Cloud Computing

Abstract- A common understanding of “cloud

computing” is continuously evolving, and the
terminology and concepts used to define it often
need clarifying. Press coverage can be vague or
may not fully capture the extent of what cloud
computing entails or represents, sometimes
reporting how companies are making their
solutions available in the “cloud” or how “cloud
computing” is the way forward, but not examining
the characteristics, models, and services involved
in understanding what cloud computing is and
what it can become. This white paper introduces
internet-based cloud computing, exploring the
characteristics, service models, and deployment
models in use today, as well as the benefits and
challenges associated with cloud computing.

INTRODUCTION. Cloud computing also describes applications that are

extended to be accessible through the Internet. These
Cloud computing is a term used to describe both a cloud applications use large data centers and
platform and type of application. A cloudcomputing powerful servers that host Webapplications and Web
platform dynamically provisions, configures, services. Anyone with a suitable Internet connection
reconfigures, and deprovisions servers asneeded. and a standardbrowser can access a cloud application.
Servers in the cloud can be physical machines or
virtual machines. Advanced cloudstypically include
other computing resources such as storage area
networks (SANs), networkequipment, firewall and
other security devices.
 servers on which the grid applications can run. Cloud
computing should not be confused with grid
computing. Grid computing involves dividing a large
task into many smaller tasks that run in parallel on
separate servers. Grids require many computers,
typically in the thousands, and commonly use
servers, desktops, and laptops.

DEFINITION

A cloud is a pool of virtualized computer resources.

A cloud can:
Host a variety of different workloads, including
batch-style back-end jobs and interactive, user-facing
applications
Allow workloads to be deployed and scaled-out
quickly through the rapid provisioning of
virtual machines or physical machines
Support redundant, self-recovering, highly
scalable programming models that allow workloads Clouds also support nongrid environments, such as a

to recover from many unavoidable hardware/software three-tier Web architecture running standard or Web

failures 2.0 applications. A cloud is more than a collection of

Monitor resource use in real time to enable computer resources because a cloud provides a

rebalancing of allocations when needed mechanism to manage those resources. Management

Cloud computing environments support grid includes provisioning, change requests, reimaging,

computing by quickly providing physical and virtual workload rebalancing, deprovisioning, and
monitoring.

SOFTWARE VIA THE INTERNET: MICROSOFT
IN ‘CLOUD’ COMPUTING:
Benefits:
Cloud computing infrastructures can allow
enterprises to achieve more efficient use of their IT
hardware and software investments. They do this by
breaking down the physical barriers inherent in
isolated systems, and automating the management of
the group of systems as a single entity. Cloud
computing is an example of an ultimately virtualized
system, and a natural evolution for data centers that
employ automated systems management, workload
balancing, and virtualization technologies.
A cloud infrastructure can be a cost efficient model
for delivering information services, reducing IT
management complexity, promoting innovation, and
increasing responsiveness through realtime workload
balancing. The Cloud makes it possible to launch
Web 2.0 applications quickly and to scale up
applications as much as needed when needed. The
platform supports traditional Java™ and Linux,
Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack-based
applications as well as new architectures such as
MapReduce and the Google File System, which
provide a means to scale applications across
thousands of servers instantly.
Large amounts of computer resource, in the form of
Xen virtual machines, can be provisioned and made
available for new applications within minutes instead
of days or weeks. Developers can gain access to these
resources through a portal and put them to use
immediately. Several products are available that
provide virtual machine capabilities, including
proprietary ones such as VMware, and open source
alternatives, such as XEN. This paper describes the
use of XEN virtualization.
Many customers are interested in cloud
infrastructures to serve as platforms for innovation,
particularly in countries that want to foster the
development of a highly skilled, high-tech work
force. They want to provide startups and research
organizations with an environment for idea exchange,
and the ability to rapidly develop and deploy new
product prototypes.
In fact, HiPODS has been hosting IBM’s innovation
portal on a virtualized cloud infrastructure in our
Silicon Valley Lab for nearly two years. We have
over seventy active innovations at a time, with each
innovation lasting on average six months. 50% of
those innovations are Web 2.0 projects (search,
collaboration, and social networking) and 27% turn
into products or solutions. Our success with the
innovation portal is documented in the August 20
Business Week cover story on global collaboration.
 Several commercial virtual worlds have as many as
nine million registered users and hundreds and
thousands of servers supporting these environments.
A company that hosts a virtual world could have real
time monitors showing the utilization level of the
current infrastructure or the average response time of
the clients in any given ‘realm’ of the virtual world.
Realms are arbitrary areas within a virtual world that
support a specific subset of people or subset of the
world. The company discovers that realm A has an
significant increase in use and the response times are
declining, whereas realms S and Z have decreased in
use. The company initiates a cloud rebalance request

