Dedicated server or Dedicated Cloud?

Within the last decade, “Cloud” has become one of the most used buzzwords in the technology industry. Marketers use it to describe everything Internet related — from apps used on mobile phones, through email, data storage services, and virtually anything else digital. While asking for the reader's apology in advance for what we will say next, we must not stop short of saying that “Cloud” has become the technology term of uninformed human beings who lack even basic technology awareness. But don't worry, if you are one of those people who have no idea what "Cloud" is in the technology sphere, we acknowledge that this is not your fault. It is those who are engaged in the corporate marketing sector to blame for the terminological Dark Ages in the field of cloud computing.

What the hell is Cloud?

The digital era idiocy is so overwhelming and widespread that, when asked, "What is cloud?" even the still-biggest search engine, Google, provides the following response: "The 'Cloud' refers to a network of remote servers accessed over the Internet, which store data and run applications instead of your local computer."

In the digital era, where we are supposed to become smarter and the information more objective, it is the world's biggest data search and information storage libraries who create and spread fake knowledge. Why do we say this? Because, in order to really receive an adequate explanation on what the cloud really is, you actually need to ask, "What is cloud in the sky?". This is where we got. 30 years ago, there was one and only thing called "cloud" — a visible mass of water droplets, ice crystals, or a mixture of them, suspended in the air.

No, anymore. Today, when the word "cloud" is used, it is not clear what the person who uses it is talking about. It could be anything technological, anything related to internet.

In fact, technology-wise, Cloud refers to a computing system in which a group of physical servers (computers) are virtualized with computing virtualization technology in the first place. Secondly, a "Compute Cloud" is a system of virtualized groups of servers, with two separate subgroups — one group of computing appliances that does processing tasks, and another group where data is stored. The two groups are physically independent and interconnected with a low latency interconnect. The main purpose of dividing the processing tasks and the data storage in two separate computing groups is to make sure that nodes part of these groups can be scaled up without operational interruption, without a downtime.

So, "Cloud" means "Cloud Computing," and when it comes to computing infrastructure Cloud Computing means a computing system that consists of two groups of servers — the first group provides resources used for data processing, such as CPU power and RAM, while the second group of servers provides data storage disk space.

Cloud Computing does not mean a "delivery of on-demand computing services like servers, storage, software, and analytics over the Internet ('the cloud')." It simply means a "computing system that consists of two groups of servers — processing nodes and storage appliances."

Here we come to the question: What is the difference between "Dedicated Server" and "Dedicated Cloud," and, more importantly, are "Dedicated Server" and "Dedicated Cloud" one and the same thing?

We will provide a very simple and, more importantly, trustworthy answer to these questions.

Dedicated Server

Dedicated Server is not a dedicated cloud. "Dedicated Server" is a specialized computer created for continuous use, which is used by a single-tenant, and the software applications that work on it are usually work directly in an operations system (OS) environment, which is directly installed and configured on the physical "Bare Metal" — another modern computing term that is widely used and creates a fair share in the overall state of terminological confusion.

Bare Metal Server means to say that the dedicated server in use by someone is a physical machine, not a virtualized computing instance. To demonstrate how inadequate has gone the technology industry, we should mention that there is also a term, "Bare Metal Cloud". And although that and educated and knowledgeable person could usually explain virtually every idiocy, "Bare Metal Cloud" is virtually inexplicable. It probably means that someone is using physical servers to create a cloud computing system, but such an explanation is rather awkward. It is awkward because the cloud computing systems are created with physical servers by default.

Anyway, let's go back to the dilemma: "Dedicated Server" or "Dedicated Cloud"?

Dedicated Cloud

Well, we have already explained what a dedicated server is. Now, it is time to do the same with the "dedicated cloud". A methodologically correct explanation is that it is "A Dedicated Cloud is a cloud computing system which is used by a single-tenant."

So, the dilemma, "Dedicated Server or Dedicated Cloud?" de facto doesn't exist? Why? Because one server (Dedicated Server) and a group of servers virtualized with computing virtualization technology (Dedicated Cloud) are incomparable in terms of resources, architecture and use cases.

What we mean is that, by the time you would eventually be presented with the question, "Dedicated Server or Dedicated Cloud?", you'd not need to think about it because you will know very well what kind of computing infrastructure architecture you need. Whoever doesn't know whether they need to use a single physical server or a bunch of them that work in a cloud computing system cannot answer the question, and clearly does not need to know the answer. It is a bit of a Catch-22. Whoever does not know what Catch-22 is, well then the situation is more or less hopeless! Because you cannot know something, if you don't know anything.

This is what AI-powered systems (GPU dedicated servers) are here to do — to replace virtually useless in terms of knowledge human beings, who want to know everything without knowing anything.

And for the purpose of this publication, we should clarify that the AI-powered systems can run both on Dedicated Servers and Dedicated Clouds.