Cloud Computing as an alternative

I just found an interesting article in Wikipedia that has a great explanation of cloud computing, with an interesting aspect.  Most articles seem to focus on explaining what cloud computing is and how it works, but this one brought up an interesting aspect in that one of the benefits of cloud computing is that it simply allows the user to be naive (in a good way) to the complications that makeup the infrastructure.  It provides an alternative to a user having to setup and configure an environment that meets their needs.

Before cloud computing it was necessary to know about and configure requirements for servers in terms of networking, speed, etc.  Cloud computing changes this by letting the user simply pick the application that will be run without having to worry about the details.  Click here for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Datacenters

Today I want to talk a little bit about how cloud computing environments are powered. A cloud environment is composed of many servers that are used together to power databases and stream the front end web interface that users use. In large environments, there could be thousands of servers, and they are distributed between multiple datacenters in different parts of the world. Each one is managed, maintained, secured and backed up by system administrators. The beauty of this environment is that servers can have downtime, and even a whole data center could shut down temporarily and there would be no loss of data of interruption of service for end-users.

IBM at www.ibm.com and www.hp.com are some of the leaders in terms of providing hardware for such environments. There's agood article I found at http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1323634,00.html that explains how the hardware is put together.

Reviora doesn't quite have thousands of servers yet, but the concept is the same and the beauty of the system is that it is better than any individual company or client could have on their own (unless they spent the same amount of money on the cost).