Cloud computing

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Cloud computing
Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1
Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing .............................................................................................................. 2
Virtualization and Private Clouds .................................................................................................................. 4
Applicability................................................................................................................................................... 5
Applications in the Pharmaceutical Industry ................................................................................................ 5
Molecular Modeling ...................................................................................................................................... 6
Symyx Technologies ...................................................................................................................................... 6
CambridgeSoft .............................................................................................................................................. 7
ChemAxon and Partners ............................................................................................................................... 8
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 9
References .................................................................................................................................................... 9
Table 1. Selected Technologies ................................................................................................................... 10
Author ......................................................................................................................................................... 11
Introduction

According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009, “technologies at the ‘Peak of Inflated
Expectations’ during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books… and Internet TV, while social software and
microblogging sites…have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among
enterprise users”. Is cloud computing also heading for the trough of disillusionment?

The Internet is often represented as a cloud and the term “cloud computing” arises from that analogy.
Accenture defines cloud computing as the dynamic provisioning of IT capabilities (hardware, software,
or services) from third parties over a network. McKinsey says that clouds are hardware-based services
offering compute, network and storage capacity where: hardware management is highly abstracted
from the buyer; buyers incur infrastructure costs as variable OPEX [operating expenditures]; and
infrastructure capacity is highly elastic (up or down).1 The cloud model differs from traditional
outsourcing in that customers do not hand over their own IT resources to be managed. Instead they plug
into the cloud, treating it as they would an internal data center or computer providing the same
functions.

Large companies can afford to build and expand their own data centers but small- to medium-sized
enterprises often choose to house their IT infrastructure in someone else’s facility. A colocation center is
a type of data center where multiple customers locate network, server and storage assets, and
interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service providers with a minimum of
cost and complexity. A selection of companies in the collocation and cloud arena is presented in Table 1.

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Amazon has a head start but well known companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple have joined
the fray.2

Although not all the companies selected for Table 1 would agree on the definitions given in this article, it
is generally supposed that there are three basic types of cloud computing: Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). In IaaS, cpu, grids or clusters,
virtualized servers, memory, networks, storage and systems software are delivered as a service. Perhaps
the best known example is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), but
traditional IT vendors such as IBM, and telecoms providers such as AT&T and Verizon are also offering
solutions. Services are typically charged by usage and can be scaled dynamically, i.e. capacity can be
increased or decreased more or less on demand.

PaaS provides virtualized servers on which users can run applications, or develop new ones, without
having to worry about maintaining the operating systems, server hardware, load balancing or computing
capacity. Well known examples include Microsoft’s Azure and Salesforce’s Force.com. Microsoft Azure
provides database and platform services starting at $0.12 per hour for compute infrastructure; $0.15 per
gigabyte for storage; and $0.10 per 10,000 transactions. For SQL Azure, a cloud database, Microsoft is
charging $9.99 for a Web Edition, which comprises up to a 1 gigabyte relational database; and $99.99 for
a Business Edition, which holds up to a 10 gigabyte relational database. For .NET Services, a set of Web-
based developer tools for building cloud-based applications, Microsoft is charging $0.15 per 100,000
message operations.

SaaS is software that is developed and hosted by the SaaS vendor and which the end user accesses over
the Internet. Unlike traditional applications that users install on their computers or servers, SaaS
software is owned by the vendor and runs on computers in the vendor’s data center (or a colocation
facility). Broadly speaking, all customers of a SaaS vendor use the same software: these are one-size-fits-
all solutions. Well known examples are Salesforce.com, Google’s Gmail and Apps, instant messaging
from AOL, Yahoo and Google, and Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) from Vonage and Skype.

Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

The great advantage of cloud computing is “elasticity”: the ability to add capacity or applications almost
at a moment’s notice. Companies buy exactly the amount of storage, computing power, security and
other IT functions that they need from specialists in data-center computing. They get sophisticated data
center services on demand, in only the amount they need and can pay for, at service levels set with the
vendor, with capabilities that can be added or subtracted at will.

The metered cost, pay-as-you-go approach appeals to small- and medium-sized enterprises; little or no
capital investment and maintenance cost is needed. IT is remotely managed and maintained, typically
for a monthly fee, and the company can let go of “plumbing concerns”. Since the vendor has many
customers, it can lower the per-unit cost to each customer. Larger companies may find it easier to
manage collaborations in the cloud, rather than having to make holes in their firewalls for contract
research organizations. SaaS deployments usually take less time than in-house ones, upgrades are

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easier, and users are always using the most recent version of the application. There may be fewer bugs
because having only one version of the software reduces complexity.

