Virtualization: the shadow of the Cloud

In recent years, we have heard a new term called Cloud, which means in general lines to have the service or application available on the internet reachable from anywhere, quite different from the traditional model where the application runs in a specific server and reachable only from a closed network. The Cloud comes with a different concept of work, instead of you buy the hardware, take care of the maintenance and provide all infrastructure, you just buy a piece of service where you will put your application to run – the simplest and practical example we see it is the email, instead of having the server mail to host you domain and provide the service, there are many companies providing this service where you pay a monthly or yearly subscription and access from anywhere and just forget the maintenance worries.

Although, do you know how the Cloud service usually works behind the scenes? It’s a complex environment and varies a lot from service to service, but the main though is to have a hardware that can work to run as many “clients” as possible in order to use the full capacity of the hardware, and make this model profitable. The service can vary widely because in our giving example about Email service, possibly the server would run only one email service and then shared with many customers. The complex service would have from each customer some specific features which would be pretty hard to match with another customer and share the same resource. In order to solve this gap, it would have another layer which splits the server in many other small servers, known as Virtualization.

To give a better idea how virtualization works, imagine the company has a very powerful server with lots of processors, memory and disk space, each time a customer comes with a specific requirement, the administrator will slice the server and create a “virtual server” or “virtual machine” with the resources to meet the requirement. This is the mentioned added layer that will be used for the customer with specific purposes and totally isolated from the rest of the resources of the powerful server.

You might be wondering that only companies with specific requirement can afford this kind of hardware!! Actually at home you can also have a virtualization environment with no money involved (or a little), of course not powerful as a server, but the same hardware using different purposes.

Let’s describe some possible scenarios:

- You might have special needs for specific software that you use only works in a specific operating system, but you don’t want to downgrade the whole environment, thus with virtualization you would keep your current operating system and create a virtual machine (VM) and install the operating system required for that. Eg: your laptop running MS Windows 7, but you use a program that works only on MS Windows XP, so this XP version would be a VM.

- A very interesting requirement - You just bought a Mac and of course some programs are incompatible with OSX and only run on Windows. Not problem, you will install this program into a VM by creating a VM to install your MS Windows 7 and later your program, so that it will be easy to switch platforms in clicks and taking advantage of both platforms.

- You would like to install a trial program and test if it fits on what you are looking for, but don’t want to do this on your fresh and clean operating system recently installed, so you would create a new VM, install the operating system, install the trial software, test and decide if it’s worth to have on your “real” computer. This is much easier to do because if you don’t like, you can reverse back a copy of this VM or just leave this VM for testing purposes.

Did you enjoy this idea? So take a look at those vendors’s website and look for the products, some are free, others paid – just be aware of the minimum requirement to run the software virtualization on your PC or laptop:




- VMWare Player from VMWare (Windows and Linux) - www.vmware.com
- VMWare Fusion from VMWare (Mac only) - www.vmware.com
- Virtual Box from Oracle (Windows, Linux and Mac) - www.virtualbox.org
- Parallels Desktop from Parallels (Mac only) - www.parallels.com

Put Your Computer In A Cloud *

Brazil now has almost 80 million Internet users, an explosion of growth thanks to many factors including tax incentives given by the government to purchase computers, as well as the rise of other gadgets such as smartphones and tablets. Thus, there is a constant exchange of information through many different sources, which often leaves users in the position of having many files to store. The files might be text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, pdf documents, music, etc. It doesn’t take long before the size of the information being stored exceeds the capacity of the smartphone or tablet. Therefore, the latest questions we are hearing from technology users are, Where is the most suitable place to store all my files? Also, what is the a simplest way to share my files with friends and colleagues? Do I need to worry about backups for all my files? If I lose a file, can I get it back?

If we look back on the 1990’s, computers had very limited space for storage because the technology was still young and also storage space was an expensive part of the computer. The storage space on a computer, known as the hard disk or hard drive, is a fixed part of the computer and not easy to detach because the operating system is installed on it. As a solution, in the 2000s, computer companies created portable storage devices such as the pen drive, also known as a USB flash drive or thumb drive. A pen drive is a storage memory device about the size of a cigarette lighter and thus easy to carry around. It soon became the preferred device for carrying personal files and backing up.

However, pen drives were limited to a single copy of the files and were smaller in storage size than a typical computer’s hard drive. Also, they were only available when you had one with you. However, recently a new Internet service has arrived to take the place of pen drives. This service is called the “cloud” and offers faster and greater access. It is a new way to store personal files. The concept is to store your files on the Internet with a synchronized copy on your computer (desktop or laptop, PC or Mac), on smartphones and on tablets. Even if those devices are not available to you at the moment, with a simple Internet connection you are able to access any of your stored files from anywhere.

In essence, we are talking about an Internet-based service that is emerging and could become your new hard disk. It is quickly becoming popular because of the proliferation of mobile devices and the need to have larger personal files available anywhere, anytime.

Regarding the different types of Internet storage cloud services already available, the most popular are the DropBox from DropBox; the iCloud from Apple; SkyDrive from Microsoft; and most recently the Drive from Google. Of course there are many others with different services, however, those mentioned are the most popular because of their features, ease of use, and openness to many platforms.

Cloud services such as these include some very interesting features, such as “free” backups. Once you place a master copy of your file on the cloud, several others copies can be distributed to multiple locations. If you lose your computer or portable device, or it breaks, once it’s fixed or you get a new one, the cloud synchronization service will do the rest for you. Another interesting feature offered by Internet cloud service is you can share files with anyone simply by granting them permission to a specific file or folder. Then an email with the link will be sent to the other user for access. Also, depending on the cloud service provider, you can share and also edit a file online in collaboration with other users without the need to download, edit, and then upload the file again.

You might be thinking that there is not enough space for all the files on your hard disk to be placed on a cloud service provider. It’s true, depending on the provider, the default size of storage might not be adequate. Cloud services start with 2 GB (gigabyte) of storage and go up to 25GB for free. However, you can purchase more space, as much space as you need, with very reasonable prices compared to other storage devices. In this way you will have everything in a safe and protected place and never have to worry about your own storage devices breaking or getting lost. We have seen in the past decade great progress in increased storage capacity both inside and outside the computer, but once files are moving in larger quantities and more quickly to the Internet via online services, it will be obvious what a great leap forward we are making to alter the way we store information using cloud storage.

* Article published on Curitiba in English.