Cloud computing is the latest buzzword these days and make no mistake, it’s not about angels sitting on clouds performing customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, business intelligence, accounts receivable, accounts payable and other such functions on their notebook PCs.

In fact it’s been around over 10 years and was previously know by rather clinical terms such as the application service provider (ASP) model, IBM called its offering a service oriented architecture (SOA) and it was previously called software as a service (SoaS).

Simply put, cloud computing and its earlier names refer to various types of software applications hosted on a remote centralized server, instead of on each individual PC or a local server, and accessed using a thin client environment, which usually is a Java, XML or a Web 2.0 app running within a web browser on a PC, PDA, smartphone or other platforms.

Some may recall Biztone.com founded in Malaysia in the late 1990s by Darryl Carlton to provide accounting applications online to paying subscribers, It later relocated its sales and marketing operations to Singapore but it didn’t enjoy the acceptance it had expected there and eventually closed down.

In 2003, Entellium relocated its headquarters to Seattle, Washington to take advantage of the market there which was more open to ASP-based services, while it retained its research and development operations in Kuala Lumpur. Some of its products were recently acquired by Intuit.

Perhaps the world wasn’t quite ready for cloud computing back then.

“However, the recent economic crisis, rising costs of data centre space, rising energy costs and the need to optimise on server, storage, human and other resources, coupled with the tendency for companies to want to outsource their non-core activities to specialised service providers have all contributed to the current surge of interest in cloud computing,” said EMC South Asia chief architect Sal Fernando (above), who spoke to Comm & Tech Asia about private cloud computing in Kuala Lumpur on 31 March.
 

Private cloud, public cloud

“Cloud computing takes two forms – namely public cloud and private cloud,” said Fernando. “Google Docs, Google Widgets, and Microsoft online Office applications are examples of public cloud computing applications, while one of the best known commercial private cloud computing is the SalesForce.com suite of customer relationship management (CRM) applications.”

Private cloud computing can either be hosted internally within an enterprise or hosted for that enterprise by an outsource service provider but either way it’s customised to that enterprise’s requirements and EMC can provide them with the servers, network and storage infrastructure for enterprise and provider infrastructures, as well as the consultancy, implementation and ongoing management services for their cloud.

However, owning and operating private clouds are expensive, so vendors (not EMC) have decided to build private cloud functionality and provide it as a hosted service to their customers, who can then focus on their core business.

“Seventy percent of companies’ IT budgets are spent on maintenance, backup, recovery and so on, so enterprises tend to outsource these functions to service providers such as AT&T which provides hosted backup on demand,” said Fernando.

Founded in 1979, the Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC originally produced memory boards for computers and later ventured into data storage products and today provides the storage infrastructure, including its Virtual SAN storage area network management product to store data in the cloud.

“The data footprint of organisations in Malaysia is growing by between 60% and 70% per annum, while the global data footprint is growing by seven petabytes per day and we provide the backup and replication systems and solutions for internal or hosted data recovery services,” said Fernando.

Data security

In 2006, EMC acquired RSA Security, the leader in security for information rights management and already well known for its data encryption algorithms.

Now a division of EMC, RSA enables EMC to provide its customers with solutions for authentication, fraud prevention, access control, credential management, data loss prevention, security information and event management,  encryption and key management.

It also plays a leading role in security standards development, helps customers meet regulatory compliance requirements, provides professional and other services.

“Security is the second most important criteria for chief information officers (CIOs) after saving money, while chief financial officers (CFOs) must ensure their company complies with corporate mandates, industry regulations and legal requirements or they can, and some already have gone to jail for not doing so,” said Fernado.

“So we provide CIOs and CFOs with the intelligence to make decisions based on these requirements, since if they don’t where their information is located, they cannot manage it,” he added.

Virtualisation

The hottest technology today is virtualisation and EMC acquired leading virtualization solutions and services provider VMware in 2004, which lets it reduce the number of Intel (Windows and Linux) servers its customers use down to by as much as one tenth.

For example, EMC had 36 Exchange servers worldwide four years ago, which it has since consolidated down to four located in Hopkinton and these four machines serve its 44,000 employees worldwide.

Customers tend to buy servers for every application but only between 8% and 15% of their processing power, memory and storage is actually used, which is a huge waste but virtualization allows applications to share all these resources, thus requiring much fewer pieces of hardware hence system cost, while also reducing overall system power consumption and cooling (air conditioning) requirements, hence cost.

“This issue came to a head recently due to the need for green IT, since when idle, each server draws 60% of the power it would when fully utilised,” said Fernando. “Fewer servers also require correspondingly less data centre space which is becoming very expensive in Malaysia,” said Fernado.

Information from data

When someone creates a piece of data stored on a server or a storage device, it remains as a piece of data and not information.

Seventy per cent of all data is unstructured – ie. located on various servers or storage somewhere in the system, instead of in a database where it can be searched, sorted, indexed, categorized, mined, analysed and so on.

For example, if a user of a social networking site sees that his friend is listening to a piece of music which he also likes, it makes it that much easier for him to obtain nthat piece of music from the friend.

So if there is a policy in place to wrap metadata around a piece of stored information, it can be more accurately categorized so that a search on it results in finer and more valid hits wherever it is located in the system.

“For example, if you search for Sal Fernando on the popular search engines, you won’t only find links related to me but also to criminals wanted by the FBI and others but with a more accurately categorised and refined search, you’d find most links related to me,” said Fernando.

Five years ago, EMC acquired a company called Documentum which provides solutions which allow users to access data using enterprise wide metadata and search capabilities.

“Despite all its benefits, cloud computing still has a long way to go before it gains wide acceptance,” said Fernando.

In some countries, national regulations will have to be changed to for example allow banks’ data and information to be stored on servers and storage facilities outside the country, in the case of hosted private clouds.