Cloud Computing Strategies Underway

Vendors including Hewlett Packard, Co. (HP), IBM Corp., Intel Corp., and Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced new and expanded cloud computing strategies. In related news, customers of Amazon.com, Inc.'s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced an outage a few weeks ago due to performance problems with its cloud computing offering.

Focal Points:

• IBM announced it is spending almost $400 million to build cloud computing data centers in Raleigh, NC and Tokyo, Japan. The 60,000 square foot North Carolina data center will be a renovation of an existing facility that focuses on environmental efficiency as part of the company's Project Big Green initiative. Reused components will include 95 percent of the building's original structure, 90 percent of the original building's materials, and 20 percent new materials manufactured from recycled products, according to the company. The data center's design employs IBM server and storage products, and its design aims to eliminate almost 32,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year compared with a similarly-sized, non-energy efficient setup. IBM intends to invest another $100 million in cloud computing over the next three years to help customers bring cloud-based infrastructures and applications online in one of its nine and counting worldwide facilities.
• HP, Intel, and Yahoo! Inc. are collaborating on a multi-data center initiative to advance cloud computing solutions on a global scale. Each company will deploy what is being called an "Internet-scale" testing environment largely utilizing HP and Intel equipment with between 1,000 and 4,000 processor cores in each location. A total of six locations are being established, one at each of the three founding members' data centers and the other three at university partners. Open source initiatives are a key foundational element, and Apache, Tashi, and other open source-based architectural components are being tested to determine best practices for design, deployment, and management of cloud infrastructure services. HP, Intel, and Yahoo! all have participated in their own cloud infrastructure initiatives separately, and hope that the joint venture will help to expedite the advancement of common solutions to the evolving architectural issues including failover, high availability, and load balancing.
• Though Sun was early to the game in offering a utility computing offering, it has been late in adapting its model to also incorporate cloud-based solutions. Reports are now coming out that Sun will spin out a business based on its Network.com per-use application, server, and storage service into a cloud infrastructure offering. The business unit will be headed by the company's chief sustainability officer, David Douglas. Sun's utility computing business only has 13 referenceable accounts and 48 available applications, and the company has remained mum on disclosing approximate total customer information. Elsewhere, Amazon.com had to take its cloud computing infrastructure offline for several hours in late July due to a communications error the company could not easily solve with the system online. Amazon.com determined that rebooting the effected systems and network components was the best way to resolve the issue.

Experton Group believes infrastructure challenges relating to application, software, and hardware virtualization will be among the most difficult and complex to resolve over the next few years. Ultimately, a clear and referenceable set of standardized interfaces and interconnects must be defined, which will require a great deal of cross-collaboration among vendors. End users will also play a critical role in this definition, as comprehension of uses, issues, breakage points, and growth paths will be key to determining resolutions and the order in which problems are addressed. True solutions to these complex problems are, unfortunately, at least seven to 10 years off due to the most critical and fundamental of shortcomings – the lack of standardized application and hardware reporting mechanisms. Cloud-based computing offers the promise of placing and moving infrastructure around the cloud, data center, and globe to best meet the demands of the business at particular points in time. IT executives should work with multiple cloud-computing vendors to understand their evolving work, guide research and implementations to overcome the most important enterprise challenges, and experiment and deploy cloud solutions where systems have proven stable and cost effective.