The Data Center: Head in the Clouds

By John Rath

May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

When I decided to write about cloud computing, the research took longer to read than it took to write the column! Cloud computing is everywhere in the news and the concept marks  an important evolutionary step to the next wave of computing.

Shifts like this in computing do not happen overnight. You won’t see major corporations moving their entire infrastructure to a cloud or cloud provider any time soon. In my opinion, cloud computing is essentially utility computing, delivered in multiple data centers across different regions of the world. It can be a service that a provider with a large data center portfolio can offer, or it can be a model used by a corporation to provision their infrastructure in a more efficient and effective way. Utility computing is “infrastructure as a service,” or computing resources that are consumed in a pay-as-you-go model.

The environmental revolution under way in the data center will be a catalyst for clouds as well, by pushing infrastructure out of smaller, individual data centers to larger, more efficient facilities owned by cloud providers.

However, much of the resistance to such a model is because of the issues of control and regulation, and the idea that you need to be able to touch and see the IT equipment that is being paid for.

The architecture of the cloud can take many forms and be beneficial to a variety of needs and sizes of companies. To the small startup company, it means they don’t have to invest in infrastructure or data center services to get their Web site or Internet application going. They simply buy compute power as a service from a cloud provider that lets them grow dynamically, only pay for what they use, and handle peaks and valleys of interest from their audience with ease.

Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) has enabled many such companies to deliver such sites and applications at a fraction of the cost of using traditional methods. My original assumption of EC2 (or any cloud service) was that it meant the infrastructure was spread across the different data centers they owned. It was only recently that Amazon announced the ability to place instances in multiple locations and have elastic IP addresses.  

Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing

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