PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD | Table of Contents: |
Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), many of which have great technical smarts despite limited headcount, long ago figured out that hosted Web servers were a good idea. You focus on what you do best, you let someone else manage your boxes and backups, and you squeeze them for better and betting pricing; better manageability, security and redundancy; better background services; and service-level agreements (SLAs) committing to higher and higher levels of uptime, performance and capacity.
Server hosts, for their part, understanding the mechanics of the squeeze, quickly realized that virtualization was their best friend. Chopping up commodity hardware into virtual private servers (VPSs) let them do everything cheaper/faster/better and kept profitability high (or at least reasonable) despite cut-throat competition. And for core hosts—the kind who really wanted to focus on building and maintaining great data centers, rather than on the "surround stuff" of customer management—there was also the added incentive of using virtualization to facilitate creation of white-label reseller networks.
The ironic result is that SMBs—at least with respect to Web servers and e-commerce—are de facto virtualization early adopters. It's very rare, these days, to meet a small-company Webmaster or Web-dev consultant who doesn't manage hosted hardware and create/deploy/manage virtual servers on a regular basis. And the management UIs (e.g., cpanel) have gotten so dead-simple that you have no sense at all that what you're doing is (from the large enterprise IT perspective, anyway) close to sci-fi.
The upshot is that a biggish chunk of the SMB space is thus what you might call "natural-born hosted cloud computing customers." This point is not lost on Amazon, or on "conventional' ISP/hosts—who, for the past two years or so, have been quietly introducing "hosted cloud'"options to their service stacks on the Web side.
Beyond the scale-free Web, the potential nirvana for enterprises small and large is the "hosted private cloud"—hosting orgs that run commodity server hardware under leading hypervisors and create virtual servers on the fly, on which standard enterprise apps reside. And this is now happening, too, largely as a result of work by companies like OnApp, which make cloud management software for server hosts. Recently released in Version 2.1, OnApp is a cloud and infrastructure management controller, supporting multiple hypervisors (Xen and KVM today, Hyper-V and VMWare soon) and providing failover and dynamic allocation, with modules for backup, image management, network management and systemwide monitoring, all under a Web interface. Over 80 ISPs, server hosts and startups now use OnApp.
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IBM VP @SLHebner explains here http://t.co/sSzfa0O5 [VIDEO]IBM's Fiona Cullen will present ‘The Power of #Cloud: Driving Business Model’ On May 24 @ Utrecht, Netherlands #cloudforum2012 #ibmcloudBlog Post: Why service providers should not ignore cloud http://t.co/ZfQyue4r via @eMarcusNet #thoughtsoncloudHave any #cloudmoment? Share your story with us via Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and tag it. See other stories http://t.co/J4ntsaQ5Sign up now for IBM #SmartCloud Enterprise! No charge for select VMs (only till May 28). More Details >> http://t.co/2LEzOUZC #ibmcloudRT @HansMoen: See this video from @IBMCloud to learn how to cut costs in building innovation in your business http://t.co/XOyJoFn6 #clou ...
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