NETWORKWORLD – What is cloud computing?
Networkworld posted an article today briefly describing some of the basic concepts relevant to the new buzz cloud computing. They briefly mention Infrastructure as a Service, and Amazon’s S3 environment.
No mention of SaaS, or any of the business continuity / disaster recovery aspects that are primary selling points of cloud computing. Oh well, maybe in another article.
Possible solution in the cloud for fitting various vendor offerings together into a synergistic system
Wide Area Networking Alert By Steve Taylor and Jim Metzler , Network World , 05/19/2009
A recent newsletter featured feedback from one of our readers – Dennis Hollarn of Erie Insurance. Dennis pointed out the challenges associated with fitting the various vendor offerings together into a synergistic system. He also brought up the possibility that the solution to this problem may reside in the cloud – with offerings from the cloud computing vendors. In the next two newsletters we’ll discuss cloud computing and invite our readers to share their opinions on the topic.
Let’s start with a definition of cloud computing. According to Whatis.com “Cloud computing is a computing paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of connections, software and services accessed over a network. This network of servers and connections is collectively known as ‘the cloud.’ Computing at the scale of the cloud allows users to access supercomputer-level power. Users can access resources as they need them. For this reason, cloud computing has also been described as on-demand computing.”
One of the primary forms of cloud computing is referred to as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Infrastructure services are comprised of the basic compute, storage, and interconnect services required to run applications. One example of such a service is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). According to Amazon, “Amazon S3 provides a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of Web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.”
It is sometimes important to take a step back and reflect on the amazing changes that are taking place in our industry. Amazon is a great example of those changes. Here is a company that started off its existence by driving fundamental change in terms of how people buy books and is now driving change in terms of how IT organizations store and retrieve data. That is truly remarkable.
We will talk about cloud computing more in the next newsletter. In the meantime, we would like to hear from you. What is your opinion of cloud computing? More hype? Great value today? Great promise, but still to early for real results?
For further discussion of Cloud Computing see Jim’s blog.
Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.
Pasted from <http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/frame/2009/051809wan1.html?nlhtwan=ts_051909&nladname=051909wideareanetworkingal>
