Forbes Gives its Blessing to Cloud Computing

Lee Gomes, who writes about virtualization for Forbes, gave his blessing to C loud Computing in a recent post.

He notes,

[N]ow, any number of start-up companies are selling off-the-shelf versions of (their) management tools. That would mean, for instance, that a company could easily turn a small collection of servers in the basement into a "private cloud" that gives it all of the advantages of cloud computing, especially the quick, ad hoc way that machines can be set up and taken down, but with none of the risk.

It also means that a company could build the software and become a cloud computing provider itself, competing with the likes of Amazon in the same way that a legion of companies compete in the Web server business.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos, who follows cloud computing at Nemertes Research, envisions another way the field might evolve: Specialized clouds. This would involve, for example, a cloud supplier targeting a specific field, such as finance or medicine. Instead of generic, low-cost computing services, these niche clouds would offer extra reliability and security, but would of course be priced to match. Companies would happily pay more for the extra features, he says.

Our recent post about Nvidia's Cloud Server for high-quality graphics (see here) is an example of the kind of specialized clouds that will likely appear in the very near future.

The concepts of Cloud Computing are sound, he found..

"The idea is that computing will become like electricity, a commodity that people needn't bother to make themselves. A few big companies will run data centers that everyone else will tap into via the Internet. Amazon's Web services were one of the first in this market, and it's what many point to when discussing the topic.

The basic idea behind cloud computing is sound. Why should a company go through the expense and bother of buying a piece of hardware when it could rent a machine online? In large part because of virtualization technologies, a company like Amazon can now take its unused computer capacity, slice it up into virtual machines and then sell access to those machines. Users can buy as much or as little computer storage and networking as they need, for only as long as they need. It can be a one-week pilot project or a Web server running for two years, a virtual machine can easily handle the task.In fact, changes are occurring in the way companies use computers, even if they have nothing to do with an Amazon-style cloud.

Amazon's Web services have been a hit among a new breed of Internet entrepreneurs, who can get a site up and running without needing to make capital investments in a data center, even one stuck in the corner of their apartment."    

 

Companies like Zetta and Parascale have, in different ways, made it much easier to have Network Attached Storage  operate seamlessly from the Cloud.It is nice to see mainstream business magazines like Forbes recognize the advantages of Cloud Computing.