Technology allows access to seemingly limitless power, storage
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Last updated August 22, 2008 3:52 p.m. PT
By ANDREA JAMESP-I REPORTER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business
/375501_cloudcomputing19.htmlAdrian C. Zamarron/AMERICAN-STATESMAN FROM PHOTOS.COM
'Cloud computing' lets firms access extra data storage through the Internet.
For a business, the electricity that flows from an outlet seems endless. And water will stream out of the tap without worry -- businesses pay only for what they use.
But computing power hasn't been so seamless. Data storage hardware can accept only a finite number of bytes. When businesses enter into monthlong server contracts, it takes days to add more capacity. If usage surpasses a server's capacity, it will crash.
Cloud computing, the super-hyped tech term of the moment, aims to change that.
Cloud computing, utility computing, Web 3.0 and grid computing are all jargon to describe a simple concept: Access to seemingly limitless computing power and storage space via the Internet.
If you use Google's Gmail service for e-mail, you've touched the cloud.
As of Monday, millions of Gmail users had 7,045 free megabytes of e-mail space each -- more than enough to store more than 7 million plain text e-mails.
That's the triumph of cloud computing. The downside, however, was illustrated one day last week when Gmail suffered an outage, and millions temporarily lost access to their e-mails.
'Incredible transformation'
Increasingly, big firms are launching into "the cloud" to sell services, while small firms plug in, waving goodbye to the server hidden in the closet.
"The future is about having a platform in the cloud," Microsoft Chief Steve Ballmer said of the trend in a July e-mail to employees. The company has invested heavily in new products that will be announced in upcoming months.
About four years ago, Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. began hatching a way to sell access to its complex computer systems. The company had already built up a robust infrastructure to support the world's largest online retail operation -- so why not let other businesses tap in?
Amazon launched its Web Services in 2006, and more than 400,000 developers have signed on to pay for services such as storage space, database access and computing power.
"Over the next decade you are going to see an incredible transformation, in my opinion," Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos told shareholders earlier this year. "It doesn't really make sense for most companies to have their own data centers, just as it doesn't make sense for most companies to produce their own electric power."
Examples of businesses that rely on Amazon are Twitter and even The New York Times, which uses Amazon to partly host its "TimesMachine," the newspaper's archives, including full-page image scans of papers going back to the 1800s.
Amazon's price for Web services starts in the pennies -- to use its Elastic Compute Cloud, for instance, Amazon charges 10 cents per hour per server.
"We routinely send people monthly bills for 17 cents," Bezos said. "If you store a gigabyte of data for a month, we'll send you a bill for 15 cents."
Though Web services are still a tiny segment of Amazon's total business, representing less than 3 percent of revenue, in the past year, the bandwidth used by its Web services surpassed the bandwidth needed for Amazon.com's retail operations.
"To me, cloud computing conjures up the image of something being very fluid and being very flexible," said Aaron Darcy, one of the product line managers at Red Hat, an open source software provider in Raleigh, N.C. "The benefits of the cloud are not only time-to-market but also pay-as-you go type of model."
Information technology budgets at nontech companies are shrinking, Darcy said, forcing IT managers to look into new resources. "It is the trendy thing right now," he said.
It also has bigger implications for business innovation. Using Salesforce.com's free service, for example, any developer with a computer and an Internet connection can build a business application without a dime.
This sort of ability could be as disruptive a force in society as the printing press or the spread of technology, said Paul McNamara, chief executive of Coghead Inc., a California software company that helps programmers to build applications in the cloud.
"History shows us that the most disruptive and market changing technologies are ones that enable a broad class of people to do what, previously, only an elite class could do," he said.
Clouds of different shapes
No two clouds are the same -- Google's cloud offerings look different from Amazon's, which differ from AT&T's, and so on.
Microsoft's cloud computing strategy is still under wraps -- the company hasn't shared any details publicly, but plans to unveil its strategy in the coming months.
Executives' recent comments suggest that Microsoft will soon offer businesses a way to launch applications using Microsoft's infrastructure.
