Three main approaches to cloud computing "landing"

Cloud computing is unstoppable. The global spending on cloud computing services is likely to grow 3 times times over the next 5 years, according to a report published by IDC, 6 times times the growth rate of the traditional IT industry. By 2012, cloud computing will reach $42 billion trillion in market size, accounting for 25% of total IT spending growth. The fourth annual benchmark survey, conducted by platform company in 2011 at the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC 2011), also shows that as more and more enterprises use private cloud to significantly improve the resource utilization of the data center, the degree of understanding and recognition of the technology by business decision-makers has improved markedly. The number of companies planning to deploy a private cloud has grown from the previous 28% to the current 33%.

Evaluate the value of cloud computing

The fundamental reason why companies need cloud computing is that traditional it methods don't work. In the face of fierce competition in the market, the existing application and Server island model can not meet the ever-changing needs of enterprises. Today, it is expensive, unresponsive, and well-funded, but ultimately the resources available are underutilized. Most servers use only 20% or less. The lack of flexibility, time and cost of buying expensive systems to meet each business requirement is equivalent to installing a small generator in each office to ensure power. IT departments must provide a competitive service model that delivers infrastructure and computing resources through Plug and Play, Pay-per-use services. Cloud computing is leading us towards that goal.

So while there is still a lot of hype on cloud computing, cloud computing is not a flash in the pan, it's the next logical step in the development of the data center from mainframe to client/server to the current cloud computing process. Of course, before implementing the cloud strategy, companies must identify the authenticity and evaluate the value of cloud computing correctly.

The best way to assess the value of cloud computing is to evaluate it from the economic drivers that drive large and medium-sized enterprises to adopt private clouds. Cloud computing enables IT departments to maximize the efficiency of computing, network, and storage resources, while reducing costs, speeding the delivery of IT services, and leveraging the power of resource sharing. This helps businesses deliver IT services faster-by eliminating or simplifying enterprise-entrenched islands IT systems migrate to an infrastructure that can respond to new business requirements in real time, reduce IT costs-more efficient use of IT resources, meaning that fewer servers are needed, reducing the footprint of the data center, Power and cooling requirements, in addition, there is no longer a need for IT organizations to provide a resource-configured island of excess infrastructure for each application to meet expected peak demand and reduce capital expenditure.

Three ways to cloud computing

All roads lead to Rome! Although there are many ways to move from an existing client/server infrastructure to cloud computing, for enterprise users, the platform company believes there are three ways to be the most important and proven to be the most effective. These three ways are:

• From virtual machines to the cloud-for users who have deployed applications on virtual machines, you can combine virtual servers to form manageable virtual machine clusters. As the number of virtual machine clusters increases, so does the need for resource sharing, and companies start deploying virtualized management platforms to automate the provisioning of virtual machines and computing resources across virtual machine clusters, creating a private cloud that is run by the IT department within the enterprise.

• From grid to cloud-some businesses are already running grids. This distributed system is managed by IT personnel and is often shared by compute-intensive or data-intensive applications. Virtual machine technology is not used in grids because each application can easily consume all the resources on a single server. In addition, multiple servers are often used together to run parallel applications. By deploying cloud management software, the grid can expand its scope to support more types of applications. Virtualization Technology and resource configuration tools enable the enterprise grid to become a private cloud.

• From desktop to cloud-applications can migrate from dedicated servers to shared infrastructures and access from client devices.

Companies can choose any of these approaches and even choose several ways to implement cloud computing for different applications or different business units. To ensure success, the adoption of cloud computing should follow an orderly, step-by-step approach, rather than a hope for overnight. The progress made depends on the scalability and cost-effectiveness requirements of a particular application, or on features such as automation of business processes.

Cloud computing platform helps cloud computing "hit the ground"

When deploying cloud computing, organizations need a management framework that leverages existing hardware and software assets and supports critical business applications. This framework must facilitate the pooling of physical and virtual resources and provide the infrastructure as a service to business users in a flexible self-service manner. Cloud computing management platform can be implemented with the underlying Basic module building technology (Hardware, operating system and virtual machine) independent, so enterprises can keep up with market trends, avoid being locked by vendors.

The platform company reminds users that they should be aware of their expertise in choosing cloud computing management Platform vendors: Creating value for a large and complex enterprise environment that can be scaled up and supporting the environment for a long time, and that the manufacturer must also be fit for the entire ecosystem of the enterprise to work with other hardware vendors, Operating system vendors, virtualization vendors, system integrators, System management software vendors, applications and middleware vendors to integrate and collaborate.

Platform's End-to-end cloud infrastructure management Platform platform ISF is a resource management and scheduling platform that centrally manages heterogeneous virtual and physical resources and provides rapid deployment, dynamic resource scheduling, and resilient computing for the various applications running on it. Its IaaS capabilities help customers implement self-service on-demand computing, networking, and storage resource applications and usage. Platform ISF also enables middleware and distributed applications to migrate to the cloud platform more easily, quickly, and with the ability to provide PAAs (platform-service) and SaaS (software-as-services), ensuring that middleware and distributed application providers are more focused on their application logic without having to consider the underlying computing, The scheduling and management of storage and network resources can significantly improve the utilization of the platform with less resources. In addition, the use of platform ISF can quickly transform an enterprise's internal data center into a dynamic private cloud (IaaS) without fear of being locked by the vendor.

Recently, platform launched a new platform ISF3.0. The new platform ISF3.0 includes the cloud services designer and employs Intel TXT technology, which enhances the security of virtualized environments and dramatically simplifies the management of private clouds. Platform ISF3.0 covers a wide range of infrastructure to multi-tier business applications, including HPC and "large data", provides an integrated management platform for a variety of heterogeneous virtual and physical systems, not only providing a comprehensive solution for enterprise private cloud deployments, It also provides support for external cloud service providers.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)