Dave Vellante and John Furrier in theCUBE at EMCVSPEX in San Francisco, CA brought in Jim Blakley, Director of Intel Architecture Systems Integration Division, to speak about the trends in IT towards cloud and big data. They asked questions relating to how the IT industry may approach the costs of going into the cloud, how that’s affecting data centers, and how the convergence and disruption to traditional infrastructure will drive future trends.

According to Blakley the datacenter is now the system, “and we’re seeing that happening a lot more lately with cloud computing and cloud storage,” the second part is in distributed clients and virtualization, as more industries take advantage of lower price points for edge computing and innovating around letting devices open windows into the datacenter, or in this case the cloud. It used to be about making devices more powerful, but now it’s about making them better connected.

The important thing that Blakley believes is that the cost of computing is dropping and the next horizon involved in cloud and big data all surrounds the hardware and implementation continuing to become easier and cheaper. What triggered the trend for cloud is the cost reduction on core infrastructure such as central computing, external and networked storage—then there’s also broadband infrastructure “has opened up the opportunity to do things in a way that we haven’t done it before.”

On the subject of current cloud-based providers versus traditional IT, Blakey believes that there’s still a lot to learn from the cloud trend, even if it differs.

Today most of the cloud service providers have the luxury of being single application servers, but this means that they have a less complex application set to follow. However, this doesn’t mean that the lessons that they’ve learned aren’t applicable to the rest of the IT industry, which sees a lot more complex issues. He uses the example of security, where having holistic control on a datacenter (or a cloud) will always be the ideal case; but most IT departments have to worry about their own users who are behind the DMZ and inside the secure areas.

Blakley sees a trend towards automation because the new horizon will be more about virtual machines than server hardware. It’s no longer an issue so much of how many servers you have, but now more about how many virtual machines you have. Each VM represents a different instance and its own creature that requires its own support, infrastructure, and specialized technician and this means there’s a scalability problem oncoming for the virtualization industry. As a result, we’ll probably see a boom in data visualization and the ability to allow one person to maintain and control a bank of VMs rather than requiring each one their own specialized worker.

EMC and the Private Cloud Blazing a Trail for the IT Industry

EMC has been long on pressing their way into the private cloud, so the discussion with Intel’s Blakely in theCUBE provides some powerful insights into why they’re going where the industry needs to go. As we saw from EMC Word 2011, their journey into the private cloud in 2010 is beginning to draw the strings of the industry into looking at the cloud as a manageable and efficient datacenter approach.

Cloud-computing, -streaming, and -storage has come along by leaps and bounds even as EMC marches into 2012 with VSPEX and earlier in February with the release of virtualization and software-as-a-service paradigms such as Atos. Between these ventures, virtualization, and further reduction in costs for storage itself, higher bandwidth, and the introduction of VMware generating the capability to make virtual machines almost anywhere more IT departments will be looking into the cost effectiveness of virtualizing their datacenters.

Intel has been pushing for research into cloud computing with a $30M plan and we expect them to be there alongside EMC, VMware, and every other cloud-based computing and storage firm as the future begins to resolve.