Cloud Computing has been getting a lot of hype lately... and rightfully so. NetApp refers to a form of it as Grid Computing and ever since it's conception, my heads been in the clouds thinking about it and how it's going to change the way we run IT and our businesses. This particular topic has been on the forefront of my mind recently...
According to Wikipedia, Cloud Computing is based development and use of computer technology where the cloud is a metaphor for the Internet and an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals. It is a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them.
For those of you who are still into Sunny Computing, wouldn't it be more logical to use services and not have to know anything about the infrastructure that supports it? This is one of the main benefits I think consumers will feel. Who wouldn't want to access their apps and technology-enabled services via the Internet? After all, you don't need to bother yourself with knowing the infrastructure in which it resides since you simply get to use what you need as you normally would via the network. Some common cloud computing applications today are Facebook, Google Apps, & Microsoft Online.
My very good friend and colleague, NetApp's CTO-at-Large , Val Bercovici feels that Cloud Computing represents a promising intersection of technical and economic trends to form a new kind of ‘information chain’ akin to supply chains in the manufacturing industry. Networking improvements, web services, grid computing and scalable storage solutions are enabling new economies of scale for service providers. They are leveraging huge capital equipment investments to offer virtual computing infrastructure rentals with common interfaces, just-in-time availability and granularity billing. This gives IT consumers of all sizes new options for shifting large capital infrastructure costs towards more incremental operational expenses in order to better enable their businesses.
This is what I like to hear. The ability to leverage your equipment investments into virtual computing rentals is, what I feel, to be around in the present and near future. It is the most cost-effective and logical way for service providers to do business.
As I think about my NetApp customers and consumers in general, I realize the need for them to not own the infrastructure per se, but rather simply access and use resources as a service and pay as they go for what they use (as long as the storage infrastructure is NetApp, of course) The payment model for this type of offering is similar to that of a utility computing model where you are billed on a subscription basis. You share your city's water and electricity with your neighbors and similarly you'll share you computing power between multiple users. The cool thing is that since we're sharing resources, servers out there wont be left idle and hence utilization rates will improve and costs will decrease.
Someone is going to be the leader in all of this... and I'm watching closely and doing my own research to find out just who the front-runner is going to be. Somewhere... over the rainbow... Cloud Computing is the wave of the future.
Good to see you guys thinking & talking about this. Will be interesting to see what role NetApp finds for itself in the cloud computing space.
Sam
Posted by: Sam Johnston | January 21, 2009 at 03:22 AM