Cloud Case

Today you can hear it everywhere. People are always talking about the "Cloud" regurgitating something that they heard at a conference, meeting or even an advertisement. But the reality remains that a lot of people don't really understand what the cloud means. They imagine it's some sort of magical or technologically advanced system that exists in space somewhere. However, close that may be to the truth what I have been amazed with is how their eyes open up when they realize that the cloud is nothing more than a server or a cluster of servers that exist in a datacenter that is independent of your physical location and the only way to reach it is over the Internet or WAN connection.

I do believe like we covered in class a lot of companies are now offering services over the Cloud. They prefer to have control over their product and prevent copyright infringement and piracy. Plus it's very beneficial for a company to offer additional services when they already have you hooked. The "Holy Grail" of the internet has always been the ability of a Website to drive traffic toward it and maintain their presence for prolonged periods. But what about businesses, how do we drive business traffic toward our website? Yes a company can have a Facebook page or a twitter account but I don't think many mangers want their employees surfing Facebook under the guise of social networking for the company. So what can we do to drive business traffic to a site and yet have employees be productive and most importantly charge them a fee? Enter; Cloud offerings but before we get into that let's take a look at a little history.

What made the cloud possible? You have to be a big player to offer cloud offering to millions of people simultaneously but more than just a backend sever with some useful software you also need infrastructure. This would not have been possible 10 years ago when the internet bandwidth prices were so high. A company could get a T1, 1.544 Mbps for about $900.00 per month whereas today you can get triple that speed for less than half. So, besides bandwidth, the other major driving force in any datacenter is Drive space. Whether you're using a SAN, SSD, TAPE or just a regular IDE OR SCSI Hard drive, you still need to have tons of space to support a large number of users and their data. Again a few years ago Terabytes which can store about 70 hours of HD video cost a pretty penny. Today you can get a Terabyte drive for about $100. It's gotten to the point where Servers and San's are talking in terms of Petabytes (1000Terabytes), I know sounds ridiculous.

Another piece of ingenuity is the ability for software to constantly compress data that is not being used regularly. This software intelligently can look for data that is not accessed regularly and compress it more than data that is used on a daily bases. GMAIL is one of the front runners in that Field. They knew that people want to hold on to their E-mails. Who likes deleting an E-mail? Not me. Well even if I don't delete it doesn't mean I'm going to read it often, so my older e-mails are compressed to a higher degree which frees up more space on the server. Pretty smart I thought. Other companies have since followed suit.

Virtualization is another key concept that made the cloud offerings possible. I think that many companies were wary about having their data on the same server as another company's data. What if there was a mistake and someone else saw my data. Yes, I know there can be security measure in place etc but try explaining that to a company lawyer, good luck. What we need or want is our own server. A server that can be shutdown, rebooted, configuration changes made to it and still not be worried about anyone else's schedule. So, if you hosted a 1000 companies and every company wanted to have 3 servers you would need real estate for 3000 servers, electricity, cooling and manpower. Now let's imagine that you did have that space and infrastructure to house that many servers. How do you grow efficiently? Let say 200 customers wanted to add 2 more servers, your cost to add 400 more servers may be as high as adding a thousand more servers and it may not make sense when you take into account the cost of electricity, cooling etc. So, do you tell your client, no? They would just take their business elsewhere. When Virtual Technology was introduced most hosted solution companies like Rackspace, jumped on the Virtual bandwagon and adopted this technology. This allowed companies to have their own server that was just theirs. They could reboot, shutdown and upgrade when they pleased. Plus from a hosting company point of view they don't need to keep increasing their real estate and related costs to expand their customer base.

Okay so we covered the backend. We looked at the how advancements in technology made the cloud possible but what about the offering. What do cloud services offer us or their business customers and why do they feel confident investing millions of dollars in software and hardware?

BACKUP

There are many companies that offer the ability to backup your important documents for free. We touched on this in class, where we were asked about backing up our home computer data, like home videos, pictures and documents. There are companies like MOZY, Amazon Cloudrive, Google Drive, Skydrive by Microsoft and tons of other companies offering the same service that vary mostly in pricing. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most home users will take advantage of this service. But businesses will need to plan more about recovery than just a backup. A backup that takes you a week to recover is not really a backup strategy. So when choosing these backup strategies one has to pay attention to how fast they can get you "your" data back.

SAS ( Software as a service)

We covered some of these examples in class from the simple Office 365 and google Docs example to the more complicated CRM (Customer Relationship management) offerings like Salesforce etc. These software offerings require a lot of horsepower and a lot of know how to run and be maintained. I like the analogy that you can't buy a Bentley and take it to the