No one can easily define it. But the next phase of the computer revolution is busy being born out of the ashes of the current economic crisis. The new approach delivers computing power as a service over the Web, like an electric utility, instead of making customers buy computers they manage themselves.
It goes by the hazy term of ‘cloud computing.’
Forget your tidy distinctions between hardware and software, networking and storage, the Web and the desktop. Most disappear as they merge into the cloud.
Clouds are located in centralised data centres that can house thousands of pizza-sized boxes, networked computers that can each process millions of transactions. They take advantage of the latest software that go by buzzwords like Web 2.0, virtualisation and open source.
Always in search of the next big idea, the technology industry has latched onto the cloud as its big new organising principle, once more normal corporate spending patterns return.
‘Compelling economics will ultimately force you to move to clouds,’ Erich Clementi, IBM’s general manager of cloud computing, told a Dublin conference last week. IBM is setting up centralised cloud computing centres across the globe.
Six months into a financial crisis that has stifled most corporate initiative, two of the world’s largest technology companies are taking the offensive.
Network gear leader Cisco has jumped into the market for big business computers called servers, while computer maker IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems, another server maker, in its biggest merger deal ever, sources say. The value of the deal could run up to $8 billion.
Both Cisco and IBM aim to capitalise on the emerging shift to cloud computing, in particular by grabbing bigger slices of the data centre supply market. They are looking to turn vast farms of server hardware and software into utility services that customers can rent.
The promise of the cloud is to do away with the need of organisations and individuals to maintain their own computer hardware, software and storage and network gear. The cloud metaphor is used to disguise the complexity of bringing all these pieces together. It’s the difference between owning and repairing a car yourself or leasing one with a mechanic to keep it running.
These actions, as they play out in coming years, have hundreds of companies large and small reassessing their strategies ahead of what Wall Street analysts are predicting will be a wave of mergers in the tech world. This consolidation could sweep up not only hardware makers, but software, networking, data storage and semiconductor suppliers as well as Web services.
There is no agreement on how to define the cloud. There are complicated academic definitions and others full of self-serving marketing spin. Computer maker Dell, created industry uproar by trying to trademark ‘cloud computing’ last year, but has retreated after widespread criticism they were claiming ownership for a generically accepted phrase.
The notion of centralised utility-scale computing dates is decades-old, dating back to the 1960s when corporations rented time slots on mainframes. Web hosting services proliferated during the 1990s. The term ‘cloud’ to describe the inner workings of the Internet-at-large date back to the 1970s.
This is all part of a long shift from hardware-based computing to software and now Web-based computing. Clouds allow unused computing resources to be shared, or ‘virtualised,’ and reused by other customers, improving efficiency. To further cut costs, most rely on inexpensive open-source software.
Source: bdnews24.com