Cloud Glossary

Application-Centric: Description for any product or service that exists to support the needs/requirements of an end user application – as opposed to "infrastructure-centric." For example, a product like Tivoli is infrastructure-centric while a product like Reliance is application-centric, b/c it bases its automated decisions on application SLAs.

Cloud Computing: While there are many definitions out there, the definition by which Univa operates is:

A category of computing solutions where any "Cloud" solution is a technology and/or service that lets users access computing resources on demand (meaning as needed) – whether resources are physical or virtual, dedicated, or shared, and no matter how they are accessed (via a direct connection, LAN, WAN or the Internet).

A Cloud environment must have four basic characteristics:

• Support boundless applications
• Ability to pool resource
• Service based approach to application delivery
• Support for virtualization

Cloud Enablement: The process of preparing one of the following, usually involving a service engagement and infrastructure/application analysis:

• A service provider to be able to deliver cloud-based services
• An end user company to be able to leverage cloud technology internally by building a private cloud environment
• An application to be able to run on a cloud infrastructure, whether internal or external (also called Cloud On-boarding or Cloudifying)

External Cloud (or Public Cloud): A cloud environment which exists outside a company's firewall, offered as a service by a 3rd party vendor (eg. Amazon EC2, Sun OCP, Google AppEngine).
Click here to read more about External or Public clouds.

Hybrid Cloud (or Mixed Cloud): A cloud environment in which external services are leveraged to extend or supplement the internal cloud – simply put, a mixture of both private and public cloud. Click here to read more about Hybrid or Mixed clouds.

Internal Cloud (or Private Cloud): A cloud environment which creates a pool of resources behind a company's firewall and includes resource management and dynamic allocation, chargeback and support for virtualization. Click here to read more about Internal or Private clouds.

Mixed Cloud (or Hybrid Cloud): A cloud environment in which external services are leveraged to extend or supplement the internal cloud – simply put, a mixture of both private and public cloud. Click here to read more about Mixed or Hybrid clouds.

Pooling resources: The act of creating a single virtual resource from multiple physical or virtual resources – this pool has flexible internal boundaries and can be divided on demand to serve the needs of various customers and applications. For example, a service governor accesses a pool of resources to allocate any number or subset of these to meet the needs of a specific application. Service providers pool data center resources (physical and virtual) to create a flexible base of computing power that can be allocated to customers, in order to avoid the one-machine-one-customer (or x-machines-one-customer) paradigm, which wastes resources

Private Cloud (or Internal Cloud): A cloud environment which creates a pool of resources behind a company's firewall and includes resource management and dynamic allocation, chargeback and support for virtualization. Click here to read more about Private or Internal clouds.

Public Cloud (or External Cloud): A cloud environment which exists outside a company's firewall, offered as a service by a 3rd party vendor (eg. Amazon EC2, Sun OCP, Google AppEngine).
Click here to read more about Public or External clouds.

Resource: Within the context of IT, resource refers to any item that can be used to support the needs of an application. Resources can be physical hardware, virtual machines, software systems, networks, storage, and even human

SaaS (Software as a Service): A model of software deployment where a provider licenses (or provides for free) an application to customers for use as a service on demand – examples include Salesforce.com or GMail. While falling out of fashion somewhat as a term, SaaS is still extremely relevant as the primary foundation on which Cloud is based

Service Governor: The technology that, according to Gartner, providers the brains of the cloud – a service governor is (again, in Gartner's words): "a runtime execution engine that has several inputs: business priorities, IT service descriptions (and dependency model), service quality and cost policies. In addition, it takes real-time data feeds that assess the performance of user transactions and the end-to-end infrastructure, and uses them to dynamically optimize the consumption of real and virtual IT infrastructure resources to meet the business requirements and service-level agreements (SLAs). It performs optimization through dynamic capacity management (that is, scaling resources up and down) and dynamically tuning the environment for optimum throughput given the demand. The service governor is the culmination of all technologies required to build the real-time infrastructure (RTI), and it's the runtime execution management tool that pulls everything together." As Gartner's Tom Bittman explains, "Say you have five business units and 100 applications – some need ultra-fast performance and others don't. The service governor will decide which application gets what."

Read more about Reliance, Univa's leading application service governor product.

SLA: Service level agreement – an agreement a vendor makes with an end user about the quality of the item being delivered. For application services, this would be an agreement to ensure a high quality of application performance, typically based on things like application availability and response times

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