by Manx Telecom's Hosting and Solutions Manager, Stephen
Trimble
Ask 10 different people, and you’ll probably get 10 different
answers! All of their answers though should have the same essence -
“the cloud” is turning IT into a commodity.
We all use electricity – it’s there whenever we turn things on
and when we need more of it, we use more - a commodity. However, we
don’t all need our own power station, sub station or generators –
we pay for what we consume, when we need it. Similarly, with
Cloud Computing you don’t need to buy computers, software, a Data
Centre etc – you pay for what you need, when you need it – from the
cloud, as a service.
Another good analogy is car rental - where anyone can hire a
car, you pay for how much you use, you can give it
back and stop paying, and more cars are available on demand
whenever you need them. Compare this to buying or leasing a car
where you have to also sort out road tax, licensing, servicing,
maintenance. With car rental (and cloud computing) the hardware
worries are taken away – you pay for the service.
For the past 2 years Manx Telecom has been heavily utilising
Cloud Computing technology to provide cost effective, flexible and
scalable infrastructure solutions to our Managed Hosting clients at
our Douglas North Data Centre.
Data Centre
In the Data Centre arena customers need access to
high-availability computing power which can scale quickly and
deliver the performance needed for their applications. We
have moved from a rather conventional tin-shifting approach to a
far more flexible model – this has resulted in significant wins
with over 300 high-availability virtual servers being managed -
spread over multiple geographic locations giving the highest
availability possible.
Our new Business Continuity Centre also utilises cloud
technology, right out to the end-user terminals. All of the 118
terminals can be used for a multitude of different functions,
served from the “cloud” (on this occasion based at our Douglas
North Data Centre), without any change in their configuration. They
can be used just as end-user PC’s one minute, then power cycled and
used as a training room within a couple of minutes.
Cloud Computing is about taking away the constraints of scale –
not caring where the resources come from (the cloud), but just
requiring them to be there, when you want them.