Most everyone is familiar with the concept of a supply chain—an interlinked vector of individual participants who cooperate to satisfy end user demand. In retail, for example, Wal-Mart capitalized on its supply chain efficiencies of coordinating product sourcing, transportation logistics, and sales data feedback to fuel its leap to biggest retailer in the world. Many of us in the tech industry are familiar with the analogous chain that ties together ODM (Original Devices Manufacturers like HTC), transport firms, product designer (e.g., HP), and retail outlets—all coordinated to deliver a, say, server to an IT operations group so that it can install it in response to demand from an applications group. But I'd like to posit that in cloud computing, particularly the private variant, another supply chain exists, one based on virtual resources within the data center. In this supply chain, demand emanates from a member of an applications group who (in the vision of cloud computing) fills out a web form that identifies type and amount of resources, (e.g., two virtual processors, so much memory, network connectivity, storage, and so on) clicks the submit button, and, voila, compute resources appear, ready to use, in a matter of minutes. It is the job of IT Operations to emulate Wal-Mart and coordinate sourcing, logistics, and shelf (or in this case, rack) stacking to ensure sufficient resources are available to meet application group demand.
Why Private Cloud Will Make IT Think Like Wal-Mart - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership
...I think cohesiveFT's ElasticServer solves at least some of this problem...