Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon into the clear blue beyond, through and beyond the clouds. Do you think you would like to float on a cloud? How about “Pennies from Heaven”? Are we there yet? Nope? Well… allow me a moment to illuminate your spirit… through the cloud.
The cloud as we know it; an Internet metaphor based on how the Internet is represented in computer network diagrams; it is a style of computing in which resources are dynamically scalable and often virtualized. SaaS (Service as a Software) over the Internet, as I have mentioned in previous posts, is the driving force.
For edifying purposes, let it be known, Microsoft is bringing its proven strategy to the cloud. Bring more of your office software to convince companies to use your updated technologies. Intel is stumbling and bringing its brand to the next generation of online productivity platform with “Microsoft Office 365.”
More than fifty-eight current and potential cloud computing users have formed a “Open Data Center Alliance”. The actual number is reported at seventy participating companies…and growing. The cloud interoperability roadmap is projected for 2011. The latter undertaking would likely cost enterprises (to a vendor lockout) about $100 billion in the next few years. This data is derived from Mr. Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center group, according to Information Week magazine’s Charles Babcock. The price tag of fifty billion dollars a year is a combined expense of the company’s seventy-member team. Interoperability has added speed to project development and is likely to increase sales of computer chips for Intel (an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, an AMERICAN global technology company) and AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) . The logic behind the Intel-orchestrated push is to establish the best standards and practices that will help enterprises and cloud performance initiatives in the future, Skaugen and Babcock say.
Many of the group’s members include National Australia Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, China Life, UBS, Teramark and BMW. They intend to provide guidance on the cloud as they build data centers for public and private cloud interoperability by 2015. This group of allies also intends to address infrastructure, management, data security, governance and the definition of cloud services.
An “Office 365” productivity platform will include the combination of Office Online Web Apps with Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online. These service-based applications will offer versions of Office Word, Excel, Power Point, email, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, web portals, extranets, voice conferencing, video conferencing, and web conferencing, as reported by Information’s Doug Henschen. . Weekly magazine. Office 365 and Office Professional Plus options can cost between $2.00 and $24.00 per month per user.
As for where the alliance will focus its technology issues, based on the company’s workload, they plan to address issues that address minimizing latency operations. They also plan to address minimizing energy use within the cloud data center. “The focus will be on a five-cloud usage model. They include the unified network required for cloud computing, where multiple network protocols for communications and storage are merged to reduce the number of ports and the amount of equipment needed to establish a cloud”, according to Skaugen and Babcock.
From the rack space cloud, cloud servers are an affordable and easy-to-use cloud computing infrastructure. Each cloud is a fully customizable virtualized server instance that can be started, maintained, and controlled by one user with full root access. Each server gives users full root access to the Linux distribution of their choice. Users pay by the hour, depending on the size of the server they use.
Cloud servers bring the power of the cloud to the traditional model based on server hosting. A cloud server gives you full flexibility to run anything from a Java website to a Ruby On Rails application. This service is included in the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and is part of the contract together with the terms of service and is subject to the terms and conditions established in a contract document.
Intel’s involvement is a sign of how uniformly cloud data centers rely on the X86 architecture development project. IBM, the microprocessor manufacturer, built its Research Triangle Park on X86 servers.
A server is a software program, or the computer on which a particular program runs. Provides a specific type of service to client software running on the same computer or other computers on a specific network. The client provides the graphical user interface (GUI) and performs some or all of the request processing for the server, which maintains the data and processes the requests. It is an important element of modern operating systems and network designs.
Now… do you feel like you’re floating on a cloud?
Cloud computing is here to stay… at least until the next test of the wind comes.
Until next time…
