purpose and specialised ones. Cisco, a leading maker of networking gear, is already talking of an ‘intercloud’, a federation of all kinds of clouds, in the same way that the internet is a network of networks. And all of those clouds will be full of applications and services.