BANGKOK, 5 February 2010 - Cloud computing technology is being piloted as an academic discipline as the computer engineering department of Kasetsart University (KU) has pioneered the technology through its server consolidation in providing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).
Assistant professor Puchong Utayopas, KU's computer engineering department, faculty of engineering, told Database cloud technology has for many years taken place in terms of virtualisation. The fundamental technology of cloud computing is the use of virtual machines sharing servers.
He noted that the university has provided a lot of servers to researchers and students at the computer engineering department for testing and internal services. "We thus shrink the number of servers and use a few high-performance computers by having virtual machines for hosting, so virtual machines can be used instead of having to implement new servers," he said, adding that the department applied VMware because it is both open and free.
Called VM cloud, the department today feeds the service with more than 20 virtual machines and more than five clusters.
Public cloud
The concept of cloud is also to promote software-as-a-service (SaaS), which requires high-speed Internet infrastructure. For Thailand, the Internet for internal organisations may be strong, but between organisations, it is still weak, so it's difficult to establish a public cloud service.
However, Puchong said there is no clear-cut business model for cloud computing in Thailand. What will be less difficult, however, is the large scale of website publishing, due to the demand for content management systems.
It is now just the beginning, he said. To go to the platform-as-a-service (PaaS), there must be software solutions running on cloud hardware. "Google is the obvious example as they have application engines with storage computing and programming models," said Puchong.
Cloud is the integration of many programs together, and so, he said, this will be an opportunity for open source software, because they will integrate the existing open source and add value.
The revolution of cloud computing in Thailand will come easier as it is centralised. "The first six to nine months will be concerned with education," said Puchong.
The government can send e-mail to public agencies by applying open source technology such as Web mail. However, co-ordination between the public agencies still faces problems.
Puchong suggested that service providers should think about what kind of services they should to deliver to customers. They may start with test-based projects with a low investment. A test-based model is possible to start with just four or five machines.
Maturing rapidly
Global analyst and consulting firm Ovum forecast that the next three years will see cloud computing mature rapidly as vendors and enterprises come to terms with the opportunities and challenges it represents.
Senior analyst Laurent Lachal said cloud computing will be a hybrid. Enterprises will mix and match public and private cloud elements with traditional hosting and outsourcing services to create solutions that fit short and long-term requirements.
The past 18 months have seen a shift in focus away from public clouds towards private ones, owing to a powerful mix of vendor push and user pull.
The private cloud is a re-badging of what data centre-focused hardware, software and service vendors have been doing under different names (such as utility computing, autonomic IT, on-demand data centre, etc) for the past 10 years. Many users are wary of public clouds' quality of service in areas such as reliability, availability, scalability and security but curious about the possibility of adopting their characteristics (for example, on-demand provisioning of IT assets).
A journey or a shortcut
Private clouds are either defined as the aim of the data centre evolution journey or as shortcuts along the way that push parts of the data centre ahead to deliver focused returns on investment. What is needed is a way to reconcile the two approaches (private cloud as a journey, and as a shortcut) to understand when, on the road towards next-generation data centres, users should take shortcuts. Unfortunately, most vendors currently emphasise the second approach rather than reconcile the two.
"Cloud computing promises to tackle two irreconcilable IT challenges—the need to lower costs and boost innovation—but it will take a lot of effort to make it work. Instead of a nimbler IT with less somewhere else, the ill-prepared will end up with their IT mess spread across a wider area", said Lachal.
Lachal believes adoption is a two-way street. "It is not just about whether cloud computing is ready for enterprises, it is, more importantly, whether or not enterprises are ready for it," he said.
"The fact is that many enterprises are not yet ready for either private or public clouds or any type of hybrids. Many enterprises lack the knowledge, skills and metrics to figure out what is best for them. They need to be able figure out how to mix and match."
