When Is a Cloud Really a Cloud? - Page 1

Early Cloud leader, Amazon, isn’t worrying about definitions. They recently released the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service, a Cloud-based offering that tries to mimic a private data center. The idea is that you can cordon off your resources just as you would in-house. You get many of the benefits of outsourcing, while mitigating many of the risks―even if many of those risks are perceived, rather than real.

“Amazon’s Cloud service is very robust. However, it’s not really a solution for the average enterprise, especially those without much IT support and with few or no developers,” said Agatha Poon, an analyst with the Yankee Group.

Poon and her colleagues track how the Cloud is penetrating the enterprise. In a survey of 500 enterprise IT pros, Yankee found that the private Cloud is far and away the most popular model for early adopters. The next most popular model is the hybrid public-private Cloud, with the “pure” public Cloud coming in at a distant third.

Patterns of Adoption

According to Yankee Group, no one vertical is driving the space. Healthcare is interested. Media companies are too, but few verticals are jumping onto the Cloud bandwagon en masse. There is one trait that early Cloud adopters have in common, though: they were early adopters of virtualization. With their server and storage infrastructure virtualized, they end up asking themselves, “What’s next?” Often, the answer is Cloud computing.

“The biggest driver is availability,” Poon said. “With a Cloud-enabled infrastructure, it’s easier for end users to access critical applications on other devices or to simply work remotely. Especially for applications that lack constant demand, the Cloud makes sense.”

An organization that has sunk a good deal of capital into creating their own optimized infrastructure isn’t going to abandon that investment and hand its applications over to a public Cloud vendor. Instead, they’ll do the sensible thing and apply Cloud technologies to their own data centers, while maybe getting their feet wet in the public Cloud; using it for something very limited and specific, such as disaster recovery.

Unlike the client roster for Amazon Web Services or Google’s App Engine, which tend to be small, developer-centric organizations, larger enterprises are guided by vendors when it comes to new technologies. They have stable relationships in place and they trust those relationships. What this means is they are encouraged to develop their own internal clouds. Cisco, Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, etc. derive the most value by giving their customers the tools and the gear to build their own internal clouds.

Moreover, if you have a trusted technology partner who makes money selling hardware and shrink-wrap software, chances are they’re warning you off of the public Cloud. You’ll hear horror stories about security and compliance, and you’ll probably leave the public Cloud alone until your vendors blaze the trail for you. After all, why would a Microsoft shop jump to Amazon when they can simply bide their time and wait for Azure to mature? That is unless you have a compelling reason pushing you towards the Cloud today.

Sony Struggles with Storage

One such compelling reason can be storage. When it comes to rich media and unstructured data, storage is a nightmare.

“Even in a slowing economy, data growth continues and IT managers struggle with cost and capacity challenges every day. Today, we are seeing an explosion in digital documents and rich media in all types of businesses. This presents significant challenges to storage teams who need to account for rapid scaling of capacity and performance in an environment that scrutinizes every capital expense,” said Terri McClure, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.

Sony Pictures Imageworks is currently coping with one such storage nightmare. As with many media companies, storage is not just a recurring bad dream, but it’s also a cost center, and an extremely expensive one. “We have been able to leverage commodity economics in all parts of our infrastructure, but storage has been the holdout,” said Steve Kowalski, senior systems architect at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

To address this issue, Imageworks is an early tester of ParaScale’s Cloud storage offering. ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software can be applied to any standard Linux platform, allowing enterprises to cluster hundreds of commodity servers together to act as a file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput. Imageworks is currently testing PCS to determine whether a private storage Cloud might better the economics of its storage-intensive infrastructure.

“After realizing benefits across workstations, render farms, and operating systems, we have the opportunity to see the benefits of commodity hardware in storage,” Kowalski said.