Cloud Computing Data Centers

As the cloud computing market continues to mature, different organizations with different opinions emerge. Current and potential cloud adopters look to experts, vendors and bloggers to help them form thoughts on the strengths and downfalls of the technology.

Langfang China Super Cloud Computing Data Center will be the world’s largest cloud data center co-developed with IBM, and employing up to 80,000 people, and will be 6.2 million square feet. Now for those who don’t understand data centers, cloud computing or the IT industry allow me to explain. I have worked in data centers before. Once at Humana and while at Microsoft main campus in Redmond, WA.

It doesn’t take 80,000 people to run a data center. Some of that much space will be for office space for administrative support of the data center. By contrast the American counterpart being built in Utah is only 1 million or so square feet. The data centers in Chicago and Atlanta are among the top 5 in America.

There are three types of cloud computing: Public, Hybrid and Private.

Public is what most of us are used to hearing about. Hybrid is a mix of corporate owned hardware and using SAAS (software as a service) on top of it. An example of SAAS would be Google Apps, Microsoft Live 365 and others. Private means you absorb the cost of both your own hardware and software.

“Private clouds are great solutions for organizations looking to keep their hardware locally managed”.

There are basically three ways in which this is provided. SAAS, PAAS and IAAS:
Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and IAAS. I’ve already explained SAAS. An example of PAAS would be online storage services such as iDrive, Amazon S3 or AWS, Mozy and Dropbox. Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components.

Organizations implementing or planning on implementing private cloud (or on-premise cloud) are not doing so because they can’t bear to part with their hardware. What they can’t bear to part with is control.

One well known cloud hosting company is Rackspace. Others are Microsoft, Amazon and IBM. “Perhaps Google Docs is the most widely known cloud services”.

Cloud computing will be around for many years and the infrastructure to support this service based technology will change as the speed of innovation continues using Moore’s Law. The future of cloud computing will be Everything as a Service. Total worldwide addressable market for cloud computing to reach $158.8B by 2014, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011. Six out of the top seven fastest areas of growth in cloud applications will be in IT areas: Big Data, mobile, systems management, backup/DR/BC, helpdesk and security.

Agility and scalability are the primary drivers for cloud adoption. Security is starting to lose its label as the primary inhibitor to cloud adoption. Expect hybrid or multi-cloud providers to emerge to challenge the current cloud ecosystem in the next 2-3 years as the technology becomes more main stream and its adoption more seamless.

Cloud computing is built for the world of tomorrow, where we each use many different kinds of computing devices: desktop, laptop, cellphone, or tablet. The intention is to make the functionality and data we need always accessible no matter where we are in the world, and no matter what we’re using to access the Internet.

Source G0Articles by Author Eric Owens . He has 27 years of IT industry hands-on expertise and has worked for fortune 100 companies. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Tampa, Florida in 1985 and a graduate of Microcomputer Science from Kentucky Polytechnic Institute in 1989. As an Analyst, Eric enjoys writing articles about technology and cloud computing. Eric has worked as an online freelance web designer and a lead web developer for a large plastics manufacturer in Seattle. He holds certifications in HTML, CSS, JavaScript,.NET, MCP, A+ and is currently working on his CCP (Cloud Computing Professional) certification.

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