This may all sound very appealing but there are downsides. In the cloud you may not have the kind of
control over your data or the performance of your applications that you need, or the ability to audit or
change the processes and policies under which users must work. Different parts of an application might
be in many places in the cloud. Complying with federal regulations such a Sarbanes Oxley, or FDA audit,
is extremely difficult. Monitoring and maintenance tools are immature. It is hard to get metrics out of
the cloud and general management of the work is not simple.3 There are systems management tools for
the cloud environment but they may not integrate with existing system management tools, so you are
likely to need two systems. Nevertheless, cloud computing may provide enough benefits to compensate
for the inconvenience of two tools.

Cloud customers may risk losing data by having them locked into proprietary formats and may lose
control of data because tools to see who is using them or who can view them are inadequate. Data loss
is a real risk. In October 2009 1 million US users of the T-Mobile Sidekick mobile phone and emailing
device lost data as a result of server failure at Danger, a company recently acquired by Microsoft.4 Bear
in mind, though, that it is easy to underestimate risks associated with the current environment while
overestimating the risk of a new one. Cloud computing is not risky for every system. Potential users need
to evaluate security measures such as firewalls, and encryption techniques and make sure that they will
have access to data and the software or source code if the service provider goes out of business.

It may not be easy to tailor service-level agreements (SLAs) to the specific needs of a business.
Compensation for downtime may be inadequate and SLAs are unlikely to cover concomitant damages,
but not all applications have stringent uptime requirements. It is sensible to balance the cost of
guaranteeing internal uptime against the advantages of opting for the cloud. It could be that your own
IT organization is not as sophisticated as it might seem.

Calculating cost savings is also not straightforward. Having little or no capital investment may actually
have tax disadvantages. SaaS deployments are cheaper initially than in-house installations and future
costs are predictable; after 3-5 years of monthly fees, however, SaaS may prove more expensive overall.
Large instances of EC2 are fairly expensive, but it is important to do the mathematics correctly and make
a fair estimate of the cost of an “on-premises” (i.e., in-house) operation.

Standards are immature and things change very rapidly in the cloud. All IaaS and SaaS providers use
different technologies and different standards. The storage infrastructure behind Amazon is different
from that of the typical data center (e.g., big Unix file systems). The Azure storage engine does not use a
standard relational database; Google’s App Engine does not support an SQL database. So you cannot
just move applications to the cloud and expect them to run. At least as much work is involved in moving
an application to the cloud as is involved in moving it from an existing server to a new one. There is also
the issue of employee skills: staff may need retraining and they may resent a change to the cloud and
fear job losses.

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Last but not least, there are latency and performance issues. The Internet connection may add to
latency or limit bandwidth. (Latency, in general, is the period of time that one component in a system is
wasting time waiting for another component. In networking, it is the amount of time it takes a packet to
travel from source to destination.) In future, programming models exploiting multithreading may hide
latency.5 Nevertheless, the service provider, not the scientist, controls the hardware, so unanticipated
sharing and reallocation of machines may affect run times. Interoperability is limited. In general, SaaS
solutions work best for non-strategic, non-mission-critical processes that are simple and standard and
not highly integrated with other business systems. Customized applications may demand an in-house
solution, but SaaS makes sense for applications that have become commoditized, such as reservation
systems in the travel industry.

Virtualization and Private Clouds

Virtualization of computers or operating systems hides the physical characteristics of a computing
platform from users; instead it shows another abstract computing platform. A hypervisor is a piece of
virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently.
Virtualization providers include VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix Systems (see Table 1). Virtualization is an
enabler of cloud computing.

