As reported in Wednesday's postings here, calls to decouple economic growth from issues of energy consumption got good airing at the start of the Data Centers Europe conference this week; but what about the decoupling of data centre design evolution and the risky nebulousness of cloud computing?
Some commentators suspect that the two entities have already become inextricable linked - but are we heading toward a case of tail wagging dog, where cloud diktats lure data centre science off in a wayward 'direction of travel'?
In seeking an answer to that question it is important, some aver, not to over-estimate the nebulous nature of the cloud construct.
Colt's executive vice president of infrastructure services unit Mark Leonard's view is that cloud computing is actually "an IT operating model - it is having an impact on data centre design," he says, although any perceived associations between cloud and consumer confidence should not be over-rated, Leonard adds: with the fundamental abstraction of cloud services from the underlying infrastructure, it is "more likely to weaken any perceived linkage between cloud service and data centre - especially in the consumer context".
It's a fair point: cloud computing in its essentials is not much more than an operating model (not unlike the OSI's multi-coloured Seven Layer Model, say) with a fluffy name that at the same time lends itself too-readily to marketing. There's where the OSI missed a trick - had it've been more marketing savvy, could the 1990s have now been known as the era of 'Rainbow Computing'?

Edited: 16 May 2011 at 06:02 PM by James Hayes