SNIA EUROPE - UK COMMITTEE COMMENT
Cloudy
Within the IT sector at the moment, you cannot have a conversation with anyone who looks forward without having to address the topic of “cloud”. It is represented in most technical areas from compute, storage and networking, the source of the name in the first place. So what is cloud and why has it become the focus of so much attention?
Well to answer that question we need to look back at other incarnations of this idea. Its forefathers were “utility computing”, “IT as a service (ITaaS)” and “computing on demand”. Each of these things amount to essentially the same thing, the consumption of IT provisions. Cloud as we see appearing now is simply an extension of this concept with one major difference. For all of the other outings, the primary driving force behind the ideas has been the various providers of these services. The models and technology were dictated by the organisations developing them and focused primarily on that technology. The current iteration however is being driven not by the developers of technology but rather surprisingly by the general public.
The mass adoption of devices that consume services and produce and deliver media without the need for local expensive infrastructure has brought the utility component of IT into the spotlight for general consumers. It has forced the formulation and delivery of pricing platforms based on utilisation and service rather than the cost of the hardware alone, which in this model is often largely discounted to encourage the service consumption. These pricing models are often simple, in order to enable understanding and more importantly to avoid falling foul of various international consumer laws. This simplicity of consumption based pricing is highly attractive and translates very neatly into the large infrastructures of enterprise organisations looking to finally understand where the IT budget is going and enumerate what is being delivered from it.
So what has happened in technology to enable this paradigm shift in the way people think about technology? Actually, there is surprisingly little change on the technology side. The driver comes from financial pressures due to recent events in the global economy, forcing new implementation scenarios and innovation. Costs and returns have been forced under the microscope and IT management now have to justify every expense with the value of what is delivered. Do more with less is the mantra pretty much across the board. So the shift is not within technology itself, but within the attitude and thinking that deploys and utilises that technology.
4
www.snia-europe.org
with a chance of gain
GLYN BOWDEN
SNIA Europe UK country committee member, SNIA CSI member, NetApp
Of course, all technology vendors have had to change their game in light of this movement, and technology has changed subtly to reflect the new requirements of this era. Focus is on efficiency, security and ensuring that a single infrastructure can support multiple tenants and maintain predictable performance and scalability. Although all of these points have been distinguishing points of technology in the past, now the surrounding toolsets and financial conditions ensure that they are now clearly measurable.
So having discussed were this revolution, for it is nothing less, has originated, what benefits are available to an organisation. The primary one is most likely the divorce of technology from business requirements. The idea of cloud is that it is precisely that, a generic platform that simply delivers consumable chunks of processing and storage, tied together with networking solutions for standardised delivery. Using new standards such as the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), which was developed by SNIA, the physical location has become abstracted from the logical placement enabling metadata and context to dictate presentation of that data. The technology and physical presence behind that is immaterial and could be changed without affecting the service delivered thanks to the abstraction layer that CDMI provides. This simplicity allows the business and developers leveraging the platform to focus on the real challenges that produce business revenue without having to be concerned about underlying technologies.
A follow on benefit from this simplicity is that using service level agreements and a service catalogue can enable the simple charging model that public consumers have been enjoying for some time. This will have huge benefits to those setting budgets and understanding the cost of doing business. This simple charging model not only simplifies the cost structure for internal IT departments, it also allows providers of these services externally to compete on a like for like basis. With this advent it is now possible to compare a complicated internal IT department with an external provider of similar services. With economies of scale this can very often give businesses a cost effective alternative to sponsoring expensive IT purchases and support.
Finally from the perspective of internal IT departments, this new model of delivering their business enables several positive changes. With the removal of technology from the business decisions, IT departments are now more able to pick the technology that suits their knowledge and skill sets and therefore is easier to deploy and support without the same
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