Recently some vendors have described solutions that emulate cloud computing on private networks,
referring to these as “private” or “internal” clouds (where “public” or “external” cloud describes cloud
computing in the traditional mainstream sense). Private cloud products claim to deliver some of the
benefits of cloud computing without the pitfalls. Hybrid solutions are also possible: building internal
clouds and connecting customer data centers to those of external cloud providers. It has been reported
that Eli Lilly wants to benefit from both internal and external clouds3 and that Amylin6 is looking at
private cloud VMware as a complement to EC2. Other experts, however, are skeptical: one has even
gone as far as to describe private clouds as absolute rubbish.7

Platform Computing has recently launched a cloud management system, Platform ISF, enabling
customers to manage workload across both virtual and physical environments and support multiple
hypervisors and operating systems from a single interface. VMware, the market leader in virtualization
technology, is moving into cloud technologies in a big way, with vSphere 4. The company is building a
huge partner network of service providers and is also releasing a “vCloud API”. VMware wants
customers to build a series of “virtual data centers”, each tailored to meet different requirements, and
then have the ability to move workloads in the virtual data centers to the infrastructure provided by
cloud vendors.

Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a new venture called Acadia. Its strategy for private cloud
computing is based on Cisco’s servers and networking, VMware’s server virtualization and EMC’s
storage. (Note, by the way, that EMC owns nearly 85% of VMware.) Other vendors, such as Google,
disagree with VMware’s emphasis on private clouds; in return VMware says Google’s online applications
are not ready for the enterprise.

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Applicability

Not everyone agrees, but McKinsey has concluded1 as follows. “Clouds already make sense for many
small and medium-size businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be
overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises. Rather than
create unrealizable expectations for “internal clouds”, CIOs should focus now on the immediate benefits
of virtualizing server storage, network operations, and other critical building blocks”. They recommend
that users should develop an overall strategy based on solid business cases not “cloud for the sake of
cloud”; use modular design in all new software to minimize costs when it comes time to migrate to the
cloud; and set up a Cloud CIO Council to advise industry.

Applications in the Pharmaceutical Industry

In the pharmaceutical sector, where large amounts of sensitive data are currently kept behind
protective firewalls, security is a real concern, as is policing individual researchers’ access to the cloud.
Nevertheless, cheminformatics vendors are starting to look at cloud options, especially in terms of
Software as a Service (SaaS) and hosted informatics. In bioinformatics and number-crunching, the cloud
has distinct advantages. EC2 billing is typically hours times number of cpus, so, as an over-generalization,
the cost for 1 cpu for 1000 hours is the same as the cost of 1000 cpus for 1 hour. This makes cloud
computing appealing for speedy answers to complex calculations. Over the past two years, new DNA
sequencing technology has emerged allowing a much more comprehensive view of biological systems at
the genetic level. This so-called next-generation sequencing has increased by orders of magnitude the
already daunting deluge of laboratory data, resulting in an immense IT challenge. Could the cloud
provide a solution?

An unnamed pharmaceutical company found that processing BLAST databases and query jobs was time
consuming on its internal grid and approached Cycle Computing8 about running BLAST and other
applications in the cloud. After the customer had approved Cycle’s security model, Cycle built a
processing pipeline for BLAST that provides more than 7000 public databases from the National Center
for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Ensembl, and the Information Sciences Institute of the University
of Southern California (ISI) that are updated weekly. The CycleCloud BLAST service is now publicly
available to all users.

Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and Genentech are already experimenting with cloud computing.9
Lilly has demonstrated the viability of cloud computing by launching a 64-machine cluster computer
working on bioinformatics sequence information, completing the work, and shutting down in 20
minutes, using Amazon’s EC2, at a cost of only $6.40, and a saving of 12 weeks’ processing. Pfizer’s
Biotherapeutics & Bioinnovation Center has used Amazon cloud services to develop and refine models in
antibody-antigen docking runs, shortening the process to two to three hours from two to three days.9

Porting applications to the cloud, however, is not straightforward. Cloud service providers such as
Amazon provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) but users need help in scheduling and using the
infrastructure. A cloud provider manages the security of its physical computer infrastructure, but users
are responsible for data encryption, data access control, and other security measures. Some of the

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companies listed in Table 1 supply such business application and security management services for cloud
computing. Pfizer is working with the BioTeam, a consulting firm, while Lilly is using software and
services from Cycle Computing and RightScale to access Amazon’s network and manage the transfer of
data onto and off of the cloud.9 Johnson and Johnson (J&J) is also a Cycle Computing customer.8 Lilly has
tried cloud applications in genomics, including BLAST; pharmacokinetics using NONMEM; statistics
through R; and simulations of clinical trial data.8 J&J has also experimented with NONMEM applications,
using Amazon Web Services (AWS) scripts.3

