What can cloud computing bring to the industry?

Not long ago, IBM announced the launch of the "Blue Cloud" program, this is a software and hardware combination product that allows enterprise users to experiment with the "cloud" computing model, and the "cloud" computing model makes computing not limited to local machines or remote server Farms, by architecting a distributed, globally accessible resource structure, Enable the data center to run calculations in a similar internet environment.

What can you bring to the enterprise?

According to IBM, the "Blue Cloud" program is an important recent IBM project, comparable to the 2000 Linux support. What does cloud computing bring to the user, so much for IBM? For instance, for example, a bank, the headquarters in the weekend when the business settlement, the need to invoke a large number of computing resources, with "cloud computing", can be the headquarters of the system of other operations, such as logistics, maintenance and so on to the provincial Bank of the data center, to ensure that the headquarters of the data center Of course, this requires a large amount of equipment and extremely high bandwidth protection.

The "Blue Cloud" is essentially providing the same "cloud computing model" for companies, enabling them to build their own "cloud computing Architecture", with the huge data processing power required to process video, community networks and other Web 2.0 technologies.

"Blue Cloud" is based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM virtualization software and data center management software, said Dennis Quan, technical director of the IBM Software group's High-performance contingency solutions.

He said the move would solve some of the problems besetting users. The emergence of diverse content such as media, especially large media such as video files, has led to increasing demand for computational performance. Data centers are suffering from power supply, space and refrigeration systems. Users are looking for some alternative ways to run these next-generation applications.

Cloud computing is a further development trend of information technology

Many experts believe that cloud computing is a further development trend of information technology, enabling IT companies to sell more hardware, software and services tailored to cloud computing. In recent years, IBM has done a lot in the data center to run efficiently, and has concentrated on desktops and other devices to run more computing tasks in the datacenter. They are named "Automatic", "valid" grid computing. Those concepts and research work have made a productive contribution to cloud computing. Experts say many tools have been added, and users are expanding computing across many machines and making programming simpler. Those who are likely to expand the scope of cloud computing are increasingly coming from researchers who dare to deal with internet search.

"In a sense, cloud computing is a natural development of grid computing models," he said. Frank Gens, an analyst with IDC Research, said. "The difference is that Google's programming model, and its true openness. Ordinary people can also write apps without having to be PhD at Stanford or Carnegie Mellon University. ”

Is it ahead?

As far as I am concerned, this application is really widely promoted and it will wait for a long time.

The reason is that if cloud computing is a grid computing model for further development, then look at the current application of grid computing, the popularity of the degree has not been high. So it takes a long time to grow from grid to cloud computing.

Because the grid or cloud computing, all need large ecosystems, simple to go to the dealer to buy is not feasible. In terms of cost, it is good to share resources among different companies and even different countries, but how can this incur additional overhead? Even within the enterprise, how to share the cost of each branch in the company? In addition, it is safe to give data to someone in a shared resource environment that has many of the company's key business resources.

At present, third party organizations have different views on the application of the plan.

Gartner's Cearley that the launch of this commercial "cloud computing" will have an impact on the development of IBM's hardware and software strategy, and it is too early to draw a comprehensive conclusion.

"This is just an isolated incident that could have far-reaching consequences in the future," he said. I think a lot of experiments are needed to verify what type of workload is appropriate for this architecture. ”

IDC argues that the challenges facing cloud computing are a direct opportunity for both solution providers and system integrators. As the solution ecosystem grows, private businesses that want to enjoy the power and cost advantages of cloud computing will be involved and will eventually push cloud computing to more users.

Currently, IBM is working with several large enterprises, universities and government agencies to implement the cloud computing program. Some countries, such as Viet Nam, have also been involved in a pilot project based on the "cloud Computing Architecture". IBM revealed that the first "blue Cloud" would be launched in the spring of 2008 and run on IBM bladecenters servers using power and x86 processors. It includes Xen and POWERVM virtualized Linux operating system images, Hadoop parallel work Scheduler, and IBM Tivoli Server Management software for managing and monitoring data center workflows. IBM also plans to launch the system z mainframe "cloud environment" next year.