We have talked about the different types of companies, now I wanna get down to specifics. The nitty gritty of how the cloud can help. This is non specific will work if your company is big or small, whether you have 10 employees or a thousand employees. Wow those are grand words your are saying to yourself but how can the things that will help my small company also work for a big company. Read after the break for more.
Cloud Computing
So most of WTC has been strictly about cloud tech or how certain segments can benefit from the cloud. I wanna get a little more personal with this one as Google moves into the social space. On a daily basis I find myself moving more and more to the cloud with my everyday life. I have cut the outlook chord because gmail’s web app is just so much better. I have access to the Google Music beta although I don’t use it. If iTunes went to a complete and true cloud solution I would be on that faster then Steve Jobs could announce it. So as more and more stuff goes to the cloud should your identity join that? Is that what Google is trying to do with it’s new social offering?
So I found out the other day that Netflix is on the cloud. This shocked me in many ways. I love Netflix, their products and most of the time their service. But I have a reliability problem when it comes to Netflix that I thought for sure a cloud would provide. Then I found out where they had deployed to. Amazon Web Services, which in some ways should not surprise me. Recently they suffered an outage on the US East Region that affected Netflix although supposed invisible to the user. Netflix did have to do a whole bunch of stuff on the back end to keep this crash from affecting customer facing services. Now their are parts of Amazon I can stand by. S3 is an amazingly reliable service. Their EC2 instances not so much. Also I would not think S3 has the throughput to truely support HD streaming. So unabridged although some new information has come to light my open love letter to Netflix.
The guys from The Cloud Geeks are truly that: geeks. Ones who have become obsessed with the way the cloud works currently and how to fix it. Now, I try not to toot our own horn on this blog cause it is one that is meant for discussion not self aggrandization. However, there is something we are working on that I have to talk about and it fits perfectly with the topic of networking.
The neural center of a cloud is its network. The brain may be in the actual servers but the network is its spinal chord and nerve endings. The cloud is nothing without it. And networking is about to change drastically as people start to convert from IP v4 to IP v6. I explain both of those and what the cloud geeks are doing for them after the break.
Render times are the bane of almost any A/V specialists existence. They always seem to get worse when you are working with a deadline so you are forced to do something besides what you wanted to, normally leading to a slightly inferior product.
What if everything you did could be done in real time with no very expensive upgrades or cards? How bout being able to edit in real time from a netbook while on the go? What if with a high-speed internet connection you could completely change the way your business works and how productive you technicians could be? As a formal A/V professional if I could have had all of those things I would probably have never left the business. The cloud gives you all of that and so much more.
We have talked some on who needs cloud and why you need the cloud. Now I wanna talk about what is involved in building a cloud. Cloud computing consists of the layers you see in the image to the left. I wanna focus on the foundation of infrastructure and how you build a proper one. What makes for a solid cloud foundation. We will talk later about processors and memory and how many servers you need to start a cloud off. For now I wanna start with what seems to be the weakest link, storage.
Businesses are probably wondering what this cloud is. Small Businesses are probably doing the same thing that Grandpa Simpson is doing in the picture. They hear all about the cloud. They might even have read that the cloud is where they should be. But it’s all confusing to them. Why does my small business need cloud computing. We have been doing just fine buying servers and computers for my end users.
Small Business (SMB) should be in the cloud. They should be using it to differentiate themselves from other SMBs. They should learn the power of cloud and leverage it to explode. We will talk about how and why.
You’re a small business. You have minimal IT needs but you keep hearing this buzz word “Cloud-Computing”. So, you try and research it and you get overwhelmed with information. You figure, “this cloud thing is too advanced for my business. I don’t need this it won’t do anything for me.” You’re wrong. It doesn’t matter how small your business is or what your business is, you need cloud computing and even more so you need a strategy. If your business doesn’t have a cloud strategy you will be left in the dust out-shined and surpassed by your competitors. So we’re going to break down some types of business and why they need the cloud in this series of posts.
Do you ever wanna check your Twitter or tweet about something that’s important to you and get the Fail Whale? Twitter serves 19 Billion searches per month. That’s more then Google or Bing. Sixty five million tweets a day from over a 190 million users. That requires some serious horsepower. But something in that kind of demand shouldn’t fail. Seems like a great case for the cloud, doesn’t it? Think about it, you’re serving that much data you would want to have almost infinite power and redundancy. You would also want some load balancing and maybe even a content distribution network.
So, who offers all of these things now, in one integrated form? The answer to that, and why it still doesn’t work coming up.
We start off whatthecloud.com with a good one. Is Google docs really “cloud”. Our answer is yes. It allows you to work and integrate in real time with multiple people of your own choosing. So lets dive in to how we think this is true “cloud” and why people should move to it.
We haven’t introduced you to our thoughts yet that as it stands today cloud is a more misused word then any other in the tech vocabulary. A VPS (Virtual private server) when put on multiple machines for redundancy is not cloud. Cloud is unending power (also known as cycles), Infinite memory (RAM), and infinite space (Hard Drive).
So lets examine this in the case of Google. I can log into my Google account along with my partners. And in real time we can build a business plan and presentation. Set up our joint password lists and build these together in real time with almost no latency. You have an almost unending storage capacity with no end in sight as Google adds to it every day. This by our definition is “cloud”. And we are proud to say we use it.