The nature of cloud computing and technology-driven analysis

Cloud computing technology, or just this term has been popular in the past two years, this is from China as the national "Twelve-Five" plan of strategic emerging industries can be seen. All kinds of it-related products on the market, and even some traditional electric appliance manufacturers to connect their products and cloud computing as far as possible. But what is the nature of cloud computing? Does virtualization mean everything? Virtualization technology has a long history, the earliest can be traced back to the mainframe era, then why not the concept of cloud computing? This article carries on some shallow level analysis discussion, the introduction jade meaning.

Cloud computing is ultimately an IT service delivery model, whether it is a public cloud or a private cloud (categorized by the ownership of IT devices), it is essentially an end user of it that can access IT services anytime, anywhere, and easily, and at the level of access to the service to the IaaS (only virtual hardware resources are available), PaaS (get programmable environment), SaaS (direct access to software application services). As for how to be able to call cloud computing at anytime, simply and quickly, there is no standard in the industry, no wonder that many tablet manufacturers with WiFi capabilities call their products the end product of cloud computing.

Since it is a service, it involves operations, although many private cloud responsible departments (such as the cloud within the enterprise) have little sense of self operation, but this will be a trend in the future. For example, the issue of user billing, which is rarely used in the domestic private cloud, in fact, the billing function is a good reflection of the IT department's actual application costs and input costs of the difference between. If private cloud applications are billed to be well below their total cost of ownership, why not turn to the public cloud service?

Since cloud computing needs to operate, it is natural and cost-related, and no operator is not concerned about cost. Virtualization is a technology that enables cloud operators to drastically reduce their operating costs by making full use of computing, storage, and network equipment resources. Originally a server only for a few users of certain applications, even if these applications are not online or use only a small amount of resources, but the server's spare resources can not be used for other devices, and virtualization is to dilute the traditional physical devices, more decentralized resources to concentrate, The so-called pool (pooling).

So why did we start talking about cloud computing until today? Virtualization is widely used in mainframes and small machines, and the virtualization of mainframe and minicomputer is at the level of physical processors, and the operating systems and applications running above can release unused processors, memory, and I/O resources for other partitions at any time. Server virtualization Technology for x86 architectures has not arisen until recent years, for the following reasons:

The first is a further increase in processor computing performance, which in turn increases the amount of idle resources that may appear on a single server, and virtualization technology (although it pays a certain cost of performance) translates this promotion directly into TCO and ROI benefits. In the case of AMD's latest release of the Hao Long 6200 series processor, its performance improvement in the virtualization environment can bring 30% TCO advantage, the return on investment can increase about 15% to 20%. At the same time, AMD Hao long processors and AMD chipsets can provide a powerful tool for cloud architectures that are energy efficient and easy to manage, providing all the required performance for a superior user experience. and through direct-attached architecture, you can provide enterprise's superior memory bandwidth, scalability, and I/O performance.

Next is the heat dissipation and power dissipation, the previous x86 system architecture in this respect is deeply criticized, the high density of the large-scale computing center of the construction cost is quite tall. And leading energy efficiency is the main competitive advantage of cloud infrastructure. The main component of any cloud computing environment is the ability to provide balanced performance with lower energy consumption. The AMD Cool Dragon processor, for example, can reduce power consumption during periods of low usage, while all of its main management software can help companies reduce energy consumption significantly. AMD Coolcore technology can reduce the individual core of power consumption, AMD PowerNow technology, can cross the processor core dynamic management of power utilization, can help enterprises better reduce power consumption.

In addition, processor support for virtualization technology is critical. For example, AMD Hao long processor contains the AMD virtualization (Amd-v Technology) suite of hardware technology to help reduce the cost of virtualization software. While providing memory management for hardware-based virtual machines, AMD supports extended migrations to help virtualization software implement real-time migration of virtual machines across the AMD Hao long processor.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)