Cloud computing - Part 2

This is in continuation of my part 1 on cloud computing.

Organizations are not going to jump into cloud computing, they would evolve and move towards characteristic of cloud computing infrastructure over period of time as they feel confident about the same. As far as cloud computing is concerned, I believe we are at stage, similar to, as of early 90’s with respect to IT services outsourcing. IT services were outsourced, so that organization could concentrate on the ‘core’ business area, cloud computing could well be a further step forward.

Now, let look at the service models normally considered in cloud computing.

SAaS : Software – as – a service :
This model is talked about quite some time now, business application are hosted on server maintained by data centers. Legal issues, security, integration and confidentiality of data of the deterring factors on this model at this point of time. Once policies, procedures and standards get defined and refined our the period of time, this is bound to get adopted, over period of time.

In terms of usage, the application are accessed through web browser and terms and condition could be governed by service level agreements.

Possible examples could be simple free generic email service to complex ERP system. Some time back, read an article in leading newspaper about ERP application in cloud computing at Tirupur, India. Its interesting to note, cloud computing has gaining acceptance even at a generally convervative society like India and that too at small town like Tirupur.

IaaS : Infrastructure – as – a service:
Computation servers, storage, hardware are considered under this service model. One would also find free on storage offered in web, this could be refered as IaaS.

PaaS : Platform – as – a service:
Development and deployment platform could be offered as a service to developers to build, deploy manage, application on SAaS.

If one looks at cloud deployment strategy, its normally, public, private and hybrid clouds. I feel the name itself quite significant to describe about the type.

The next question is any one's mind would be, what kind of hardware does one require towards hosting cloud computing?.

At this point of time, normally cloud computing is deployed in traditional model. By traditional model, I mean one might have a server to cater database tier or application tier, which is almost a 'silos' based model. But, since cloud computing, one need to have efficient hardware and manpower(refer to my example of restaurant) to manage cloud better in a data centre. This is where hardware could play a main role, the new technology like grid computing, Real application clusters, automatic storage management, server scale up features plays in important role toward better management and deployment of cloud.

Will briefly provide more details about the hardware part in the next write up.