Leaving aside the giggles over nomenclature, I had quite a nice talk with Dr. Rich Wolski, the lead scientist on the original open source project (also with CEO Woody Rollins and the VP of marketing).

Anyway, Wolski had an interesting and quite succinct definition of the differences between a data center employing virtualization in its currently accepted form and a cloud infrastructure, because, on paper, the two share enough common elements that lots of people (and marketers) are happy to fuzz the two together.

I didn’t think that was quite right, and neither does the Good Doctor, (ha! like I’m the expert over here). Otherwise, why get excited over cloud? If that were true, then it’s just re-packaged old news, and nobody needs to do anything but change the badges and maybe dice up the trim package, if I may borrow from the big book of automobile industry metaphors. But cloud is fundamentally something different, and new, and it’s worth knowing why.

He says it’s down to access and the control structure. The major difference between a data center and a cloud is access- a cloud is set up so anyone can drop a penny in the slot and start up a server or six- in a data center, you ask, and someone does it for you, then hands over the steering wheel.

He said something like, pardon the paraphrasing, “in a data center, virtualization is the grease that lubricates resource management” for the admins; it allows the guy in charge to move his resources around- “it’s a reconfiguration mechanism,” but “in a cloud, [virtualization] is a fence.” it separates and protects resources and lets everyone have their own private playground without knocking over the other kids’ toys.

A subtle difference? Wolski says it’s down to a bedrock set of premises and assumptions that drove the development of the cloud model.

“We tried to look at the cloud paradigm from an analytical perspective,” he explains, and “cloud is an ecommerce model-it’s a transactional model [in a] distributed system”.

Did that sink in? At its most basic, cloud is not about computers. It’s about sales. Start with the premise that you have a product (server instances/CPU time/bit buckets), you want to sell them to any and all comers over the internet (ecommerce) and you want to do a lot of it. What you get is “cloud computing”, and logically, it’s no surprise that Amazon pioneered it commercially. They didn’t assume they needed a resource farm and a way to sell access to it- they assumed they had servers and needed to sell those instead.

So that’s interesting to me. Cloud is not a utopian access opium dream- it’s a logical outgrowth of commodity commerce.

UPDATE:Story’s done, look for it soon. One more little nugget from Wolski on defining cloud computing: When he and his crew started thinking about the project in 2007, they found it was “utterly impossible to get a consensus” on what cloud was, so they “decided to sidestep the debate by picking the thing that was demonstrably was a cloud — the one thing no one could say was NOT a cloud.” Their answer? Amazon Web Services.

So there you have it – not sure what an elephant is? Look around; you can’t miss one if it’s in the room with you.

The yet to be released VDC-OS represents the evolution of the VMware Infrastructure; the platform, which is due for release sometime this year,  will transform traditional data centers into internal cloud environments. The business case for creating an private cloud is less complexity in the data center; software like VDC-OS will virtualize and automate systems to the point that there is less ‘knob turning’ and more time spent on tasks that improve business, said VMware Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Bogomil Balkansky.

“Too much of IT budgets are spent on management tasks and keeping the lights on, instead of on tasks that actually improve business,” Balkansky said. “Infrastructure complexities should not get in the way of this, but they do.”

While external clouds like Amazon EC2 offer the same benefits of internal clouds, VMware is betting that large enterprises won’t send their mission critical applications outside the four walls of their data centers to these providers. Instead, they will want to create private cloud compute infrastructures using software like VDC-OS.

“There are security challenges with public clouds; enterprises don’t trust [outsiders] with their customer and financial data,” Balkansky said.  “We want to transfer the notion of cloud computing to internal data center operations.”

VMware is also hosting a webinar on January 29 about Internal Cloud Computing, if you want to hear more on this.

Balkansky said private cloud computing environments will gain traction in large data centers, but that could just be a self-serving prophecy. After all, most public cloud providers won’t pay for VMware software and use free and open source Xen instead; hence, VMware has no place to go but within the enterprises that already know and love VMware.

While VMware is on an private cloud advocacy mission, as the largest virtualization provider on the planet, it can’t ignore the need to play well with public clouds. That’s where VMware’s vCloud initiative comes into play; it will eventually allow VMware users to move their virtual machines on demand between their datacenters and cloud service providers, and over 200 partners have signed up to support vCloud so far, Balkansky said.