Today, offerings such as Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are providing a new model for on demand compute resources based on virtual machines. Virtual appliances are a natural deployment vehicle for this type of infrastructure, allowing a clean separation between the memory, compute, and storage resources managed by the appliance provider and the complete software stack managed by the end user. Virtual appliances also allow a simple transition from internal virtualization clusters to outsourced providers, enabling capacity spikes to be handled. Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
Jan. 8, 2012 11:38 AM EST
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