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Friday, May 30, 2014

The 2nd wave of cloud computing workloads is the next battleground for IaaS and PaaS MSP's

Its been a while...

Sorry for my neglect over the last few of months, it has been a busy time as I transition to a new role in a new country so hopefully you are glad for me to be back...

As the cloud market continues to mature and the large players continue to define the marketplace, a new dynamic is beginning to emerge.  While the, what I call, "simple IT-aaS" market continues its race to the bottom price wise, the larger players are starting to act like they believe this model is not sustainable in the medium term. Let me expand on this premise...

If you look at x86 virtualisation technology as a pre-cursor to cloud, then the adoption went like this... first off you virtualised your test and dev environment so you could trial the benefits, then as your processes matured you rolled VMWare across your production x86 estate.  Whilst you were achieving all you had hoped for with this new technology, you didn't touch your UNIX and Mainframe backend systems so you took 50% cost out of 30% of your IT budget.  A noble pursuit but did you really 'move the needle.

Cloud is following the same adoption model, whilst moving your 'Simple IT' to an AWS (or Softlayer) instance is a noble pursuit, are you again going to move the needle when you take a macro perspective on your IT budget.  If you manage to take your x86 on premise estate and move it off premise then for sure you will achieve savings and clear the decks of a number of issues and support nightmares in the process, but will you really affect your bottom line IT cost base?

The next battleground is how you take your systems that have been architected to deliver 99.999% availability 24x7x365 and run your business critical systems and look to deliver them as-a-Service, either on premise or ultimately off premise in the public cloud.  My belief is that only when you can deliver on this project will you truly be able to declare victory.

So how do you achieve 99.999% in the cloud when the best of the best (i.e. AWS according to Gartner's IaaS magic quadrant) only deliver at best 99.9% ???

One approach I would advocate is to map out your mission critical workloads and look for common components of the applications, such as database and middleware and look to decompose your applications into horizontal 'utilities' that can be delivered as-a-Service.  Take for instance database, I am sure in any large corporate there are hundreds of servers running databases such as Oracle and DB2 on UNIX servers that also run the application the database supports.  Why not try to consolidate these databases into a horizontal utility that can be provided to any application that requires a database.  This way you can centralise and offer DB-aaS to your applications.  If you take this approach you can then, based on latency and other factors, decide whether this utility is on premise or in the public cloud.

However a word of caution, if you look to aggregate multiple databases onto one utility service, then that service better scale, be available and be secure...

I hear dissent... No cloud platform can scale, be available and offer enterprise grade security on the levels you need to offer high I/O workloads such as database as a horizontal utility...

Can you see where this is going yet...

Well there is one cloud platform that can handle Enterprise (class) Cloud (workloads in one) System... IBM's new Enterprise Cloud System.

Check it out at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/solutions/cloud/system.html and get in touch if you want to know more via @StevenDickens3 on Twitter...