Several concepts that cloud computing needs to be clarified

From IBM, Google, Amazon to Dell, Microsoft (and, if possible, a long list of company names after that), these companies are sparing no effort to push the concept of cloud computing and interpret cloud computing and related applications from their perspective.

Although journalists have interviewed several cloud-related experts and written several articles about cloud computing, they still want to explore the concept of cloud computing in greater depth. This time, the reporter contacted the IBM company's global vice President Dr. Mattwan, hoping to help clarify several concepts of cloud computing.

Cloud is the inevitable development of Web services

In many people's minds, the concept of cloud computing, like its name, appears out of thin air. However, Mattwan said that cloud computing is the inevitable outcome of the development of Web services to a certain stage.

Mattwan that before companies can send a lot of services through the Internet, such as booking, map, search, after these various services increased, the reliability of services, availability requirements have increased dramatically. It is difficult to provide sufficient performance through clustering, and it must be achieved by building data centers around the world. For large companies such as Google and Amazon, who have the capacity to build data centers scattered across continents and have the capacity to spare, while other small companies do not, then Google or Amazon can put their infrastructure The ability to serve as a service to the relevant users, this is the origin of cloud computing.

For some large multinationals, they need someone to help them build the infrastructure services that are based on the internet, which is what IBM Blue Cloud computing is all about.

Different foundations lead to cloud concepts

After IBM proposed the concept of cloud computing, almost overnight, companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are trumpeting their cloud computing offerings and are fundamentally different. In this respect, Mattwan said, there is no one who is wrong, everyone can be called cloud computing, but because the basis of their own cloud computing different, will lead to the current cloud computing development direction and concept is different.

According to Matt Wang's introduction, for Google, its biggest business as a search engine, the purpose of cloud computing is to optimize the performance of its search engine, after the development of its infrastructure, want to use it as a service for users, but it loaded a lot of services, including word processing , maps, image processing, etc., it should be said that Google's cloud computing concept is close to an application cloud.

And Amazon as an E-commerce company, it provides the EC2 and S3 products, is the infrastructure as a service for users to use, let others install their own applications. For Salesforce, it started out as a SaaS website Salesforce.com, and it needed to provide a unified interface for others to carry Salesforce services to expand their ecological environment.

Mattwan said that the vast majority of IBM's software products are middleware, so, for IBM, is the hope that the application is based on the Internet (SaaS-representative), IBM will be based on the entire Internet to provide middleware, this is the fundamental starting point of IBM Cloud computing.

Cloud computing is much larger than virtualization

While visiting IBM's China Cloud Computing Center, a demonstration of cloud computing capabilities was shown when the IBM Technology manager demonstrated how to assign user requests for cloud computing resources and provisioning resources in a way that was very similar to how server virtualization was previously understood by the reporter, and in fact, IBM's cloud computing is really the division of server resources through Xen virtualization technology. So what is the relationship between cloud computing and server virtualization?

In this Mattwan, the reporter sees the function demo is only part of cloud computing, which involves quite a lot of content. For example, he says, it's like going into a shopping mall, where there might be restaurants, and if you just go into the restaurant and come out and say, "shopping malls and restaurants are one thing, it's obviously wrong."

"Cloud computing is not just a virtualization of infrastructure, but a platform for application-level submissions and more." "Mattwan said. IBM has just built a framework for users, which includes a variety of infrastructure, and how users use the architecture of cloud computing to decide for themselves.

IBM offers not only blue cloud products

Previously, it has been said that IBM's cloud computing is primarily for companies to provide their own cloud computing infrastructure, rather than Google or Amazon as the common services to provide cloud infrastructure. Mattwan says IBM is also setting up a data center in North Carolina to provide cloud computing services to the outside world.

Mattwan said that IBM's data center will be completed in the fourth quarter of 2009, not only will the use of IBM's latest technology, and the building itself will be environmentally friendly materials, in operation, will provide different types of external enterprises cloud computing services, to achieve the IBM Cloud computing Services customer number of large-scale development.

Cloud computing is not competitive with the Internet

At the ceremony of the June Beijing Cloud Computing Center, IBM executives said that cloud computing would be as important as the Internet in the next 12 years. In this respect, the reporter expressed puzzled, why will cloud computing and the Internet to compare?

Mattwan that this may be a mistake at the time of translation. In fact, he said, cloud computing is the driving force behind the development of the second generation of the Internet, rather than competing with the Internet.

"With the Internet, we can push cloud computing. In addition, cloud computing is also an important driver of the Internet's development in the next phase. "Mattwan said.