The Importance of IT Infrastructure in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a strategic new industry and represents a new generation of technological revolution. In the foreseeable future, there will be bigger spurts of energy in the field of cloud computing. Cloud computing has also brought new opportunities to traditional IT equipment providers—who have been prompted to make significant changes to traditional IT products.

Cloud computing is a new commercial computing model in which computing tasks are distributed in a resource pool consisting of a large number of computers. A variety of applications can obtain the necessary computing power, storage space and software services as needed. The resource pool is a pool of infrastructure, and its openness directly influences the quality of other cloud-based services such as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Depending on service models, cloud computing is classified into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS and SaaS. Fundamentally, the provision of cloud computing power refers to application and service delivery from the IT infrastructure.  Computational resources are provided on demand via a computer network, and these resources are easily extensible. To a user, resources in the cloud are infinitely extensible and available any time. Resources can be used and expanded whenever needed, and payment can be made according to the amount of resource used. Just like water and electricity are public utilities, cloud computing will become the IT infrastructure that provides continuous computational services to people everywhere. Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT capabilities are provided as a service to multiple customers using Internet technologies.

The essence of cloud computing is the aggregation of mass data and application resources. So there are very demanding requirements on performance, stability, and manageability of the background servers. Traditional low-end servers are not an ideal platform for cloud computing. Two points must be considered in relation to the web server farm pattern currently used by Google and Amazon. One is that Google and Amazon provide limited cloud computing application types, and the scale of the closely coupled processing is not large. Another major consideration is that the price of high-end servers is not affordable, even though they might be technically suitable.  As cloud computing becomes more popular, sales of high-end green servers will double, and the cost will further decline. Quality, high-end servers will develop rapidly.

The platform for providing cloud computing power is the core of cloud computing. The aggregation of data and applications itself has not changed computing types. The future cloud computing platform will still need to run core applications such as database and middleware. But the scale of these applications will increase enormously. What’s more, high-load tasks such as management, resource scheduling, and job scheduling of the cloud computing platform are key high-tension applications. Because these core applications involve large-scale on-line transaction processing (OLTP), a cluster of low-end servers cannot support these high-end applications. Therefore, high-end servers are the inevitable choice for the core business of cloud computing. In a typical distributed storage system, especially in a private cloud application, storage nodes can use cheap servers and storage devices. But the master server for managing name spaces, access control, data retrieval, and mapping relations between files and data blocks (especially a master server in a distributed file system with huge data) usually uses a high-end server to guarantee high performance, availability and security of the distributed file system. Cloud computing imposes various requirements on performance and efficiency of data centers. In some real-time operations, it requires higher level computing with less delay and faster response.

Currently, cloud computing services are limited only to peripheral, low-end, and general applications. Future cloud computing will penetrate into key fields. There will be critical requirements on system reliability and service level and a call for better fundamental physical equipment on the bottom-layer. The importance of IT infrastructure in the cloud computing era is self-evident. Improving the capabilities of IT infrastructure is the first door to success in cloud computing.