Virtualization Technology in The Clouds
Virtualization technology is most popular in the server world, virtualization technology is also being used in data storage such as Storage Area Networks. Virtualization allows users to consolidate physical resources, simplify deployment and administration, and reduce power and cooling requirements.
In the virtualization or clouds era, people should Forget the desktop. The future of computing is in your browser. Now, the convergence of the next set of things are going to impact the Web, which the cloud and mobile are changing the structure of the Web and therefore the vantage point–the browser–as your gateway. But the architecture of a mobile client coupled with a big back end in the cloud applied to the desktop is changing everything as well. Because browsers I think generally are becoming thinner and lighter at the core with the extensibility that we talked about before around the Mozilla.
Now it’s the browser on whatever device it might be. It might be your mobile handset. It might be your PC. It might be your Apple, your Mac. But in all cases you have a lot of flexibility now to connect to a gigantic computing resource. So if you think about what the desktop was and is still to some extent today as a foundation of what the browser–the use case–what the browser will displace. So on a typical, let’s say, a PC platform that the largest volume application probably is Microsoft Office. So what do you have in there? You have an e-mail client. You have a word processing package. You have a way to make presentations or documents. You have a contact manager, calendaring device.
If you think about what a browser is in the new world that might in the browser case be a tabbed browser where you can click on one click like you would click on Microsoft Office to open it. With one click now under a group tab you can open up a spreadsheet, like, you know, Google’s spreadsheet or Google Docs. Or, you know, word processing or a calendar. All those things now come with one click on a Web interface that used to be a multi-hundred dollar, thousand dollar software package per unit from Microsoft. So it’s going to be a different world.
Cloud Computing Grows Up
In 2009, the cloud went from a vague concept to a must-have technology. It’s always fun to watch the emergence of new IT trends and how quickly concepts and products evolve in the early stages. Never was this truer than with cloud computing and what the industry witnessed around its evolution. Over the past year, cloud computing has captured significant attention of CEOs, CIOs and IT personnel alike, as businesses began to investigate the value of moving certain workloads to a cloud model. Facing mounting pressures to provide better services quickly, while reducing costs, many IT decision makers found the economics and capabilities of cloud compelling. Here are a few significant highlights:
1. Private clouds get a seat at the table.
Over the past year, companies from markets ranging from financial services to retail executed proofs of concepts and pilots of both public and private clouds. This wide-spread experimentation has matured the usage of private clouds, and in many cases, has become the primary focus for most enterprises. In fact, based on IBM research, we know that a private cloud is more likely to be seen as appealing to clients than public clouds (64% vs. 30%.) Private clouds take the concepts and technologies leveraged by large cloud-based service providers, and applies them to internal data centers. This entails pooling of resources, leveraging virtualization and delivering IT services via dynamic provisioning and a self-service portal.
The results of a private cloud model are astonishing. For workloads such as pre-production test systems, clients of IBM have seen eight-month return on investments and have cut overall IT expenses by up to 60%. Much of these savings comes from improved utilization of resources brought about by virtualization and resource pooling. But the real advantage of cloud comes in labor savings. A well-defined private cloud can deliver certain IT services for 20% or less of the labor required in traditional IT delivery models.
2. The “opening” of the cloud.
Most cloud service providers had proprietary interfaces for requesting resources and/or running on their cloud infrastructure. This has changed over the course of the year, especially with the concepts of open standards and open source emerging as vitally important to the success and stability of cloud computing.
A key event in the opening of the cloud was the publishing of the Open Cloud Manifesto in March 2009. The purpose of the manifesto was to spell out the key elements of an open system and to push for these elements to be present in the emerging world of cloud computing.
The Open Cloud Manifesto stresses the following:
–Cloud vendors should work together to define open solutions to address cloud challenges like security, integration and interoperability.
–Cloud providers should not use their market position to create vendor lock-in.
–Cloud vendors should embrace existing standards where they apply, and work together to create new standards where required.
–Cloud community efforts should always be customer-driven.
–Cloud standards groups need to stay coordinated to ensure there are not competing open standards in this emerging area.
Since the introduction of the manifesto and its associated Web site, there are now close to 300 supporters of the initiative.
This is only the beginning. There are now numerous efforts underway to standardize on key elements of the cloud computing model–APIs, data formats and protocols, for example. The Web site reveals an impressive list of efforts currently underway.
3. Public clouds are ready for the enterprise.
The evolution of cloud computing is somewhat reminiscent of the dawning of the Internet age back in the ’90s. Remember when we all said we would never put our credit card numbers on the Internet? Well, those days are long gone; most of us have several Web vendors with whom we entrust our personal information, because online security has matured.
Cloud computing is following a similar path. Although few are ready to move mission-critical or sensitive applications to the cloud, enterprises are starting to embrace public cloud service providers as part of their overall IT strategy. Public clouds offer the opportunity to offload certain workloads from the enterprise data center ,creating flexibility in space utilization, people utilization and capital utilization.
Today, the workloads moving to the public cloud include pre-production systems, collaboration software, batch analytics and virtual desktop images. As the security and reliability guarantees of public cloud service providers improve, more workloads will be ready for this type of outsourcing. IBM, for example, is focused on providing the same level of SLA assurances that enterprises hold themselves to. It won’t be long before we start seeing production and other mission-critical workloads out on the public cloud.
This year was a key year for cloud computing. At the beginning of 2009, most of the discussion around cloud was definitional in nature: What is cloud and how can it help me? By year end, much has changed; most of the discussion is around economics and how best to leverage cloud computing technologies.
Virtualization Versus the Cloud
A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before. It used to be that something virtual wasn’t real. And that clouds were just that–those puffy things in the sky. Today we have the tech industry terms “virtual computing” and “cloud computing,” which often get mixed up. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell them apart, and it involves hearkening back to the age-old distinction between hardware and software. When you’re talking about virtual computing, you’re invariably talking about hardware; specifically, making PC-style hardware available to users in a new way. A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before.
Cloud computing, by contrast, usually refers to the sorts of software that run once a computer gets turned on. The “cloud” indicates that the software is hosted in a data center, not sitting on your desktop. If you use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office for your word processing or spreadsheets, that’s cloud computing. You can mix and match these two approaches, undertaking cloud computing on a nonvirtual, traditional PC. And the opposite: You can use traditional, Office-style programs on a virtual PC.
Not Everything Will Move To The Cloud
Some applications will be better off running on internal networks. So what better place to look at how data management is changing? Forbes caught up with John Engates, Rackspace’s chief technology officer, to talk about the evolution and where things are likely to go in the future.
We started with Linux servers. Windows came later for us. Today what’s different is that we do it for much larger customers and we manage a much broader set of applications. For all of them we manage up to just under the application, including data center network servers, operating systems, databases and application servers.
Customers bring all kinds of applications to us, but what’s underneath those applications is common among our customers. It’s the same flavors of Windows or Linux or the same hardware platforms and storage platforms. We work with the customers to support those applications, so it’s an extension of their IT operation. There is obviously some gray area in between. We’ll work with the customers to make it work and will bring in whoever it takes and sort out the problem.
Paying by the hour for CPUs or by the gigabyte for storage are necessary financial models. Companies are trying to take advantage of that. Sometimes it’s hard because the applications aren’t written that way, but more and more they are being architected like that.
Our customers traditionally have looked at infrastructure-as-a-service, so they’ve had administrative access to the applications. What’s next is moving up the stack to offer platform-as-a-service. It’s between the infrastructure and the application. A business could take a platform and build their tools right on that instead of worrying about the underlying infrastructure. This is targeted more at a developer instead of a systems administrator.
