| Cloud Computing Service Levels
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IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service
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| Virtualization
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The virtualization layer where the physical hardware is being sliced into virtual machines that each have their own operating system installed. Usually Linux or Unix based. These virtual machines are then collected into pools based on the resources they have. These pools of resources are the key to providing elasticity with respect to server architecture. These virtual machines can be brought online and assigned to a resource pool on-the-fly when the demand on that pool increases. They can then be destroyed when they are no longer needed. The ability to provision and destroy virtual machines on the fly allows a vendor to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). There are many major players in this commodity layer such as VMware, Citrix, Sun Microsystems and even Microsoft.
[Description Under Construction]
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| Hardware
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The hardware is expected to be inexpensive commodity hardware with no fault tolerance. Redundancy and fault tolerance are handled within the software layer, so hardware is expected to fail. This is completely counter intuitive to most people in the IT field as they are used to procuring fault tolerant servers with multiple power supplies, RAID disk arrays, etc.
[Description Under Construction]
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[Page Under Construction]
