FOCUS CLOUD UPDATE
Issue 12, Oct/Nov
FOCUS UPDATE: CLOUD COMPUTING
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n recent months several studies have shown growing interest and a high rate of adoption of cloud computing in Latin America.
ISACA, a non-profit organization that brings together more than 86,000 IT professionals worldwide carried out a survey which found more than one third of organizations in Latin America had intentions to use cloud computing in 2010. The figure was higher than that recorded in surveys conducted in North America and Europe, where only 25% and 18% of institutions, respectively, said they would use cloud computing during the same period.
In August, the management software company Spiceworks published a report which showed that small and medium-sized enterprises in Latin America are leading the way with cloud computing services, and that 41% of companies they spoke with said they were adopting the cloud, compared to 24% in North America and 19% in Europe.
And with virtualization being the gateway (although not the ultimate goal) to ensure the delivery of cloud computing services, analyst IDC’s figures showed that in 2009, 10% of new servers that were shipped to Latin America had some level of virtualization. “This gives the idea that about 10% of new servers will be used for delivering services in the cloud, with a large curved projection of about 15%,” it said. “There are certain metrics that suggest that Latin America is embracing the concept of virtualization and is expanding to deliver cloud computing services on an accelerated basis.”
Service providers have also been fast to push the cloud. In the last year in LATAM, the number of providers in the market has grown, with promises of infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and more being made.
Entel in Chile, for instance, began offering on-demand virtual servers, among other services, at its new 8,000 m sq data center. Terremark also announced just this year that it could provide cloud computing services
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www.datacenterdynamics.com
CLOUD HARVESTING IN LATAM Latin American companies seem eager for cloud computing, but could they be trying to run too fast? DatacenterDynamics’ LATAM editor Virginia Toledo reports
from its data center in São Paulo, Brazil, a facility of 4,400 m sq of which 2,000 m sq is dedicated to hosting infrastructure.
“We are in the process of planning a further expansion of approximately another 2,000 m sq,” said Rodolfo Garcia, president of Terremark Latin America.
REACHING INTO THE CLOUD
All these figures are influencing the level of awareness on the significance of cloud technology. And according to Carlos Rodriguez, manager of business development for data center architectures for Cisco in Latin America, one thing a lot of reports do not cover is how prepared a lot of these companies are for the cloud.
The market for cloud services is expanding rapidly
“There is a misunderstanding in the market that you can get cloud computing by simply virtualizing servers so it can offer a service in the cloud that is self-managed, installed and deliverable on demand. This is not true,” Rodriguez said. “We have found that in some cases, when customers have taken that statement as true and been virtualizing servers regardless of network infrastructure that will connect the machines, the service offered is very poor.”
According to Rodriguez, even the operational level becomes a “headache rather than a relief” in instances such as these.
Just how prevalent is this problem? Rodriguez declined to comment on the percentage of data centers he thinks are actually ready to provide cloud services. “Even we – the industry –
have not agreed to say what is needed to build a virtualized data center,” Rodriguez says.
FOR THOSE THAT DARE
For companies serious about the cloud in LATAM, Rodriguez does offer some tips that can help when migrating from a traditional system, where each application runs on a single server, to a virtualized environment. Naturally this is from Cisco’s and a networking perspective.
First Rodriguez says companies need to consider the increase in traffic this could cause. “If I had a server that exchanged data at a rate of, say, 200 to 300 megabits per second, and ended up with 40 or 60 applications within this same machine, traffic will have increased considerably,” Rodriguez says. “It is therefore very important to have a network infrastructure that supports 10 Gb Ethernet.”
“We have seen very significant growth in the delivery of Cisco’s products for 10 Gb Ethernet in data centers. To give an idea of its magnitude, in fiscal year 2010 Cisco’s product sales grew by 156% for 10 Gb Ethernet for networking virtualized servers.”
Cisco is also starting to see the first signs of adoption of other technologies that facilitate the delivery of services in the cloud, such as those allowing for convergence via fiber channel over Ethernet (FCoE), but in this case, according to Rodriguez, the growth is only 5 to10%.
For many, the cloud is inevitable – providers are betting on it and now, in LATAM, business itself is pushing for its capabilities. It is a trend that is on an unstoppable path. Getting it right will be key to the speed of cloud take- up, getting it wrong could be costly, and leave a lot of businesses burned.
Terremark’s NAP do Brasil Data Center
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