14 DAY TRIAL // ASUS is preparing to start seriously offering cloud services, even if it begins with a private cloud instead of a public one.
Said private cloud, according to Digitimes, will serve the National Taiwan University (NTU) and will be put to use this month, March 2012.
A Taiwan-based bank has also reportedly placed some orders for cloud services.
According to ASUS Vice Chairman Jonathan Tseng, the company has actually been developing cloud computing facilities and products for four years, albeit quietly.
This year will finally mark the emergence of the first functional installations and business deals.
ASUS will start serving large enterprises and then expand to private cloud solutions for small-to-medium businesses in the second half of 2012.
If nothing else, demand should be particularly high in the medical and education industries.
All things considered, the company's decision to enter this field at this time is a good one.
After all, Intel only recently launched the Xeon E5 series of server central processing units (CPUs), which are the closest thing to perfect for cloud.
Not only are they faster and more energy efficient, but they also have AES encryption at hardware level, not to mention the ability to encrypt and decrypt data in real time.
One of the biggest concerns of customers is that the data floating in the cloud isn't exactly as secure as it would be in a mainframe buried underneath dozens of firewalls, so the increased security is a major step forward.
For those that want to learn more, we've covered how the Xeon E5 have the best data center performance per Watt and the I/O integrated into the CPU, drastically improving latency.
Of course, ASUS will have rivals. Dell has already announced servers powered by them, as did NEC, AVADirect and Puget. Some of the machines even have NVIDIA GPU accelerators running in tandem.