コスト削減がクラウド導入要因であるとは限らない:=>

CAPEX重視からOPEX重視のITへのシフト、業務効率向上の手段として採用するなど、様々な意見がある、という調査結果出ている。

ひいてはクラウド導入コストの要因にもなるのでは、と考える。

Paul Miller, who pens Cloud of Data, had an interesting perspective during a chat this week on what effect infrastructure upgrade cycles might have on cloud computing adoption. Paul postulated that as these servers fail and organizations have to make the decision to replace or not replace them that cloud computing becomes a more viable option. That seems a reasonable assumption, especially if the primary reason organizations are evaluating cloud computing is driven by a desire to reduce costs. But in a recent post Paul posits this might not be the case, citing a recent ongoing study from Avanadein which C-level executives were asked, among other questions, how the economic climate effected their decisions regarding cloud. Interestingly "only 13% suggesting it had 'helped' adoption plans and 58% reporting 'no effect.'"

In my conversations with Nick Carr and others, there's been an underlying presumption (on my part, as well as theirs) that cost-saving arguments with respect to Cloud Computing would prove persuasive and compelling. It would appear not. This would suggest, of course, that Enterprise adopters are taking to the Cloud for reasons other than the budget sheet…

I'll come back to this, as I'm not convinced there is a direct correlation between external economics and internal budgets, at least in this case. But let's go with that for a moment. Assuming there are budgetary constraints on organizations what else would drive adopters to cloud computing and where are they getting the money?

Our own research on this subject found that efficiency, not reduction of costs, was the primary driver for public cloud computing adoptionand that despite budgetary constraints 71%of organizations would see an increase in fund allocation for the purposes of public and private cloud computing initiatives. But a reduction in capital expenses still ranked high with 68% of respondents citing a reduction in capital expenses as a driver toward public cloud computing and 63% citing the same as a driver for private cloud computing.

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ISN'T THAT CONTRADICTORY?

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It seems so, doesn't it? If organizations are interested in cloud computing as a means to reduce capital expenses then why would we be seeing an increase in spending on cloud computing initiatives, especially private cloud computing which almost certainly requires capital expenditures to achieve? After all, there's virtualization software, improvements in infrastructure, and management systems that need to be in place for the successful implementation of a private cloud computing environment.

Perhaps the budget increases are coming at the expense of other areas in IT. Let us consider theaforementioned study on server failure:

In round numbers, the scheduled replacement of some three million servers worldwide, or about 3 percent of all servers, has been delayed, Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's global head of research, said today at the research firm's Symposium/ITxpo 2009 conference here. He added that the number of delayed replacements should reach 10 percent of all servers by 2010.

Certainly one way to reduce capital expenses is to not purchase new servers. But the servers that will begin to fail certainly have applications deployed on them that are if not critical at least important to the business, otherwise they would not have hardware dedicated to them. So where are those applications going? Virtual machines, most likely. Consolidated onto newer, more reliable hardware capable of supporting many applications contained within virtual machines. Virtualization is a primary enabler of consolidation efforts, which in turn reflects in IT budgets as reductions in capital expenditures.

Shifting the budget that would normally be allocated to acquire new hardware to virtualization and cloud computing initiatives, both public and private, would certainly explain an increase in funds available for cloud computing. This would also explain why external economic factors do not appear to be, according to Avanade's study, a driving factor in cloud computing adoption.

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COSTS STILL A FACTOR

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It's still important to remember that Avanade's study doesn't indicate that reducing costs isn't a driver for cloud computing, it just says that external economics aren't really playing a role in decision-making at this time. In fact within the study is this little nugget indicating cost savings are, in fact, an important factor in cloud computing adoption:

Companies are under equal pressure to innovate and save money and, many are turning to new technology as a way to do this. The vast majority of respondents (85 percent) report that their company's rate of new technology adoption is either increasing or staying the same (83 percent in the United States).

But if we assume that organizations are shifting allocation of funds rather than asking for bigger budgets, then it is possible that economic constraints have little effect on adoption of cloud computing. If cloud computing initiatives required funding without reducing other existing budgets then it would be more likely that adoption rates would be slower than what is shown in both Avanade and F5 research and more folks in the Avanade research might have indicated that economics were in fact impacting their adoption plans.

米国政府CIO Vivek Kundra氏はフリーソフトの推奨者=>

政府のIT導入ポリシーとして本格的に採用されるかどうかはさて置いて、無償のソフトを考慮するのもITコストを下げる手法として考慮する事が重要になってきている、という記事。

Summary

Cloud computing undoubtedly changes how we individually and collectively will approach information technology.  The challenge, as the CIO of the United States Vivek Kundra has framed it, is to have the business of government IT work as well as IT does for ourselves in our personal business.