Molecular Modeling

Schrödinger is another company working with Cycle Computing. The two partners are offering cloud
solutions to run Schrödinger’s chemical simulation and molecular modeling software on elastic
resources in the US and Europe. Schrödinger argues as follows. Computation is central to drug discovery
but too often it is rate-limiting. Local computational resources, though they may be adequate on a time-
averaged basis, are often insufficient to perform the massive burst-mode computations needed to bring
a project forward in a timely fashion. Schrödinger believes that the combination of its own software and
CycleCloud offers a way to perform large computational experiments quickly, robustly and securely,
even when local resources are inadequate. Schrödinger plans eventually to make all its applications
available on the cloud, staging them in an order dictated by customer demand. The company is working
with interested customers on a case-by-case basis at this point, rather than pushing out a “cloud
product”. Schrödinger already has commercial customers running Glide on the cloud, and has in-house
experience with additional applications.

A spokesman for Schrödinger’s competitor Accelrys, says that Accelrys is pulling together its strategy
with regard to cloud computing, hosted informatics and SaaS. Some customers are experimenting with
the cloud to see whether it meets security standards, and whether the pricing model has benefits. There
are security guidelines. “It’s all about trust; it’s all about value”, says the spokesman. Amazon, Google
and Microsoft will gain trust. It is possible to build a mission-critical application that is cloud-based.
Admittedly, customization is a challenge; there is a balance between customization and configuration.
Accelrys must provide a solution that meets market demand. This issue is not unique to pharma.
Accelrys wants to make sure that its solutions meet customers’ demands and expectations.

Symyx Technologies

Symyx sees cloud computing and hosted solutions as very different. A spokesman says that the cloud is
awesome, for instance, for calculation or data look-up services where users want to overcome
bottlenecks that may be placed by high demand on single servers. Symyx customers are already doing
big QSAR calculations and homology modeling using EC2, but they have barriers that prevent them from
making full use of the cloud right now. They cannot accept the concept of grabbing at any available
service in the cloud, provided by a number of resources or servers from almost an undetermined source.
Pharmaceutical industry users often require audit trails and, in the cloud, following the audit trail can be
difficult. In “true SaaS” this can still be an issue if the system being used is multi-tenant and has no audit
trails for specific tenants. A hosted system can obviously be deployed and fine tuned to meet specific

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audit and security needs. Security is essential for registration and electronic laboratory notebook (ELN)
applications in the pharmaceutical industry.

Symyx has extensive experience with hosting DiscoveryGate, its integrated platform for delivering
content from the primary and secondary literature, and tertiary reference information. The architecture
and data for Symyx’ DiscoveryGate Web service are hosted in a bullet-proof, secure environment with
24*7*365 service. The system runs on dedicated hardware hosting multiple VMware servers delivering
the Web service. The hardware can scale up to 300 VMware servers if needed, allowing Symyx to cope
with high demand. Added technology allows Symyx to load share requests between VMware servers
ensuring that all customers get a good service. The same environment will now be used to deliver
Symyx’ hosted ELN solution. Based on their business needs and security concerns, customers can choose
to have a “no frills”, multi-tenancy ELN, or choose a custom hosting solution for their ELN where they
have designated VMware servers, or just designated Oracle instances, as requested in some cases.

The hosted informatics infrastructure provided by Symyx is supported by Switch Communications
Group, an information storage and protection specialist. Switch provides highly secure, mission-critical,
interconnectivity, and disaster-avoidance colocation services, within guaranteed reliable, lowest risk (so-
called Tier 4+) facilities. The secure Switch facility where Symyx hosts the ELN service is compliant with
SAS 70, Type II auditing standards and specifications supporting disaster recovery and business
continuity plans. Third-party, offsite data backup, archiving and recovery services are also provided.

Hosted informatics provides cost benefits over the traditional software model because its shared
resources environment offers significant economies of scale, but moving to a hosted informatics model
is not just to cut costs: the primary goal is to improve operational agility.10 For example, partnering is a
key issue when it comes to hosting. A hole in an in-house firewall is costly to manage but a hosted
system streamlines outsourcing by enabling R&D organizations to turn on and turn off third-party
collaborators quickly and efficiently. Vendor, customers and collaborators can then concentrate on their
core competencies.

