[irq]: serially techie23/11/2009
The reason I assert you will end up with break-even or a loss is because if you start to accurately identify the additional expenditures necessary to maintain and operate that investment, then costs start to dramatically increase relative to this single expenditure. To offset these costs, a business would need on the order of a 25% costs reduction or increase in profits to have a “return”. As I noted above, TCO and ROI are notional concepts designed to be manipulated by those with budgets to justify expenditures. I have yet to see one CIO actually go back and reconcile the initial ROI estimates against the original assertion past year one.
[…]
The metric I recommend is total service cost (TSC). Basically stated as a formula, TSC is:
(Cost of Infrastructure + Cost of Operations + Cost of Software + Cost of Risk) – Billed Usage = TSC
[…]
At this point, you’ve laid out very little capital to get started, your development costs were kept relatively low and you’re service is being managed by your Cloud provider. This sounds resoundingly like the story many startups delivering Cloud-based services are prescribing as success. However, because you highly leveraged with a significant number of dependencies on external agencies, your cost of risk is significantly higher than if you has hosted it in a co-located facility with less compute capacity and used your own employees, which maintains knowledge internally to your company, which causes you to set a higher price point for your unit of billing, which results in slower uptake in sales.
„A Better Metric for Analyzing the Value of the Cloud — CIOUpdate.com
Quote posted at 13:42 Comments
18/11/2009
Photo posted at 08:45 Comments
16/11/2009
Cloud computing can help you reduce costs, increase flexibility, and reduce risk. You can leverage the cloud to host applications ranging from the business critical to the experimental. But not all applications are suited for cloud computing environments. When deciding whether and how to move an application to the cloud, you must first assess the expected risks and rewards. Once you’ve determined that an application can run in the cloud, you next should determine whether it can be further optimized to harness the energy of the cloud. This white paper presents a methodology for determining when and how to refactor applications for cloud computing environments. (via Optimizing Applications for Cloud Computing Environments )
Photo posted at 09:29 Comments
12/11/2009
I wanted to let everyone know that IBM has recently released two papers on cloud security and would welcome your thoughts and suggestions about them.
The first is a new white paper called, “IBM Point of View: Security and Cloud Computing.” This paper takes a balanced look at the key issues in securing cloud platforms without getting into a lot of hype. Unlike any other cloud security guidance I’ve read, it describes the relationship between the cloud platform’s security and SOA security so you can see how the cloud specific parts of security relate to existing security infrastructure and techniques.
[…]
The second paper, “Cloud Security Guidance: IBM Recommendations for the Implementation of Cloud Security” is a more checklist-oriented discussion of issues that should be considered in evaluating cloud environments. It combines many of the IT security issues you’d expect to discuss in any IT environment with cloud-specific issues that are particular to cloud-computing. combining many aspects of IT security.
„Quote posted at 14:36 Comments
10/11/2009
Photo posted at 08:10 Comments
05/11/2009
Elemental Cloud Computing is a new research offering dedicated to exploring the opportunities, issues, technologies, offerings and implications of cloud computing from a practitioner perspective. (via elemental cloud computing : intentional cloud watching - by brenda michelson)
Photo posted at 09:13 Comments
13/10/2009
network pieces
Incomplete thought [props to Hoff]…
I think that control plane and data/forwarding plane separation will end up a common feature of data center networks at scale, for cloud, etc. It’s a lesson from telcos.
The work of control plane software optimization is really a set of algorithmic route calculation (etc.) and distributed database problems that are better attacked outside the confines of network hardware, with general purpose machines.
The work of the data plane is more about capability optimization in asics, fpgas, etc. for latency, latency jitter, scaling, subscription rates, etc.
These two things have very different cycles and [I think] are better off not tied to one another.
analytics at network edges
Incomplete thought…
Much churn and anguish to remove the network limits to scaling virtualized environments has driven people to make the network “aware”, “intelligent”, and “smart” with a focus on virtualization, orchestration, etc.
In this, I think a useful idea has been lost—
The network should provide more intelligence. How about we embed serious awareness in the form of analytics capabilities into the network? Instead of discovering distributed/networked/cloud application hiccups, failures, overloads, etc., at the core and after the fact—I want to intercept and predict them at the edges where they start. There must be markers and patterns to requests, responses, session states, etc., that can be teased out and understood by the edge.. and once observed, passed on to correlators, orchestrators, management systems, etc.
Ultimately, I think there are decisions and actions that should be made/taken at the edge to head off certain kinds of problems before they manifest application-infrastructure-wide.
.
