Page 277 -

The Greening of IT
242 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

Types of Cloud Computing Offerings

Figure B.1 depicts the various kinds of offerings based on cloud com-
puting prevalent today. The offerings are based on three broad layers or
categories, namely i) Platform or Infrastructure Basis, ii) Business
Applications, and iii) Business Services.
Examples

Business Fulfillment services, payment Amazon Fulfillment, Amazon
Services services, printing services Flexible Payment Solution, PayPal

Web application services, IBM Bluehouse, Lotus Sametime Unyte,
Business
Applications collaboration application services, Google Apps, Salesforce.com CRM
business application services
Amazon Elastic Cloud, Amazon
Database services (Cloud DB),
Storage Services, Joyent
Platform compute services (Compute Cloud), Accelerators, IBM Remote Data
storage services (Cloud Storage) Protection services
Source: IBM Software Group
ptg
Figure B.1 Types of cloud computing
Platform-based offerings focus on providing storage services (Cloud
Storage), computing capacity (Compute Cloud), and database services
(Cloud DB). Cloud storage is a model of networked data storage where
data is stored on multiple virtual servers, generally hosted by third par-
ties, rather than being hosted on dedicated servers. Hosting companies
operate large data centers; and people who require their data to be
hosted buy or lease storage capacity from them and use it for their stor-
age needs. The data center operators, in the background, virtualize the
resources according to the requirements of the customer and expose
them as virtual servers, which the customers can themselves manage.
Physically, the resource may span across multiple servers. Nirvanix,
offers a storage delivery service used by developers for storing content
and data and making them available worldwide at low latency. In the
case of Nirvanix, the system may span multiple data centers or even
continents.
Amazon.com is probably the first company to sell cloud-based com-
puting in the form of its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a part of
Amazon’s web services platform. It provides computing capacity in the