A comparison of several cloud computing platforms

Cloud computing is a natural move to a new perception of information infrastructure which appeared as a result of evolution of the technological base of hardware of today's computer complexes. It has been one of the most hot research topics. Now many corporations are involved in cloud computing related techniques and many cloud computing platforms have been put forward. This is a favorable situation to study and apply cloud computing related techniques. For beginning users it is still very hard to make a reasonable choice among large number of offers. What difference are there for different cloud computing platforms and what characteristics and advantages has each? To answer these problems, the characteristics, architectures and applications of several popular platforms of cloud computing are analyzed and discussed in detail. From the comparison of these platforms users can better understand different cloud platforms and more reasonablely choose what they want. This communication present the results of testing Eucalyptus and Opennebula on heterogeneous platforms SMU (PM–PU St. Petersburg University) and analyzes its features and advantages for the project data centers of the University. Bibliogr. 5. Il. 4. Table 1.