Cloud computing: The next revolutionary innovation in computing

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Cloud computing is a word that people have heard a lot. In recent years, I have been groping. After the departure from Netcom, I began to do broadband capital, investment in contact with a lot of people, things and technology. In this process, I have always thought: from the investment point of view, especially from the perspective of technology investment, each era, the most important thing is to grasp a particularly important technological innovation.

In the past 50 years of it innovation, mainly divided into such a few stages:

The first stage is the 1960 era of computer commercialization, the so-called IBM360 series appeared. It was a very significant innovation in that era, but it benefited only one company in the world that IBM,IBM almost monopolized all computer hardware, software and applications in that era.

The second stage is the age of personal computers. Today, the world's most powerful companies, whether Microsoft, Intel or Hewlett-Packard, have benefited almost all of the PC revolution. It took about 30 years to complete the road to 100 years of business, becoming a global company, and the personal computer has become a very important part of America's core competitiveness.

The third stage of innovation is mobile communications and the Internet. This phase of the IT enterprise has been faster development, the emergence of Google, Yahoo and other enterprises.

Whether as an investor or a practitioner, I have been looking for similar major research innovations over the years to change our entire computing structure and way of life, like computers and the Internet. To find such innovation, whether for investors, or for China's next stage of industrial development is of great significance.

From the computer revolution to the cloud era

Many people say that computer innovation has come to a dead end, just as someone at the end of 19th century said that physics was over. But just as people think there is nothing to study, there is atomic physics, quantum mechanics and today's semiconductor technology, which is of great significance in changing human life. So, is there anything that can trigger a transformative technology to change the entire computing structure and change the way the whole of production, life and work is developed today?

In the IBM era, all of our computational solutions to the fundamental problem is actually the problem of knowledge processing, the storage of necessary information processing and distribution. In the mainframe era, the equivalent of all of our information is centrally controlled, all information is on the IBM mainframe, when needed through the 60K line to connect to it. The core feature of the mainframe era is that information is monopolized and information is very expensive. Remember in the era of minicomputer, we have to wear white coats, slippers, and must be at a fixed time to go to the machine.

The PC changed all this. The core concept of personal computer reform, first proposed by Steve, he said that knowledge should not be monopolized, knowledge should be personal. My knowledge

Why should be placed on the host storage, should be required to get. So he said everyone should have a computer. Microsoft has a particularly famous advertisement for "What Are you doing tomorrow". The main idea is that everyone should have a machine that belongs to you tomorrow. This is the process of information from monopoly to democratization. A major change has begun.

In the personal computer age, we have so much information about resources, but what is the biggest problem it faces? First, a large amount of resources in a computer is wasted, our CPU or memory disk, idle when not. Second, few commodities have been commercialized for 20 years or so, and its basic price remains unchanged. The first PC appeared at about 1500 dollars, and now a PC is between 1500 and 2000 dollars. From the business model point of view, the most successful is the Win-tel Alliance, that is, Intel's chip plus Windows operating system, it can ensure that the computing power is increasing, but the price unchanged. Although computer applications are already very high, the cost of computers is still very great. Another very big problem is that our knowledge needs to be applied on the one hand and shared on the other. The Internet solves part of the problem of sharing, via email or website, but the computer problem is not solved. Next, we need to address many of the problems the PC faces, such as high costs, idle computing resources, a lot of data not being processed centrally, and so on.

Now we are in another era, the age of clouds. What is the next generation of computers? is a screen, this screen connected to the broadband network, is a supercomputer. This computer is not a computer as physical as IBM, but a network-related machine. All the information, when needed, can be taken from the Internet at any time, and when it is not needed, it is stored in the middle of the cloud.

The biggest difference between the cloud era and the mainframe era is that the bandwidth of the network is already very wide, and the information is downloaded even faster than the download on the hard disk. Mainframe era is the central processing of information, personal computer era is the personal information, cloud computing era has formed a personalized body and the central processing of the structure of the combination. In every way, cloud computing is a significant change.

