Cloudware Technologies - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 301

data about customer preferences, sentiment, and behaviors (see Chapter 21,
Section 21.1.1 “What Is Big Data?”). Companies can integrate this informa-
tion with internal sales and product data to gain insight into customer pref-
erences to make more targeted and personalized offers.
15.1.1 Characteristics of Virtualized Environment
In a virtualized environment, there are three major components: guest, host,
and virtualization layer. The guest represents the system component that
interacts with the virtualization layer rather than with the host, as would
normally happen. The host represents the original environment where the
guest is supposed to be managed. The virtualization layer is responsible for
recreating the same or a different environment where the guest will operate.
Virtualization has three characteristics that support the scalability and
operating efficiency required for big data environments:
1. Partitioning : In virtualization, many applications and operating sys-
tems are supported in a single physical system by partitioning (sepa-
rating) the available resources.
2. Isolation : Each virtual machine is isolated from its host physical sys-
tem and other virtualized machines. Because of this isolation, if one
virtual instance crashes, the other virtual machines and the host
system are not affected. In addition, data are not shared between
one virtual instance and another.
3. Encapsulation : A virtual machines can be represented (and even
stored) as a single file, so you can identify it easily based on the ser-
vices it provides. For example, the file containing the encapsulated
process could be a complete business service. This encapsulated
virtual machine could be presented to an application as a complete
entity. Thus, encapsulation could protect each application so that it
does not interfere with another application.
Virtualization abstracts the underlying resources and simplifies their use,
isolates users from one another, and supports replication, which, in turn,
increases the elasticity of the system. Virtualization is a critical aspect of
cloud computing, equally important to the providers and consumers of
cloud services, and plays an important role in
• System security because it allows isolation of services running on
the same hardware
• Portable performance and reliability because it allows applications
to migrate from one platform to another
• Development and management of services offered by a provider
• Performance isolation