Speaking on the topic last month, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie told financial analysts, "I think it is a very, very significant transformation. The simplest way that I would explain it to my neighbor who isn't in the industry is that, you know, there's a computer on the desktop. ... There's that computer in the data center, you know, that you walk by in your company. But there's a new computer that is available up in the cloud, and it is going to be transformational in terms of how people write and build solutions once they can assume that they can leverage that resource up there."
Microsoft has already been described as a player in the "cloud computing" arena. But Microsoft's current offerings differ from Amazon's in many ways.
The Redmond company began selling pay-as-you-go storage space in 2008, in the form of SQL Server Data Services, but does not yet sell pay-as-you-go computing power.
Microsoft is investing in data centers for a full-scale blowout of cloud computing offerings in 2009.
Microsoft also offers free Internet software services via its Windows operating system. Such free services -- another iteration of "cloud computing" -- include Windows Live's SkyDrive, which is online file storage for individuals, and Photo Gallery, which lets people share photos and videos.
This aspect of cloud computing is also shared by Salesforce.com and Google, both major players in the sector.
Google Apps, which includes online word processing and spreadsheets, is now sold to businesses. And Google App Engine lets developers build Web applications using Google's systems.
The list of companies trying to get in on the action reads like a who's who of technology firms.
IBM has been ramping up and taking its offerings to businesses around the globe, most recently launching two new "cloud centers," in Tokyo and Raleigh, N.C.. In March, the company joined the Industrial Development Agency of Ireland to establish what it calls Europe's first cloud computing center in Dublin. It will focus on research and business development.
And Dell is trying to trademark the term "cloud computing."
How it works
Isn't cloud computing just another word for outsourcing?
Sort of, says David Pollock, Seattle-based consultant at Deloitte. "Cloud computing is the next step in outsourcing."
The concept of cloud computing began in the late 1990s, with the dot-com boom. But serious adoption began around 2003 and has been growing, particularly in 2008.
"Salesforce.com has done more than anybody just because of their willingness to go after the market," said Pollock, who helps clients decide on IT systems.
Salesforce.com's clients are larger enterprises rather than startups, said Ariel Kelman, a senior director at Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco.
"The big difference is that cloud computing is a much simpler approach that is easier for people to get from idea to application in a shorter period of time," he said. "The complexity is removed. There's no need to think about software and versions. ... Things don't break as often. ... The whole goal of cloud computing is to make business applications as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com."
More partnerships will have to be formed to allow different functions to be integrated, Kelman said. That's why SalesForce has partnered with Google to offer Google Apps with its services.
Cloud computing, of course, isn't fluffy. It depends on giant deployments of hundreds of thousands of servers -- pushing the limits on power and efficiency. Backups are not at one site far away, but at multiple sites, said Geoffrey Noer, senior director of product management at Rackable Systems in Fremont, Calif., which installs farms of computer servers for large companies including Yahoo and Google.
Cloud computing has increased demand for his company's services.
"One of the big trends in cloud computing is not to make any one server super robust or super redundant but to handle redundancy through software," Noer said. "If a single server goes down, or a rack or a whole data center goes down, another one picks up."
Rain on the cloud's parade
Cloud computing, or whatever it ends up being called, still faces major obstacles.
First is reliability. When one of Amazon's Web services went down recently, users had no access to their files for more than six hours.
Another is security, experts say.
Before adopting cloud computing as a solution, companies must ask themselves, "How much of your information do you really want hosted off-site?" Deloitte's Pollock said. "That's a thorny little question that has to be addressed. In order for cloud computing to work, your data has to be stored off of your premises."
Companies are already working to address problems. San Francisco-based Hyperic Inc. has developed cloud-monitoring software, for example, to help companies deal with outages.
"As the industry solves both of those (reliability and security), I think we're going to see massive, massive scale out in the cloud," said Stacey Schneider, senior marketing director at Hyperic. "Even if it's a wild success today, it's going to blow your mind in the next two to three years.
"People are going to have to deal with the fact that the cloud is here to stay."
P-I reporter Andrea James can be reached at 206-448-8124 or andreajames@seattlepi.com
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