Looking back to one of my predictions for 2014, I had posited that traditional storage solutions labeled cloud will no longer fly this year, and some of the big-iron vendors will be forced to offer their wares as pay-as-you-go services. Perhaps this was stating an obvious eventuality as the market moves to a more cost-effective consumption model – but lo and behold, only two months into the year, it is already happening.
You may have seen that a large vendor introduced a pay-as-you-go model for their on-premise storage. While geared toward managed service providers seeking to provide cloud storage to their customers, this new payment model is the first volley in what will likely be a pay-as-you-go tidal wave for hardware. Such models are certainly laudable efforts, bestowing customers the benefit of not having to purchase multiple years’ worth of capacity from day one at the current pricing.
Are We All Cloud Service Brokers Now? Part II
By John Dixon, Consulting Architect
In my last post, I discussed Cloud Service Brokers and some of their benefits after reading a couple of articles from Robin Meehan (Article 1 here and Article 2 here). In this post, I will break down some of Robin’s points and explain why I agree or disagree with each.
At the end of last post, I was breaking down cloud arbitrage into three areas (run-time, deployment-time, plan-time). Credit to Robin for run-time and deployment-time arbitrage. I really like those terms, and I think it illuminates the conversation. So, run-time cloud arbitrage is really science fiction right now – this is where the CSB moves running workloads around on the fly to find the best benefit for the customer. I haven’t seen any technology (yet) that does this. However, VMware does deployment-time and run-time arbitrage with VMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduling – albeit, in a single virtual datacenter, with individual VMs, and with a single policy objective to balance a cluster’s load across vSphere nodes. See Duncan Epping’s excellent write up on DRS here. Even 10 years ago, this was not possible. 15 years ago, this was certainly science fiction. Now, it’s pretty common to have DRS enabled for all of your vSphere clusters.
A few of Robin’s points…
Point 1:
“The ability to migrate IT workloads dynamically (i.e. at run-time, not at deployment time) is something I sometimes see as a capability under the ‘cloud broker’ banner, but in my view it really just doesn’t make sense – at least not at the moment.”
I agree. Run-time cloud arbitrage and workload migration ala vMotion is not possible today in cloud. Will it be possible within the next few years? Absolutely. I think it will first manifest itself in a VMware High Availability-like scenario. Again, see Duncan Epping’s fantastic deep-dive into HA. If cloud provider X drops off of the internet suddenly, then restart the resources and application at cloud provider Y (where cloud provider Y might even be your own datacenter). This is sometimes known as DR as a service, or DRaaS. And even now, there are some DRaaS solutions that are coming onto the market.
Point 2:
“The rate of innovation in the IaaS/PaaS/DaaS market is such that most of the other vendors are playing catch-up with AWS, as AWS continue to differentiate themselves from the following pack. This shows no sign of slowing down over the next couple of years – so the only way a migrated workload is going to work across multiple cloud vendors is if it only relies on the lowest common denominator functionality across the vendors, which is typically basic storage, virtualised compute and connectivity.”
Also agree, the rate of innovation in the market for cloud computing is rapid as specialization sets in at an industrial level. This also means that downward price pressures are enormous for vendors in the cloud space, even today as vendors vie for market share. As switching costs decrease (e.g., portability of applications increases), prices for IaaS will decrease even more. Now, wouldn’t you, as a customer, like to take advantage of this market behavior? Take in to consideration that CSBs aggregate providers but they also aggregate customer demand. If you believe this interpretation of the market for IaaS, then you’ll want to position yourself to take advantage of it by planning portability for your applications. A CSB can help you do this.
Point 3:
“The bottom line is that if you are going to architect your applications so they can run on any cloud service provider, then you can’t easily use any of the good bits and hence your value in migrating to a cloud solution is diminished. Not ruined, just reduced.”
Disagree. To take advantage of market behavior, customers should look to avoid using proprietary features of IaaS platforms because they compromise portability. Like we noted earlier, increased portability of applications means more flexibility to take advantage of market behavior that leads to decreasing prices.
This is where perspective on cloud becomes really important. For example, GreenPages has a customer with a great use case for commodity IaaS. They may deploy ~800 machines in a cluster at AWS for only a matter of hours to run a simulation or solve a problem. After the result is read, these machines are completely destroyed—even the data. So, it makes no difference to this customer where they do this work. AWS happens to be the convenient choice right now. Next quarter, it may be Azure, who knows? I’m absolutely certain that this customer sees more benefit in avoiding the use of propriety features (a.k.a., the “good bits” of cloud) in a cloud provider rather than using them.
What is your perspective on cloud?
• A means to improve time to market and agility
• A way to transform capex into opex
• Simply a management paradigm – you can have cloud anywhere, even internally as long as you have self-service and infinite resources
• An enabler for a new methodology like DevOps
• Simply a destination for applications
I think that a good perspective may include all of these things. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.
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Latest cloud research notes continued struggle for channel
Research from IT services bods MTI has revealed that UK channel businesses are struggling to meet the needs of their demands due to the accelerated growth of cloud computing.
