As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Bank of America is ramping up its push to leverage cloud-based infrastructures by aiming to transition 80% of its workloads to software defined data centers by 2018. To help facilitate the transition to software-defined datacenters, Bank of America is engaged in conversations with vendors building hardware according to specifications from the OpenCompute Project, an open source hardware movement started by Facebook that seeks to reduce the cost of hardware by revealing Facebook’s hardware specifications to the industry at large. The Open Compute-compatible data center leverages commodity hardware that conforms to the hardware specifications used by Facebook to build its giant infrastructure. Bank of America’s reported interest in using OpenCompute-compatible hardware and transitioning to software-defined datacenters illustrates the depth of the transformation of enterprise IT toward computing resources with enhanced operational agility, the ability to elastically scale and ingest and run analytics on massive volumes of transactional data. Although Bank of America’s exploration of private cloud development and commodity hardware has been underway for well over a year, its recently reported target of transferring 80% of its workloads to software defined data centers wherein applications provision and manage computing resources underscores how cloud computing and the transformation of the contemporary datacenter extends well beyond the purview of internet and technology startups to highly regulated industries such as financial services as well. The other obvious implication of the increasing use of commodity hardware is the concomitant pressure on players such as HP, Dell and Lenovo to transform their product lines and business model in tandem with the industry-wide migration toward commodity hardware and the transformation of the contemporary datacenter as evinced by technology from vendors such as Vapor IO and Mesosphere.
Cloud Computing Today 