The trigger for this post is a conversation I’ve had far too often with an IT executive who has an ambitious plan to leverage hypervisor virtualization to create a new data center infrastructure upon which his entire business would run. The goals are laudable; dramatic cost reductions, increased availability, decreased time to market (as measured by how long it takes to provision a VM)…all things any sensible business or IT executive wants, right? But when I asked about their plans for business applications that didn’t fit his deployment options (literally small, medium, and large) I got an answer that made me cringe: “they’ll have to”.
When did The Business start existing for the sake of IT instead of the other way around? Did I miss a memo?
Of course it doesn’t, and unless your business is providing IT goods or services it never will. Which brings me around to the title – all the talk about Cloud Computing these days is centered on making an ‘unlimited’ number of commodity VM’s available quickly and for low cost. Who among you feels any company in the Fortune 1000 with a reasonable amount of complexity could run their entire business on commodity VM’s? I certainly don’t know of any…so it puzzles me that any rational IT executive would think they could make that approach work inside their own data center.
In our experience driving large and complex IT Transformations we have found a several profound Truths:
· 30% of the application portfolio consumes 70% of the data center resources
· If you can make things work well for that 30% you’re going to make the business happy
· The remaining 70% of the application portfolio will probably fit just fine into the commodity VM’s (and if they don’t they probably aren’t all that important to the business anyway).
So, looping back to where we started…why drive a data center strategy that only addresses the applications that consume 30% of the infrastructure and doesn’t focus on what the business cares about?
Technologies like hypervisor virtualization are just one piece of the puzzle. The ideal balance requires an approach we call Fit-for-Purpose … literally making the right resources available to the right application workload at the right time, based on an understanding of business policies and priorities AND the infrastructure resources that are currently available (or underutilized). It involves leveraging and sharing specialized resources in conjunction with commodity platforms in order to optimize the physics of workload execution. For example, take a function like XML transformation – very common in business applications, and most frequently performed with software on a commodity compute platform. Sure, that works fine…but what if you could execute that same function at layer 2 with firmware at wire-speed in an XML accelerator? My experience shows that you can replace a dozen or more servers with a single appliance and improve performance from 5-10 seconds to 0.5 microseconds. That’s Fit-for-Purpose, and just a single example of a functional optimization technique that can be repeated across different parts of your IT delivery lifecycle.
Truly effective Clouds – internal or external – must apply this principle to enable IT to simplify and reduce cost without impairing the differentiation necessary for business success.
Tony Bishop is CEO, Adaptivity. He'd previously served as SVP and chief architect of Wachovia's Corporate Investment Banking Technology Group, where his team earned numerous awards for its SOA and utility computing infrastructure. Tony has 19 years' experience and is the recipient of 40 under 40 Most Innovative IT Leaders, Premier 100 IT Leaders as selected (by ComputerWorld in 2007) and a member of Wall Street Gold Book 2007.
Sheppard Narkier is chief scientist and co-founder of Adaptivity. Prior to that, he was head of software portfolio management and IT governance for the Wachovia Corporate Investment Banking Technology Group. Sheppard has more than 29 years of experience in the IT industry. He focuses on cost-effective IT systems and is an acknowleged expert at reusable components (frameworks, programs, architecture), the realtime enterprise, SOAs, messaging and legacy system integration.
Jim Houghton is the Chief Technology Officer and co-Founder of Adaptivity. Jim was the SVP of Architecture & Strategy for the infrastructure organization at Bank of America, where he drove legacy infrastructure transformation initiatives across 40+ data centers. Prior to that he was the Head of Wachovia’s Utility Product Management, where he drove the design, services, and offerings for SOA and Utility Computing for the technology division of Wachovia’s Corporate & Investment Bank. Jim has also led leading-edge consulting practices at IBM Global Technology Services and Deloitte Consulting.
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the bigger opportunity
Good piece and point well made.
The potential strategic prize, though (maybe) comes not from any optimization at the server or data center level, but from migrating the application architectures so that they can work on lots of smaller, identical computers. Work in the DC is far too far away from the business.
If Berkley's Abovetheclouds analysis is correct, then the 7x cost advantage of IaaS from the 'cloud' over owning your own could be the enabler of Nicholas Carr's Big Switch and the elimination of DCs from corporate assets in the same way that Fortune 1000 companies don't tend to own power plants (unless they're a power utility).
Only a small proportion of commercial systems require very low latency or high performance. Over time, Moore's Law is moving the envelope of the size of an organization that *has* to construct complex ICT environment for strategic differentiation ever upwards.
Taking out a low risk option on the potential opportunity is an important strategic question.
Re: the bigger opportunity
Thanks for the kind words -
The points you are making are better addressed by discussing, when, not if they will happen. I agree with your perspective, but IMHO the timing will be far enough out that we'll still be talking about internal optimization opportunities 5+ years from now. There are too many security/confidentiality-privacy and compliance barriers today ... not to mention immaturity of Cloud-interoperability standards that inhibit large scale adoption.
Two additional points I'd like you to consider ...
- the simple example I described can improve performance & reduce latency, but it can also allow you to replace a dozen or more servers with a single appliance. That's real savings in capex and opex through reduced space/power/cooling & maintenance. That's a universal goal of every CIO I know.
- this type of optimization will (or should) continue in the Cloud...the provider who can differentiate through improved performance at a lower cost will win market share.
Thanks for reading -
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