Kim Davis - The difference between IaaS, Paas, and SaaS is incremental. I-a-a-S is usually contracting for "the whole enchalada" while S-a-a-S is getting access to a specific application. Things get a little blurry inbetween, with some vendors "bending" P-a-a-S to meet their own product offering definitions.
There are a number of improvements the long-lines providers are implementing (like MPLS) to make the process more efficient. However, most of the time it comes down to "last mile" decisions and how much each organization is willing to "pony up" for services.
Labnuke - you are absolutely correct. It's not just about bandwidth and latency (or poles or cable or...). We need an entirely new suite of technology to address the problem, not bandaid patches.
Is there anything that enterprises can do to assure connectivity between their LANs and the cloud service provider? (This seems to me to be related to the "last-mile" problem in Internet service provision.) Or is this entirely up to the telcos?
Another problem with new technology is cost. It is possbile to put a huge amount of cable in the ground (with almost infinite bandwidth), but how much would need to be charged for it? On the side of telephone poles and cables, they have all been amortized off the books many years ago, so costs are low.
Randy Ah, yes, of course. One thing we saw in an earlier class is that cloud providers, like other kinds of technology partners, often specialize by vertical industry type.
You mentioned Sandy: There's a big debate, for example, over whether or not to replace telephone poles with more telephone poles and electric poles -- or put them underground. We went thru that here in FL after our four-hurricane season. Guess what: Many are still above ground because it's cheaper, short-term, although less efficient, more dangerous, and more expensive long term.
for WAN & LAN it's not just about capacity (how much data) and speed (how fast - latency) it's also about the effectiveness of the protocols and client/server applications - a poor LAN application and/or service will still be a poor cloud application or service
Public Cloud is available to everyone who has money. It usually is focused on providing the minimum level of capabilities for the least possible cost.
Community Cloud is like a "members only" club. It allows only clients with like needs, and usually provides specialized shared services that are relevant only to those members.
Yes, Randy, I think we see that in some regions of the world where they don't have all our aging infrastructure to replace or amortize! Or long contracts to play out.
When do you bring up IaaS to prospective or existing clients, Randy? And is this something you typically offer to existing clients or is this something you are more likely to provide to new customers?
One thing that is needed industry-wide is the upgrading of aging transmission infrastructure that has been in place for decades. When I was on a project in India, I was surprised to see how far ahead of us they were with cell phone technology. The answer was simple - they didn't have to factor in all those telephone poles and wire streached from coast-to-coast. New technologies need new, more capable infrastructures to support them
Kim, video eats a lot of bandwidth but audio has greater latency demands. People will put up with a lot more stuttering and lag with video than they will with audio.
Video is definitely a problem, but so is VoIP, Social Media, High Definition images, GIS, RFID, and just about any other digital service you can stuff down a WAN link.
WAN bandwidth is always a consideration. Recently we attended a presentation by AT&T, which made bandwidth consumption predictions that were simply staggering! This is an area of technology that needs further attention if I-a-a-S is to blossum.
It's difficult to specify the main performance indicators without knowing what specifically is important to your organization. Certainly performance, security, capacity, scalability, etc. are on most companies lists, but there are other things that may be specific to each organization too. (such as HIPPA compliance metrics for medical providers)
I was taken aback by the WAN problems you described, Randy. Could we be in a position where the demand for IaaS could outstrip capacity for data transmission?
It is a shift in focus for IT professionals. Life in "the Cloud" environment will mean a far greater focus on services delivery, process efficiencies, overall IT governance, and SLA-based management.
I don't see it necessarily eliminating jobs - just shifting their focus to support a new model.
I wondered about the infrastructure portion: You mention the condition of today's infrastructure. What does this mean for IT professionals as they map out their cloud plans?
@django - and then the railroads went to buried cables to manage/monitor switches along the lines... multiple cables could be run along the same path and used for other purposes
Makes sense. If your application doesn't live on servers on the local networks, WAN throughput directly affects application responsiveness and latency.
many communication lines run along railroad right of ways in the US... consider how much area that covers - that's why the datacenter I visited had some great connectivity to a very high-speed network.
SPRINT - Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunication - Southern Pac's communication lines actually went along the railroads and covered a large region of the country - so led to a lot of coverage for actual telephony
@mitch - exactly... I just learned recently that SPRINT is actually an acronym and was a private network at one time - care to guess what SPRINT means?
labnuke - That's fascinating. The Internet's infrastructure is built on some very old technology indeed. Intercontinental cables are located in the same places that intercontinnential telegraph cables were laid in the 19th Century.
recently visited a new $15 million datacenter that is just going into service - this hardened datacenter was built in a location where autos were built in the 40's-60's... the power and communication infrastructure really made the location very attractive... repurposing old manufacturing areas can be done and lead to improved economic conditions - it just changes the skill sets needed and long-term focus of the region
@Desktopbyduck: Hit the play button on the player above, the audio player is different from before: it doesn't start automatically. Audio is working very well.
I am a fan of microturbines. I am glad some data centers are using these natural gas engines to cool/heat and power their data centers. If I remember right the internal combustion engine thermal efficiency is about 30%, turbines about 60%.
@aum, I've seen a few videos on server farms/cloud data centers showing the innovative things they have done to make the centers energy efficient. Just promotional materials???
Since the pc market seems to be drying out, will the infrastructure as a cloud service and other cloud services help out microsoft and intel? Or are the clouds mostly using non-MS and non-Intel blade servers?
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