CambridgeSoft

Symyx’ competitor, CambridgeSoft has recently announced ChemBioOffice Cloud, an integrated
informatics suite available over the Internet, also allowing customers to focus on the science while
CambridgeSoft takes care of the science IT. CambridgeSoft believes that staffing and running an IT
department is not core to the research activities for a growing number of today’s life science companies.
To meet its customers’ needs, CambridgeSoft offers professional, standard, basic and customized
hosting services. All hosting models cover database maintenance, application maintenance, hardware
and software maintenance, monitoring, support and help desk for CambridgeSoft E-Notebook,
Inventory, Registration, BioAssay and BioSAR. A special team is dedicated solely to customer hosted
solutions. The team involves hardware and operating system specialists, Oracle DBA’s, and application
and support specialists and project managers strategically positioned worldwide to provide 24*7
support. Like Symyx, CambridgeSoft offers high standards of security and reliability in its colocation

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facilities. Rather than repeat the complexities of industry standards and jargon, we refer the reader to a
detailed white paper on the company’s Web site.11

ChemAxon and Partners

In response to increasing demand for software as a service and hosted cheminformatics solutions,
DeltaSoft and ChemAxon have teamed up to provide a suite of fully hosted applications, including
compound registration, inventory, bioassay, and structure activity searching and reporting.12 DeltaSoft
already had a suite of Web applications based on chemical cartridge technology and ChemAxon has a
cartridge and a suite of tools. Several joint customers had internal and virtualized servers with the
ChemCart suite and the ChemAxon cartridge, so further collaboration made sense.

DeltaSoft currently offers the ChemCart suite hosted internally, externally, or in the cloud. For the cloud,
the company uses Amazon EC2. Oracle explicitly supports Amazon Web Services. EC2 provides ready-
made “machine images” (AMIs), which include both operating systems (Linux or Windows) and Oracle
images. This makes the installation very quick and easy; DeltaSoft simply installs its components on top
of these machine images. ChemCart is already a Web based product, so DeltaSoft was able to take
advantage quickly of this new platform without any code changes.

The ChemCart modules currently offered using Amazon on the backend are Compound Registration,
Electronic Laboratory Notebook, Reagent Inventory, Sample Inventory, BioAssay, and Structure Activity
Browser; further cloud offerings are planned in the future. In addition to these SaaS offerings, DeltaSoft
also offers the basic ChemCart product as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, allowing users to
develop custom Web applications quickly and easily in the cloud. DeltaSoft has licensing agreements
with both ChemAxon and Oracle to provide the underlying chemistry cartridge and other components in
its chemistry solutions, so it can offer a complete package to customers. Other chemistry cartridges are
also supported, but they would be licensed separately.

Contur Software is another partner of ChemAxon’s. Contur has added chemistry functionality12 in
iLabber, the company’s recently launched ELN system available as an online service. Using a software as
a service (SaaS) model, Contur Software is making iLabber available to individual researchers and smaller
R&D organisations that previously have not been able to use high-end ELN systems due to the cost of
hardware, licences and maintenance. The added functionality gives users of iLabber access to chemistry
drawing, chemical structure and reaction searching, stoichiometric calculations (reaction planning), and
iLabber’s reagent and reactant databases. All chemistry searching in iLabber is powered by JChem
Cartridge. In addition, MarvinSketch is provided to premium users at no extra cost. To use iLabber,
scientists download a desktop client; operation, maintenance and data storage is managed by Contur
Software. The service is available to individual researchers and smaller research groups (recommended
up to 15 users). Individual researchers use iLabber for free, while there is a fee of $60 per month and
user for commercial organisations. Academic institutions pay half of that fee.

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Conclusion

Trevor Heritage, CEO of Symyx, claims that pharma’s concerns about data and operations security are
largely alleviated by today’s mature scalable and redundant multitier architectures, and shared
resources environments.10 Third-party data centers offer facilities to isolate customer data, perform
regular backups, and minimize failure through redundancy. Detailed service level agreements spell out
responsibilities. There are standards for disaster recovery and business continuity to protect SaaS
customers. His arguments are persuasive for hosted informatics but it is obvious that big pharma is
unlikely to risk its intellectual property in the public cloud at large, as the technology currently stands.

References

1. McKinsey & Co. Report presented at Uptime Institute Symposium April 18, 2009. Clearing the Air on
Cloud Computing. http://uptimeinstitute.org/content/view/353/319;
http://images.cxotoday.com/cxoimages/storyimages/matter101157.pdf (accessed November 27, 2009).

