I love to be on the water, ocean or lake. It doesn’t matter to me.  More to the point, I love to sail.  To me, there is nothing more peaceful than listening to the sound of the water rushing past the hull, and the wind humming through the rigging and sails en route to your destination. Of course, you could also take a big flashy power boat, but while they provide the thrill of skipping across the waves at high speeds, you’re often using up a lot of resources, i.e. fuel, and rattling your bones in the process. In the end, there’s something very powerful and satisfying about utilizing the efficiency of nature’s resources, and a little engineering, to get from point A to point B. The goal is accomplished and the journey is often much more enjoyable.

Boats and sailing were top of mind while I was in Miami recently for the Parallels Summit – they are everywhere!  Fortuitously the conference was focused on Cloud Computing, which you might compare to the sailing of the IT world – powerful yet refreshingly power-efficient, unlike the old guard of “power boats,” energy-hungry on-site data centers.  At Parallel’s, I had the opportunity to lead two sessions on the unique infrastructure requirements that Cloud Computing now presents us with, like scalability and energy-efficiency.

Parallels Summit focused on talking to web hosters and cloud providers who are delivering services to all customers segments (here’s a recap of my session from David Hamilton at Web Host Industry Review).  While cloud computing is becoming a mainstay concept across customer market segments, it is particularly critical for the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market.  SMBs want to invest in cloud computing for the cost-efficiency and range of services it enables, particularly if it provides a way for them to stretch their limited budgets and IT resources.  They need to be able to trust the cloud service providers to build a balanced, energy-efficient infrastructure that can scale on demand as their business grows.  They don’t need the flash and speed of the high performance power boat, but rather a solid performing, efficient vessel that will be sure to get them to their destination no matter what obstacle present themselves.

In short, cloud service providers have three main opportunities to get involved:

• Help SMBs understand the requirements for a scalable, energy-efficient cloud computing infrastructure.
• Grow their own bottom lines by innovating on behalf of their SMB customers
• Take a balanced approach to developing the cloud computing server platform. The best designs balance performance, power efficiency and cost, not just raw speed.

But the cloud service providers can’t do it alone. AMD is helping providers take advantage of the SMB cloud computing opportunity by enabling balanced computing power. In my role as virtualization solutions product manager for AMD, I can speak in particular to the importance of virtualization to the evolution and success of cloud computing – you might say that virtualization is the engine that drives the cloud.  Providers can rely on the fact that AMD offers AMD Virtualization™ Technology (AMD-V^TM) that helps deliver an efficient cloud computing infrastructure, regardless of which AMD Opteron™ processor they decide to build upon (for more background, see my colleague Margaret Lewis’ post on the importance of the processor to cloud computing)

The evolution continues in the first half of 2010 with the introduction of the AMD Opteron ^TM 6000 Series platform and AMD Opteron ^TM 4000 Series platform. These options are tailored to meet the varying needs of customers, and John Fruehe goes into more depth on the @Work blog on this here.

Using processors tailored for scalability and efficiency –  like these AMD Opteron processors – is a first step for providers who want to develop balanced, high-performance cloud computing infrastructures for the SMB market.  It enables providers to help ensure they’re creating cloud computing solutions that can drive value and growth for customers for miles down the road.

Tim Mueting is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.