US cloud computing Image cloud drives entrepreneurship

March 19, 2012-26th, we took part in the "Cloud America Tour", organized by the China Electronics Society Cloud Computing Experts Committee, to visit a number of US cloud computing companies in Seattle and San Francisco, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Rackspace such as the industry giants, Heroku, Engine Yard, puppet and other emerging cloud computing companies, but also including Cloudcamp as the representative of the U.S. cloud computing community. Although in a hurry, it is difficult to carry out very in-depth communication, but a wide range of contacts, the U.S. cloud computing industry and technology development has more intuitive understanding.

Microsoft

The first stop we visited was at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. Enterprise IT to cloud computing has become a trend, so Microsoft and software and hardware giants IBM, HP, Oracle, Dell, are actively layout cloud computing technology, products and platforms, or acquisitions, or actively research and development.

Why is cloud computing so important now? Rolf Harms, who is in charge of Microsoft's corporate cloud strategy, gives the answer from an economic point of view:

After moving to the Azure platform, Microsoft's own official web site, microsoft.com, reduced costs by 90%, availability from 99.1% to 99.997%, and deployment time from weeks down to 45 minutes, improving dramatically.

Harms's introduction contains a picture of the different uses of the private cloud and the public cloud, very clear, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Private cloud and public cloud application scenario

In the long run, the public cloud has an obvious price advantage over the private cloud, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Comparison of private and public cloud costs

One of the focuses of the cloud computing war is how to reduce the cost of building and operating data centers and environmental issues. Facebook's Open-source Open Compute project has exacerbated competition in data center technology. Microsoft has also invested heavily in cloud computing data centers to develop a new generation of data centers. This time we had the honor to visit Microsoft in Redmond Ridge Research and Development Data center, all aspects are very advanced, although the equipment density is extremely (52u/rack), the Pue value still can reach 1.17. It should be said that it is not backward in pure equipment, but this thousands of square meters of data center only 10 people in charge of operation, while the main Quincy data center supporting the azure platform, covers an area of 470,000 square feet, operating personnel also only 35 people, the degree of automation is astonishing. In addition, because the equipment density is too large, Cisco existing switches can not support, we must develop a new generation.

Figure 3 Gartner's IaaS Magic Quadrant

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)