Usage scenarios to deprovision five servers each from realms S and Z

Cloud computing can play a significant role in a and provision ten servers to Realm A. After a couple

variety of areas including internal pilots, innovations, of minutes the ten servers are relocated without

virtual worlds, e-business, social networks, and interruption to any users in any of the realms and the

search. Here we summarize several basic but response time for realm A has returned to acceptable

important usage scenarios that highlight the breadth levels. The company has achieved significant cost

and depth of impact that cloud computing can have savings by reusing underutilized equipment,

on an enterprise. maintained high customer satisfaction, avoided help

Internal innovation desk calls from users and completed in minutes what

Innovators request resources online through a simple would previously have taken days or weeks to

Web interface. They specify a desired start and end accomplish.

dates for their pilot. A cloud resource administrator

approves or rejects the request. Upon approval, the
cloud provisions the servers. The innovator has the
resources available for use within a few minutes or an
hour depending on what type of resource was
requested.
Virtual worlds
Virtual worlds require significant amounts of
computing power, especially as those virtual spaces
become large or as more and more users log in.
Massively multiplayer online games (MMPOG) are a
good example of significantly large virtual worlds.
 deployment, installation, and configuration of the
e-business: Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems,
In e-business, scalability can be achieved by making
new servers available as needed. For example a
company may experience high workloads on
weekends or evenings as opposed to early mornings
and weekdays. If a company has a significantly large
cloud, they could schedule computer resources to be
provisioned each evening, weekend, or during a peak
season. There are more opportunities to achieve
efficiencies as the cloud grows. Another aspect of
this scenario involves employing business policies to
decide what applications receive higher priorities and
thus more computing resources. Revenue generating
applications may be rated higher than research and
development or innovation pilots. For several months
IBM has been running a cloud infrastructure that
adjusts computer resources appropriately and
automatically according to business policies.
Personal hobbies
Innovation is no longer a concept developed and along with the installation / configuration of any
owned by companies and businesses. It is becoming software stack that the user requests. Tivoli
popular at the individual level, and more individuals Provisioning Manager uses Websphere Application
are coming up with innovations. These individuals Server to communicate the provisioning status and
could be requesting servers from a cloud to work on availability of resources in the data center, to
their innovations schedule the provisioning and deprovisioning of
Architecture resources, and to reserve resources for future use. As
Figure 1 illustrates the high level architecture of the a result of the provisioning, virtual machines are
cloud computing platform. It’s comprised of a data created using the XEN hypervisor or physical
center, IBM® Tivoli® Provisioning Manager, IBM® machines are created using Network Installation
Tivoli® Monitoring, IBM® Websphere® Manager, Remote Deployment Manager, or Cluster
Application Server, IBM® DB2®, and virtualization Systems Manager, depending upon the operating
components. This architecture diagram focuses on the system and platform. IBM Tivoli Monitoring Server
core back end of the cloud computing platform; it monitors the health (CPU, disk, and memory) of the
does not address the user interface. Tivoli servers provisioned by Tivoli Provisioning Manager.
Provisioning Manager automates imaging, DB2 is the database server that Tivoli Provisioning
Manager uses to store the resource data. IBM Tivoli
Monitoring agents that are installed on the virtual and
physical machines communicate with the Tivoli
Monitoring server to get the health of the virtual
machines and provide the same to the user. The cloud
computing platform has two user interfaces to
provision servers.
One interface is feature rich -- fully loaded with
the WebSphere suite of products – and relatively
more involved from a process perspective.
One interface provides basic screens for making
provisioning requests.
All requests are handled by Web2.0 components
deployed on the WebSphere Application Server.
Requests are forwarded to Tivoli Provisioning
Manager for provisioning/deprovisioning servers.
Automated provisioning:
The core functionality of a cloud is its ability to
automatically provision servers for innovators and to
enable innovators, administrators, and others to use
that function with a Web-based interface. The role-
based interface abstracts out the complexity of IBM
Tivoli Provisioning Manager, Remote Deployment
