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CLOUD for the average (Personal or Business) Internet users means nothing...
They will only hear it as another mysterious "techy word" out there. It really is such a vague term, anyway.
How many times have you heard someone ask, "What is CLOUD?,"? Why bother explaining. Targeting this group with "CLOUD" is just like jumping on a bandwagon to use a word that has buzz. This strategy is not interesting at all - and just makes me think you have no imagination.
CLOUD for the CIOs, IT managers, developers, etc. (who have a clue), will know that it is Services provided by a scalable infrastructure. Some call "Storage Services" CLOUD. Boring. Storage Services may well be considered a "piece" of CLOUD, but there are many impostors out there, such as Storage Providers using XEN or VMware, KVM and especially M$ Virtual Server. For the expense of managing this stuff - along with their inherent limitations - one may as well set up physical servers and cluster them. Today, Hardware is cheap and provides the same - or better - redundancy. Think about it. A VM is simply a virtualized block. If you go the extra length and set up V-Motion, which requires not only an extremely expensive bunch of hardware and the VMware software, you are still only managing "virtual blocks".
So, what is TRUE CLOUD?
TRUE CLOUD is a SaaS tightly, dynamically integrated to an underlying infrastructure that has unlimited scale.
- The only way to provide unlimited scale is to Virtualize.
- The only way to tightly, dynamically integrate a SaaS to a Virtual Infrastructure is to use Container Virtualization technology, such as Parallels Virtuozzo.
The simplest way to check this point is to ask the following questions;
"Can a user on your SaaS order an extra 10GB of HDD, 1000MB of RAM and 1000MB of Bandwidth - kicking off a stream of XML to the Virtualization Software to IMMEDIATELY scale out the user's Server to these new resource settings WITHOUT restarting?"
Hint: This is impossible with other Virtualization Solutions. The server must be restarted - which means;
- The service must stop and restart
- The Service or Data is unavailable
- The SaaS may be live, but the data is not, so not TRUE CLOUD.
or
"Can your SaaS migrate ONLY the Data within an old server to a new, higher-density physical server over the LAN or WAN - LIVE - in a very short period of time?"
Hint: This is either impossible or pointless with other Virtualization Solutions.
Reasons:
When you create a VM, you must install the OS and Application INSIDE the VM. The Data is then loaded inside the server via an Application and users or other feed methods. What this means is that you must migrate the WHOLE VM block - including the OS, Applications and finally the Data to the new server. The OS and Application resource requirements themselves will be large (Many GBs) and put an un-necessary extra load on the migration. Anyway, with VMware, you need the extremely expensive V-Motion to do this and it can only be done locally using expensive SAN Storage, fiber, etc.
With Container Virtualization, only the Data itself is migrated. The OS and Applications are the same on both servers - because the Virtualization technology itself Virtualises the OS - not the Hardware. It also has the added benefit of being able to Virtualize Applications - called Application Templates, thus also removing the need to migrate the application.
This means you can move the "heart" of the server along normal LAN or WAN very fast, and it will keep the session, being a truly LIVE migration.
So, what this means for a TRUE CLOUD is that as the users and applications grow within your SaaS, you are able to scale your underlying infrastructure - live, on-demand, dynamically - at a much lower TCO.