Virtual Way

Cloud computing can be think of as a cloud of computer software, data storage and other services provided over the Internet.
The concept can be implemented in the form of SaaS (Software as a Service), Web 2.0 and other well-known technology, in which the main aim is to satisfy computing needs of the user through Internet. Services are usually performed in consolidated Data Centers to keep costs low while improving overall utilization. One good example is Google Applications, which provides some common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on Google servers.

The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet, based on how it is presented in computer network. It is also an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.

Cloud with virtualization

Virtualization lead to the foundation of Cloud computing. Hypervisors like ESX provide the infrastructure and management tools layer on top of that to add the self-service, automation, and control.
In cloud computing Virtualization can provide flexibility and efficient management of the underlying hardware or if the underlying hardware has more compute capacity than the Cloud can use it.
Ultimately, virtualization clubbed with cloud computing can lead to better provisioning, increased throughput and differentiation, reduce environmental impact and strengthen business continuity, all while saving money and getting more out of network infrastructure.

Benefits of Cloud computing

As cloud computing is evolving so rapidly, what are the benefits organizations and customers getting? Few of the benefits can be summarized as:

* Potential cost reduction: Organizations internal storages and servers can be placed for cloud computing setup so it will incur very low initial investment. Customers or user of cloud computing solution does not require putting capital expenditure for hardware, software licenses and implementation of services. Also users are not going to take care of administering the hardware and infrastructure software. Most cloud computing solutions are offering pay-and-use model, so customers may pay according to their need. Users can also have flexibility to use services for particular time period. This is particularly significant in cases where an organization has unpredictable or fluctuating service demand.

* Overcome data center capacity constraints: Most time data centers get full and that need to remove a server for any new server you add. But customers working with a cloud computing solution can overcome this limitation by offloading the servers to their cloud vendor’s data center.

* Easy implementation of new development: If some organization gets new project to develop but do not have the proper hardware and software setup available Cloud Vendors are the right solution. The organization does not need to purchase hardware, software licenses or implementing services, what they need to do is get its cloud-computing arrangement off the ground. This way time and cost could be saved up to a great extent.

* Scalability: IT companies or customers always anticipate rise in load of requirement and so rises the requirement of additional hardware and software. With Cloud computing an organization can add and subtract capacity as its network load dictates. Also cloud-computing follows a utility model in which service costs are based on consumption, companies pay for only what they use.


Limitation of Cloud

The organizations are putting Cloud setup according to their demand, there is no particular protocol to follow, and it may lead to chaos in coming time. There are several other limitations to address:

* Speed of Network: High speed Internet connectivity is must for cloud users. If the speed is low performance suffers and so the users. Because of Google’s on-demand Gmail and Google Apps services went out for hours. During that time, end users either affords disrupted service or they are to access their Gmail or online applications altogether.

* Security: Data security is the main concern in cloud computing world. The resources in the cloud are shared by multiple users so it raises security issue.

* Cost: In case of very high usage demand the cost of cloud computing increases than traditional hosting.


Players in Cloud Computing

1. Amazon is the first one to provide true cloud computing resources with Amazon Web Services. The offerings include S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), SimpleDB and SQS (Simple Queuing Service) making it a full set of services for cloud computing.

2. VMware’s vCloud is the cloud solution that was built on the reliability and advanced technology of VMware products. VMware is also aiming to enable private cloud computing and bridge companies to external cloud platforms. Naturally, all of these connecting clouds and data centers will be glued together with virtualization software.

3. Google launched its cloud computing offering named Apps engine. That comes across both as cloud computing resource as well as Platform as a Service for developing, deploying and running applications.

4. IBM has announced its cloud computing offering named Blue Cloud which is expected to launch very soon. The Blue Cloud is a distributed computing architecture based on an open-source project called Hadoop. It is built on IBM’s own software Tivoli and hardware BladeCenters and System z mainframes.

5. Red Hat also provides cloud computing using Amazon Web Services on the open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system which uses instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service.


Despite of some of its limitation Cloud computing is rapidly evolving and attracting the focus of IT Industries and consumer of IT. Cloud with virtualization can do major transformation. It can reduce cost to a remarkable extent and provides ease to the users.