Categorizing Clouds

Peter Laird from Oracle has written a wonderful blog to help navigate through the various concepts in cloud computing. Based on the current market offerings, he defines cloud computing as the "... virtualization of the data center, such that server machines are not thought of individually but as just a commodity in a greater collection of server machines." A visual representation of the different categories is also provided in his blog. Another really interesting talk in this space is from Alexis Richardson of CohesiveFT -- given at the Open Grid Forum in Barcelona (June 2008). Alexis talks about the Elastic Server from CohesiveFT, and provides a reference to John Will's Blog on "IT Management and Cloud" -- where a list of Cloud vendors currently providing commercial offerings can be found. Interesting to see that commercial vendors are starting to become more "Cloud active".