Free (and low cost) alternatives to established software products will be an important part of IT strategy in the public sector for the next decade.

Analysis

The concept of "free" is a powerful one. Whether it is a 2-for-1 happy hour drink, a sample of teriyaki chicken at the mall food court, or a complimentary ticket to an event, we all like free. This is true in the technology area as well.

  

            There is much discussion about the whole concept of "free" pricing for many products and services today – and many of the email, storage, hosting, and applications that are at the forefront of cloud computing today are indeed free. The most notable of these are the product offerings of Google (Gmail, GoogleApps, GoogleDocs, and others). Much attention has been devoted to the concept of "freeconomics," most notable the recent book by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson entitled, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Most consumer-level cloud offerings would be labeled a "freemium," which is a free version that is supported by a paid, premium version. Such freemiums are becoming an emergent business model, as they are particularly popular among online service and software companies. And, when faced with competing against "free" alternatives, older, more established companies have seen users migrate to the gratis alternative. Indeed, some see an entire "Culture of free" emerging, where from music to entertainment to news to software, people are coming to expect that free is the price they should pay. 

 

            In the corporate computing market, as software, hardware and processing power, and storage capacity become more and more commoditized, cloud computing becomes a free – or lower cost – alternative to the way things have been done for decades. As Gartner's Andrea DiMaio recently remarked: "Why should I bother looking for an email client to replace Outlook and coexist with my newly installed OpenOffice, if I can get email and office suite as a service with somebody like Google at a fraction of the cost and - most importantly - giving up the IT management burden too? Why are we talking about moving servers from Windows to Linux when the real question is why do we need to have our own servers in the first place?"

 

             As in the corporate market, government agencies across the United States and around the world are looking at free cloud-based offerings to play a major role in their cloud computing strategies. The first CIO of the federal government, Vivek Kundra is also a big proponent of using free resources where appropriate in government IT, as demonstrated by his experience of moving the District of Columbia's workers to Google's free email and application offerings. He is now looking at how such free applications can fit into an overall cloud computing strategy for the federal government. Indeed, much of the growth in the use of cloud computing in government overall will be in the area of "free" apps, such as switching from Microsoft Office to Google Apps. As Federal CIO Kundra recently observed, "it makes no sense to spend billions down the line when we can get these technologies for free." But beyond Google's offerings, the government will be seeking to leverage other free cloud resources. To that end, Kundra recently observed that: "We don't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on video and networks that have already been created. Facebook alone has 200 million users, 56 million users are in the U.S. There's not a single Web site in the U.S. government that has that kind of reach and [Facebook users] are active on a daily basis."

 

            Thus, "free" is indeed a powerful concept, and one that both presents vast opportunities for growth – and a challenge to many of the established models and leading computing companies today. CIOs and top corporate executives will lead the way in increasingly asking that simple question "why pay when I (and my employees) can get it for free!" Thus, the free model will be an important shaper of IT strategy in the public and private sectors for the next decade.

GoogleのSpannerと呼ばれるデータセンタ自動化システム、もう少し情報が=>

下記のブログで解説されている。

Googleともなると、世界レベルでデータセンタの統合が必要になるインフラを作っている。

世界各国にあるデータセンタを全部繋げて、ネームスペースを統合して、データセンタ間のデータ多重化、移行、負荷分散、などの管理作業を極力自動化させよう、という広大な構想を元にSpannerというシステムを開発している、との事。 

 

スケールが出来ない話なのであまりピンとこないし、Google以外の企業にとってはあまり意味の無い技術かもしれないので、さほどフォローするつもりは無いけど、これくらいの規模感でシステムを考えないと、Googleのようなクラウドシステムは作ることが出来ない、という事か。

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Google's Secret to efficient Data Center design – ability to predict performance

DataCenterKnowledge has a post on Google's (Public, NASDAQ:GOOG) future envisioning 10 million servers.

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

October 20th, 2009 : Rich Miller

Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future.

Google's Jeff Dean was one of the keynote speakers at an ACM workshop on large-scale computing systems, and discussed some of the technical details of the company's mighty infrastructure, which is spread across dozens of data centers around the world.

In his presentation (link via James Hamilton), Dean also discussed a new storage and computation system called Spanner, which will seek to automate management of Google services across multiple data centers. That includes automated allocation of resources across "entire fleets of machines."

Going to Jeff Dean's presentation, I found a Google secret.

Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large
Distributed Systems

Designing Efficient Systems
Given a basic problem definition, how do you choose the "best" solution?
• Best could be simplest, highest performance, easiest to extend, etc.
Important skill: ability to estimate performance of a system design
– without actually having to build it!

What is Google's assumption of where computing is going?

Thinking like an information factory Google describes the machinery as servers, racks, and clusters.  This approach supports the idea of information production.  Google introduces the idea of data centers being like a computer, but I find a more accurate analogy is to think of data centers as information factories.  IT equipment are the machines in the factory, consuming large amounts of electricity for power and cooling the IT load.

 

Located in a data center like Dalles, OR

With all that equipment things must break.  And, yes they do.

Reliability & Availability
• Things will crash. Deal with it!
– Assume you could start with super reliable servers (MTBF of 30 years)
– Build computing system with 10 thousand of those
– Watch one fail per day
• Fault-tolerant software is inevitable
• Typical yearly flakiness metrics
– 1-5% of your disk drives will die
– Servers will crash at least twice (2-4% failure rate)

The Joys of Real Hardware
Typical first year for a new cluster:
~0.5 overheating (power down most machines in <5 mins, ~1-2 days to recover)
~1 PDU failure (~500-1000 machines suddenly disappear, ~6 hours to come back)
~1 rack-move (plenty of warning, ~500-1000 machines powered down, ~6 hours)
~1 network rewiring (rolling ~5% of machines down over 2-day span)
~20 rack failures (40-80 machines instantly disappear, 1-6 hours to get back)
~5 racks go wonky (40-80 machines see 50% packetloss)
~8 network maintenances (4 might cause ~30-minute random connectivity losses)
~12 router reloads (takes out DNS and external vips for a couple minutes)
~3 router failures (have to immediately pull traffic for an hour)
~dozens of minor 30-second blips for dns
~1000 individual machine failures
~thousands of hard drive failures
slow disks, bad memory, misconfigured machines, flaky machines, etc.
Long distance links: wild dogs, sharks, dead horses, drunken hunters, etc.

Monitoring is how you know your estimates are correct.

Add Sufficient Monitoring/Status/Debugging Hooks
All our servers:
• Export HTML-based status pages for easy diagnosis
• Export a collection of key-value pairs via a standard interface
– monitoring systems periodically collect this from running servers
• RPC subsystem collects sample of all requests, all error requests, all
requests >0.0s, >0.05s, >0.1s, >0.5s, >1s, etc.
• Support low-overhead online profiling
– cpu profiling
– memory profiling
– lock contention profiling
If your system is slow or misbehaving, can you figure out why?

Many people have quoted the idea "you can't manage what you don't measure."  But a more advanced concept that Google discusses is "If you don't know what's going on, you can't do
decent back-of-the-envelope calculations!"

Know Your Basic Building Blocks
Core language libraries, basic data structures,
protocol buffers, GFS, BigTable,
indexing systems, MySQL, MapReduce, …
Not just their interfaces, but understand their
implementations (at least at a high level)
If you don't know what's going on, you can't do
decent back-of-the-envelope calculations!

This ideas being discussed are by a software architect, but the idea applies just as much to data center design.  And, the benefit Google has it has all of IT and development thinking this way.

And here is another secret to great design.  Say No to features.  But what the data center design industry wants to do is to get you to say yes to everything, because it makes the data center building more expensive increasing profits.

So what is the big design problem Google is working on?

Jeff Dean did a great job of putting a lot of good ideas in his presentation, and it was nice Google let him present some secrets we could all learn from.

Green Data Center Blog / Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:05:33 GMT

Zetta Cloud Storage他、クラウドストレージ市場の動向=>

Zetta Cloud Storageがベータ終了し本格展開された。 Network Snapshot/Replication、といったNASで提供されようなストレージ機能がクラウドで出来るのが特徴との事。 

 

しかしながら、この市場、ものすごく込み合っているのが現状。 価格ががどんどん下がっているため、クラウドストレージの初期投資の回収が難しくなってきているベンダーが出てくるはず。

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Zetta Cloud Storage Goes Live

Zetta, an enterprise-level cloud storage service available to managed service providers and VARs, finally leaves a long closed beta phase and becomes available to the channel at large today. Sure, online storage is an increasingly crowded market, but Zetta claims to have licked a few challenges that plague their peers. Here's how.

What sets Zetta apart? We haven't tested the system, but the company claims its service integrates into existing networks better than their competitors by using existing protocols. Zetta also claims to offer better security and stability to boot. One of the bullet points they're most proud of is their network snapshot/replication feature, a common feature for on-site storage solutions that's apparently rare in the cloud.

