The
arrival of cloud computing technologies to the IT market has
not happened in the big bang
mode.
Unlike other technologies
more directly related to the research and innovative activities that manufacturers in the world of IT (as might be the use of flash technology in storage systems,
higher recording densities on tape, or FCoE), Cloud Computing is not
is a technology in itself, but is rather a "way
of doing".
In my view, it all
started in the mid-90s, with the
emergence of ISPs (Internet
Service Providers) and ASP (Application Service Providers). These were the years of the birth of the Internet Age. The need of an Internet connection to be a consumer of
content, and the need to have
"presence" on the Internet to become a content generator was quickly covered with
ISPs (those that
provided access) and ASP's (those that
provided the infrastructure
needed to publish content).
Thereafter, as a result of the
acquisition of knowledge in the
new technologies of the Internet by businesses, Service Providers
began to lose focus, and were the companies
themselves, seeing the potential of
the Internet as a new channel to
open new lines of business (or
expand existing), which took care of personally managing its online presence. In fact, web
applications that were only mere information
portals, became sites where e-commerce
activities can be done, both B2C (the most successful business of all time)
and B2B.
Obviously, these business execution capabilities may be beyond the any business capabilities, leaving a
margin of existence to the ASP
(ISPs were gradually eliminated by the telcos).
But in the second era of the Internet, where "being on the
internet" was not only for
disseminating information (it was
mainly for doing business), the ASP had to evolve,
did not come to stay
static websites, which eventually
generate a new way of working, and therefore a new way of doing online business. Then we came to the "dot.com" era.
Everyone
wanted to do business very quickly, so there was no time to create departments, or build a datacenter, time-to-market was critical. How is this problem of getting quicker deployments resolved?
A new type of service providers appeared: the hosters (as a continuation of the story we might call them HSP, Hosting Service Provider).
With HSP, companies no longer have to worry about the more purely technological
side. They just need to focus on
defining a good business strategy. Once defined, if a company has some development capacity, it can implement the
solution and it is ready. If not, it just has to find a
company that will make the
development and deploy it to the
HSP chosen.
Alongside all the evolution we have been living in recent years in all that relates to "the
web" and mobile, the world's infrastructure has also undergone major changes. From the IBM mainframe virtualizer (now renamed to zVM) of the 60s, to the current KVM, Xen, vSphere, Hyper-V,
etc., the world of virtualization has
evolved in dizzying, provided a new vision
and a new way of managing the
infrastructure.
Workload
consolidation, cost
reduction, simplification of the datacenter,
high availability, and a right utilization
of the installed resources are some of the concepts to which we have been migrating almost without realizing the fact that we have just virtualized our hardware.
But virtualization is not only a valuable asset for companies with own datacenter. Those
who are taking greater advantage of developments in virtualization technologies are undoubtedly the HSP.
HSPs have been able to finally get rid of dealing
a big problem, the "power
and cooling." At the time of the
birth of the HSP, one operating system instance was installed in one
physical machine (they were the years that became popular pizza servers, 1 server
= 1U, ie, 42
servers per standard rack), and powering and
cooling hosters’ datacenters was
a real headache.
With
virtualization the HSP consolidate operating
system instances one far fewer
physical machines, allowing them to lower their costs exponentially, and
improve their service offerings.
And
not just talking about physical space. The power consumption decreases
dramatically, which also makes it also decreases the need
for refrigeration. That is, virtualization has a double impact on the
cost savings, as well as everything
that is in itself by consolidating services, also helps reduce datacenter PUE.
HSP's as Rackspace, Softlayer, Terremark,
etc ..., can
offer hosting services at a much
lower price, and also a very quicker provisioning process.
Infrastructure virtualization has changed the way we manage our hardware infrastructure,
and the next step is here knocking on doors of datacenters:
network virtualization.
We
ourselves see it in our datacenters: provisioning a virtual machine software takes minutes to
set up, but the configuration of the network part is a series
of manual tasks that must be
added to the total provisioning time.
New
trends in what is known as "software-defined"
are called to finish simplifying all procurement processes and operations, at the same time that it will
mean the next step in the design
and management of systems high Availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR).
Software-Defined Networks (SDN), Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), or Software-Defined Storage (SDS) are some of the initiatives (definable as best as pure technology strategies) that begin to fill the tables of CIOs and datacenter architects, and where the next battle for control of the datacenter between computer hardware manufacturers and communications hardware manufacturers as long as the software-defined trends will be responsible for completing the process of virtualization, to lead us to what I call the Virtual Datacenter.
