The Cloud means many things to many people. It can be discussed as a usage, business model or an architecture. Here, I am covering the emergence of Cloud architectures which provide for a stronger user experience and greater economies for IT. Cloud was initially perceived as a move to a fully centralised, unbalanced model, providing a lowest common denominator user experience through tradtional browser-based applications. Yet, in the last couple of years, there has been recognition that Cloud has more than one access model, and vendors, developers and deployments alike have been moving to a more distributed, balanced model.
This model, Rich Services Cloud, represents the convergence of Web technologies, Cloud architectures and Virtualization infrastructure to provide data and applications that can be accessed from any device, anywhere. Clients are peers in the Cloud along with the nodes in the Data Centre, with data and application processing distributed across them according to device capabilities (processor, display, graphics, network, power, storage, etcetera), location (nearest node, quality of services of local network and ecosystem), and workload. Together with rich internet application technologies and the emergence of the next generation of browsers which serve as application runtimes and enable native code integration, this model provides the targeted, responsive experience of desktop applications, ubiquitous data and applications, and the economies of scale afforded to IT by centralised management.
Rich Services provide a truly immersive and expansive Cloud for consumers, SMB and the enterprise. Yet there are still a number of concerns with Cloud as to security, performance, energy efficiency, manageability and standards. Intel architecture has addressed these concerns on both client and server platforms. With AMT, VT, TPM and TXT on vPro and Nehalem platforms, Intel enables manageable, secure, trusted and scalable Rich Services Cloud, with applications that best leverage client processing power, form factors and experience.
Josh Hilliker has produced the following videos which demonstrate the power of Rich Services Cloud ohn Intel using a Financials and a Document Editor application.
With Rich Services and Intel technologies, you can take full advantage of all that the Cloud has to offer.
I will be demonstrating these applications at IDF 2009 in San Francisco Sept 22-24. Drop by to see these in action and to learn more about Rich Services and Intel. Read my blog to learn more about emerging Cloud models, architectures and technologies.
