CIO Magazine: Cloud, Virtualization - Wasting IT Resources

26 February, 2010

Cloud-computing providers like Amazon, for example, provide a lot of power and flexibility on demand, but it takes too much time for a resource-constrained IT shop to set up or modify, according to Steven Peltzman, CIO of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Peltzman is plotting a long-term virtualization/cloud-computing plan for MoMA, which currently has more than 100 servers, most at less than 50 percent utilization, to support a heavily digitized makeover of the museum and its offerings.

Along with mainstream SaaS, cloud and virtualization providers, Peltzman is is testing Cloudshare Pro, a free service that creates a generic-computing environment IT managers can hand over to business partners, or build to give internal users additional capacity.

Unlike Google's Gmail — which Peltzman likes as a low-cost, highly efficient way to outsource e-mail, Cloudshare isn't limited to a single function. Once created, it provides a portal through which specific users get access to up to six Linux or Windows virtual machines, 10 user accounts and free access to Microsoft Office 2010 or 2007, SQL Server, Oracle and other applications.

"If you're a really good sysadmin with experience setting up huge environments, you can crank those out on Amazon or another cloud to get what you need," Peltzman says. "That still takes time and expertise. With this [Cloudshare] you call up the interface, yank down a menu to load Windows 2000 or XP, yank down this app, that app, and sign up your user. It makes the process less cumbersome."

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