Almost Half of IT Managers Are Looking in the Cloud

The combination of an improving economy and aging hardware has the IT market ripe for a move to a Cloud-based infrastructure, with almost half of enterprises considering it, according to market researcher IDC. But before IT decision-makers move to the Cloud, they have a few questions first.

The report is the first by IDC to examine the economics of Cloud deployment and the costs involved. The research firm found that 44 percent of the enterprises it surveyed are considering the Cloud, and that private Clouds will be a much bigger market than public Clouds, which should be great news for server vendors that saw sales crater last year.

The company projects server revenue for public Cloud computing will grow from $582 million in 2009 to $718 million in 2014, while server revenue for the private Cloud market will grow from $7.3 billion in 2009 to $11.8 billion in 2014. More significantly, IDC found some clear lines of delineation between users and hardware when it comes to private versus public Clouds.

"A private Cloud is higher-end, used by larger enterprises. A public is for the SMB market," Katie Broderick, research analyst for servers and data centers at IDC, told InternetNews.com. "There are definitely more servers deployed in a public Cloud than a private Cloud, but the money for private Cloud is bigger because a public Cloud server is a lower-end x86 server, because they run a lower-end workload."

This makes for a lot of hardware. IDC says 122,615 servers were deployed in private clouds in 2009 and this number will grow to 502,626 in 2014. For public Clouds, 318,121 servers were deployed in 2009 and that figure will grow to 875,954 units in 2014.

Most of that growth will be in x86-based systems. Cloud servers running on x86 will grow from 315,000 units in 2009 to 871,000 in 2014, but RISC (define)systems from Oracle and IBM will still see expansion, too. IDC expects the number of RISC-based servers to grow from 2,390 units in 2009 to 4,529 in 2014.

IDC defines "private Cloud" as a converged infrastructure with server, storage and networking working in lockstep from out of the box, with the servers all virtualized and automated. "If you need a virtual machine image for a corporate team in 15 minutes, you can do it," Broderick said. "Today, it would take days to upload the software and prepare a server for a team."

Still, the market's not quite there yet. Early attempts at virtualization solved one problem but created another, she added.

"We had physical server sprawl, now we have virtual machine server sprawl," Broderick said. Companies were deploying virtual machines all over their environment and not removing them, so VMs used for a short-term project would still be up and running years later -- a state that showed that virtualized environments were not yet not fully mature.

She said further automation is needed to avoid this problem by having VMs expire or at least notify admins that they are sitting idle for a long period.

Top reasons for embracing private, public clouds

With that under control, however, enterprises could be poised to reap the benefits of a virtualized, automated private Cloud.

"Typically, a private Cloud should be less expensive but it depends on the hardware, maintenance contracts and service contracts," Broderick said. "The part where you would save the most money is in management, automation and how easy it is to use every day."

When it comes to the pros and cons of Clouds in the minds of those surveyed, public and private Clouds have almost total overlap. The top four reasons for moving to a both a private and public Cloud, according to those surveyed by IDC, are improved availability, aid in disaster recovery, improved asset utilization and lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and they were all of nearly equal value. At the bottom of the list was saving on IT headcount.

The leading concern in moving to the Cloud, not surprisingly, is security, especially for public Cloud. More than 70 percent of those surveyed said that was their top concern for moving to public Clouds, while about 45 percent of those surveyed felt the same for private Clouds. The second-highest issue -- that the technology is immature -- was in the 20 to 30 percent range.

Another issue, according to Broderick, is that existing infrastructures may not be compatible with a Cloud environment. Others are taking a wait-and-see attitude, more so with public clouds than private. IDC has not yet measured how much money vendors have saved from their current Cloud deployments. That will likely come next, Broderick added.

Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.