Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Business changes as globalization and mobility resulted in an increasing number
of distributed data centres. At present, prevailing practice is to optimize each data
centre mostly independent of other data centres. This means that each data centre is
designed to accommodate high peak demand for computation power and data. As
a result, there is an ever increasing demand for storage and computing power. For
example, the volume of digital content is constantly increasing. In 2007, the amount
of information created exceeded available storage capacity for the first time ever
(Gantz et al. 2008). Although around 70% of digital information is created by indi-
viduals, “enterprises are responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compli-
ance of 85%” (Gantz et al. 2008). The total amount of information, including paper
and digital content, in enterprises, governments, schools, and small businesses is
estimated to grow 67% per year until 2012 (Gantz et al. 2009). This implies tech-
nological challenges as well as challenges with regard to information governance
for businesses.
The increasing number of data centres resulted in overproportional increase
in their maintenance costs, in particular with respect to power and cooling costs
(Belady 2007). Energy efficiency of IT is a concern that becomes increasingly
important. The continuously increasing amount of digital information requires
increasing compute power, bigger storage capacities and more powerful network
infrastructure to transmit information. This ultimately results in increasing
carbon footprint of IT. By 2020, ICT are estimated to become among the biggest
greenhouse gas emitters, accounting for around 3% of all emissions (Boccaletti
et al. 2008). Growth in the number and size of data centres is estimated to be
the fastest increasing contributor to greenhouse emissions (Boccaletti et al.
2008).
Grid computing has been among the first attempts to manage the high number
of computing nodes in distributed data centres and to achieve better utilization of
distributed and heterogeneous computing resources in companies. Advances in
virtualization technology enable greater decoupling between physical computing
resources and software applications and promise higher industry adoption of
distributed computing concepts such as Grid and Cloud. The continuous increase
of maintenance costs and demand for additional resources as well as for scalability
and flexibility of resources is leading many companies to consider outsourcing their
data centres to external providers. “
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the
enabling technologies that allow such external hosting efficiently
” (AbdelSalam
et al. 2009).
1.4 Towards Grid and Cloud Computing in Companies
The business and technological drivers of Grid and Cloud Computing described in
sections 1.2 and 1.3 provide a strong business case for Grid and Cloud Computing
in companies. To meet this demand, different types of commercial Grid and Cloud
offerings have evolved in form of utility computing, Grid middleware, and appli-
cations offered in the Software-as-a-Service manner based on Grid infrastructure.
