The Planet Blog

After reading our last few posts, you know all about “the cloud” now, right? Well, yes and no. You know about the cloud in a general sense, but when it comes to current applications of the cloud, we need to drill down a little deeper.

The hosting industry is abuzz about cloud computing and cloud storage. Based on some completely fictional research*, 7 out of 10 hosting customers do not differentiate between the two. *The numbers may be fictional, but based on my experience working with customers, the sentiment is entirely true.

Virtualization and Abstraction

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane … back to the days of virtualization. Why? Because the work put into developing virtualization has been a springboard for cloud technologies – specifically with regard to abstraction, the ability to present computational power and/or storage space without theoretical limits. Through abstraction, a single physical server can be divided into several distinct virtual servers, which function as independent physical servers that have their own dedicated resources.

Cloud computing and cloud storage take the principle of abstraction and tweak it. Instead of taking one physical server and creating several independent virtual servers, the development of the cloud takes multiple physical servers and creates virtual servers that freely move between physical machines as though they were all a single server. Naturally, that’s attractive to a hosting customer.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing allows access to theoretically limitless computational resources. A user can scale from one Web server and one database server, to five Web servers and three database servers on the fly, with no upfront capital expenditure. Cloud computing essentially makes one large virtualized server that spans the entire available hardware infrastructure. Instead of having 20 servers with 4GHz of processor power each, the cloud shows 80GHz of processor power.

Cloud computing customers purchase a part of that cloud computing platform, and if no other customers are using resources on a given installation, that customer has the can use all 80GHz of process power one minute and scale back to almost nothing the next minute. The technology is in its infancy, but it’s helping to redefine the concept of a server: It’s not a black-and-white matter of physical resources anymore.

While the hardware abstraction is impressive, the greatest potential benefit of cloud computing is its use in Software as a Service (SaaS). It’s revolutionary to have an office application that scales from 10 users to 10,000 users and also available to anyone or any device with a network connection.

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage can be an amalgam of SaaS and HaaS (Hardware as a Service): Straightforward user interfaces combined with a solid hardware storage infrastructure. Because a cloud storage installation is dedicated to access, protection and serving data, the key component is hard disk space. Being able to pay for the space that meets your specific needs at a given time has significant advantages over a traditional solution like building out a storage area network in your local office. Your storage can be available to all of your satellite offices in London, Asmara and Santiago. Moreover, your company isn’t responsible for repairing file systems, replacing drives, or dealing with Nick Burns (your company’s computer guy). Brilliant!

We’ve launched a very successful cloud storage solution, and if you’re interested in seeing what the cloud can do for you, you can sign up for our Storage Cloud Test. On the cloud computing side, our team has been evaluating the most powerful, reliable and cost-efficient cloud computing solutions, and we plan on launching a computing platform as dominant as the storage platform in the near future.

Cloud computing and cloud storage have come a long way in the past year or two, and with the hosting industry’s focus on the development and enhancement of the platforms, the sky is the limit for the clouds.

Pun intended.

- Chris

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Servers and Solutions, Tech Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.