For cloud computing, we can use such a metaphor. Water is a very important resource of human society, we human civilization are related to water, no water can not survive. Mainframe era is equivalent to a lake in the middle, when we need water, we carry containers to the lake to bring water, and then put it to the home to drink. Just like the primitive society when we need water, we go to a lake to fetch water. The personal computer age is equivalent to our entering the village era, each of the first wells, the need for water from their own home well in the water to carry up, do not need when the well is placed here, is completely idle. So, in the cloud era, we move from the countryside to the city. How to get water in the city? First of all, there is a large reservoir, more importantly, there is a water network, so that when needed to open the faucet, do not need to put there, the water is readily available. The water supply system from Lake to city is a change of the whole civilization.

For example, information and knowledge are money, how do we save money in the early days? In the countryside, we put the cash in our house, put it under the Gingsi, and take it out when needed. When you come to the city, put the money in the bank, take the money out of the bank when you need it, and put it in the bank when I don't need it. Banks are the equivalent of clouds. If information and knowledge are as important as money, we should be able to get it when we need it, when we don't need it. If one of the most important factors contributing to the industrial revolution is the centralized treatment of funds, when there is no need, I can give a loan to others, as a corollary, now a lot of information is scattered in each of us, the information and knowledge to focus on, then the knowledge that mankind can acquire is how great!

What is the application of cloud? I give the simplest application, in daily life, a lot of people have to take medicine every day, but I take the medicine and my parents are basically the same medicine, are three times a day, two tablets. Our weight, life experience are not the same, why take the medicine is similar, the amount is similar? One of the key things we have in life is very imprecise. How can you have personalized medicine? In Silicon Valley, I've seen a company that uses cloud technology to know your daily blood pressure and all kinds of life experiences and living conditions through the sensors in everyone's cell phone, and then focus on all sorts of information, through a central database of clouds, to analyze different ages, How different experiences and different kinds of people react to the effects of drugs. In the future, because the cloud has a central knowledge structure platform, it can analyze the data to determine the amount of each person's medication. It is possible to compare and give back to everyone's health status by centralizing all the medical records that we started from childhood. This has achieved a very important leap for human health, the so-called personalized medicine. But without a lot of data processing, the problem cannot be solved.

The advent and development of cloud computing

Why is cloud computing possible today, and what is the driving force behind it? What is the result of the change in cloud computing? Like the personal computers that democratize knowledge, what does cloud computing bring? The answer we know at the moment is to make the whole calculation cheaper, The price of the end of the cloud that each person owns in the future is equivalent to the price of a book. Behind it is the ability of a supercomputer. Today, one of our supercomputers is millions of dollars, but in the future a terminal will be very diverse and very inexpensive. You're just a screen with a few communications tools, but it's the same computing power as a supercomputer.

So I think the core of cloud computing in the future is the same as the fundamental core of every change-a process that makes life easier, cheaper and more democratized. The era of cloud is like the invention of printing, the core is to make the spread of knowledge cheaper. One of the most important results of the cloud in the future is to make the entire computing environment and knowledge acquisition more affordable. Knowledge can be centralized, and, in the case of centralized processing, the so-called data into information, information into wisdom. This process makes the whole production efficiency greatly improved.

Why is it that the cloud market is present and has not appeared in the past many years? I have summed up several major motivations.

The first power is the advent of broadband networks. 1995, there is a very important technological innovation, is the optical fiber technology innovation, in the past our telephone lines are copper, optical fiber appearance so that voice and information can be transmitted through the light, and the transmission cost of information greatly reduced. It has sparked a revolution in the IT field of fiber optics. The result of the fiber revolution is that information becomes ubiquitous, bandwidth becomes omnipotent, and a great deal of information can be delivered in a very short time. I remember in the netcom when we from Guangdong to Beijing to do a demonstration, a fiber than the hair is thinner, can be divided into more than 360 waves, take out one of the waves, you can make 16,000 high-definition movies simultaneously spread. Now with the enhancement of optical fiber technology, the capacity of bandwidth is also increasing. So broadband is a very central technology driving force in cloud computing.

