I read a fascinating article today by Lori MacVittie who blogs over at DevCentral. Lori wrote a phenomenal post on the subject of virtual appliances versus specialized hardware entitled “When Did Specialized Hardware Become a Dirty Word?”
This post has crystallized a lot of my thinking around this topic over the past year or so. I encourage you to read it. What I really like about Lori’s observation is that she recognizes the organizational and cultural barriers that will mean that the adoption of virtual appliances in the infrastructure will likely not yield the expected savings or efficiencies that their proponents claim.
I tell people that the cloud starts at the bottom of the IT stack — on the infrastructure that is the backbone of the cloud. I’m going to explore this concept in my next two posts.