"We give them everything a current NAS system would give them," says Zetta CEO and Co-founder Jeff Treuhaft, a veteran of VeriSign, NetScape and Silicon Graphics.

Zetta's backups cost $0.25/GB a month for one terabyte, and you can increase your storage on the fly as you need it. They have no tiered service — all of their customers get all of their features, including customer service, future protocol and API support, and free performance upgrades as they become available.

Interestingly, Treuhaft says small businesses often have more sophisticated storage needs than larger enterprises — so Zetta caters to everyone, regardless of company size. The only thing their clients have in common, he says, is that they tend to come looking for storage when they hit the 20 terabyte mark, and small businesses especially can benefit from making sure backups are someone else's (namely Zetta's) problem and saving on IT staff.

Crowded Market

Still, Zetta is entering a crowded market. More than 80 percent of the MSPs filling out our current MSPmentor 100 survey already offer some sort of managed storage. (Though that figure could change, since the survey is open until December 11, 2009).

And competition looms around every corner. A sampling of moves:

• Ingram Micro Seismic recently launched an IROD (Instant Recovery on Demand) service with CA, and CA is planning SaaS moves involving ARCserve and XOsoft.
• Intronis has been building a pure channel white label SaaS storage service for MSPs and VARs.
• Level Platforms today announced integration with VaultLogix.
• Vembu recently announced plans to link into the Amazon Simple Storage Service.
• And Nimsoft announced a single dashboard for monitoring on-premise and cloud services, including Amazon S3.

Frankly, SaaS storage options facing MSPs can be overwhelming. But many MSPs are at an inflection point. Earlier today, MSPmentor noted that masterIT — an MSPmentor 100 company — was evaluating its next backup and recovery move.

Looking ahead, Zetta hopes to inject itself into those types of discussions.

Follow MSPmentor via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; and Twitter. And sign up for our Enewsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center. Plus, check out more MSP voices at www.MSPtweet.com.

MSPmentor / Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:44:59 GMT

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「ストレージSaaSだけでは生き延びれない」、と以前から予測していますが、いよいよクラウドのData Warehouseが=>

登場し始めています。  Teradata、Greenplum、等の名前が紹介されているが、本当はもっといるのです。

 

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The Cloud as a Warehouse

投稿者: Arthur Cole 2009/10/22 12:36:38

The cloud is already making gains in enterprise circles as an effective means to boost storage capacity, so it shouldn't be any surprise that it is already heading in the next logical direction: as a full-blown data warehousing solution.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about comments by several leading thinkers that cloud-based warehousing is an idea whose time has not yet come. That may still be the case, but it's certainly not through a lack of trying. And while serious privacy and policy/governance issues still exist when you start talking about analyzing corporate and consumer data in the cloud, there's no reason to think these can't be worked out once functioning warehouse architectures are up and running.

In fact, it's important to note that one of the experts downplaying the idea of warehousing in the cloud was Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata, who argued that warehousing applications are probably best left to private clouds. Well, surprise, Teradata this week announced a new strategy aimed at bringing its warehouse capabilities to both public and private clouds. The push features a new set of products called the Agile Analytics Cloud that can be used to establish data marts on an internal cloud, but there is also the Teradata Express software for Amazon's EC2 server and the VMware Player.

Now, to be fair to Brobst, Teradata is still wading into the public cloud very carefully. The Express system only works on one node and provides only 1 TB of data, which isn't very much as far as the cloud goes. But there is something to be said for not expecting too much performance over public networks until I/O and service-level capabilities ramp up a bit more.

Other vendors, meanwhile, aren't so reticent. Greenplum Software, which bills itself as the "pioneer" of enterprise data cloud solutions, recently beefed up its Greenplum Database with a new column-oriented feature designed to leverage the system's parallel processing capabilities by allowing for mixed row and column analytics. The company is also offering a free version of the software, although only as a single-node edition.

Making the technology available is one thing, but actual user experience is quite another. To date, however, only a handful of enterprises have deployed cloud-based warehousing, and even then only on limited bases. That's why it might be a good idea to keep track of Dollar General Corp., which recently signed with service provider 1010data to offload its entire warehouse, more than 70 billion records, to the cloud. As reported by Information Management's Julie Langenkamp, the deal calls for 1010 to  provide the warehouse as well as all front-end analytic tools and support services for DG's central operations, nine distribution centers and more than 8,500 stores, which cumulatively generate more than 5 billion records a year.