The second driver is a very significant technological change, which is called parallel computing. Parallel computing is first called high-performance computing, and is mainly applied to supercomputers. The use of supercomputers in the past, one is an IDF incident, such as the simulation of atomic bombing data must be used by large computer. In addition, it is used in weather forecasting, oil exploration and other work data calculation. In the past, IBM has made a supercomputer called the Blue gene, it is very large, the calculation is placed in several rooms, each computer price of tens of millions of dollars, or even more expensive, this is the military or large enterprises can afford. But when scientists do research in physics, it becomes more expensive to do experiments, and they want to be able to make such a supercomputer at a less expensive cost. The scientists slowly invented a technique called parallel computing. This technology does not need to be a super mainframe, but a lot of personal computer CPU parallel connection, a CPU can not do this function, do 100,000 CPU, through a software to the distribution of a complex calculation to 100,000 CPU, These computing techniques can be used to solve large scale physics calculations in the laboratory. After the parallel calculation, the supercomputer became very cheap, and the last tens of millions of dollars of computers were now millions of dollars. Before and after 2000, parallel computing software began to be formed.

The concept of parallel computing is also very simple, if the use of personal computers is equivalent to a person's hand workshop, parallel computing is the tens of thousands of mass organizations to do a good job, even if the ability of each CPU is very weak, but we all go to do one thing, the division of labor after the concentration, then the efficiency is high. This software technology has become a very core technology. In the U.S. capital markets such a bad situation, there are two or three listed companies, one of which has no income, the market value has been 4 billion dollars, called VMware, do is virtu-alizationsoftware (virtualization software). Recently another company called Citrix, it does a new generation of software to the parallel computing method gradually commercialized, the various CPU concentration, focus on the major events. The virtualization of software has become the second most important technology driver of cloud computing.

The third technological force is the advent of cloud computing. The real application of the cloud begins with Yahoo. Yahoo's e-mail initially faced a very big problem, when they already have 60 million e-mail users, the use of a very large, Yahoo background computer can not solve the problem. So Jerry Yang led the engineers to find a way to imagine whether can not buy IBM's mainframe, do not buy Dell's server, using the simple PC this thing to solve the application of Yahoo email. Later, the group of Engineers with parallel computing software, wrote a very well-known operating system, the operating system can put some machines together, and then form the so-called calculation ruler, equivalent to the Super host. Today, Yahoo's email is a very typical application of the cloud, because your email all exist in the Yahoo server, like in the cloud above. Download it when you use it, and all emails exist here when you don't need it.

Yahoo Application cloud process, is around Yahoo email and backstage management of the data center wrote a set of procedures to become a cloud. People thought that the so-called cloud background operating system is very complex, but after the application is very good. Today, Google's application is also very typical cloud applications, such as Google's e-mail, Search, Document, are needed to see when the information is not needed in the central processing and storage. Including A-mazon, it is another angle for the application of the cloud. Amazon is a book-selling company, and every Christmas, sales are 1500 times to 2000 times times the usual. When I was working in a telecom company, it was the Spring Festival when all the telephones were jammed. What happens when you encounter a similar elasticity requirement? So many servers, the holidays are busy, no festive time when the server is idle there. Amazon later suggested that when the server was not available to rent out, others can lease the computing power when needed, rent on demand, so that the spare inventory can be fully used. The applications of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, three companies, I think is the real beginning of cloud computing.

The emergence of such a large technological transformation has a lot of rationality, it is from the central to the Division, from the division back to the central process. From its driving force, the first is the application of broadband, and the second is the emergence of virtualization software to be able to centralize computing capacity; The third is the application of cloud companies in the practice of the gradual discovery that the cloud can solve very practical problems. According to this kind of idea to look at the future computer pattern, I assume that in the future, Beijing may be like building a power plant, building several super information plants, possibly covering several particularly large buildings as data centers, storing a large number of servers in the heart, and connecting to our various jobs through a fiber-optic wireless network. Little information needs to be stored on its own, and a large number of calculations are done through the network, through the information plant.

