What is a Cloud Server

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What Is a Cloud Server ?

What is a cloud server?

Those who have not embraced this revolutionary

technology are the ones who can ask this question.

The technology geeks

would tell you that cloud server is a dynamic virtual private server.

For the majority, however, detailed information is needed to understand what a

cloud server is.

What happens in this case is that a single physical server is partitioned

such that it emerges as several servers. Virtualization is a relatively new

technology. A cloud server is a virtual machine that acts in place of the

normal physical server. A cloud server can be booted independently. At

the same time, it runs its own operating system.

When you want to identify a new server, you do so without sacrificing the

cloud server.

This is unlike the traditional dedicated server. For the

physical one, you have to employ new hardware, which makes the

process very expensive.

In most cases, all these hardware have to be put

into place in a matter of months.

A cloud server is also cost effective. This is due to the integration of

services you would normally lease separately.

For example, it is possible

to set up firewalls, back ups and even restore points with the same

service provider.

Each of these services is a dedicated service in the

case of physical servers. With a cloud server, it is possible to handle most

of the tasks remotely.

There was a time when many people feared that a cloud server would be

more susceptible to cyber attacks than the conventional servers would.

For a long time, what is a cloud server is a question that has disturbed

many company executives.

Times have changed, and businesses that do

not embrace this technology are losing.

It is a fact that a cloud server

offers similar level of security, and sometimes even higher, that the

dedicated servers.

Most applications that must be run daily on dedicated servers are easily

automated in a cloud server. This means that support services and

general maintenance are easy to carry out.

When one cloud server is

overloaded, it is easy to switch from it to another one that is not

overloaded. In most cases, this dynamism is automated.

The Details of a Cloud Server

If you are still asking what is a cloud server, then you may not know how

easy it is to scale up. In fact, you can add the number of servers several

times. All these are done without any interruption to the work flow.

On top

of this, a cloud server is capable of working at its maximum capacity.

Another advantage of a cloud server is the way in which it is leased.

Businesses can customize the available resources to their specific

needs. This is exactly what they pay for.

This is unlike dedicated servers

where the services are packaged, and a business is likely to have

superfluous services on its package.

There are few hindrances to the adoption of cloud server technology. One

of them is a human barrier; the fact that this is a relatively new technology

and people do not want to experiment with it, sort of.

Making the switch

from a traditional dedicated server to a cloud server may also be

expensive.

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EXPLAINING CLOUD SERVER TERMS

With the massive push toward cloud computing in the enterprise, there are some considerations that hardware vendors will have to come to terms with in the long run.

Unlike the old infrastructure model with hardware bearing the brunt of fault tolerance, the new infrastructure model places all fault tolerance concerns within the software layer itself.

I won’t say that this is a new concept as Google has been doing exactly this for a very long time (in IT time at least.)

This accomplishes many things, but two particular benefits are that load balancing can now be more intelligent overall, and hardware can be reduced to the absolute most commodity parts available to cut cost.

Because the cloud does not need hardware to provide fault tolerance, the hardware required for a ‘cloud server’ is very basic.

I like to think of these servers as netbook equivalents. Bargain bin motherboards, processors, RAM and hard drives can be thrown together to make a low cost commodity cloud server. A ‘Cloud OS’ and ‘Cloud FS’ handle the underpinnings as far as operating system and distributed file system.

When combined in the right fashion, the Cloud Software Layer along with the underpinning Cloud OS and Cloud FS can literally allow one of these ‘cloud servers’ to be plugged in and auto-provision itself into the resource pool. When there is a failure of a component or an entire cloud server, the Cloud Software Layer can notify system administrators. Replacement is as simple as unplugging the bad server and plugging in a new one. The server will auto provision itself into the resource pool and it’s ready to go. Management and maintenance are simplified greatly.

Looking back at the hardware that will be used to make these cloud servers, last generation surplus parts are perfect for this type of implementation.

Each individual server (or node in grid terms) has modest requirements similar to that of a netbook computer. The tasks that these servers will perform are well defined and it is the combination of hundreds or thousands of these servers that provide the real horse power behind the cloud.

We see that netbooks can cost as little as $200 and I see no reason why these small cloud servers can not hit the $100 mark as they need no LCD display or peripheral ports, they can use cheaper standard 3.5″ hard drives and need no real casing to speak of (depending on the deployment method.)

These units can even be racked in shelves of 4 units with direct DC power to each board. There would only need to be a single AC to DC inverter per rack with UPS to ensure power is flowing to the rack as a whole. The amount of heat being created will be far less than with a typical server, and it may even be possible to get the thermal thresholds down to the level where a bare heat-sink (without fans) can be used for the processors. This will also drastically reduce the amount of cooling needed in the data center.

The possibilities are literally endless and it gets me excited just to think about this type of stuff.

Of course, all of this is dependent on the intelligence and robust fault tolerance built into the cloud software layer. As I said before, Google has already done this and has been using a similar infrastructure for a long time, so it is not a pipe dream.

