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Wed, Mar 5, 2008 12:19 EST

Cloud Computing: Reality Check From Early Adopters

Topic: Infrastructure

Blog: Inside Tech

Current Rating: 0 Comments: 2

Have you seen the IBM commercial where employees listening to an executive make a speech play "buzzword bingo"? It wouldn’t be so funny if it weren't so true. And the biggest buzzword in technology right now is "the cloud." Every vendor wants to tell me how they're in the cloud, how they "get" the cloud, and above all, how the cloud is going to make IT's life so much easier. The newest high-profile entrant into this game of buzzword bingo is Microsoft, with its announcement earlier this week that it will begin to offer up some of its traditional programs and services via the Internet later this year, in a hosted model. You know, via the cloud.

As I've noted before, the cloud is not new. The cloud is the Internet. Salesforce and the other companies who have convinced corporate IT departments to use Software as a Service already know plenty about the cloud. True, new technology jobs will move into the cloud. For example, IBM wants to help customers analyze and mash up huge data sets on the fly in the cloud. But make no mistake, it is Google that is forcing Microsoft to play this game, a scary game that impacts the sacred Microsoft ground of on-premise applications and all the server software needed to support them.

At every CIO conference I attend, I meet lots of CIOs who tell me the same thing: If I could get out from under these Microsoft Office licenses, believe me, I would. I can’t wait for Google to show me that they understand the application security that I need.

So now Microsoft will jump in and offer these customers its own hosted apps, to compete with Google. However, I believe it's a real possibility that this Microsoft offering could fall flat on its face. Why? In order for it to succeed, Microsoft will have to make the pricing quite attractive, and just as importantly, make administration and security chores beautifully simple. Do these three key points sound like tasks that the Microsoft we have all known for years will execute well? Look at their ongoing struggles with Vista. Enough said.

Meanwhile, as you'll need to continue to explain to colleagues inside and outside of IT that you "get" the cloud, we'll continue to do articles that will help. See our new look at experiences from early adopters of cloud services, "Cloud Computing: Tales From the Front." Make no mistake, buzzword-lovers and hype-spreaders: CIOs such as Doug Menefee, CIO of Schumacher Group, a Lafayette, Louisiana-based company that staffs emergency rooms for hospitals, have their feet on the ground when it comes to the cloud.

As Menefee told the story's author, Bill Snyder, running some of Schumacher's applications outside the datacenter solves some problems. He combined a custom application with a Salesforce.com CRM application to handle thousands of contracts among his company, hospitals and doctors. As the story notes: "Those moves, which involved about half of the company's IT infrastructure, avoided the expense of his hiring an additional three to five full-time IT staffers, at a cost of $40,000 to $80,000 a year, plus a large outlay for additional hardware."

But, he says, his datacenter won’t disappear entirely into the cloud. He has application latency and security concerns, plus a legacy billing system that's definitely not a fit for the cloud.

Maybe

Keywords:

cloud, cloud computing

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Wed, Mar 5, 2008 22:34 EST
Posted by: Paul Wallis
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Laurianne,

There has been a bit of hype about "The Cloud" recently.

During 2003, the late Jim Gray made an analysis of computing economics:

“'On Demand' computing is only economical for very cpu-intensive (100,000 instructions per byte or a cpu-day-per gigabyte of network traffic) applications. Pre-provisioned computing is likely to be more economical for most applications - especially data-intensive ones.”

And

“If telecom prices drop faster than Moore's law, the analysis fails. If telecom prices drop slower than Moore's law, the analysis becomes stronger.”

Since then, Telecom prices have fallen and bandwidth has increased, but more slowly than processing power, leaving the economics worse than in 2003.

By 2012, the proposed Blue Gene/Q will operate at about 10,000 TFLOPS outstripping Moore’s law by a factor of about 10.

I’ve tried to put The Cloud in historical context and discussed some of its forerunners here. My take is that:

"I'm sure that advances will appear over the coming years to bring us closer, but at the moment there are too many issues and costs with network traffic and data movements to allow it to happen for all but select processor intensive applications, such as image rendering and finite modelling.”

Given current technological circumstances, and recent events like The Gulf cables being cut and Amazon S3 failing, today the business is being asked to take a leap of faith to put mission critical applications in The Cloud.

PJW

www.stromasoftware.com

 
Thu, Mar 6, 2008 12:43 EST
Posted by: Laurianne McLaughlin
Rating:

Paul, thanks for sharing your analysis, and for bringing up the Amazon S3 and cable cut issues. You're right, those 2 recent events are just the kind of issues that make CIOs leery of the cloud for mission critical work.

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