Multicore Packet Processing Forum

By Eric Carmes – 6WIND Founder and CEO

Cloud Computing is ranked as the number one software business trend for 2010. All the giants have polished their marketing strategies to grab the largest part of a market that will reach $100B in 2013 if the analyst forecasts are true. Cloud computing is a shift back to centralized architectures after years of domination by the client-server model that represented a break from the mainframe computing model. With broadband Internet, optical networking, computing and storage technology improvements it is becoming less important to have a server close to the door. Cloud computing is driven by end-customer cost savings thanks to a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model. Infrastructure costs have dramatically declined over time.

It is also an opportunity for major players to change the landscape at different levels. Software incumbents (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP…) have to provide the market with cloud-ready solutions while the Internet software players (Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com…) want to keep their competitive advantage in providing applications as well as platforms. On the infrastructure side the router–server convergence we already talked about in the Forum (Multicore Packet Processing at the Heart of Convergence) is underway.

What are the critical barriers that Cloud Computing will have to overcome? I have read a few studies and I found the following one that is very interesting from the network infrastructure point of view.

In principle, most applications can benefit from the cloud computing architecture. But these applications will require very high performance. I remember when I was trying WAP applications on my mobile phone. It was so slow that it was a complete disaster. Now, thought, the iPhone is successful because the necessary bandwidth to have useful applications is available. So, performance could be the Achilles heel of cloud computing if all the required technologies are not perfectly synchronized.

Cloud computing will be a success if the network infrastructure plumbers like us provide the whole industry with a high performance, cost-effective and reliable solution.