Cloud Busting: How Did We Get To This Point So Quickly?

News Article -- July 20, 2011

Technology Evolution

The discussion began with a look at the key technological advancements that have brought us to this inflection point in enterprise IT. “The story of the cloud began in 2003, when most large organisations began to use IP for their network management,” explained Capellas. “Up until this point, most businesses used dedicated leased lines for data networking, yet the move to IP took place right across the world in a period of around 24 months.” Having an IP layer in place means network capacity can be dynamically assigned as needed and users are only charged for what they use.

This marked a conceptual change for most large organisations as they came to understand the commercial advantages of only paying for usage. “Not only did costs generally come down,” said Capellas, “but it led to greater operational flexibility with businesses no longer being constrained by availability. Instead they could pursue opportunity wherever it appeared, confident that their infrastructure would enable growth in more or less any direction.”

Capacity for Change

This data communications revolution was followed by a step-change in the power and flexibility of processing, the catalyst being the arrival of Intel’s X-86 microprocessing architecture. This brought down processing costs and allowed for new levels of scalability. Finally, came wireless technology. “This has expanded the edge of both public and corporate networks,” explained Capellas. “Smart phones are everywhere.

As mini-apps in their millions spread across the world’s population, barriers between previously separate technologies are being broken down. Content is doubling every six months and includes voice telephony, video, animation and business data: it’s all just digital content that’s created, shared, recycled and blended within a world of multi-media applications and activities.” These are the steps that have brought us to where we are now: adoption of IP for networks; new levels of processing power; the fast consumerisation of wireless and the dramatic growth in content.

The Economic Factor

The cloud is the natural outcome of this fast, evolutionary change. The demand or flexibility in use, together with the explosion in content, means that networks can no longer be managed in a traditional way. But it takes something more than technology potential to create a true inflection point, and that extra factor is provided by economics.

A global recession meant organisations of every kind had to reduce costs to survive, and that has driven demand for entirely new commercial models. “Economic problems are good for technology,” said Capellas. “Real technology breakthroughs tend to happen immediately after periods of economic difficulty. Businesses are likely to freeze investment during the downturn, and when conditions change for the better, they want to make up for lost time by seeking big operational improvements. That’s when they seek out and invest in radical new ideas.”

In short, old commercial models no longer represent value for money. Historically ROI on IT has been low. This is due to many factors not least the cost of maintaining legacy systems and servers dedicated to specific applications with additional capacity for “emergencies”. Even a well-run corporate data centre may only use 30% of its capacity. This leads to problems in times of plenty, but in hard times it is simply unacceptable. Of course it’s also now unnecessary.

Consumption-Based IT

“The cloud represents commercialisation of converged technology, enabling many organisations to divest themselves of many fixed costs and focus on core business. Buying in IT as a set of on-demand services, paying only for what they use, choosing only what they really need enables a revolutionary change for the better in their cost base and agility.

It’s hard to see why they would not do this.” Most end-users need no longer think too much about networking capacity because it is virtualised, thanks to the use of IP. “We assume that capacity will be there when we need it,” said Capellas, “and that we will only pay for what we use. We can apply the same approach to a total infrastructure. In this converged environment, end-users do not need to worry about whether they have enough servers or the right number of licenses. Now, applications and data storage will dynamically take up the space they need, as required. It is an automatic, organic process.”

With virtualisation, infrastructure can reach unheard-of utilization rates of close to 100%. And when demand seems likely to exceed supply, you simply buy another block of converged, combined processing, storage and networking capacity, just as you might slot in another low-cost blade today. So how close are we to cloud maturity? “The best sign of acceptance,” concluded Capellas, “will be when no one cares about discussing the cloud anymore. The underlying key characteristic is simply consumption-based IT, and that is the key to understanding and then to acceptance.”

Article originally published in Smart Business, CSC’s UK magazine.

Focus

Michael Capellas is the Leader of the VCE Coalition

The Virtual Computing Environment coalition (VCE) which comprises Cisco, EMC and VMware represents an unprecedented level of collaboration in development, services, and partner enablement that reduces risk in the infrastructure virtualisation journey to the private cloud for organisations. The VCE’s Vblock Infrastructure Packages deliver a complete IT infrastructure that integrates bestof-breed virtualisation, networking, compute, storage, security, and best-of-breed management technologies.