Welcome to the Cloud Computing Cool Solutions Community

In a recent survey of more than 200 IT professionals at large enterprises, 89 percent of respondents see private clouds as the next logical stop for organizations already using virtualization and 93 percent feel private cloud platforms should offer a management framework that can span a heterogeneous infrastructure. If you're like those guys, you need to check out Novell Cloud Manager.

VMware held their annual VMWorld conference this week in San Francisco where it tried to define its vision of the future of the Cloud.

Congratulations to Robert Schneider, whose entry was selected as the Grand Prize winner in our contest.

There's apparently an ongoing debate on public versus private cloud computing, and which one’s better. This argument is ultimately a non-starter, however, because both can easily co-exist (or not) depending on your company's needs.

The fashion industry has a great concept where trends are always repeated. They call this the fashion cycle. Every morning on my commute in to work I observe this in person. Apparently 80’s fashions are back in style now, albeit streamlined a bit from their original incarnations. I see endless streams of women wearing off the shoulder blouses that could have come from a Cyndi Lauper’s closet and an army of men trying to be Gordon Gecko. Thank goodness I don’t wear a suit to work!

Why is Intelligent Workload Management important to IaaS providers? IaaS providers should pay attention to what's happening in the IWM market.

Will history repeat itself with a "busting" explosion of rolling thunder from dotcom days?

CIO Magazine reports from a recent Economic Impact Study (April 2010) that 39% of the 410 respondents say that the economic recession has accelerated their organization's use of alternative IT models (e.g., cloud, on-demand services, SaaS). As an ex-analyst from the sourcing era of ASP's, ISP's, MSP's, etc. in the dotcom rush to get to the web via hosting providers, this is a reminiscent trend and one that repeats with each new technology trrend.

Users find the public cloud convenient, while IT finds it frightening. Do they both have a point?

I was inspired to write this post by two things:

1. A user on the Novell Cool Solutions forums named FlyingGuy, who has made his dislike of cloud computing very clear in his comments to two of my other posts.
2. I found some really cool infographics that I wanted to share.