Cloud Computing Celebrates its 5th Anniversary

VMworld in Las Vegas is taking everyone by storm just like the recent Hurricane Irene and the momentous Labor Day celebration over the weekend. Both major and minor cloud computing players and vendors are competing hard core as they bring out their best and latest virtualization products for the public to see.

Dell kicked off the start of the game as it announced last Monday their plans to launch new cloud-based infrastructure service using VMware technology.

Dell’s move is historically significant as it arrived on the month marking Amazon’s 5th year celebration after it launched its Compute Cloud beta or EC2 five years ago on the same month. The EC2 product launch officially marked the beginning of the cloud service platform 5 years ago.

The five-year distance between the product launches is not to suggest that Dell is way out of the league because there is another player that just announced its bet product on the cloud market, Hewlett-Packard. HP also recently announced its new cloud products, services and visions, which are all focused on the business sector.

Dell and HP’s recent announcements only show that the cloud-solutions business is not a short-term fad; rather it is a mainstream path requiring a long process.

Charles King, a Pund-IT analyst said “Quite a few companies have concerns about hosting company data and applications in public cloud environments. We are still in the early stages in seeing these services roll out.”

Many believe that the reference to cloud computing being on its early stages is difficult to accept because with all the publicity and commotion it has created and continues to create makes it like it has been in the business several years back.

If one has to think though and is interested in cloud computing research it is indeed very difficult to see data information earlier than 2006. The reason being that in the earlier years cloud computing was referred to only as the grid-based computing.

Sun Microsystems is one of the companies that created a milestone in March 2006; at that time it announced a new vision for its long-time product logo stating that “The Network is the Computer.” It created a new public awareness that is focused on cloud thinking and service compute resources when it offered its Sun Grid. Sun Microsystems offered this service by allowing its users to choose their compute capacity and to order them via the Internet while payments are conveniently made through PayPal.

This move was followed suit by Google’s announcement of its new Search Engine Strategies on the August 9, 2006 conference.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the new model “starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing — they should be in a ‘cloud’ somewhere.”

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