Manager, Network Installation Manager, business
process execution language (BPEL), and Web
services.
Typically, a pilot team needs four to twelve weeks to
identify, procure, and build a pilotinfrastructure and
additional time to build a security compliant software
stack so that developers can begin building or
deploying applications and code. The cloud provides
a framework andoffering that reduces that boarding
process to aproximately one hour We accomplish this
through a role-based Web portal that allows
innovators to fill out a formdefining their hardware
platform, CPU, memory, storage, operating system,
middleware, and team members and associated roles.
This process takes about five minutes. After
submitting the request through the portal, a cloud
administrator is notified and logs in to approve,
modify, and/or
Open source
Open source solutions played an important role in the
development of the cloud. In particular, a couple of
projects have been foundations for common cloud
services such as virtualization and parallel
processing. Xen is an open-source virtual machine
implementation that allows physical machines to host
multiple copies of operating systems. Xen is used in
the cloud to represent machines as virtual images that
can be easily and repeatedly provisioned and
deprovisioned. Hadoop, now under the Apache
license, is an open-source framework for running
large data processing applications on a cluster. It
allows the creation and execution of applications
using Google’s MapReduce programming paradigm,
which divides the application into small fragments of
work that can be executed on any node in the cluster.
It also transparently supports reliability and data
migration through the use of a distributed file system.
Using Hadoop, the cloud can execute parallel
applications on a massive data set in a reasonable
amount of time, enabling computationally-intensive
services such as retrieving information efficiently,
customizing user sessions based on past history, or
generating results based on Monte Carlo
(probabilistic) algorithms.
 the disks inside the machines, along with the network
to provide a shared file system that is redundant. This
can increase the total data processing speed when the
data and processing power is spread out efficiently.
The Google file system is a part of a storage
architecture but it is not considered to be a SAN
architecture. A SAN architecture relies on an adapter
other than an Ethernet in the computer nodes, and has
a network similar to an Etherent network that can
then host various SAN devices.
Conclusion
Storage architecture in the cloud
In today's global competitive market, companies must
The storage architecture of the cloud includes the
innovate and get the most from its resources to
capabilities of the Google file system along with the
succeed. This requires enabling its employees,
benefits of a storage area network (SAN). Either
business partners, and users with the platforms and
technique can be used by itself, or both can be used
collaboration tools that promote innovation. Cloud
together as needed. The combination of data and
computing infrastructures are next generation
computer power is important. Computer power often
platforms that can provide tremendous value to
is measured in the cycle speed of a processor.
companies of any size. They can help companies
Computer speed also needs to account for the number
achieve more efficient use of their IT hardware and
of processors. The number of processors within an
software investments and provide a means to
SMP and the number within a cluster may both be
accelerate the adoption of innovations. Cloud
important. When looking at disk storage, the amount
computing increases profitability by improving
of space is often the primary measure. The number of
resource utilization. Innovators are free to focus on
gigabytes or terrabytes of data needed is important.
the innovation rather than the logistics of finding and
But access rates are often more important. Being able
managing resources that enable the innovation. IBM
to only read sixty megabyes per second may limit
is a leader in cloud computing and innovation
your processing capabilites below your computer
technologies. IBM has been using these technologies
capabilites. Individual disks have limits on the rate at
internally to promote innovations through its own
which they can process data. A single computer may
innovation portal, the Technology Adoption Program
have multiple disks, or with SAN file system be able
(TAP).
to access data over the network. So data placement
References
can be an important factor in achieving high data
The HiPODS Architecture Board led by Dennis
access rates. Spreading the data over multiple
Quan
computer nodes may be desired, or having all the
The Incubation Solutions Team that owns the
datam reside on a single node may be required for
Cloud strategy led by Jose Vargas
optimal performance. The Google file structure can
be used in the cloud environment. When used, it uses
The Innovation Factory team led by Jeff
Coveyduc