It workshop observation: Cisco sees four cloud computing echelon

What should the cloud operating system look like? Linux manufacturer Red Hat believes this should be a Linux operating system. Cisco, the network equipment giant, does not think so, despite the close cooperation with Red Hat in some areas, Cisco believes that the cloud operating system may have to take a completely different path.

Red hat and Cisco were busy with their "cloud" plans last week – the former launched a new cloud-certification program, while the latter outlined its approach to the market's cloud computing strategy, which has a common place in the two companies ' cloud computing initiatives?

Red hat last week launched an elastic cloud service that could buy cloud computing services with an hour through its certification program, and so far they have won certification partners like Amazon. At the same time, although Cisco provides an increasing number of cloud computing infrastructures, they do not currently have a partner like Red Hat certification services.

Cisco's chief technology Officer Padmasree Warrior's speech is as stylized as the IT executive's speech we heard at any time. They explored cloud computing and its trends, in any case, Cisco Systems is interested in cloud computing, apparently unifying the network and storage, and their blades and rack servers and their virtualized servers and networks will play a role in the cloud computing world, Even play an important role. We're all looking forward to it.

The big news today is that Cisco is not planning to participate in the cloud computing arena, they will build their own computing or storage cloud, competing with vendors like Amazon, IBM, Oracle and Sun, as every telecoms company, service provider, and Internet hosting company do, are building their own clouds. The entire IT world is not just about cloud-like Earth, but also clouds like Venus, or at least the eddy that forms Jupiter.

Clouds have different meanings and concepts for many different people. Warrior explains that Cisco divides cloud computing into four echelon. At the bottom is the IT infrastructure, which includes servers, storage, and networks, and the entire unified Computing unit is the participant in this infrastructure. In this area, Cisco plans to compete with IBM and HP and forge partnerships with companies such as Emc,vmware and Microsoft.

The next echelon of warrior Analytics is infrastructure, service, which means Cisco will sell cloud computing products like Amazon's Flex computing cloud, S3 and EBS storage. Warrior a slide show to date the main provider of cloud computing, Amazon, At&t, BT, HP, Ibm,sun, Oracle, Savvis,telstra and Terremark. Cisco will not be one of them, although they will inevitably try to build commercial clouds and sell cloud products.

But that means Cisco is competing with the main users of the building cloud, and if Cisco shows them the economic situation and the operational advantages of the product, those users are likely to choose the Californian system to do the job. This is no doubt taboo, at least until the unified computing system products are sold to telecom and hosting providers before they can take action.

Now the next step is the warrior of Cisco's cloud computing model, called the platform, the service, which will actually provide a cloud infrastructure for the software development framework that allows users to configure applications through this infrastructure. This is more like Google's app Engine, Microsoft's Windows Azure, and a bit like Amazon's Web services. In Cisco's concept, the application software framework is WebEx Connect, which evolved from the online Web conferencing platform in early 2000, and has become a web conferencing, chat and collaboration tool that combines the application programming interface framework with other applications, and can be expanded according to the needs of the IT enterprise.

The top and last echelon that Cisco has helped us build is software as a service, where Cisco is absolutely intent on becoming a partner with Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Google. WebEx will become its brand. WebEx mail--a mail and calendar service based on Cisco's Postpath products acquired last summer will be added to the WebEx product suite and delivered to users at the top of Cisco's own cloud infrastructure. Dennerline added that more than 4 of the world. 500 million of knowledge workers use Web conferencing, and the sales of collaborative software and services are about $34 billion trillion, Dennerline said. "We don't have an absolute share in this area yet." As for how Cisco will get their absolute share, it's like the old saying: Build, buy and cooperate.