Zhu Bunzhi: Ten Myths about cloud computing

Cloud computing is undoubtedly one of the biggest hotspots at the moment, Shenzhou Earth "cloud", everywhere in the construction of cloud computing Base: the National Development and Reform Commission in 16 cities to promote the national innovative city pilot work, and selected the Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Wuxi 5 cities first to carry out cloud computing services innovation and development pilot demonstration work. But the rapid development of cloud computing has led many people to fail to understand cloud computing correctly and to misunderstand cloud computing. To this end, Chinabyte reporter recently interviewed the IBM Greater China Region Cloud Computing Center General Manager Zhu Bunzhi, please her according to IBM's practical experience, pointed out that the current people in the cloud computing domain the most common mistakes.

Ms. Zhu Bunzhi, general manager of IBM Greater China Cloud Computing Center

The first big mistake, many people think cloud computing is grid computing. But in fact, there is a very big difference. Grid technology is an integral part of cloud computing, and how to provide resources to a task is the main difference between grid and cloud. Grid computing focuses on how to move a task to what it needs, typically a remote two-period resource that is already available. Usually, a grid is a group of servers, a large computing task can be split into a number of small tasks are assigned to these servers to run parallel, grid computing is mainly used in education and scientific research institutions, but in the enterprise applications less.

In fact, the cloud can be seen as a phased upgrade of the previous generation of computing patterns (such as grid computing, utility computing), and cloud computing is a computing model in which applications, data, and IT resources are provided to users through the network in a service way. At the same time, cloud computing is also an infrastructure management methodology, a large number of computing resources to form the IT pool, Ufida Dynamic Initiative highly virtualized resources for users to use. In a cloud computing environment, all computing resources, such as servers, can be dynamically generated from the hardware infrastructure and adapted to the needs of the task. As a result, cloud computing can support grid computing, and it can also support non grid computing, such as three-tier architecture applications or Web 2.0 applications. Overall, cloud computing has the ability to quickly deploy new businesses and quickly support user logons, which are not resilient to grid computing.

Implementation of cloud computing needs to discard the original IT infrastructure resources, this is the second understanding of cloud computing misunderstanding. The essence of cloud computing is to maximize the utilization of IT investments through consolidation, sharing, and dynamic provisioning, including new investments and existing resources. As a result, implementing cloud computing does not require abandoning existing IT infrastructure resources, and cloud computing systems can efficiently monitor and manage existing and new IT infrastructure resources.

The third misconception is that cloud computing is only suitable for a certain scale of enterprises, some people think that the cloud is only suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises, some people think that only for large companies. In fact, cloud computing can be divided into two broad categories, the public cloud and the private cloud. Small and medium-sized enterprises can derive great benefits from the public cloud: they can get resources from the cloud provider without having to buy the infrastructure. For big businesses or government departments, you can also improve management, quality, and service by building your own private cloud. Therefore, cloud computing can be suitable for different types of customers.

The fourth myth is that cloud computing is a technology or a product. In fact, cloud computing should be an end-to-end solution that combines multiple products and technologies. Cloud computing is implemented through a variety of technologies, such as virtualization, automation, Web 2.0, and so on. Cloud computing platforms require different technologies to implement the technology architecture IaaS, PAAs or SaaS, or even cloud security supplements.

The fifth misconception is that cloud computing is SaaS. SaaS is only part of cloud computing, and the ultimate goal of the cloud is to implement ITaaS (it as a service). Of course, SaaS can benefit from the rapid deployment and resource extensions provided by the cloud, so that SaaS applications can be very scalable on both the number of users and rapid deployment.

The big mistake is to think of it as just virtualization. Virtualization is just as much a part of cloud computing. The more advanced part of cloud than virtualization is that the cloud can provide an end user with a customized IT environment for the virtual machine to deploy directly to the user. Cloud computing integrates existing technologies for virtualization, Grid computing, and utility computing and builds on them.

The seventh misconception is that the cloud does not guarantee data security. This actually depends on how the enterprise stores their data. Some public clouds do not meet all the needs of the enterprise. However, they can share messages, photos and videos, or some other personal application service. For the enterprise, there are two aspects of security issues, one is the technical level, in the private cloud environment, the data is still stored in the firewall, and does not weaken security. At the same time, because cloud computing can help companies to do off-site disaster preparedness, but also to help enterprises improve security. The second level is about the degree of trust in the vendor of the public cloud. For businesses, storing data on a standardized and standardized cloud ensures the safe and efficient use of data.

The eighth misconception is that the financial crisis will reduce the IT investment budget and affect the broad implementation of cloud computing. But in fact, according to IDC analysis, the financial crisis has accelerated the pace of adoption of cloud technology. From an economic point of view, the cloud can help enterprises save 80% of the data center usable area, save 60% of the power and refrigeration consumption, achieve 3 times times the utilization of facilities, so that existing resources can be more efficient use.

The Nineth myth is that cloud computing is not mature enough. In fact, cloud computing has now been validated in many places, such as the Wuxi government and the European Itricity Project, which has been applied to the production environment with IBM's help, and has delivered cloud computing convenience to their customers.

However, to turn the benefits of cloud computing into reality and reduce risk, IBM advises customers to adopt a 80/20 approach, which is to move 80% of the business to the cloud, which should benefit from dynamic resource management while retaining 20% of the key business deployments in a proprietary private environment.

The last myth is that the world needs only one cloud to be enough. For example, because of bandwidth and latency issues, the customer's requirements for the level of cloud computing services, we see that the cloud's development prospects are actually very regional. In addition, in different industries, cloud applications are not the same. In fact, cloud can be customized to provide the best quality of service to end users, in addition to universal services, and user groups can be tailored to their own characteristics

To define special services and applications.

(Responsible editor: admin)