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Cloud computing isn't another name for "utility computing" or just a buzzword that will be replaced by another term. "The cloud is the next evolution of the Internet," declared Russ Daniels,Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ)'s CTO for cloud computing and VP of cloud strategy.
Part of Daniels' responsibility is explaining to customers how they should think about their future and cloud computing.
"Every enterprise customer who comes to HP expects to have a conversation about the cloud," he noted at a breakfast meeting for the press in San Francisco. Daniels described how HP views where cloud computing is headed.
"Effectively, the world is cleaving in two," he explained. There's the traditional world of the enterprise data center, which will continue to exist, and there is a new external supply of compute power and services accessible over the Internet. The data center is almost always on the company's premises and contains servers and networks dedicated to particular applications and tasks. The cloud is off-premises, and its resources are primarily shared across many customers' tasks and can be expanded upon demand to meet traffic increases.
"Virtually every enterprise will operate in hybrid mode," with some of its operations on-premises and some in the cloud, he predicted. Contrary to some theories put forth, he said cloud computing is not a replacement for the data center. "The idea that we're going to one day throw a switch and move everything out to one of a small number of external data centers, located next to a low-cost power source, is nonsensical. It's not going to happen. Cloud computing is not the end of IT," he said.
Daniels said he attended a recent conference where Marissa Mayer, Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s VP of search products and user experience, and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN).com CTO Werner Vogels were asked if they believed that in the future, there would be three cloud-based data centers: Amazon's, Google's, and Microsoft's. "They said yeah, we think that's the way the world is going to go," Daniels said.
But HP takes this stand: "That's a radical oversimplification. The cloud doesn't displace the business data center. HP thinks there will be a balance of the two." Other data center forms, including small, mobile ones, will undercut the once-assumed advantages of big new data centers at cheap power sources.
Daniels pointed out that present cloud models call for virtualized files to be imported in a prearranged format and run on computer resources prepared to receive them. But the cloud's economy of scale trails off at a certain point, if the workloads themselves haven't been rearchitected for cloud computing, not merely virtualized and moved off the enterprise's premises.
"If you use virtualization [internally], you will gain a significant reduction in cost. If you move the workload to the cloud, you have to redesign the software architecture of the workload" to realize another "order of magnitude" cost savings, he said.
Daniels used the example of Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).com, which created sales force automation as an online service for medium and small businesses that didn't have the IT infrastructure to implement Siebel Systems sales force automation.
"Salesforce couldn't just host Siebel's application. It wasn't designed for multitenancy. It wasn't designed for variable demand," he said.
By creating a new multitenant application, hosted in a large data center, Salesforce brought cloud computing to a specific business application for small and medium business. Because multiple customers could use the same application, and flow their data through the same database server without intermingling, Salesforce could charge $40 a seat for its application, instead of $400 or $4,000.
Enterprises with heavy workloads for the cloud will likewise have to redesign their software so that its workload can be subdivided, distributed across many servers, or possibly run in parallel on a server array. "If we don't get the software workload design right, you won't get the linear cost savings," where savings increase in step with increased usage of the cloud, Daniels said. Cloud computing is a new phenomenon made up of several familiar ones: the economy of scale of a large, professionally managed data center,; Internet technologies that follow standards and allow for predictable connections; and virtualization, which allows for full server utilization. When combined, however, they represent a new form of computing, Daniels said. "The cloud ultimately is a transformative force. It allows you to do things that you couldn't do with traditional technology."
He gave the example of a large supply chain, such as HP (NYSE: HPQ)'s $60 billion-a-year supply chain of computer parts and software. Knowledge about each part is limited because integrating all the vendors and steps of the supply chain is a cost-prohibitive task. But if HP requires each vendor to file reports in the cloud on its parts as they ship, HP can perform analytics on the assembled information that could track down specific issues and problems.
"The [cloud] transformation allows integration of information that wouldn't have happened before," he said.
Gartner analyst David Cearley added to Daniels' analysis by saying that cloud computing providers will get to automated operations in the 2010-2012 timeframe, or sooner than enterprise data centers. Doing so will give them a competitive advantage over on-premises computing, he said.
Enterprises will get to automated operations in the 2015-2020 timeframe, he said.
In another estimate, Cearley said today's "monolithic" clouds, where one workload is accepted and processed for one enterprise, eventually will be offset by vertical workloads for multiple parties, such as HP's supply chain integration, in the 2010-2012 timeframe.
From 2012 to 2015, different cloud suppliers will learn how to federate their resources so that a single customer can make use of more than one cloud at a time.
From 2019 onward, cloud suppliers will operate in standardized environments that allow customers to move workloads or accounts from one supplier to another.
Daniels and Cearley agreed that the backbone of cloud computing is the production of services. "Instead of isolation islands, different people will be building services, all to operate in the cloud," Cearley said.
A new kind of systems integrator already is emerging, such as Aptiva, who offers to combine services from, say, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), to take advantage of the cloud for the enterprise, he noted. Although Daniels didn't name them, examples of such integrators might include theIBM (NYSE: IBM) Blue Cloud initiative, Appirio, or Juniper Networks (NSDQ: JNPR).
How are other companies striking a balance between innovation and cutting costs with cloud computing? InformationWeek has published an independent analysis of this topic. Download the report here (registration required).
-----------------------------BY Charles Babcock
Source：InformationWeek
Copyright © 2009 United Business Media LLC, All rights reserved.
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