Consuming compute and storage services by DAM News Staff

March 9, 2009

Cloud Computing’s Three-Horse Race

Cloud Computing has hit the main stage, solidly capturing the minds of both the technology and business communities. But while three distinct deployment models have emerged, it’s far from certain which of them will go on to prosper. The three models are:

1. Renting raw hardware: compute processing, data storage and networking bandwidth.
2. Leveraging an integrated application development engine.
3. Ordering an application.

So in order to get a better sense of the prospects of each approach, let’s take a closer look at key companies promoting them and the market forces shaping them.

Cloud Hardware Rental (Infrastructure as a Service)
Consuming compute and storage services is more involved than the term “rental” may indicate, but this first step transforms and focuses most businesses on their specific value, which isn’t necessarily IT infrastructure.

The most well-known purveyor in this category isAmazon, but there are many other players as well, among themGoGrid,Layered Technologies,JoyentandMosso/Rackspace.

The rental model provides one-to-one replacement of current enterprise infrastructure, except off-site and easily accessible. By choosing CPU type, memory amount and disk configurations of the lowest common denominator, customers of cloud hardware rental know exactly what they receive, can control the infrastructure at a fine-grain level and can easily compare pricing.

But it takes a certain skill set to load, operate and maintain applications in the cloud. Companies likeRightScaleandElastraaim to streamline this process. And, unfortunately, Internet outages still occur, as evidenced by theSprint-Cogent feud in late 2008, so everything may not always be at your fingertips.

Continues @http://gigaom.com