Not everyone thinks of Amazon, Google, eBay, and Yahoo as key IT suppliers to business but that will change, according to Ian Osborne, a senior executive at Intellect.
He gave a thought-provoking talk to the Numara software "Engage Public Sectror Forum" in Central London on Cloud Computing and SaaS [software as a service], developments which will lead to a "new wave of business innovation".
He said that Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and Microsoft as the major cloud providers have infrastructures of hundreds of thousands of servers which will rise to millions in time.
They may not replace core IT systems but will be useful for email, storage and non-core activity. They have technologies for job scheduling, data sharing and management. With open source technologies they may threaten Microsoft Office.
Their data centres are also relatively green. They "care about power consumption, fault tolerance scalability, operational costs and performance," said Osborne.
One of Google's huge data centres on the Columbia River in Oregan is powered by electricity from a hydro-electric plant and cooled by recycled water.
There are disadvantages. Robust service level service agreements have yet to become common - though they will, said Osborne. There is also a question of how to manage data when you don't know where it's stored, and how to quickly identify the causes of faults.
Full article on ComputerWeekly.com. There is also an excellent summary of the conference by David Bicknell on the Numara website.
Links:
Engage Public Sector Forum - Numara software blog
Millions of servers: the future of cloud firms Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft - Computer Weekly
Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft will be key cloud providers of the future - Computer Weekly
Comments (3)
The above brings up an interesting topic on the future of Disaster Recovery Centers and how Business Continuity Projects will be managed moving forward.
Posted by Alfonzo | May 15, 2009 4:45 PM
Posted on May 15, 2009 16:45
Good point. Would you want to rely for disaster recovery on Google?
Posted by Tony Collins
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May 15, 2009 5:07 PM
Posted on May 15, 2009 17:07
Tony, many thanks for your insightful coverage, as always, and your thoughtful comments on the blog. Interesting, isn't it, that despite all Google's data centres on the Columbia River, it can still suffer a major outage as happened yesterday? Ian Osborne was right about those service level agreements.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/05/15/236060/google-embarrassed-and-apologetic-after-crash.htm
Posted by David Bicknell | May 15, 2009 5:12 PM
Posted on May 15, 2009 17:12