The extraordinary aspect of cloud computing is its ability to support computing, even offer information storage and management, as a service off the Internet, without the expertise or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. This is revolutionizing computing and information storage, particularly at the personal and SME levels.

It has been able to break monopoly and create the next-generation paradigm in IT and computing. Cloud computing has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry by letting companies to use IT resources efficiently, and reduces the amount of power needed, thereby saving energy and pooling IT resources.

The fact that cloud computing is gaining prevalence is largely due to the reduction in spending on hardware and software infrastructure, while increasing computing power and business resilience.

Impact

Flexible Datacenter: Virtualizing a single physical computer is just the beginning. It is now possible to scale across hundreds of interconnected physical computers and storage devices to form an entire virtual infrastructure.

There is no need to assign servers, storage, or network bandwidth permanently to each application. Instead, the hardware resources are dynamically allocated when and where they are needed.

This “internal cloud” means the applications with the highest priority will always have the resources they need without wasting money on excess hardware only needed for peak times. The internal cloud can connect to an external cloud as well, providing the flexibility, availability and scalability a business needs to thrive.

Storage Virtualization: Storage virtualization simplifies today’s diverse and complex network storage systems and offers a wide range of benefits. Organizations can simplify the management of their infrastructure, consolidating many physical storage systems from different vendors into one pool of storage, masking the complexity of the underlying physical structure and greatly increasing utilization.

Storage virtualization also brings about significant cost reductions and efficiencies, by reducing the need for additional software applications and licences, reducing the need for additional hardware investment (which in turn means lower power, cooling and space costs) and also by reducing labour costs and resources required to manage spiralling data volumes.

Green IT: Virtualization promotes green IT by significantly cutting energy costs. Thanks to the need for fewer physical servers, the power required to maintain the datacenter shrinks, even as the hardware footprint also reduces. With increasing regulatory and community pressure on businesses to adopt green responsibilities, virtualization is becoming more a necessity than choice.

Conclusion

The economic crisis and a need to "do more with less" is driving more businesses toward innovation and pushing changes in the computing ecosystem. As adoption to newer technologies increase, early adopters generate buzz about the technology, which drives even more people toward it. As the technology matures and the knowledge-base grows, larger vendors move into the field, making the technology less intimidating to new adopters and more manageable for all users.

These changing computing paradigms are impacting a similar transformation in the information infrastructure space as well and information management as we know it is set to scale new dimensions.

(Sarv Saravanan is the VP & MD, EMC India Center of Excellence)