Emerging Technologies in IT

Infrastructure: Cloud
Computing
 Environmental Impact of IT
– computer energy is often wasted
• leaving the computer on when not in use (CPU and fan
consume power, screen savers consume power)
– printing is often wasteful
• for a “paperless” society, we tend to use more paper
today than before computer-prevalence
– pollution
• manufacturing techniques
• packaging
• disposal of computers and components (e-waste)
– toxicity
• there are toxic chemicals used in the manufacturing of
computers and components which can enter the food
chain and water
 System Constraints
• Data centers have huge losses, mostly cooling, low utilization and UPS
• Only 2.5% of energy entering a data center goes to useful computing
 Circuit Constraints
• Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that can be placed
inexpensively on a circuit doubles every year
• Current metal interconnect technologies are hugely inefficient due to power
losses

P: Power
C: Capacitance
V: Voltage
f : Frequency
 Green IT

• Techniques designed to reduce power consumption and e-waste

• Multi-core processors
– As the clock speed of CPUs increased, the amount of heat generated and
electricity consumed increased.
– Solution is to use two or more slower processors to generate the same
computing power but reduce heat and power consumption
– Use only one of the cores during periods of low demand

• Virtualization is the process of presenting a set of computing resources so that

they can be accessed in multiple ways without regard to physical configuration
 Virtualization

• Way of reducing hardware proliferation.

• One or a few physical servers can act as many

‘virtual’ servers.

• Each virtual server can run a different operating

system or version of software.

• Increases utilization of server capacity.

• Reduces power consumption, hardware

maintenance and operating cost.

• Requires additional server virtualization software.

Virtualization
 On-Demand (Utility) Computing

• Firms off-loading peak demand for computing

power to remote, large-scale data processing
centers

• Developed by IBM, SUN, and HP

• Firms pay only for the computing power they use,

as with their electricity supplier.

• Excellent for firms with spiked demand curves

caused by seasonal variations in consumer
demand, e.g. holiday shopping

• Saves firms from purchasing excessive levels of

infrastructure
 Cloud Computing
• Cloud Computing is a general term used to describe a new
class of network based computing that takes place over the
Internet,
– basically a step on from Utility Computing
– a collection/group of integrated and networked hardware,
software and Internet infrastructure (called a platform).
– Using the Internet for communication and transport, it
provides hardware, software and networking services to
clients
• These platforms hide the complexity and details of the
underlying infrastructure from users and applications by
providing very simple graphical interface or API (Applications
Programming Interface).
 Cloud Computing…

• What user organizations understand about

Cloud Computing?
• Why do they intend to move to cloud
computing?
• What threats they perceive?
• In what different ways cloud computing help
user organizations?
• In what context they do not intend to move to
cloud computing?
 What is Cloud Computing?

• Provides on-demand services

• Anywhere, anytime and any place access services..
• Pay for use and as needed
• Measure services availed….
• No buy hardware, software….resources….
• Scale up and down in capacity and functionalities
• The hardware and software services are available to
– general public, enterprises, corporations and
businesses markets
 On Premise vs. Cloud Computing
On Premise:
• Companies own their software and hardware and keep
them “on premise” in data centers and other specialized
facilities.
• Enable these applications for different devices—desktops,
laptops, tablets, and smartphones—and make them
accessible to employees at home and on the road via web
browsers.
• They can also open this infrastructure to people outside
the organization, such as contractors, suppliers, and joint
venture partners.
 Cloud Computing…
• With cloud computing, companies lease their digital assets,
and their employees don’t know the location of the computers,
data centers, applications, and databases that they’re using.
These resources are just “in the cloud” somewhere.

