Google is buying land – obviously to build datacenters. E. g. 1000 acres in Iowa <LINK> and 800 acres in Oklahoma <LINK>. How many square-feet are the data-centers supposed have? What’s your guess? I’m sure that they don’t need these sites to just install racks and some modern cooling facility.

These chunks of land would be enought to build a Google theme park or – to be more on topic – addressing the issue of rising power costs, to install a nuclear power station. This would provide kind of clean energy, but would not be very sexy, looking a the high risks implied.

So the only purpose for these sites with big green Google will be to build modern high efficient datacenters and also highly modern power plants utilizing renewable energy. Google already invests in companies developing such technologies, as you can read on Googles Website in an article titled “powering a clean enery revolution” <HERE>.

Now we will be able to understand the meaning of “grid computing”.

What do you think?

To enrich the discussion and enhance your knowledge about clouds, I digged out an comprehensive chart, showing all the different types of clouds. Really impressive.

<TYPES OF CLOUDS>

A very interesting company these days seems to be Elastra <HOMEPAGE>. They are evangelists of a new approach to so called ‘Elastic Computing’ which might be the ‘next generation in IT infrastructure‘. What in the beginning seems to be a very ambitious idea, is well presented and well documented and seems to make sense in many respects. My understanding after a first look is, that they basically of tool set, called the ‘Elastra Cloud Server On Demand‘ sitting on top of a generic cloud provider like e.g. Amazon EC2. Utilizing the ‘Elastic Computing Markup Language‘ (ECML) and the ‘Elastic Deployment Markup Language‘ (EDML) to have a structured description of cloud environments they want to revolutionize design, deployment, management and especially the automation of cloud computing solutions, including new pricing models and much more.

If one wants to dig into details, navigate to their smoothly designed products page <HERE> and have a look in the Whitepapers to learn something about clouds and their constraints. Or read this Grid Today article <HERE>.

I will watch them closely.

Roland

Ever thought about the relationship of Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing? Some say, cloud computing is a evolution of SaaS, which from my perspective is not true. As far as my research goes, both developments aim at the same goal – to make computing services available on-demand:

• No need for hardware and software on premise
• Reduced efforts for administration and governance
• No idle hardware consuming electricity

While Software-as-a-Service covers the application part, cloud computing is more about the hardware topics covering cpu, storage and network. I see both as the two extremes with several other buzzy things in between like Platform-as-a-Service, Mash-Ups and Next-Generation-Hosting. The baseline seems to be quite clear and the multitude of offerings is immense. So no one needs to question Gartner top ten predictions for IT organization <LINK> earlier this year. One question from my side is: Isn’t this a little bit too conservative? Is this only true for IT-organizations? Doesn’t other industries have margin pressure as well?

Especially predictions No 4

By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license.[...]

and No 5

By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.[...]

are really compelling – just image the market size we are talking about….

Just to give you some brainfood: Salesforce meets GoogleApps

Roland

If you read comments on the HP-EDS deal, one can get the impression, that this deal is not only about market-shares, but also to a large extend about HPs future positioning in the IT world and – I hardly dare to say the all new 2008 buzzword of the year – ‘clouds’. Or do you think these commenters are wrong?

HP-EDS: It’s About The Clouds, Baby!

Om Malik of Gigaom.com saying

[...]If you plot the EDS bid against these four recent developments, it is not that difficult to postulate that HP is building its own cloud focused on large global companies.[...]

Combined HP-EDS can explore missing methodology around how to offload IT to the cloud(s)

ZDNets Dana Gardner saying

[...]HP with EDS has now clearly staked its future on the top prize in IT: next-generation IT operations efficiency, proper outsourcing methods, cloud computing services management, and high-level consulting as the onramp.[...]

[...]The cost efficiencies, utilization rates, flexibility, marketplace-driven productivity aspects of cloud computing are simply too wonderful to ignore. We simply should not have standalone email servers every 60 square yards inside of companies. It’s foolish.[...]

The Clouds Part on HP’s Computing Strategy

By Kevin Maney, Portfolio.com saying on wired.com

[...]But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It’s looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing — a.k.a. hardware as a service.[...]

Comment: nice Term ‘Hardware as a service’ or ‘HaaS’. i’ll come back to this later

HP Acquires EDS: More Cloud Computing Fallout?

