Clouds clear up at C-Change

PANJIM (GOA), INDIA: A polemic discussion on 'Cloud Computing: Boastful or Impactful' analyzed many facets and inhibitions of clouds at C-Change here today.

The idea was to sift out the hype from real value and the moderator started by breaking the discussion in three parts accordingly – clouds, rains and drops. He gave the analogy that rains can be heavy or artificial like the current buzz around clouds while drops also help to decide the real place they fall on and benefit.

Panelists had CIOs like SS Sharma from J K Tyres, Ajay Srivastava from Spice Group, Chandan Sinha from GHCL Ltd as well as Sandeep Gildiyal from Wipro Infotech and Venkatesh Krishnan from Sun Microsystems. They shared, debated and opined on issues like control, application amenability, possibility of mission-critical applications getting on clouds, etc. The issue of mission-critical applications and readiness for clouds came under distinct spotlight.

Moderator of the panel, Atul Kumar from Ispat Industries, concluded: "There can't be fire without a spark. Everything starts with a hype. There are enough control mechanisms. Readiness for tier 1 to 2 has started emerging while mission-critical applications are still under cloud. There are a few success stories too. Yes, CIOs have to move with a little caution and have to take in only as much they can digest."

The discussion was followed by a session on 'Recovery to Fighting Fit' by Manoj Chugh, president, EMC, India & SAARC who talked about new engines of trends in storage and around clouds and issues surrounding it.

“Move information within your infrastructure and sweat your assets” is what Chugh advised as he brought attention to tiering of storage.

He then suggested, "Don't forget data de-duplication, storage, re-look at memory compute, information infrastructure getting radically changed, back-up, network infrastructure and look at management frameworks very very carefully. Think about automation of moving of applications from one tier to another which works by just looking at the nature of applications and results in better input-output throughputs, power savings and better utilization."

Later, talking on 'Innovation: Desktop to Data center' Venkatesh Krishnan, director - Banking, Insurance and Financial Services, Sun Microsystems India, said, "Business faces challenges today with energy costs and operations cost going up. Servers and storage are heating up your data center and it's a critical part of your IT Budget."

He illustrated some latest innovations at Sun like Chip Multithreaded architecture, server-on-chip concept, SPARC innovations, role of Moore's Law in the processor industry etc.