Page 31 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE C L O UD REV O L UTION

The point is that few of the largest enterprise data centers
claim 45,000 servers; some data centers in the cloud are being
built on a scale never seen before. They tend to drive econo-
mies of scale that are not easy to duplicate anywhere else.
These data centers are frequently what people are refer-
ring to when they discuss the cloud. In common parlance, the

cloud is all those servers out on the Internet that are deliver-
ing information and services to end users, wherever they may
be. But such a description, in which we are still somewhat mes-
merized by size, is not the point. In addition to assembling a
lot of server power, the cloud does things differently than the
way computing has been organized before. Big Internet data
centers have existed since the advent of AltaVista, Lycos,

Excite, and other early search engines.
One distinction is that these new data centers have been
able to leave so many of the problems associated with tradi-
tional data centers behind. The traditional data center is
labor-intensive and has many different kinds of servers, re-
flecting an evolution through several early models of comput-
ing supplied by different manufacturers. The cloud data
centers are different. They seem to have been engineered at
a stroke for a new set of priorities; all the servers are the same

or closely related and are managed in the same way. They re-
quire fewer people. The traditional data center is overengi-
neered and overinvested in hardware, trying to avoid machine
failure. The cloud data center tolerates hardware failures and
routes work around them. It solves through software the hard-
ware problems that used to necessitate the shutdown of ma-
chines and replacement of parts. It ties together large numbers

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