Cloud computing is a term that encompasses a lot of different things. From servers and infrastructure to office software, a lot of IT is now sold on a cloud-based, service model. This means that any comparison of cloud providers can not only be very complex, but can also end up measuring companies that don’t even compete with each other. To avoid this situation, different types of cloud services should be looked at separately. Today, we are going to focus on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

IaaS providers are companies that provide the most basic IT needs – servers, networking, and storage – on a usage-based payment model. They typically make heavy investments in data centers and other infrastructure, and then rent it out, allowing consumers to avoid investments of their own. Even these providers, however, are not all pursuing the same business model. While the largest and most well-known are focused on the general public, with fully on-line automated set-ups, there are also some niche players that cater only to the enterprise market, as well as smaller companies that resell infrastructure from larger ones, usually with some added services.

Comparing companies

For the sake of this comparison, we are going to focus on IaaS providers whose services can be purchased directly on-line, without requiring contact with salespeople of any kind. They were selected based both on my knowledge of companies in this space and based on the availability of information about them on the web. I ended up with 11 companies, ranging from the large and well known to smaller, newer ones.

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Stringing together a cluster of 30,000 processing cores, Amazon’s EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud has managed to achieve the rank of 42 in the top 500 supercomputer ranking of the world. Granted, it isn’t the first in performance with a score of 240 trillion calculations per second but it is by no means an average performer either. The main point is that it is available to anyone, unlike your usual supercomputer cluster which has been built with a dedicated purpose in mind and therefore has rather limited access (and even longer waiting lines).

Amazon proved this by doing an actual paid-for supercomputing process at a mere $1279 an hour. While this may seem like a lot to some people, the people who have set up an actual supercomputer cluster will be shaking their heads in disbelief (and probably regret!) at the millions of dollars used to create a dedicated supercomputer cluster, much less keep one running. What boggles the mind even further is that Amazon did this while running all of their other Cloud related services at the same time.

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First up is IDC, which recently issued a report stating that entrenched interests are starting to show the strain of shifting to the new paradigm, making it highly likely that more than a few of today’s giants could go the way of Wang, DEC and other stalwarts of the mainframe era. According to the Chief Analyst Frank Gens, spending on new technologies will reach about 20 percent of the total IT spend, a dramatic shift of the recent past when the vast majority of budgets were devoted to maintaining existing platforms. Already, spending on new technologies is growing six times faster than that of traditional servers and PCs.

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1. The Cloud = Business for the Data Center Industry

About once a week I still see goofy headlines asserting that cloud computing is bad news for data centers. The reality, which became crystal clear in 2011, is that the growth of cloud computing means big business for the data center industry. Virtual servers don’t magically float in the clouds. They all live in physical servers, inside data centers. Cloud technologies have driven demand for more efficient data center space that can support higher-density computing workloads. That trend manifests itself in many ways – a hardware refresh, or a data center retrofit, or outsourcing to a cloud specialist, or leasing colocation space or wholesale data center suites. Cloud growth at Rackspace means more leasing for DuPont Fabros, international expansion for Salesforce.com means more business for NTT, and Twitter’s need for impoved latency and redundancy means business for QTS. Not to mention that the data center providers who were most aggressive about moving into enterprise cloud, Terremark and Savvis, were both acquired this year. On virtually all fronts, 2011 was the year in which cloud computing moved from discussion to dollars, and the data center industry was a major beneficiary.

2. Modularity Goes Mainstream

Another technology that saw adoption shift gears was the modular data center. The trend was solidified by a steady stream of announcements of new projects and new customers – something that had been conspicuously absent during the first few years of containerized offerings. It wasn’t just the number of modules, either.

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Today is a wonderful time for anyone interested in Cloud Computing to be working with the US government. On the one hand, the government considers Cloud to be strategically important, and they already have a track record as an early adopter of Cloud Computing on a grand scale. On the other hand, the government is also in the unique position of being able to drive standards for the approach—and in fact, they are even responsible for establishing the most widely adopted definition of Cloud Computing.

The federal agency who has taken this leadership position is the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the US Department of Commerce. NIST’s formal definition of Cloud Computing is already well known—“a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Concise as that definition is, it only marks the beginning of the work NIST is doing to formalize and standardize the full breadth of Cloud Computing approaches, both within the government as well as for the world at large.

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Chipita America may be as close to a server-less company as one can find. Its ERP systems, EDI, BI, Office, Exchange and file servers are all hosted in a service provider’s cloud.

About six years ago, when many IT managers were debating Nicholas Carr’s book ” Does IT Matter ,” Chipita CIO Scott Martin was moving the Tulsa, Okla.-based snack food maker’s email to a third party’s cloud hosted platform. Since then Chipita has moved the rest its core systems to the cloud.

