Enterprise Computing In The CloudEnterprise Computing In The Cloud

The past few days have brought new evidence that cloud computing can be used for more than lightweight and newly built Web applications. IBM, SAP, and Microsoft have just revealed efforts to use the cloud to move and manage the kinds of big workloads that are common in corporate data centers.At the Cebit trade show in Hannover, Germany, IBM and SAP demonstrated the migration of SAP workloads across a cloud of IBM servers. Using technology developed by IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, and under the auspices of the European Union-funded "Reservoir" project (short for resources and services virtualization without barriers), the demo involved moving live SAP workloads from one IBM Power6 server (or cloud) to another using virtualized logical partitions.

IBM says the tech preview shows how companies might use cloud computing for load balancing and lowering data center energy consumption. IBM emphasized that its approach works with "any type of underlying networking" technology, a reference to the need for cloud-to-cloud interoperability.

Separately, Microsoft says that one of the early adopters of its Azure Services Platform is using the Azure service bus to move data between an AS/400 computer and a mainframe. Microsoft hasn't publicly announced that customer case study -- it came up in my conversation with Steven Martin, Microsoft's senior director of developer platform product management -- but it's another example of how the cloud can be used for the types of data workloads that IT departments have been managing internally for years.

That example involves a company in the oil and gas industry. Martin says he's also been talking to insurance companies about using Azure cloud services for on-demand computing capacity for temporary, seasonal data processing.

Large companies are in the early stages of cloud computing, and IT pros are still evaluating the security, governance, and data-availability implications of the cloud model. Yet, as the examples are beginning to show, cloud computing holds promise for more than startups, SMBs, and Web 2.0 companies.