Cloud computing brings revolutionary changes. First, personal terminals may no longer need Microsoft's operating system, possibly a monitor plus a central server with broadband connections. Second, Intel's chips are no longer so important. In the past, the monopoly of the computer's core was Intel's chip, and a large part of Intel's chip capability was computing. But after the advent of the Internet, people found that from the application, we use computers to calculate very limited, a lot of use is data processing. Now we see seven or eight new chip companies that do not do so much computing power, making chips is very cheap, is the price of Intel One-tenth, but the performance is 100 times times higher than Intel, because it only do data processing. So the chip in the cloud computing structure has also undergone a very big change. Intel made the chip small to keep it in the computer. Cloud computing machine in a big house, there is no need to make the chip too small. Intel's one chip to put two cores, cloud computing can put 100 cores, there is no need to do a few cores in the same chip, the general chip put together there are 100 cores. So, in the field of personal computers, two important companies are facing huge challenges.

We used to have all the computing environment divided into three pieces, one is the computer server, do information processing; the second is the switch, which is what Huawei and Lucent do; the third is the data router, which is responsible for data allocation. These three things were separate, and now cloud computing is putting processors and servers, switches and routers together. In the field of telecommunications, our current environment is also very wasteful, I sent an e-mail, this message is not sent directly to the destination, but sent to China Telecom's mail server, the mail server is very stupid, do not know where the destination, so the mail is generally first to Washington, D.C., a dedicated global domain name server In the domain name server to find the message of the registered domain name, may mail also in Shanghai Login station to find a half-day, found that I sent the destination is in China Telecom server, next to my server, and then sent over. Now the whole text message, the mail is so go, this is a very stupid system. The reason for this is that routing, swapping, and processing are all separate. Put them together in the future, I don't need to go around when I send emails.

In 1993, when I was an Asian letter, Assyria was the first company in China to do Internet. At that time everyone told me that the internet in China is not used by anyone. Some people say that at that time, China has 8,000 email users, I often doubt that the internet can survive in China? But there's a voice that keeps reminding me of the fact that email is convenient, simple and inexpensive, easier and simpler than fax and postal mail. I was convinced that the common sense of things-convenience, simplicity, cheap things must be able to survive.

The concept of cloud seems complex, but it is also very simple and common sense. Why every family has its own "well"? Why is there such a big waste? It's common sense, I can have only one monitor, everything I want to get from the center, like from the lake, to the well, to the tap. Tcl is now doing interactive TV, I talk to Li about our current problems, said that our mobile phone has a set of communications, the computer has a set of communications, the future of interactive television will have a set of communications, the three communications record synchronization is very difficult. In fact, these communications can be placed on the cloud, can be picked at any time, never lost, always synchronized. From such a simple application you will find that it is very easy to solve the problem with the cloud, and it is very difficult to walk this way through personal computers. In addition, the cloud in the industry's application is much more, this is I believe that cloud computing must be able to succeed, because it is consistent with people's common sense, the nature of the pursuit of knowledge. People need cheap and convenient things, in the past by Microsoft, Intel Monopoly era will gradually be brought about by the impact of Yu Yun end.

Cloud Computing in China

What does cloud computing mean for China? First, it is a major innovation opportunity. In the advent of the personal computer revolution, China was in the "Cultural Revolution". But we are all involved in both the Internet and mobile communications, and China is basically the most widely used beneficiary.

Unlike in the past, China is now the world's largest market, and we have three times times more mobile subscribers than the US, and the personal computer market has surpassed the US. With such a large market, can we seize the opportunity in this technological change from the fundamental technology and synchronize with the US and not apply it under the monopolistic environment of Intel, Microsoft and Google? We can at least try.

