The Wallstreet Journal article “Internet Industry is on a Cloud”
does not do Cloud computing any justice at all.
Isolated pools of computing, network and storage are underutilized most of the time, but must be provisioned for that hypothetical peak capacity day, or even a peak capacity hour. What if we could reengineer our Operating Systems, network/storage management as well as all the other higher layers of software to work in a way that we are able to treat hardware resources as a set of “Compute Pools”, “Storage Pools” and “Network Pools”?
Numerous technical challenges have to be overcome to make this happen. This is what today’s Cloud Computing Frameworks are hoping to achieve.
Existing software vendors with their per Server and per CPU pricing have a lot to lose from this disruptive model. A BI provider like “Vertica“ hosted in the cloud, can compete very well with traditional datawarehousing frameworks. Imagine, using a BI tool few months in a year, to analyze a year’s worth of data, using temporarily provisioned servers and rented software. Cost of an approach like this can be an order of magnitude less than traditional buy, install and maintain approach.
I think Sun’s private cloud offering may be the tipping point that will persuade mainstream rather than cutting edge IT organizations to switch to a cloud approach. With a private cloud, one could share compute, network and storage resources amongst a set of business units, or even affiliated companies.
You can read a comparison of existing cloud offerings here:
PS: Why do many servers have an average utilization of 1% or less. Consider an IT shop with dedicated set of servers per application policy. For an application rolled out 8 years ago, the average utilization when in use was perhaps 15%. With today’s technology the average utilization when in use will be 5%. The average across 365 days, 24 hours, can certainly be below 1%.
