Cloud eliminates enterprise data center?

Do you still remember where you were on the August 1, 1981 12:01 noon? Don't tell me you don't remember such an important moment in the history of the world. The change of day changed the whole world completely-on that day, MTV officially appeared, the famous singer Buggles "television eliminated broadcast singer" first broadcast, marked the demise of radio music. What a wonderful day it is. I was always amazed when the older generation said how they used to listen to music on the radio.

But things don't evolve as people think. MTV did not become a real revolution. It's not even a new idea. I was listening to music on the radio on my way to work this morning. In fact, MTV is only an improved version of the old 1960 's, when the Beatles ' a Hard day ' Night the first time in the film creative use of the form of music video.

In fact, 1981 years ago, the idea has repeatedly entered the television field, the form is also very diverse, such as Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Monkees. In the 70 's, Bob Whitney, founder of the Philadelphia "TOP-40" radio program, sold the TV marathon idea called the "now explosion" to the television station, which aired hundreds of hours of music and television broadcasts during the 13-week period. The program's director Steve Rash and Fred Bauer set up a new music television company called Innovisions, which produced a new program called the Music CONNECTION. After the program was chopped, Viacom bought its copyright and eventually launched MTV ...

As you can see, MTV is not the first form of music television, it is only the first to achieve long-term success. MTV did not "Kill the Radio Star" as Buggles in the early 1981 MTV. What we have learned from this is that if the practice is right, people will have a clear demand for music and television, but it is only a supplement to the radio, not the elimination of the broadcast.

This also applies to the informal term "cloud computing". Earlier products claimed that the revolutionary idea of cloud computing would wipe out traditional enterprise internal devices and that private data centers were obsolete. But if someone looked around at the current state of cloud computing and the Enterprise data center, there would be enough evidence to show that cloud computing and music TV were in the same state.

The basic fact is that cloud computing, no matter how you define it, is not a revolution. The American Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says that "cloud computing is a model, enables users to quickly configure and publish these resources by enabling them to easily use network access on demand to configure shared pools of computing resources such as networks, servers, storage systems, applications, and services. There is very little interaction between the required management work or the service provider. ”

This is only an evolution in the early days of the enterprise providing similar service functionality to internal users through mainframes. Admittedly, in the early mainframe era, sharing was limited within the company, and the World Wide Web was a long time before it appeared. However, the concept of cloud computing had already emerged at that time, when the high salaries of professionals and the scarcity of personnel forced enterprises to share resource computer resources and to pay for their use by departments. Well, maybe the definition of a mainframe and today's cloud is a revolutionary difference in fast provisioning, but it's also a result of the frustration of those who can only wait weeks to put a green screen end on their desktop.

During this period, J.C.R Licklider conceived a concept called "Interstellar computer Network", which is the foundation of later ARPANET. (If you're familiar with history, you'll know that Arpanet is the foundation of the World Wide Web--also known as the Internet--that we're talking about today.) ）

Then, cloud computing "broke out" in 1997, Ramnath Chellappa, a professor of information systems at the University of Texas, first uttered the word at Dallas's informs convention, when he said: "Computing has evolved from a mainframe architecture to a web-based architecture." At the same time, there have been many terms to describe these new forms, and the advent of E-commerce has led to the emergence of ' cloud computing '. The purpose of this work is to analyse the role that agents and intermediaries play in supporting this framework. ”

The first real warning to traditional data centers was in 1999, when Mark Benioff was supported by Larry Ellison, where he founded CRM in a small apartment in San Francisco (Customer relationship Management software company Salesforce.com, the "Software End" revolution began. Ironically, Larry Ellison, a year ago, also funded another "cloud" initiative – NetSuite, formerly Netledger, but Salesforce.com was widely seen as the first software, service (SaaS) company.

The advent of SaaS does have the potential to break traditional data centers and procurement patterns. All of a sudden, businesses can choose to use mission-critical enterprise software without having to use any additional data center computers. More importantly, the business unit discovers Salesforce.com and starts buying CRM "seats" without the knowledge and support of the IT organization of its own enterprise.

But what about the ending? IT department did not disappear. Instead, they found that the entire company had "rogue apps". In general, this can happen when users find that their outstanding new applications really work, and they need to share information with other systems that the IT staff manages. So SaaS begins to integrate into the traditional it domain of enterprise computing.

Another important threat to the enterprise data Center came in 2002, when Amazon built Amazon Web Services, a cloud-based service that included storage and computing, and opened the era of infrastructure, service (IaaS). It was later commercialized in 2006, and Amazon released a version called EC2 (Flexible Computing cloud) and S3 (simple storage service). Through these services, users can lease the calculation cycle and storage resources, and pay according to usage.

Of course, the traditional data center has ended! Buggles said it! But things didn't work out the way they imagined. Amazon and other IaaS companies, such as Rackspace Cloud and Azure, have risen. This provides a convenient way for small companies to adopt applications without having to build a data center (or install a hot server in a closet or somewhere). Big companies are not ignoring this. Some large companies see it as an ideal way to improve the resources of existing data centers and to help adjust the peaks and troughs of computing consumption. This concept is increasingly known as the "cloud Burst", which enables an enterprise to introduce an external computing cycle when it requires special applications that are not in the internal infrastructure.

Throughout the experience, the IT sector has exposed the flaws of early cloud computing to the world. The main problem comes from data security and the continued availability of resources, which are issues that enterprise data centers have been working on for years and are also good at dealing with. Just a few days ago in December 2012, the Amazon had a serious accident, and Netflix streaming customers and Salesforce.com Heroku customers had been affected for almost a whole day. In the April 2011, Amazon's accident took some clients several days to recover.

Recently, attention has shifted to private clouds and mixed clouds. This is clearly a recognition that traditional data centres are not obsolete. If you can ' t beat ' em, join ' em ' (the one who can't win) says the main cloud infrastructure providers, such as Jie, Microsoft and VMware, boast that they can build private clouds in the datacenter with their own virtualization platforms.

How does this affect the spending patterns of the datacenter? In recent years, data center spending has been a bit like a roller coaster, in part because of the weak overall economic growth since 2008. As the ESG Research report (ESG Survey: 2013IT spending intent survey) shows, cutting costs seems to be the mantra of the IT industry.

In addition, analysts expect a larger share of the IT budget to be used for cloud computing initiatives, including the implementation of SaaS and Hybrid cloud.

Finally, in the same It expenditure intent Survey report, ESG also reported that a greater share of the IT budget would be used to maintain the existing infrastructure rather than invest in new IT projects.

Clearly, companies are tweaking their understanding of the usefulness of cloud computing, and their spending patterns reflect:

· Reduce costs

· Invest in more cloud projects (supposedly supporting the above ranking intent)

· One would argue that the intention to rank first and second in the table above would lead to a shift in the relative budget share from new technology investment to the maintenance of existing technology.

In Emulex, we have been keeping a close eye on the deployment of these technologies because they affect the customer's buying behavior. Although we do not think that television will really eliminate the broadcast singers, but we do realize that television and radio singers have room for development, we have to them (promoted) is equal.