Three years on, surprisingly, the online services provider Hotschedules.com Inc., based in Austin, has grown by more than 100% per cent a year, and the business boom has prompted them to spend 60,000 of dollars to buy new, more powerful server hardware.

has been supporting ever-expanding networks, hotschedules.com has so far improved internal server security and worked to maximize the normal working hours of nearly 375,000 users, while compressing hardware spending and stabilizing power costs became its number one problem.

The solution is virtualization, an increasingly popular technology that helps companies with limited resources to reduce the cost of server hardware. Virtualization is essentially a layer of software that enables organizations to consolidate their internal servers into less hardware. Such dozens of-server streamlining also saves money and footprint.

But virtualization is not the first choice for hotschedules.com to improve its computing power. Looking back on 1999, hotschedules.com a monthly fee to lease server capabilities and storage systems from third-party providers--the cloud computing industry is now calling it. But the lack of customer service, installation fees and limited computing power have led companies to finally decide to deploy virtualization.

hotschedules.com "The manufacturer has configured two servers and some memory for us, but that's all we've got," says Matt WuDing, chief technology officer for. The lack of customer service we can get is by no means the best experience.

Companies like Hotschedules.com quickly find that there is no single way to hit the world, and that it is impossible for all methods to improve server and storage capabilities. Some have questioned the belief that virtualization requires expensive expertise and stronger security as a guarantee. Other cloud-computing enthusiasts have been highly praised for the scalability of cloud computing, while others have questioned its overall reliability.

Even the cost-saving advantages touted by front-line manufacturers have sparked heated debate. A controversial research report by McKinsey & Co, in March 2009, said that migrating it workloads to the cloud for large businesses is more expensive and less reliable than using an internal hardware system.

So how do companies judge virtualization and cloud computing to be better for business needs?

Mark Tonsetic, the Executive Committee project manager of the infrastructure executive Committee in Washington, D.C., says the key is to choose from the project's own province, based on the characteristics of the application software or the data it supports. He added that "each plan should be evaluated with the requirements of the server workload and disaster recovery, as well as the standards of the security risks and vendors involved."

In the case of hotschedules.com, the decisive factor is to keep sustainable development needs while reducing the associated costs. When signing up for big new customers, the company realized that they had to buy 60,000 of dollars worth of server hardware, expanding the size of the data center by one fold to meet the soaring demand of large chain restaurants.

"It's really a huge outlay, so I think there's a better way to meet the requirements," WuDing said.

Since the company's Hyper-V management program was configured last year, Hotschedules.com has consolidated 42 physical servers into four units. Hotschedules.com's chief executive, Ray Pawlikowski, says the computing power has increased 10 times-fold, which allows the company to host a large number of users without having to increase its monthly spending. For example, the company spends 12000 dollars a month on average, and Pawlikowski estimates that if new servers are added to the data center, the monthly cost of electricity will soar to 20000 dollars.

Extensibility Issues

Cloud computing may offer a lower percentage of base packaging, but WuDing warns that "once you start adding flashy components to your customer's requirements, the price range becomes a hurdle". These more complex features include iphone scheduling apps, automated English-Spanish telephony and instant notification of general configuration changes.

But external cloud services are a good thing for businesses that have no intention of keeping pace with data growth.

FreshBooks The is the department responsible for online invoicing and time tracking at 2ndSite Inc., located in Toronto. The company's chief executive, Mike McDerment, says they will not only rent photos to nearly 1 million users, design storage space for logos and spreadsheets, but also deal with a number of difficult problems with infrastructure management. He knows that expanding FreshBooks servers to meet the volatile storage needs of small business users can only lead to trouble. So they ordered the cloud files service from Rackspace US Inc.

mcderment the explains that although we are a technology-leading company, the rapid expansion of large-scale data is not at the heart of our business. The storage of these files is a time-consuming effort. Rackspace These workloads out, we will be able to focus on compiling the application software.

FreshBooks The has tasted the benefits of cloud computing by using low risk applications such as file storage and management for cloud computing, and they have not experienced power outages or technical confusion. After all, the much-maligned interruption of services has plagued cloud computing from the outset. That's why mcderment is so cautious in measuring the advantages of the technology.

mcderment The says "people have to keep their eyes open and ask," can cloud computing support the core services of our company, and is the 45-minute downtime acceptable? '"。

Bill Guilles, an outpatient application software service at Israel's Deaconess Medical Center, believes that accidental cloud-service outages are something their center cannot afford. The teaching hospital in Boston has recently deployed virtualization technology from the virtualization giant VMware Company. This has allowed more than 200 private practitioners in Massachusetts to access electronic medical records. Given the nature of the high confidentiality of medical data, Guilles that the choice was sensible.

" because these are patient records, we want to have the information storage space ourselves. Of course, you can sign a confidentiality agreement with the manufacturer, but it still risks. If an abusive employee in a manufacturer sells all of our AIDS data to some medical research institutions, we will be jointly and severally liable for breach of the security agreement without any recourse. Use virtualization at least, this is our own staff, we have this data.

Finally, the choice of cloud computing or virtualization depends on your current needs assessment and future development. After all, the computing power and storage capacity of an enterprise must evolve along with the expansion of the business. "In the current environment, money is very precious, and companies must take a very serious look at the computing power requirements of the future years to determine whether they are making the right investment decisions today," Tonsetic said.

Dublin Data Center

According to Microsoft, the Dublin Data Center is Microsoft's first large-scale data center outside the US. Microsoft's data center will serve Microsoft Web apps such as Windows Live, Bing, and Azure cloud computing services. The Dublin data Center is mainly used to achieve cloud computing service requirements, covering 303,000 square feet, the initial power consumption of 5.4 MW, the future expansion of power consumption will reach 22.2 MW.

If the Berlin Data Centre solution succeeds, it will create a centre for data processing in this area, further driving more business investment in the development of this technology.

Microsoft, which spent 500 million dollars on the data center in the suburbs of Dublin, was officially launched in October 2009.