Traditional warehousing is probably the prime example of an enterprise function that can only be truly effective if it is backed by substantial investment. The value of the knowledge that comes out depends largely on the storage capacity and the level of analytics that you put in.

Putting it all on the cloud draws down much of the investment, but the jury is still out as to whether it can provide the return that makes it worthwhile.

But if it can't do it just yet, it probably will be able to very soon.

クラウドインフラ管理ツールとは？ クラウドを「造る」、から「利用する」時代へ。事例として=>

下記の記事にいくつか製品ソリューションが紹介されている。  クラウドはふわっとして見えないだけに、レーダーの整備をちゃんとしなきゃ、てな感じかな？ 

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Managing the Cloud Infrastructure

投稿者: Arthur Cole 2009/10/21 17:06:47

The cloud is shaping up to be a great way to manage resources in the data center. The question is, how will you manage resources on the cloud?

It's more than just an academic question at this point, with the IT industry poised for major expansion onto the cloud in the coming year, both as a means to control costs and increase productivity. A recent survey commissioned by traffic management firm Zeus Technology found that barely a quarter of IT executives feel they have sufficient cloud management capability in place, even though three quarters say they are ready to start using cloud services.

While at its heart the cloud can be seen as simply another resource tier like the physical and virtual layers that already exist in most data centers, in a practical sense it adds quite a bit of complexity to overall management and automation efforts. One problem is the difficulty in monitoring the cloud in conjunction with the other tiers, which means most management efforts extend no further than the data center walls.

But a company called Nimsoft says it has a fix for the problem. The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution provides real-time monitoring and reporting of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure in a single view. The system features a probe architecture that extends across virtualization layers like VMware and Citrix and then onto Google, Rackspace, Amazon and other services. Also included is a unified monitoring and reporting system that covers most popular APIs and allows for customized reporting for workload distribution, performance benchmarks and SLA compliance.

By its nature, the cloud is intended to provide a dynamic infrastructure designed to meet application and service needs at a moment's notice. But unless you are ready for a whole lot of manual reconfiguration every time a new service goes up or an application is reassigned, you'll need some kind of automation. And until very recently, that kind of technology simply didn't exist.

Unisys is one company making progress in this area by leveraging traditional automation technology onto its Secure Cloud Solution. The company is using the Enigmatec Execution Management System as the key component in its uOrchestrate infrastructure module, designed to provide a dynamic resource allocation and monitoring system to growing cloud environments. Powered by Enigmatec's proprietary run book automation software, the EMS system ties many common provisioning and support tools to workflow automation technology to provide an automated IT process management platform.

But probably the most intriguing approach to date comes from a company called LineSider Technologies. Its OverDrive system uses virtual LAN (VLAN) technology to re-orient underlying infrastructure components as changes are made to business policies and relationships on the cloud. The company says that by layering cloud infrastructure on top of a virtual network, rather than a physical one, you can avoid the sometimes lengthy reprovisioning process that arises every time an application, computing or storage resource is changed. For service providers in particular, this could be crucial because it allows them to establish individual VLANs for each customer.

It's almost become a running joke in the industry that every advancement in data center functionality, be it virtualization or the cloud, adds new layers of management complexity even while it solves or greatly alleviates many of the headaches of the old paradigm.

So while it seems it's much easier to fix problems from the outside than the inside, here's hoping that more management and automation systems start to focus on ways to bring cloud infrastructures into the fold.

Nimsoft社が複合クラウド環境を監視するツールを発表。クラウドを使ったSI事業に効果的なツールとして、=>

複数のクラウド環境のシステム稼動状況を、自社内のネットワークシステムの状況と同じように単一のダッシュボード上でモニタリングし、障害を事前に探知し、システム全体の保全性を高める事に寄与する。 

 

これからはもうクラウドを造る時代ではなく、「利用する時代」。 こういうツールの整備に視点が移るべきかも知れない。   

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Nimsoft Tool Offers 'Unified Monitoring'

October 21st, 2009 : John Rath

A look at the dashboard for Nimsoft NMS Unified Monitoring.

"The era of unified monitoring has begun. 10/20/2009."That was the slogan on a t-shirt at the Gartner ITxpo Tuesday from Nimsoft, which announced Tuesday that its Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) now provides real-time monitoring of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service applications alongsides virtualized in-house data center operations.

The enhanced monitoring allows customers to gain complete visibility over their entire IT infrastructure, monitoring both internal and external environments. Cloud and SaaS probes monitor and benchmark Google Apps, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and EC2, Salesforce.com and other services.  A complete API is available to both customers and third party developers to enable extensions to NMS.