There's something stirring out there in the computing world that will have large implications for communications service providers. Cloud computing is going to rip away the boundaries that have separated formerly-distinct business segments, realign value chains and bring massively large new players into fragmented, highly distributed businesses that are unaccumstomed to this level of competition. Consider recent moves by VMware, for example.
VMware has unveiled infrastructure software that pools hardware resources, such as servers, storage and network, into an on-premise cloud-computing environment. At one level, this helps enterprises better manage data center resources. At another level it helps enterprises support remote or traveling users with all the applications they would expect to be able to use at their office desktops. The federation capability might be used in several ways, such as extending business partner access to enterprise resources for inventory tracking or supply chain management.
Okay, you say. It's a more efficient way to use computing resources, but so what? The "so what" is that cloud computing now means small Web hosting outfits are going to compete with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others. That's a big deal
The Virtual Datacenter Operating System allocates resources to applications based on the workloads they're handling at a particular time. The VDC-OS also delivers a set of application services, such as security and scalability. These services are independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which the applications were built to run.
Cloud computing has become one of the dominant drivers in the IT sector over the last year or so. It generally it refers to hosting applications remotely and allowing local access using a browser.
The new platform will enable mid-market and low-end enterprise IT shops to build their own enterprise-grade external hosted clouds, and connect them with other clouds, if they so choose.
VDC-OS shifts the center of server computing from individual operating systems to infrastructure software that spans many distributed servers, VMware said. In essence, the new technology serves as the operating system for the entire data center.
The VDC-OS expands virtual infrastructure along three dimensions. First, it seamlessly aggregates servers, storage and network as a pool of on-premise cloud resources and allocate them to applications that need them most. Second, it
delivers a set of application services to guarantee the right levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which they were built to run.
Third, the VDC-OS federates compute capacity between the on-premise and off-premise clouds. Unlike a traditional OS, which is optimized for a single server and supports only those applications written to its interfaces, the VDC-OS serves as the OS for the entire datacenter and supports the full diversity of any application written to any OS, from legacy Windows applications to modern distributed applications that run in mixed operating system environments.
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