Hybrid Cloud -best of both worlds – Interop 2011
May 10, 2011 – Las Vegas, NV – One of the major cloud providers at Interop was Rackspace Cloud. In a discussion with Hybrid Hosting product manager Toby Owen, we had a chance to talk abou the directions in the cloud, why th hybrid model is becoming so popular and what the major bottlenecks are in cloud adoption. The hybrid hosting solutions are a combination of standard multi-tenant hositng and private/dedicate machine hosting. The main factors driving the use of the hybrid cloud are the cost of on and off premise computing, the costs of managing the end to end content, and finally the cost of the secure pipe (bandwidth) to the cloud.
A large number of the hybrid customer are from the medical industry and they are using the clound in combination with their existing private network solutions. The driver for the use is based on costs, taxes and the ability to shift their normal CAPEX budget to a scheduled OPEX budget on a multi year basis. The cloud configuration is fairly evenly split on the primary use being CPU/Compute based, storage based and multi-location access based. With the use model being split, the pricing and business model is still a bit “squishy” rather than firm. This softness results the “fixed costs” of the cloud use, still having a great deal of “variable cost” issues.
The advantage of the cloud model for dedicated hosting, is the ability to very quickly create IT implementations that are data packet optimized. As they monitor, for performance balancing, data packet size/configuration/frequency, they can setup a new server – CPU, Storage, video, load balancer, switches, firewall in minutes to hours vs days & weeks for typical companies. These servers have multiple pipe sizes for data access based on the business model chosen.
The single largest limitation on the web is still the size, cost and availability of high speed data access. The pipe up and down is the issue. When applications are in the cloud, and the data just gets passed around in the same server room, the rest of the computing world is fine. However, when large data has to be moved up or dowm fro m t cloud it is a problem. Backplanes in services rooms can run as high as 100Gb/s and typically upload/downloads are in the Kb/s to (short duration) Mb/s data rates. This discrepancy limits cloud applications to those where the working data does not have to move to or from the cloud, but a reduced data (report) type application works best. In that mode, the hybrid cloud can process the data locally in the cloud, and the reduced content interface with the user.
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