2. Clash of the Clouds. The Economist October 15, 2009.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14637206 (accessed November 15, 2009).

3. Proffitt, A. Pharma’s Early Cloud Adopters. BioIT World, November/December 2009, pp.31-32.

4. Microsoft Sidekick users lose data.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/6316609/Microsoft-Sidekick-users-lose-data.html
(accessed November 28, 2009)

5. Farber, R. Cloud Computing: Pie in the Sky? ScientificComputing.com, November/December 2009

6. Davies, K. Amylin, Amazon, and the Cloud. BioIT World, November/December 2009, pp. 35, 42.

7. Davies, K. The “C” Word. BioIT World, November/December 2009, pp. 24-26, 42.

8. Davies, K. Cycle Computing’s Tour de Cloud. BioIT World, November/December 2009, pp.28-29.

9. Mullin, R. The New Computing Pioneers. Chem. Eng. News 2009, 87(21), 10-14.

10. Heritage, T. Hosted Informatics: Bringing Cloud Computing Down to Earth with Bottom-line Benefits
for Pharma. Next Generation Pharmaceutical, Issue 17, October 2009.
http://www.symyx.com/micro/hosted-informatics/ (accessed November 29, 2009).

11. Describing the Cloud. Details of CambridgeSoft’s Hosted Computing Environment.
http://chembionews.cambridgesoft.com/WhitePapers/PDF/DescribingTheCloud.pdf (accessed
November 28, 2009).

12. Report on ChemAxon Users Group meeting.
http://www.chemaxon.com/UGM/09/09_UGM_report_Warr.html (accessed November 28, 2009)

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Table 1. Selected Technologies

Company/technol Web site Comments
ogy
Amazon Web http://aws.amazon.com/ Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Services (Amazon EC2)
Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3)
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Simple Queue Service
(Amazon SQS)
Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Amazon Relational Database
Service (Amazon RDS)
AWS Premium Support

Cirrhus9 http://www.cirrhus9.com/ IT infrastructure.
C9 Cloud computing integration
services
Citrix Systems http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/pro Citrix Cloud Center (C3)
duct.asp?contentID=1681633 virtualization and networking
products
Cycle Computing http://www.cyclecomputing.com/ CycleServer: administration for
managing and using Condor
pools
CycleCloud: secure, on-demand
grids via CycleCloud, built on
Amazon Web Services
Cloud FS file system for building
storage cloud
Google App http://code.google.com/appengine/ Development stack for building
Engine and hosting Web applications
IBM http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/ Dynamic infrastructure.
Service management for cloud
computing.
IBM software in a cloud
environment using Amazon
Machine Images
Isilon http://www.isilon.com/ Scalable Network Attached
Storage (NAS) solution
Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ Windows Azure: operating
Windows Azure system as a service.
Microsoft SQL Azure: relational
database in the cloud
Nirvanix http://www.nirvanix.com/solutions/index.aspx Cloud storage solutions
Nirvanix http://www.nirvanix.com/solutions/index.aspx Nirvanix Storage Delivery

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Network: cloud storage for the
enterprise
ParaScale http://www.parascale.com/ Software-only solution to
create, manage and power
cloud storage
Platform http://www.platform.com/ Cluster, grid and cloud
Computing management software
RightScale http://www.rightscale.com/ RightScale cloud management
platform
Salesforce http://www.salesforce.com Cloud infrastructure.
Force.com platform including
database, security, workflow,
user interface, and other tools.
Customer Relationship
Management applications
Sun Cloud http://www.sun.com/solutions/cloudcomputing/ Developer tools.
Computing index.jsp Sun Cloud Partner Initiative
Scalable infrastructure
Switch http://www.switchnap.com/ Highly secure, mission-critical
Communications interconnectivity and disaster-
Group avoidance colocation services
Univa UD http://www.univaud.com/ Infrastructure products for
private cloud, hybrid cloud and
intelligent cloud
VMware http://www.vmware.com/ vSphere data center
virtualization.
vCloud Express for VMware
Virtualized infrastructure.
Private cloud

Author

Dr. Wendy A. Warr, Wendy Warr & Associates (wendy@warr.com, http://www.warr.com), November
2009

Cloud computing

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