The IT industry has been quite excited with the latest cloud implementation. Large companies have spent billions of dollars in cloud technologies investments. In some ways, cloud technology isn’t new. It is about storing information on distant servers that we can access remotely. However, the cloud technology has given us new implementations, such as the ability to run application and multimedia content smoothly, given the availability of fast Internet access. Cloud technology is about providing PMSN or processing, memory, storage and network resources for consumers. In general, cloud could liberate people from limitations of their personal devices.
Remote working is also more feasible and we could obtain easier IT management. Businesses can receive applications and services from the cloud, one thing that they may not be able to get through local resources. Depending on the type of cloud, companies no longer need to set up a data center facility in their office. This will free them from costs of maintaining expensive equipments. Obviously, this has caused some IT professionals to see cloud as a threat, but others see it as a liberation.
But, what is cloud technology? To fully understand cloud, it is important to understand its basic principle. One of the commonly-discussed parts of cloud is virtualization. In recent years, the industry has been very busy consolidating their data center resources. They aim to have fewer racks. At the same time, they seek to have smaller and smaller footprint. The utilization level could reach 20 percent because many companies only need to run a single application in their server.
Operating an underutilized server can be a financial nightmare, because we spend money on things that we don’t use. Worse, we need to spend maintenance cost regularly and it is also necessary to replace some of the outdated equipments after a few years. Low utilization won’t provide any return, especially when we need to consider that the average lifecycle of computers, including servers are about 3 years. Their values also depreciate significantly the moment we remove them from the packaging box.
In fact, a 3-year old server would worth equal to scrap metal and recyclable plastic that can be obtained from dismantling them. Fortunately, there are refined toolsets that we can use to virtualize our application and make it runs completely in the cloud. We could look for services that have clusters of virtualized servers that are capable of hosting multiple services and applications. This kind of implementation should bring many benefits for us. We could order for resources that can operate our application smoothly.
We need to consider the expeditious use of virtualization through the reduced use of hardware systems. Hardware manufacturers and data center designers are able to introduce methods that can reduce the power needed to cool down the system. Cooling is one of the costliest implementations in data center and with virtualization in the cloud, companies no longer need to deal with this. They no longer need to worry about designing proper airflow and eliminating hot spots inside the data center.