"A Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of interconnected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources based on service-level agreements established through negotiation between the service provider and consumers” (Buyya et al.)
"A Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a collection of interconnected and virtualized computers that are dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified computing resources based on service-level agreements established through negotiation between the service provider and consumers” (Buyya et al.)
“A large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is driven by economies of scale, in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically-scalable, managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand to external customers over the Internet” (Foster et al.)
Start point: October/November 2007 - IBM Blue Cloud
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/
« Values to customers include:
Reducing IT management complexity and skill requirements
Pricing on a per hour basis for each instance type: from $0.084/hour for the smallest "On-Demand" virtual machine running Linux to 12x more for the largest one running Windows (Nov. 2009). The data transfer charge ranges from $0.08 to $0.15 per gigabyte, depending volume
Data Cloud S3 (Simple Storage Service)
from $0.55 to $0.15 per GB-month, + bandwidth usage (from $0.08 to 0.15 per GB) + requests (from $0.01 to $0.1 per 1000 requests)
102 billion objects stored files (March 2010)
data transfer is charged by TB / month data transfer, depending on the source and target of such transfer.