Technologies Driving Cloud Computing Date:   Wednesday , November 03, 2010 Cloud computing should be the most talked about buzzword today. Hardly a day passes when one is not confronted with one or other newly brewed material on the subject. No surprise that it is discussed around many drawing boards today as the next big thing hitting us after the WEB. There are many cautious souls who have seen the hysterical drive around the internet & WEB technologies during the dot com days and the bubble that followed leaving many scattered. While a decade down the line there is a clear unison that the WEB is here to stay and is becoming ever more embedded into our lives. The bandwidth, security, browser capability etc. required its own time to attain the level of maturity to deliver services at the level acceptable to make web as popular a platform as foreseen during the days of the dot com bubble. Similarly the success and the broad acceptance of Cloud Computing is going to be based on a few enabling technologies. What is interesting to note is the level of maturity attained by many of these technologies at the time of this writing. Therefore we try to analyze these technologies from the technology viewpoint and understand the crucial role played by some of the technology advancement making Cloud Computing a reality. Virtualization: Basically a technology that abstracts the various hardware subcomponents and permits multi-tenanting a system and thereby optimizing the hardware usage. An essential component for any public cloud (a factory scale capacity meant for broad consumption mostly on internet) or a private cloud (an exclusively deployed capacity typically in secured network of the owner). It is no more the elite technology reserved to mainframe systems, the choice of very matured & stable virtualization software from licensed to open source software are today plenty. The virtualization technology embedded by leading processor vendors is a further boost. Bandwidth cost: The bandwidth price of network has come down to a point that it is suddenly making it compelling to access an entire suite of services from internet. This means the business case for a public or a community cloud (very similar to public cloud by meant for consumption by a closed community) becomes much easier. The bandwidth cost is expected to ease further and making it ever more compelling. X86: The significant performance & reliability improvement recently seen with systems based on x86 processor is pulling more customer and as well equally the ISVs to embrace it for critical business systems. Suddenly we see commodity hardware capable of delivering large scale business critical services in a private or a public cloud at compelling price points. Specific RISC, GPU based processors will also have a role to play in the cloud, but is expected to attract only niche applications. Blades: Blade based systems have brought in unprecedented level of optimization in datacenters today. While the shared chassis meant better compute per watt of electricity, it also meant extreme flexibility in engineering and maintaining datacenters. The IMAC (Install, Add, Move and Change) on hardware is suddenly simplified to a few minutes of physical work. Unified management: Convergence of Hardware and the network interconnects is not only cutting down the datacenter floor space but also enabling single unified management of datacenter hardware. Something that has been the struggle with all the Enterprise Management Software. This means the overall capacity for a private or a public cloud can be managed as a single entity. Next Generation Datacenters: Most often the business case for a cloud is broken at the datacenter level, the legacy cooling and build nature of datacenter meant limited scope for handling scale unit type capacities required in a private or a public cloud to optimize the operation cost. The new generation of datacenters is permitting modular handling of capacities and making it possible to pack huge capacities in small unit footprints. Licensing & distribution: ISVs and licensing has always been an issue on virtualized platforms, virtualization meant reduced license sale and hence vigorously opposed by many software suppliers. With virtualization now accepted as an essential component in a datacenter, the software vendors not accepting a licensing model for virtualized system is only a handful. This and the advent of virtual appliances as a distribution format are making rapid enablement of services on private clouds. The same is also valid for the IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (Software as a service) and also PaaS (Platform as a Service). Analyzing Cloud Computing from this perspective makes one believe there is no real technical reason why Cloud should not be the next big thing coming our way in the Information Technology evolution. There may still be non- technical issues like legal, compliance and some legislative in nature, which is going to hold back many from taking the public cloud way immediately. But most of these concerns doesn’t hold good for a secure Private Cloud and therefore in all probability will be the first stepping stone for an enterprise to adopt cloud in steps. A real success of Cloud means we are going to take many mundane non strategic expenses going towards delivering and consuming information technology for today’s consumers either for enterprise or individuals. Software developers are able to maximize spend on developing their core IP and not spending on multi-platforming, testing, packaging, distribution etc., means we can expect a radical new level of innovation coming our way. Innovations we believe will also solve some of our fundamentals problems. The author is GM - Compute & Storage Practice, Wipro India, Middle East and Africa