Comments on: DB2 has innovative approach for Cloud Computing according to Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO

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By: Lightway

Lightway — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:11:51 +0000

In definition and execution, I agree they are different, however, they are both competing on cost and administrative overhead efficiency.

The cost comparison comes into play when you weigh the initial capital expenditure of investing in VMware servers, and supporting infrastructure, versus the long term costs of the ‘renting’ cloud services. You still have power and cooling costs long term with VMware hardware, but these may even out versus renting services in the cloud. It would be nice if there were some long term studies of the cost comparison over time.

VMware hardware becomes recycled easily, especially for dev and QA environments, which don’t really need the latest and greatest horsepower, and may become obsolete, so a standardized image just gets wiped and replaced with another one.

I think a better application of Cloud is for web based services, or for startup companies that can’t afford a massive data center investment.

I see blade servers, VMWare, and Cloud all as competing technologies, all looking to leverage the 3 themes that were mentioned.

But those are just my personal opinions, and thanks for the excellent article.

By: Leon

Leon — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:30:40 +0000

Cloud Computing does not compete with virtualization technologies like VMWare, Xen etc. Cloud Computing at its core is actually exploiting 3 key themes to deliver great reductions in IT costs. These 3 themes are:
1. standardization
2. virtualization and
3. automation
VMWare is probably the most recognizable virtualization technology but it is neither Cloud Computing nor does it compete with Cloud Computing. Best way yo think about virtualization is to think about increasing server utilization. It is not the only benefit but it is a starting point for most. Cloud Computing (or utility computing) is most often thought of a way to rent computing capacity much the same way we get electricity, telephone, watter etc. In other words, instead of purchasing your own servers, storage etc. and housing them in your own data center, Cloud Computing envisions server and storage capacity being provided by a cloud provider (like Amazon) and being delivered on a pay-as-you-go basis where you only pay for what you use and typically without any upfront fee or contract commitment.

By: Lightway

Lightway — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:34:46 +0000

From this keynote address, and also examining the DB2 cloud licensing model, it would seem that the cloud is competing directly with the VM-ware type of environments, which are geared more towards dev and QA, and also web-based production services companies.

There’s alot of hype currently on the cloud model, so I’m not sure yet if it’s universally applicable, but we’ll be watching to see how this develops. I’m not so sure you could implement a cloud model on a heavy lifter, like an ERP system, for example, that just requires too much bandwidth and horsepower.

Also, check out XtreemOS, which has the possibility of becoming one of the next great disruptive technologies along the scale of the world wide web. I can imagine clouds and data centers becoming virtualized across the WAN for major resource aggregation:

http://www.xtreemos.org/

Glad to see DB2 getting recognition from Amazon, I’ve used pretty much every database out there and DB2 is my favorite.