Bob Warfield saying on Smoothspan Blog:

[...]Who knows, maybe HP can push this into a higher level strategy to get into the Cloud Computing game on their own. Certainly EDS has been very active in the application outsourcing business, but historically that’s been an ASP’s game and has not been very competitive against true SaaS offerings.[...]

HP + EDS = Enterprise Clouds?

Michael Bowen saying on Cubegeeks blog

[...]Only large cross functional services organizations teamed up with serious compute clouds and grids can do that. If that’s what HP has in mind with EDS, it’s going to be a brave new world.

I’m in the first phase of the ‘cloud enthusiasm’, so maybe it’s not a good mood to comment on this. Most of what the commenters said makes sense. But if all this was true, It feels like there is some ‘cloud hysteria’ arising, showing me the importance of cloud computing for the future of IT.

Roland

I’m glad, that I’m not the only one who was getting confused about this ‘game-changing’ topics when reading sentences like

‘IBM today unveiled Blue Cloud, a utility computing initiative designed to help customers run efficient grid-based platforms in enterprise data centers.’

This is the introductionary phrase of a datacenterknowledge.com article <READIT> from last year about IBMs ‘Blue cloud’ press release. Grid, Utility and Clouds plus datacenters in one sentence is quite a challange today, where new players and commenters are popping every day. In Dells cloud blog, Jimmy Pike tries to give a definition on these three important 2008 buzzwords <READIT>. After first beeing sceptic about the definitions, I partly changed my mind. I’d put more emphasis on “Utility computing” beeing not only an idea, but more kind of marketing buzz. And I wouldn’t call clouds beeing a subset of grids.

So what is the point? How are grids and clouds working together?

Does a cloud have to be a grid?

like John Willis asks <HERE>. The answers is definitely no.

As far as my research goes at this point, grids are more focussing on the hardware, the platforms, the interoperatbility between some or many or vaste number of systemes to provide ‘Internet scale’ computing power. The term ‘grid’ is describing more or less an architectural pattern.

Clouds are more focussing on the delivery of computing services. It’s about APIs, payments and so on. Clouds are can be based on computing grids, but can also have a different system architecture like seti@HOME (p2p clouds).

IBMs press kit <SEEHERE> for the Blue cloud press release adds some more interesting points about to the discussion

IBM today unveiled plans around cloud computing, a revolutionary approach to computing that will allow corporate data centers to act with the efficiency of the Internet. IBM’s commitment to cloud computing echoes another major commitment to computing the company made in 2000 when it announced its support of Linux.

So here we learn from IBM: Clouds are about ‘internet’, ‘data centers’ and ‘computing’, which sounds like defining a new computing paradigm:

From Host over Client Server to Web based and cloud

I’ll come back to point, I promise.

Roland

Commodity hardware vs. high tech. This is seems to be the baseline. While Google has shown that commodity hardware using the ‘right’ OS and architecture is able to outperform everything else, IBM entered the battlefield about six months ago <ARTICLE_READWRITEWEB>. They even teamed up with google to <PRESSRELEASE_IBM> to provide cloud developement facilities to US universities. But what’s IBMs goal? Just to be on the field? No. IBM has several handicaps compared to Google. They have a long history and many customers putting pressure on them, so It’s not just “here’s our new cloud plattform – just use and pay”. Instead IBM has a long track record in developing and selling hardware from a to z – or was it System i to System z , so they want to take their customer base with them to the new age. While ‘newcomers’ like Google and Amazon attract young companies and early adopters, traditional player like IBM need to take care of corporate customers and the masses. And maybe they are working on preparing the public for several years now with their “On-Demand-Computing” campaign? Who knows?

So probably, there will not be a big war, It’s more like sharing the cake.

Roland

It looks like Cisco was attracted by EMC announcements in the recent weeks to go for the cloud. Though this possible $45Bn deals is still a rumor, most commenters on this issue <LIKE_HERE> agree, that this deal makes sense for Cisco. After showing its muscels and the will to move to the Web 2.0 field with the acquisition of collaboration software maker WebEx <HAVEALOOK> finally starts off for the clouds. Let’s wait and see a new titan entering the ring.

Roland

Hi,

i’m Roland and using this blog I will discuss the future of IT. As you all may know, the IT architectural model of clouds is one of the hottest topics during the last months. I’ve choosen this term not because I’m convinced the future of computing lies in the clouds – I like this ambiguous word and also I like looking to the sky and watch the clouds passing by. So let’s see what the future will bring and how I can transform this to writing.

Roland