Resource allocation, load balancing and economies of scale are all well and good, but can management technology keep up with the cloud?

It seems like every time there is another new paradigm shift in the data center, all eyes turn toward new capabilities, new efficiencies and all the cost savings that come along.

Rarely do we hear questions from the front office like "How are we going to manage this thing?"

So it is with the cloud. But don't worry. Even if many of you are still getting your heads around managing data across both physical and virtual layers, the cloud is only one more layer on top of that. Except that it now reaches outside the data center. And there aren't really any compatibility standards just yet. And besides, no one has really figured out what the cloud is anyway.

Nevertheless, it's full steam ahead for most of you. Upwards of 70 percent of enterprises out there are saying they plan to deploy some form of cloud capability in the coming year.

The good news, of course, is that because the cloud relies so heavily on virtualization, the management technologies that are already in place for virtual infrastructure can go a long way toward keeping things under control in the cloud.

"Virtualization provides the underpinning for the idea of cloud computing," said Jake Sorofman, vice president of marketing at application virtualization specialist rPath. "Cloud computing is the convergence of a few trends: virtualization, SaaS, utility and grid computing. Ultimately, as these all mature and come together, the cloud becomes an interconnected web of data centers where you can actually start shifting application workloads across clouds. When you start to compare the cost, service and performance advantages of moving workloads, it really starts to look like electricity."

So far, so good. The challenge, however, is making sure data, applications, services and everything else needed for a smooth-running operation are mapped across the physical layer, the virtual layer and any combination of public, private or hybrid clouds -- all in a dynamic, real-time fashion so as not to add latency to business operations.

To that end, a new breed of management developers is coming out with some rather innovative approaches that bypass the usual strictures on cross-layer data manipulation. One of them is FastScale, which is basing its approach on "logical servers" that can be used to house a complete software stack anywhere the operator chooses to locate it.

"One of the key actions defined in the logical server is the option to 'blueprint,'" says Jerry McLeod, FastScale's vice president of marketing and business development. "When a logical server has been designed with blueprinting, the software automatically analyzes the complete software stack and includes in the build only the required components. So the resulting build is very lightweight."

McLeod said the software build is not completed until a target destination has been identified. The target could be a physical or virtual server, an AMI for Amazon or a virtual machine within a virtual infrastructure. The chief advantage of the logical server approach is that it gives you the ability to build the tools you want and then decide later where you want to deploy them, eliminating the need to shift multiple application stacks between the various environments.

One of the chief misnomers about the cloud is that it provides advanced data center technology without a lot of infrastructure. While that is true up to a point, the fact is that shifting large amounts of data across the cloud requires bandwidth, and that does require infrastructure.

Most experts will tell you that a 10 GbE architecture is the minimum for both virtualization and the cloud, with many large organizations already setting their sights on 20 Gbps InfiniBand or higher.

There are those, however, who say they can keep the advanced networking requirements to a minimum. CTERA, for one, says it can provide an appliance-based solution that is robust enough to at least get storage services up and running for the less well-heeled.

CTERA founder and CEO Liran Eshel says the company's CloudPlug is simpler to deploy and manage because it offers as close to a plug-and-play environment as possible.

"What we are trying to do is solve the problems of cloud storage, namely, that it is too slow to access and too difficult to understand," he says. "This should allow normal customers to tap into the economies of scale that cloud storage provides while enjoying the same simplicity and speed of traditional local network storage. We believe that with these problems solved we can turn cloud storage from hype into a practical reality."

This focus on simplicity is catching on among many of the smaller players. They look at the immensely complex platforms like VMware's vSphere and Microsoft Azure and see environments that can be tamed not with more complex management tools, just a better way to deliver those tools across multiple layers.

"The automation stack should be broad and deep, not complex," says Mark Fletcher, chief marketing officer at French data management firm ORSYP. "In fact, complex systems need simplification. Virtualization causes a scaling issue -- nothing more. You have a cost optimization policy that pushes virtualization as a solution, and you have to manage that environment. This improves Time to Market for new services but potentially impacts Time to Delivery of daily operations like SLA, as you are servicing more environment instances with the same physical resources."

John Newsom, Quest Software's VP/GM of application management, echoed that notion, adding that management improvements on the architecture level will still be in order.

"Fundamentally, it's a similar approach because you are still answering the same questions: Is SLA being violated? Are end users impacted? How many? For how long? What is the root cause of the issue? Who on the team needs to fix it?," he says. "(But) since end users, transactions and services are inherently crossing the boundaries of technologies and IT teams, the siloed nature of tooling and monitoring must end. Teams need a management system that is based on a model of the service and its transactions, not of the physical layout of teams or technology domains."

It may be a cliche, but the adage, "The more things change, the more they stay the same" certainly applies here.

Your goals are still the same, and most of your toolset will be familiar, but the way you approach the challenge of management will change. The good news is that while you'll have a tough environment to master, you'll also have the architecture to do it.