Public cloud, meet private cloud

Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at Savvis Inc. a cloud infrastructure provider in St. Louis, admits that the industry has a ways to go before IT users with private clouds in their data centers can manage the seamless swapping of resource allocation with subscription services out on the public Internet. But he argues his company has taken the first small steps toward bridging the systems management gap between public and private clouds.

Today Savvis announced Savvis Compute Cloud  with the intent to give IT more direct control over resources located in any of Savvis's 29 data centers. For example, instead of calling a Savvis technician to provision a new virtual machine, a process that can take from hours to days, through the SavvisStation Portal, an authorized IT user can make changes directly. This new capability applies for both dedicated servers an enterprise has subscribed to as well as slices on multi-tenant servers.

Doerr contends the new feature is a precursor to even more sophisticated management of applications across public and private clouds. He says that soon businesses that have intermittent spikes in demand or short-term resource requirements will get even more granular control over cloud-based assets both within their own as well as Savvis's data centers.

However, he acknowledges that pesky interoperability issues remain to be ironed out between virtualized environments. Savvis's support for VMware will make it the only virtual-machine technology friendly for both public and private clouds at his company.

But he's an optimist and believes interoperability barriers will be overcome. In time, Doerr says, "there will only be islands of incompatibility in oceans of interoperability."