Martin said he didn’t see a competitive advantage in managing internal systems, believing that his time could be best spent focusing on business needs.

“The real difference that IT leaders [can make] is being able to leverage information to create competitive advantage in the marketplace,” said Martin.

Six years later, Martin is still a pioneer in cloud adoption, and at times is called on to defend and explain the approach to his peers.

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Businesses looking for a secure virtual environment will only consider the private cloud in the near future, according to analyst IDC.

This is because the private cloud, rather than a public or hybrid cloud, bears the closest resemblance to the virtualised infrastructure that IT departments have implemented and where they are able to maintain control.

“The decision in the next year or two will only be about the private cloud,” Eric Domage, programme manager for EMEA software and service group at IDC, told the analyst’s Virtualisation and Cloud Security Conference in London.

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The three primary types of cloud computing are IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – infrastructure, platform and software as a service, respectively. When you take a closer look, you’ll see that what will decide this argument are your own company’s needs and comfort level.

These services are made possible by virtualization, the ubiquity of high-speed networks and the capabilities of today’s browsers. With these things in place, it becomes less necessary to own your own infrastructure, or even to own your own software. You can get what you need from the cloud, as you need it.

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NEW YORK, Nov. 3, 2011 – Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) members will triple cloud deployment in the next 2 years according to a report published by the organization today. This adoption is 5X faster than Q2’2011 IDC market forecasts [1] (Source: IDC Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2011-2015 Forecast (Doc # 228485, June 2011) for the >$90B expected invested in cloud operations worldwide in the next two years and reflects growing member confidence in delivery of industry standard cloud solutions that align with top customer requirements outlined by the organization earlier this year.

The member forecast was delivered as the organization’s leadership outlined its next major advancements in addressing the top obstacles to cloud adoption including publication of best practices for cloud application development and resiliency as well as collaborations on potential standards with the leading industry organizations for cloud security and management, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). The announcements are the latest details to emerge from the organization as it moves towards its goal of accelerating over $50B in cloud investment over the next three years.

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In Part 1, I talked about the most important applications in your business, also know as your mission critical applications. I covered reasons that many of these mission critical applications are ill-behaved and require special care and feeding in your enterprise data center. These reasons include high bandwidth requirements on the headquarters or wide area network, expensive overbuilt servers, and additional hours of maintenance overhead per month.

How do these worst-behaved applications affect your data center requirements?

Bandwidth – Many applications generate large amounts of network traffic for even the smallest user activity. These levels of traffic can cause the applications to perform poorly via the Internet or small remote office connections. These apps can influence your decision on the location of the primary data center. It often seems simplest to place the data center close (in the same building) to your highest number of users. Yet an in-house data center may not fully support your data center uptime requirements.

Interoperability – If your most important applications link up to other important applications, you may be forced to put these applications in the same data center. If your manufacturing system is feeding data to your customer management system and your accounting system, reliability becomes more important, because a small amount downtime can affect three important software systems, not just one.

Souped-up, expensive servers – Experience has taught your IT staff to overbuild server and storage hardware to solve some of the bad behaviors of your mission critical applications. These non-standard configurations can drive up costs. Non-standard configurations are also more difficult to operate in cloud computing environments, forcing the data center to remain physical, instead of virtual.

More Maintenance – More problems mean more maintenance work to solve them. This drives up FTE requirements and makes outsourcing more complex and expensive. Maintenance load can influence location and staff requirements for the data center.

Costly uptime – Problem applications are harder to keep running and often require more technology for high uptime levels. Expensive high uptime technologies like clustering greatly drive up the costs of keeping the application alive and well.

Ill-behaved line-of-business applications influence strategic data center decisions:

Primary data center location – Would your data center be better off in-house, in the cloud, in an outsourced data center facility or a hybrid of all three?

Wide area network design – Where is the hub of the network? How many telecom providers should I use? How much bandwidth do I buy? How can I get the best pricing?

Server hardware ownership and maintenance – Do I buy my own servers for maximum control? Do I use virtual servers in the cloud? Do I use a combination of both?

Maintenance – Does in-house staff do maintenance or do I outsource it?

Good CIO strategy includes a clear understanding of the mission critical applications and their data center requirements.

More CIOs are using these tools to mitigate the risks of their worst-behaved applications:

• Thin application delivery via software by VMware and Citrix to solve bandwidth problems
• Affordable colocation to build in 99.995% uptime on the data center power and cooling
• Cloud computing services like virtual private servers for predictable mission critical applications
• Change management discipline to manage application behaviors and reduce maintenance

Don’t let your worst-behaved applications cause you to make bad decisions about your data center.

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