Where Virtualization Meets the Cloud
What's all the buzz about? Cloud computing is one of Gartner's top 10 strategic technology trends for 2009 - #2, right behind virtualization. Analysts say the economics of cloud for customers are compelling, with expected savings for business applications of 3-5x. That's not chump change - particularly in today's recessionary economy. But the biggest benefits of the cloud aren't just cost-savings. They're the increased flexibility, elasticity and scalability available to optimize efficiency and best serve the needs of the business.
What is Cloud Computing?
Whether you're an enterprise or small to medium business, you'll soon be benefiting from the cloud. But what is cloud computing exactly?
Cloud computing is essentially the ability to acquire or deliver a resource on demand, configured however the users choose, and paid for according to consumption. From a supplier's perspective, including both internal IT groups and service providers, it means being able to deliver and manage resource pools and applications in a multi-tenancy environment, to deliver the user an on-demand, pay-per-use service. A cloud service can be infrastructure for hosting applications or data storage, a development platform, or even an application that you can get on-demand, either off-site at a provider, such as SunGard or Salesforce, or built onsite within IT.
It's important to note that while many view cloud computing as services consumed externally, innovative CIOs have taken the steps to transform their IT groups into internal service providers. This strategic shift gives them control and accountability for usage and resources, while providing a dynamic, self service model to accommodate the needs and SLAs required by the business units.
For those of us who remember the good old dot com days, before the bust, we saw the concept of hosted services emerge. Everyone jumped on the ASP, ISP, MSP (application service provider, internet service provider, managed service provider, respectively) bandwagons and built offerings to deliver online services or variants thereof, such as on-demand software and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Remembering back to the xSP days, however, we must also remember that there were issues with the services hosting model. One issue was that few were comfortable with the concept of having their information hosted outside of their immediate control, as well as the fear of being locked into a relationship with particular vendors.
So, as the new concept of the cloud emerges, many are asking how it's different this time around and what should we expect? Unlike those previous hosting models, we see well-established companies diversifying their business models to offer new services, based on established core competencies. This fundamental difference will help shape and stabilize the new concept of the cloud.
But even more importantly, we have seen new technologies evolve over the past decade that are essential to the notion of the cloud. The key technology is virtualization. In addition to some amazing cost savings and goodness for the environment, virtualization's ability to separate the OS and application from the hardware give it ideal properties to best deliver these on-demand cloud services. Charles King, Principal Analyst at Pund-IT put it succinctly: "Without virtualization there is no cloud- that's what enabled the emergence of this new, sustainable industry."
Challenges of the cloud