• Customers don’t have to concern themselves with details; they

just rent what they need from the cloud.
• Making individuals more productive
• Facilitating collaboration
• Mining insights from data
• Developing and hosting applications
 Cloud Computing…
• It dramatically lowers the cost of entry for smaller firms trying
to benefit from compute-intensive business analytics that were
hitherto available only to the largest of corporations (Dynamic
provisioning of resources).
• Provide an almost immediate access to hardware resources,
with no upfront capital investments for users, leading to a
faster time to market in many businesses.
• Cloud computing can lower IT barriers to innovation, as can
be witnessed from the many promising startups, from the
ubiquitous online applications such as Facebook and Youtube
to the more focused applications like TripIt (for managing
one's travel) or Mint (for managing one's personal finances).
 Cloud Computing Characteristics
Common Characteristics:

Massive Scale Resilient Computing

Homogeneity Geographic Distribution

Virtualization Service Orientation

Low Cost Software Advanced Security

Essential Characteristics:

On Demand Self-Service
Broad Network Access Rapid Elasticity
Resource Pooling Measured Service

Adopted from: Effectively and Securely Using the Cloud Computing Paradigm by peter Mell, Tim Grance
 Characteristics
• Scalability Infrastructure capacity allows for traffic spikes and
minimizes delays.
• Resiliency Cloud providers have mirrored solutions to minimize
downtime in the event of a disaster. This type of resiliency can give
businesses the sustainability they need during unanticipated events.
• Homogeneity: No matter which cloud provider and architecture an
organization uses, an open cloud will make it easy for them to work
with other groups, even if those other groups choose different
providers and architectures.
• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision
computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as
needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each
service’s provider.
• Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network
and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by
heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones,
laptops, and PDAs).
 Characteristics…
• Resource pooling. Multi-tenant model.. There is a sense of location
independence in that the customer generally has no control or
knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but
may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g.,
country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage,
processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.
• Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically
provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and
rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities
available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be
purchased in any quantity at any time.
• Measured Service. Cloud systems automatically control and
optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some
level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage,
processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts)
New classes of applications and delivers services that were not
possible before
(a) mobile interactive applications that are location-, environment-
and context-aware and that respond in real time to information
provided by human users, nonhuman sensors (e.g. humidity and
stress sensors within a shipping container) or even from
independent information services (e.g. worldwide weather data)4;
(b) parallel batch processing, that allows users to take advantage of
huge amounts of processing power to analyze terabytes of data
for relatively small periods of time, while programming
abstractions like Google's MapReduce or its open- source
counterpart Hadoop makes the complex process of parallel
execution of an application over hundreds of servers transparent
to programmers;
(c) business analytics that can use the vast amount of computer
resources to understand customers, buying habits, supply chains
and so on from voluminous amounts of data; and
(d) extensions of compute-intensive desktop applications that can
offload the data crunching to the cloud leaving only the rendering
of the processed data at the front-end, with the availability of
network bandwidth reducing the latency involved.
 Cloud Service Models
Software as a Platform as a Infrastructure as a
Service (SaaS) Service (PaaS) Service (IaaS)

SalesForce CRM

LotusLive

Google App
Engine

Adopted from: Effectively and Securely Using the Cloud Computing Paradigm by peter Mell, Tim Grance
• INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-A-SERVICE (IAAS), is the most basic; it’s a server or
servers out there in the cloud, or a bunch of storage capacity or bandwidth. IaaS
customers, which are often tech companies, typically have a lot of IT expertise;
they want access to computing power but don’t want to be responsible for installing
or maintaining it. Ex. Amazon's S3 storage service and EC2 computing platform,
Rackspace Cloud Servers, Joyent and Terremark

• PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE (PAAS). This is a cloud-based platform that

companies can use to develop their custom applications or write software that
integrates with existing applications. PaaS environments come equipped with
software development technologies like Java, .NET, Python, and Ruby on Rails and
allow customers to start writing code quickly, Microsoft's Azure Services Platform,
Google App Engine, Amazon's Relational Database Services and Rackspace Cloud
Sites.
• SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE (SAAS), the third category, is the largest and most
mature part of the cloud. It’s an application or suite of applications that resides in
the cloud instead of on a user’s hard drive or in a data center. E.g. Salesforce.com’s
CRM software; collaboration software—spreadsheets, word processing programs,
and so on—has moved into the cloud with Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365,
GMail, TurboTax Online, Facebook, or Twitter.