Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Cloud computing is a confusing topic for vendor strategists. One reason? Most of us confuse two fundamentally different types of compute clouds as one. Server clouds support the needs of traditional business apps while scale-out clouds are designed for massive, many-machine workloads such as Web sites or grid compute applications. Scale-out clouds differ from server clouds in five key ways: 1) much larger workloads; 2) loosely coupled software architecture; 3) fault tolerance in software, not hardware; 4) simple state management; and 5) server virtualization is for provisioning flexibility — not machine sharing. Strategists must update their server virtualization plans to embrace the evolution to server cloud, while developing a separate strategy to compete in the arena for scale-out clouds.

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