It is up to the individual hardware vendors such as Sun, HP and Dell to design and deliver a cloud server that will meed the needs of future cloud computing infrastructures. They will also need to deliver it at a cost that reflects the level of commodity the server now represents in the data center.

Oh, one more thing. I just wanted to note that it is not written anywhere that x86 has to be the processor architecture standard for this new breed of cloud servers.

I can easily see a custom designed ARM processor fitting the bill................

cloud-gpu

GPU in the cloud: what does it mean?

EXPLAINED A fast GPU for your iPad and instant access to huge games online

One hundred copies of Windows powered by a single server with one Kepler GPU....................

The new Kepler GPU that Nvidia recently announced has been five years in the making.

It will be at the heart of supercomputers that will help make scientific discoveries as well as powering gaming clouds and high resolution remote computing. But why is Kepler more than just another really powerful, really expensive GPU?

Cloud gaming: fast to play, faster to start

If it was just really powerful, Kepler would still be impressive.

Demonstrating a combination of fluid simulation and ray tracing, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang pointed out that "Doing ray tracing for films takes up the vast majority of processing time – the hours and hours that are necessary to render a frame – and with Kepler we're able to do ray tracing in real time.

"These are real time simulated effects that are only possible because of high performance computing only possible because were really doing fluid simulation, light simulation. Simulation and computer graphics are merging; in a few years computer graphics will look nothing like the easily shaded graphics we see in console games today."

You wouldn't create special effects like The Hulk in the new Avengers movie remotely but it's useful to review them on any machine

Faster and lower power

Architecturally, Kepler is both faster than the previous Fermi GPU and lower power; there are many more cores but they run at 750MHz rather than 1.3GHz.

Two GPUs on a graphics card like the Kepler-powered GTX 690 will be able to communicate directly with each other; they can also communicate with up to 32 CPU cores instead of just one CPU at a time, and data parallelism means the GPU can look at the results of computations and decide what to do next instead of sending information back to the CPU and waiting for instructions.

It also has a memory management unit; combined with Nvidia's hypervisor and VGX architecture, that lets Kepler be a virtual GPU for remote access with a tool like Citrix Receiver on a tablet or Microsoft RemoteFX on a thin client – or power gaming cloud services that Nvidia is calling GeForce Grid.

Not all of that is in the first Kepler GPU, the Tesla K10 that's just started shipping, but all the features will be in the Tesla K20, coming in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Services like Playcast and Gaikai will use Kepler GPUs later this year to let you play console-style games on any device with an H.264 decoder.

That's similar to the OnLive service but Nvidia General Manager Phil Eisler says GeForce Grid will be much more efficient to run.

Kepler powers GeForce Gridservices like Gaikai for playing console games on any H.264 capable device

"With the first generation of cloud gaming that's out there, you pretty much take a one to one ratio of one computer, one graphics card to one game, which is pretty expensive.

The new Kepler architecture is much more power efficient; we can actually render a game in half the power.

"Plus the built in encoder means you can offload encoding from the CPU so you can run many more games per server; you can go from what is effectively one game per server to about eight games per server and that reduces the cost by that much and reduces power by half."

The cost of running a service will be low enough that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsuan Huang told TechRadar the expects the monthly price for access to mainstream games will be the same as streaming films from Netflix. "Our goal is to be streaming at a cost level like Netflix.

In which case you'll be able to enjoy hundres of games, thousands of games in a library for $10 a month. And for blockbuster video games the moment that it comes out, the nanosecond it comes out, you'll be able to enjoy that for some premium charge."

Huang thinks that cable TV companies and Internet TV providers will offer their own gaming services. "They offer different channels and instead of ABC and CBS there would be potentially a channel that says GeForce GRID and has a whole bunch of games inside."

Kepler is going to power high resolution remote computing for work and high performance gaming in the cloud, but what about putting it in your home PC and having your own cloud? Huang likes the idea but he's realistic about how well it would work in practice.

"The challenge is you want to be able to stream at a very low latency and that PC sitting in a den somewhere is literally right in front of you but we need to stream that over the clumsy Wi-Fi in people homes so there's a lot of obstacles.

That's exactly the PC I want at home though. I want a PC with three GTX 690s - because that's the most you can put in a PC- and put that in the basement somewhere and just stream it to wherever our family happens to be."

One thing Nvidia isn't talking about this week is whether any of the same technology powering Kepler is going to show up in the ARM CPU it promised to build back at CES 2011, but Project Denver is still going strong according to Chief Scientist Bill Dally.

"It's an ARM core with performance better than you can get with cores availability from ARM and it has substantially better energy efficiency even at this higher performance. That's all we're saying about it now, because we don't want to tip our hand and have our competitors know what we're doing."

Huang is making his usual bold predictions about Project Denver though; "You are going to be so happy," he promised. It doesn't sound as if they'll be ready for the Windows RT launch though.