I am using Virtualization, am I not using Cloud ?
A lot of people are confused with the differences between Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Are they different? Are they the same? & what defines the relationship between them? A part of this confusion is due to tons of Cloud computing definitions floating around the web. To record these in a holistic manner, we have listed the set of opinions and questions that worry & irk customers:-
1) I have/am using a Data Center which internally uses Virtualization. Am I on Cloud?
2) I am already using Virtualization; do I need to move to Cloud?
3) I have to devise the IT strategy for my organization. Should I include Virtualization or Cloud in it? Which is better?
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The list is endless.
Virtualization is a half-a-century old technology. It was coined by IBM in the 60’s and since then has revolutionized the Data Center and Enterprise IT Infrastructure.
Effective Utilization is one of the corner stones of Virtualization.
VMware, a company founded in 1998 brought Virtualization in the mainstream, and its products have since dominated the Server Virtualization market. Xen, a product of Research labs back in 2003, had created a stir in the Open Source world by bringing Cost-effective and reliable virtualization to the masses. Organizations have been either tweaking or using the Xen Virtualization Software to build effective Data Centers.
However, all this was still restricted to the Data Center world. Enterprises looking for a managed Infrastructure services would host their suite of applications in large Data Centers which run on the many Off-the-shelf Virtualization products.
Any new demands from the Customer would lead to a manual intervention at the Data Center, and this would take substantial time. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan also involved manual labor and were inherently risky, and hence required systematic planning. The Virtualized Data Center improved the effectiveness of the Servers, but had no effect on price models, and the Customer involvement was limited. More so, dynamic scaling and on-demand provisioning were unheard of.
Virtualization was a boon to the IT industry, but still had a long way to go in order to create and sustain a market based on economies of scale.
In comes Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing has its foundation in the success of Virtualization and technologies that have enabled Virtualization to perform at near native speed. However it does away with the various challenges and risks involved with plain-vanilla Virtualization solutions. Over the matured layer of Virtualization software, runs a perfectly orchestrated set of services, which enable dynamic provisioning, on demand scaling & high availability aspects of a Cloud. This set of services is then abstracted by a Self Service portal giving users an interface that they identify with.
These services can be categorized as:-
a) Metering, Billing and Rating System
b) Identity Management
c) Dynamic Provisioning Engine
d) Monitoring and Management
e) Security Sub-system.
However, each vendor alters & adds new set of services to the above list in order to improve the functionality of its cloud offering. The careful interaction of these services provides the bare virtualization resources to be available on demand by the user.
Hence Virtualization is a key component of Cloud Computing, but it is the various set of services surrounding it, that gives Cloud Computing the real edge and its game changer qualities.