HP is in the Cloud era competition focus comes

People are always obsessed with the definition of cloud computing, and in this article let's put aside the trouble and take a look at the issues that are not often discussed, and understand the real problems of the major cloud computing providers, including pricing and contract terms.

Cloud computing is getting closer to us

Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud cloud service is arguably the most famous, but now the market is in turmoil mucilloid, we have collected detailed data from 12 underlying architecture cloud providers, including prices, services, contracts, and supported platforms, and so on.

We can conclude from the data that while Microsoft is sparing no effort to expand the market impact of Hyper-V, almost all vendors are using VMware or Xen hypervisor, and only one of the 12 vendors supports Microsoft's virtual Server. Vendors support a wide variety of operating systems, Web servers, and multiple databases, and can divide physical resources into small chunks to be allocated to one or more customers. All 12 vendors allow businesses to purchase a small amount of computing resources (as low as 256MB of memory) and pay only for actual consumption of memory, hard disk space, and bandwidth. In addition, only At&t, IBM and Unisys need annual contracts.

Paying computing power in real terms makes cloud computing a bit like paying electricity. "We don't think of cloud computing as a new technology, but as a kind of sales model," says Bryan Doerr, Savvis's chief technology officer. The price competition is also unprecedentedly intense, the lowest price today is the Rackspace provides 1.5 cents per hour for each CPU. Cloud computing as an emerging market, the current pricing model has not been formed, as the number of market participants continue to increase, the expected price competition is still fierce. However, it is questionable whether the analogy of cloud computing to electricity is appropriate, because the difference between data and electricity is quite large. For more information please refer to the 51cto.com related report "The data is not electricity outside the cloud is far from us".

For example, Savvis started hosting the virtual server earlier this year, and Verizon launched the Cloud-based infrastructure service in June, and Unisys one months after Verizon. Rackspace is gradually positioning itself as a cloud-bottom architecture builder, while the smaller 3Tera and Skytap provide a more segmented computing service.

The attraction of cloud computing to buy CPU on demand

Virtual host and software testing and development are the two most mainstream uses of the underlying architecture as a service (Infrastructure-as-a-service). If an E-commerce Web site places a Web server in the cloud, how much computing power is required will be based on increased or reduced network traffic, so there is no need to configure hardware based on peak processing capabilities.

Software testing is the beginning of many enterprises to go into cloud computing. The enterprise IT team can buy pre-packaged software stacks from vendors, allocate memory and hard drives, and load and start testing. Once the test is complete, the project can be terminated.

For example, the satellite broadband provider, WildBlue, purchased the cloud services provided by Skytap as a test and development environment, with a return of 4 months, WildBlue completed the test project for only 9500 dollars, and if they purchased, configured and managed the hardware themselves, The chief information officer, Casullo, estimates that it will cost at least 500,000 dollars.

What is the focus of competition in the cloud era? If you use this question to ask a hardware device manufacturer, the answer is likely to be the data center's overall solution, at least in the eyes of Cisco, a company that has been leading the way in the network device arena and has an overwhelming share of the industry to announce the start of a manufacturing server full access to the data center area, and now Cisco is likely to have one more fellow-traveler, it is Hewlett-Packard, a giant in computer hardware that has just taken over 13.9 billion of dollars in the price of its leading IT service provider last year, and now news has emerged that it has locked its takeover target in the area of network equipment, with the potential target of Brocade Communications Bae (brocade) or Juniper NX (Juniper Network).