We have three advantages, one is that China's market is big enough, even if this technology is not particularly good, it is likely to apply icon VCD Standard as the industry standard. The United States has never been VCD, the United States is VHL, but our VCD has become a standard. Whether we can have our own chips and operating systems in the process, being used by China as a standard, I think this is a very important opportunity. Second, Chinese companies are not burdened. I used to accompany China Mobile to the United States to do cloud survey, from Microsoft, Google, Cisco, HP, to IBM, I found that they face a very big problem, Microsoft or IBM in cloud planning is very difficult to deal with the problem is that their existing system how to do? Google and Yahoo are actually a lot of technology in this area, But the problem they face is that technology is not open to each other, and China, both carriers and internet companies, has no such burdens. Third, although there are many technologies still in the United States, but now is not the same as in the past, we have the capital, we can invest in the United States in the field of cloud computing new generation of companies. Silicon Valley companies are more innovative, but we can use equity investments to bring such technologies to China quickly.

The core of the computer revolution is actually the problem of data, the data together into information, we have solved the problem is the transmission of information, but information to become knowledge and wisdom, need to be processed and personalized. This is actually a process from information to intelligence, which is equivalent to the transformation from the so-called industrial society to the information society. This application is very important to us, such as China to solve the environmental problems, 1.3 billion of the population of health, insurance and social security issues, if the traditional method, it is very difficult to solve. But cloud technology can provide a quick solution.

Give a simple example, for example, in smart grid applications. Now all the applications of electricity are not intelligent, we do not know how much electricity used, in which room, who to use. Now put a so-called sensor next to the electrical appliance, forming the internet of things. The sensor collects the state around each lamp, how many people are in the room, and when, the information is centralized. This vast amount of information can only be handled by the ability of cloud computing. In such a structure, can save huge power.

The application of cloud computing in every industry is revolutionary, and for China, the scope of demand is broader. I think cloud computing is a great opportunity to solve the industry's leapfrog development and make the social structure more reasonable. So since last year, I've put all my energy into this place.

Originally many people say the cloud is still very distant, is "Yunshan", but I think now is "surging".

Cloud computing is now divided into 6 levels: first, the infrastructure level, is a huge data center, in the future may be a city with two to three like a power plant data center. The second level, in each data center storage equipment, is a large number of storage needs of the next generation of CPUs; third, platform, platform is very key, is the cloud operating system, now I see these companies operating systems are running millions of computers, China Mobile, China Telecom can become supercomputers, With 500 million terminals, these terminals require the operating system to manage, so the platform will be a very core level, the fourth level, is a variety of applications, including medical applications in various industries, the fifth level is the service, the sixth level is the user, because the user is different, the terminal is not the same.

After the cloud appeared, many service types were not in the past. The first level can provide the infrastructure as a service, such as if we set up a large data center, so that banks or insurance companies do not need to build their own, leasing our data storage capacity can be; second, platform as a service, I build a huge operating system platform, you develop a wide range of applications, Renting my operating system can be the third is the so-called software as a service, the future of the software in the case of the cloud may be free, do not need to buy the database before doing. In this way, all the IT business in the past will be provided in the form of services in the structure of cloud computing.

At present, do cloud the best several companies have Google, Yahoo and other companies, and IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard in this area are backward. The main reason Google and Yahoo do cloud is because they have their own applications, and continue to develop such technology. Now do a variety of companies, many names we have heard, some companies are new, some entrepreneurial less than a year, some two years or so, from which to see early Google, early Microsoft's embryonic form. In the field of cloud computing, more than 150 companies are doing it, and now there are two investment banks in Silicon Valley that specialize in cloud consulting.

Many people ask whether the cloud is safe, so we keep it safe in the bank. If my file is stored in a personal computer or a U disk, you lose the file. On the cloud, it put this file into 10 first, each copy of 10 copies, standby in GFs, each person to take out an incomplete, only in your terminal, the 10 can be centralized record, and then use your fingerprints to decrypt. So the cloud will be safer.

I expect the cloud to be the object of our relish in the next two or three years. My predictions aren't necessarily right, but I have this feeling. China must be ready to participate in the transformation of cloud computing. I often say, can our generation of Chinese see the fundamental innovations like Watt's steam engine and Ford's invention of cars? Sometimes, I often pessimistic, we do not see this fundamental innovation. The advent of the cloud provides this opportunity.