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Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction 
Volume 2 in the Cloud rEvolution Series
The IT world is becoming more and more abstract, empowering users to think outside the server box. Abstraction is one of the key building blocks of the cloud, according to the latest volume of CSC's Leading Edge Forum Report, "Cloud rEvolution: The Art of Abstraction."
"Abstraction is just a representation of reality, and it is nothing new to IT. In fact, IT itself is an abstraction, because we represent reality in terms of ones and zeroes," says Yale Esrock, co-author of the report with Rick Muñoz and Doug Neal.
Loosening the stack
Long used to mask complexity, abstraction is loosening the traditional IT stack and paving the way for cloud computing. "Abstraction provides the secret sauce that positions hardware and software to be delivered as services from the cloud and, in so doing, completely transforms the digital domain," says Paul Gustafson, director of the Leading Edge Forum.
The report compares today's server to a frozen glass of water, with the hardware (the glass) and operating system (the water) frozen together as one unit. When this frozen stack is loosened, or made liquid, new flexibility arises:
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Related Information LEF Reports examine key technologies, best practices and the work of clients, CSC technologists and alliance partners. Learn more about the LEF. Download Volume 2 (PDF, 7.6MB) or a PDF of this article. Download Volume 1 (PDF, 5.6MB). |
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"If the operating system is virtualized, its bond with the hardware melts. The original block of ice breaks down into multiple ice cubes, each cube a virtual machine running its own operating system, each separate but still within the confines of one glass (physical server). The tight coupling melts. Each ice cube can even be moved to a different glass."
Server virtualization is emerging as the primary tool for supporting the flexible, Green data centers of the future.
"Once you start virtualizing hardware and software, you start to make a transition from physical products that deliver our IT, to a service-oriented representation of those products," says Esrock. "In the cloud, the physical products — servers, storage, networks and applications — have been abstracted into services, which are then delivered to you from a third party over the Internet."
From 'in here' to 'out there'
Virtualization and other forms of abstraction have been shifting enterprise IT from products to services, from "owned and operated here" to "accessed and rented out there" on the network, says the report. In addition to server virtualization, another type of abstraction gaining momentum is desktop virtualization, or desktop as a service. Today, large organizations may have thousands of desktops, which are proving difficult and costly to maintain.
"To keep them running is a nightmare for almost all IT organizations," says Esrock. "But with desktop virtualization, in essence you have one central image in the data center, which gets personalized with user preferences and settings and is served to all the individual desktops. You don't have to maintain thousands of desktops, you only have to maintain the one copy in the data center."
Not only does it help from a management and a cost standpoint, desktop virtualization will also help end users feel more comfortable moving to the cloud.
"There is going to be a psychological connection: Once you get used to the concept that your desktop doesn't have to reside on your own desktop computer — that it's off somewhere in the data center — it might as well be anywhere," he explains. "And so why not have it maintained at a third-party or, in fact, in the cloud?"
The report also explores application virtualization. Most applications today run in specific environments on specific hardware, which limits flexibility and makes software distribution and management difficult. Application virtualization addresses this by abstracting the application from the underlying operating system. The application exists in its own isolated environment and can be run on different types of devices with different operating systems without actually being installed.
"You have true software flexibility: You can run a virtualized application on your desktop. You can run it on your iPhone. You can run on it on many different kinds of devices, each of which has its own operating system," says Esrock.
Software virtualization ultimately opens the door to managing and distributing software from afar — from the cloud.