The term "Cloud Computing" has become very popular in recent years. It generally refers to a network-centric way of using IT services. A core vision is to relieve IT users from mundane details about how IT services are implemented and present the network to users as simple as possible – as a black box, or the "cloud".
This vision is certainly not new, although recent technological advances have gradually brought us closer to it. With faster computing hardware, virtualization technology has become practical and proliferated. We are seeing virtual server, virtual memory, virtual network, virtual storage, etc. and virtualization is becoming another buzzword in the IT industry. It can be said that the main tenet of virtualization is to simulate a physical system by software, thereby achieving great ease in deployment because software is in nature easy to duplicate, modify and transfer. And it is with this great ease in deployment, IT services can be provided more timely and flexibly, approaching the ideals of cloud computing that we have envisioned.
With virtualization technology, a data center is able to offer computing power and disk storage "as a service". These are generally referred to as "infrastructure as a service" or IaaS. While a commercial data center may serve a large number of organizations in public, many organizations are implementing their own private cloud infrastructure to cater for a wide variety of needs arising from internal departments.
The benefits of cloud computing include agility in deployment, cost saving through resource sharing and thus more environmentally friendly. As one may expect, private cloud brings further benefits in security, privacy and control. Traditionally, when an IT worker deploys an application, it’s not uncommon to take 6-8 weeks from procurement of new hardware to installation of hardware and software. With cloud infrastructure, these can be done in just a few days or even hours.
ITSC has started the private cloud journey around 3 years ago. Throughout the years, the private cloud infrastructure evolves from a test bed hosting only development and test servers to a critical infrastructural component running over 200 production servers for a dozen of departments. As of today, a large portion of services provided by ITSC is solely or partially supported by the HKUST private cloud infrastructure. To learn more about how the HKUST private cloud may help you, please visit:
