Analysis: Grid Computing vs Cloud Computing What is the difference?

Lew Tucker, CIO of Cisco Systems, who is responsible for the cloud business, is no stranger to the field of large-scale computing. Tucker, who joined Cisco in June, worked at Sun Microsystems, where he was responsible for Sun's cloud and large-scale network computing.

Tucker's primary responsibilities at Cisco cover different business units because the cloud involves business users, service providers and partners. For Tucker, the cloud is not just a raster computing or other new term for large-scale distributed computing, although they have commonality.

Tucker said in an interview that "the cloud has a strong correlation with many of the things we know from raster computing. We know the advantages of scale and ownership of a unified infrastructure, and understand that you must implement Management automation."

Raster computing is the most common term used between 2000 and 2005, and Sun's popularity of raster computing has contributed. In 2004, Sun launched an enterprise-class grid platform to provide utility computing for enterprise users. Although the early promise of raster computing to users sounds the same as the promise of the cloud, Tucker emphasizes that there are some significant differences between them.

"The big difference in SUN's raster computing is that it was originally designed to run very large-scale applications in batch mode," Tucker said. "So raster computing is very useful for very large scale computing. Those applications send the data to the grid for calculation and then output."

In contrast, the cloud is not a batch system. Unlike data centers and server platforms, the cloud is based on the network application delivery space. Tucker emphasizes that the concept of cloud comes from a large cloud company like Amazon, which must build a large-scale infrastructure to run one or two applications.

"With the cloud, we can try to do the same on a large grid-like infrastructure," Tucker said. "But these infrastructures are now targeted at long-running application services. Application software is delivered via the Internet."

From a management perspective, the broad nature of the cloud makes it difficult for companies like Cisco to actually measure how much their business is related to the cloud.

Cisco's unified computing platform is a cloud platform, but they also have a variety of switch products.

Tucker said, "We must first really understand what a cloud is and what is just a traditional network business."

Tucker also stressed that analysts have different forecasts for the cloud market, and he is also collecting more detailed statistics about the current state of the cloud market and the future. His plan is to measure the capabilities of Cisco in this area as a whole.

"The Unified Computing System is an important product that users use on the cloud, but most of today's clouds may be running Cisco's network devices," Tucker said. "They may not be able to use unified computing at this time. System, so we try to build a cloud with Cisco network equipment. This is not a unified computing system and is usually considered a traditional infrastructure."

Looking ahead, Tucker has set several goals for Cisco's cloud business. The goal in the first place is to convey to the market clear information about what Cisco's cloud strategy is, so that all the different cloud departments within Cisco can work together as a whole.

"Cloud computing is very important to Cisco, and we must find ways to expand the results," Tucker said.

Tucker also stressed that Cisco's sales also face enterprise users and service providers, so they can also help business users use private clouds and ultimately benefit from service providers.

"I want to say that enterprise users can move freely between private clouds. We can help them build private clouds and help them extend their workloads to enterprise-class cloud computing from Cisco. The service provider benefits."