Evolution of the cloud from HP, Intel and Yahoo

HP

HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) today announced the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.

The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.

HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation.

Very cool, I wonder if we might see more development in terms of products/services around the cloud computing space. It will be interesting to see how cloud computing as a business platform develops, as we abstract the application, the end user from the hardware and as we tier the data center, the infrastructure and the application - might we have different configurations, technologies to achieve the cloud?

The tier1 cloud, the one that delivers core services and functionality to the end user, might use high available redundant compute nodes, the development cloud which rents out application time, space, or power, might run on the cheapest compute nodes in a fresh air cooled data center with cheap storage. How we transform not only the technologies, the best practice not to mention the way we do business including the billing will be the interesting part - how much of my IT transactions do I need to control? How much of the IT function is core to my business, and how much can be outsourced to the ‘cloud’ to the common infrastructure - can my common applications run on an infrastructure I don’t own? We’ll have to see, do check out the article.