Cloud Computing - What is it and what is its potential?

I just wanted to point out that you used "its" perfectly, sir. And for that, I am thankful.

Congratulations.

 

I do not believe that it is SOX compliant.

 

You can build your own "cloud".
Citrix Xen App.

Licensing isn't cheap though.

 

This is incorrect. It is not a sales/marketing gimmick. It is actual, different technology.

In a nutshell, it is instant scalability on a pay as you need it basis. That's why when purchasing cloud computing they price in Time versus Hardware.

You don't need cloud computing if you only need one server (or a shared server). It is highly doubtful the OP needs it.

I'll add to Xerobull's list by saying that you really do not need Cloud Computers unless your usage needs (mainly bandwidth) are unpredictable at any given time...as you become overloaded, rather than requiring you to already have enough hardware in place for load-balancing, you can merely fire-up another instance, and shut it back down when the peak load dies.

It is perfect (and almost a necessity) for SaaS applications like Salesforce.com...who cannot predict their needs from hour to hour, much less month to month.

The classic example of this is a event ticket site. They will have huge spikes at the beginning of ticket sales. They don't need the hardware sitting around all month waiting for the few days in the month where they need 1000x more scalability. Same with media sites that allow streaming of live events.

Disadvantages:

• You cannot virtualize RAM across servers. So if it is your RAM needs that spike, you need another solution.
• You don't really have direct access to the harddrive, including your database. Commits might just be virtualized vs the actual. Not quite ACID compliant. This is often the reason why you hear sites like Salesforce have massive outages that actually lose quite a bit of data. Non-virtual computing is less vulnerable to data loss, because the actual harddware has to fail in an unrecoverable manner.
• It is often hard to diagnose errors between application, actual harddware and the virtual environment...and you have little ability to debug the virtual environment.

 

doboyz pretty much nailed it. It's not just someone hosting a server for you. It's not you being able to get your files on your machine at home. It's various services (whether infrastructure, software, etc) that are provided to you in the 'cloud'. You don't necessarily know where it is physically located. But you can get to it from wherever you need. Think Spotify. Think Netflix. That song or movie you're playing. Is it located in New York? Houston? It doesn't matter. It's there. You access it from your computer, your phone, your Xbox.

 

uh, having multiple servers anywhere in the world supporting a single IP address is not cloud computing anymore than standard solutions. You are misinformed if you think non-virtualized solutions cannot do this.

Besides, this is not the only use of Cloud Computing, nor the primary reason it was created. I would even say this part is a sales ploy by hosting providers.

Small to Medium sized companies do not *need* it per say, because most can predict their harddware requirements from month to month, if not year to year. Cloud computer for them is just a sales tactic by the hosting provider. The hosting provider is the one who doesn't know their hardware needs from month to month, day to day...not the SMBs.

It is more convenient and efficient for the hosting provider to use virtualization for rolling out client servers, but the client doesn't really have a win here unless the cost-savings are passed on to them.

IT professionals often fined it sexy, because they can push a button and instantly have a new environment; thus, making their job easier. Plus, many IT professionals get their start in Hosting companies, so they are exposed to benefits of virtualization. But does the actual client need instant environments like that. I will be willing to guess that over 90% of the companies sold virtualization have no need for it.

And don't try to convince me it is a requirement for efficient Disaster Recovery. It creates more disasters than it provides better recovery vs that standard solutions.

 

Speaking of Cloud Computing, my company is an IT consulting firm here in Houston providing IT Consulting, Private Cloud, Disaster Recovery services. About 150 employees and growing. We've got a few positions available:

• Service Desk Level I
• Service Desk Level II
• IT Infrastructure Project Manager
• Account Executive

See the full job descriptions and submit your resume
http://www.dyonyx.com/careers.aspx

 

I don't know man, but it's neck and neck with "Agile software development" in terms of things every company seems to want to adopt because every other company is adopting them. :grin:

 

Once upon a time I applied for a PM position with Dyonyx. Very cool folks.

The company I work ran a VDI proof-of-concept last year with XenApp and XenDesktop. Unfortunately, the business case that resulted wasn't strong enough vs. the related capex, so we are back at the drawing board trying get that sorted.

The actual VDI environment was really cool. We were able to virtualize our apps and provision a virtual version of our Win7 corporate image, which meant our people could run our applications and Windows image on any device (tablets, smartphones, etc.) that could run the Citrix receiver.

 

^ uh... of course. cloud/related is huge right now. dropbox, box.net, icloud, amazon, microsoft, google, rackspace, etc, etc...

dropbox i believe actually uses Amazon storage for the backend storage. though they just bought a company called Cove announced yesterday to help them scale their infrastructure strategy as they grow.

i think apple will ultimately dominate the space from the consumer perspective as they have pretty much every consumer tech space recently, as they are best positioned to syncronize cloud storage with user needs - devices, photos, music, etc.

i used box.net recently for business purposes - effectively as a make-shift data room for a deal I'm working on, and it's been surprisingly very very efficient.

 

Google music is awesome!

 

That's half of it. There is nothing going on today that hasn't been done on a mainframe for over 30 years. The other half is the network.

The term "cloud" comes from the telco world. When you make a phone call, you pass through a series of switches that get you to the other person on the line. However, the average person or company has no visibility on how the phone call actually gets there. Users described the infrastructure as the cloud since it just worked.

Now we are applying the same concept to computers. The idea is that the data and processing just resides somewhere on the network and the user is abstracted from it.

 

My company specializes in packaging and application virtualization. AppV, citrix profiling, thinapp, etc.