Surgient's CTO talks cloud technology
Dave Malcolm discusses must-have components for a successful private cloud, best practices, and what kind of ROI company's can expect
Follow @infoworldIt's been a busy year for cloud computing and for cloud software provider Surgient, which recently launched a new version of their product.
The company has been creating and hosting cloud technology for more than eight years, and the company's CTO, Dave Malcolm, sat down to talk cloud as we near the end of the "year of the cloud." We hit on topics such as must-have components for a successful private cloud, best practices for deploying cloud technology, what kind of ROI can company's expect from the cloud.
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InfoWorld: You guys have been doing cloud and cloud management for many years now, long before there was even a name for it. How long has it been and how has Surgient defined the cloud?
Dave Malcolm: We got started with our core technology development in 2001 and Surgient was launched as a company in May of 2003. We've been at this longer than any other cloud/virtualization management vendor. As our engineering team tackled the challenges of server virtualization and the abstraction of virtual resources from the physical infrastructure, we naturally referred to the technology as "cloud" even then. The terminology permeated a lot of our internal vernacular, and it's even ingrained in the IP filed with the U.S. Patent Office over the last decade. Cloud has been core to our technology and approach from the very beginning.
At a high level, we describe the cloud much as everyone else: an elastic, pooled infrastructure that is globally accessible via a robust self-service model that enables organizations to "pay per use." Beyond these characteristics, we find there are several more that are critical for a successful cloud. One of the most important is that capacity must be able to be managed dynamically. Our platform is based on this dynamic capacity management model, enabling administrators and users to see exactly what resources are reserved, used, and reclaimed at any one time, now and in the future. This detailed insight into capacity usage is critical in a cloud model with finite resources that are shared among different constituent groups. To make this work in practice, we've found that cloud administrators need a management model and platform that enables them to reduce manual intervention and focus on more strategic activities. This eliminates a great deal of the effort necessary to support the dynamic cloud environment.