No prizes for guessing the angle of this research; if your instant thought was ‘resellers struggle in a cloud-heavy market, thus they’ll need a partner to help monetise’, then you’d be right. Yet the stats, taken from over 150 respondents with seven in ten resellers, make for interesting reading.
The results show infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the most common service provided by resellers, with over three quarters (77%) of respondents citing it as a key service for their clients. Conversely, the least popular being managed security services.
For resellers, the biggest challenge over the next 18 months was clear: clients are requesting more complex solutions which is affecting their business. Ranked one to six with one being …
The outlook for privacy and data protection for cloud in 2014
2014 is likely to prove to be a big year in data protection for many industries – none more so that the cloud computing industry with the possible adoption of the EU’s proposed Data Protection Regulation, implementation of European cyber security strategies and moves by Germany and France to set up a European Communications Network.
In a recent weekly podcast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested a European Communications Network should be set up to avoid potential access to data by the U.S. Government. In the podcast Merkel commented: “We’ll talk about European providers that offer security to our citizens, so one shouldn’t have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic”.
It is not clear whether these comments will ever develop into anything more concrete but what is clear is that concerns around data protection and cyber security are driving a number of regulatory developments that …
What’s Missing from “Cloud First” in the Enterprise?
My first experience with an “inverted yield curve” was in 2001 just prior to the tech bubble bursting. I was working on a financial portal for an investment bank and one of the charts was a yield curve. It looked odd all of a sudden, so I looked it up in a book of financial terms. An inverted yield is indicated when interest rates for short-term capital are higher than interest rates for long-term capital. In other words, people are willing to pay a significant price to alleviate short-term concerns because they’re focused on the now and not so concerned about one year, three years, five years, or thirty years from now. Inverted yield curves some believe signal disruption in financial markets. On the surface, Cloud First seems to signal the disruption that is cloud computing. To take this metaphor a little further, this inversion of Cloud First from “Cloud Never” suggests to me an inverted set of concerns. Does Cloud First prioritize an immediate need to say “something” about the cloud and cloud strategy? Does Cloud First prioritize the now while discounting near, mid, and long-term opportunities that far exceed the “costs less, more agile, faster time-to-market” recording I hear played daily throughout the blogosphere? Beyond staying Cloud First what else can enterprise technology teams prioritize that may amplify their ability to execute in the cloud?
QTS Announces 2013 Channel Partner Program Results and 2014 Focus
QTS Realty Trust (NYSE: QTS), one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing providers of data center facilities and managed services, announced the 2013 performance of its channel partner program and planned enhancements for this year.
QTS finished 2013 with 74 partners that closed sales, and of those sales, 54 were new customers to QTS. The result was a 21 percent growth in revenue over last year from the channel partner program. Charlotte, N.C.-based telecommunications and data center consulting firm Converged Network Services Group (CNSG) was honored with winning Partner of the Year for the second consecutive year.
«CNSG had an outstanding performance in 2013 generating more revenue than any other QTS Partner,» said Frank Eagle, vice president, business development – QTS. «Based on their data center services focus, strong sales skills and work to integrate our sales teams, it’s no surprise that they repeated as our top performing partner.»
QTS Launches Enterprise Cloud Solution
QTS Realty Trust has launched the QTS Enterprise Cloud, an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. Built upon industry-leading VMware, EMC and Cisco technologies, the platform is secure and flexible to meet evolving enterprise IT infrastructure needs.
«As a VMware vCloud® Powered Partner, QTS has adopted VMware vCloud Suite to deliver its Enterprise Cloud Services,» said Geoff Waters, vice president, Global Channel Partners –VMware. «We congratulate QTS on the launch of QTS Enterprise Cloud.»
QTS Enterprise Cloud is housed in QTS’ Atlanta-Suwanee and Santa Clara data centers, which employ multi-factor physical and logical security protocols. QTS’ Enterprise Cloud extends the cloud and managed services component of the company’s 3C’s product portfolio, and meets growing market demand among enterprise customers for control and visibility.
Net Neutrality: Are We on a Collision Course? | Part 1
The cable companies and telcos who dominate the U.S. market for Internet access won a victory when they succeeded in having the heart of the FCC’s ruling on net neutrality struck down. Now, for the first time legally, those companies can both block content and offer fast lane services at their discretion.
I have mentioned several times in my recent series of blogs that the eventual outcome of this decision may not be as obvious as we first thought: it may be less bad than network neutrality advocates feared, and rather less wonderful than some of the anti-neutrality advocates hoped. In previous blogs, I mentioned that neither the device vendors nor the edge providers will sit by passively and let the carrier’s Internet service providers (ISPs) call all the shots. To really understand this, it is worth reviewing other aspects of the Internet as they are actually evolving, as compared to the somewhat static model apparently envisioned by the courts, the FCC and some of the carriers.
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NCOIC Debuts Roadmap to Manage Cyber-Secure Hybrid Computing Environment
The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) has begun offering an open process that will enable governments, agencies and businesses to create and manage a secure, hybrid IT computing environment quickly and cost effectively.
Known as the NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC™), the process defines how to build a federated cloud infrastructure that provides a foundation for information sharing within a secure environment, enabling a diverse group of users to exchange data via their different technology applications so they can work on a common project or problem.