Re: CEO's head in the Cloud
- From: Thomas Roach <troach@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: moabrivers@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 11:01:14 -0400
There are some benefits to running things in the cloud as well as drawbacks.
You have to analyze these things and decide if it makes sense. I would tell
your CEO that it is worth looking into and then look into it.
At my previous place the COO was really big on the cloud. Said everyone was
doing it so should we. We already were running an Oracle RAC cluster with
all our DB's consolidated. We had VMWARE and then we had things replicated
to other Data Centers for Disaster recovery. In essence we were already
leveraging a "private" cloud model and were reaping the benefits. The reason
the COO wanted to get into the cloud is because he was convinced that if we
don't get on the cloud bandwagon then we would fall behind our competition
and let them gain a competitive edge. He was also convinced that he now had
a dilemma because all the cloud marketing material kept telling him the
cloud was the solution to the dilemma of the CIO of having inefficient very
expensive data centers. He was also convinced that once in the cloud he
would need less people to manage all this.
So we looked at it. We looked at Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure (Microsoft
just from a cost perspective). Because we already had VMWARE, we could
easily add more capacity and we already had enough bandwidth to handle a
large spike in network traffic. So we did our testing with Amazon and
noticed their storage was slower than ours. Running some things here and
some things there were slower like bringing back data sets to our
application servers here. Let's put it this way, Amazon offers flexibility
like Matt mentioned but in trying to add more memory without needing more
CPU was difficult. Maybe it changed but Amazon only gave you a few
configurations and to go to the next one you had to get other resources you
really didn't need.
Last but not least, we looked at the cost. To run our data center at Amazon
was drastically more expensive. We also looked at Windows Azure to run our
300 windows guest and that alone was over a million dollars on top of the
other costs. Our costs, we took into account our electricity costs, our
rent, our licensing costs, and networking costs. So the whole TCO and ROI
thing I take with a grain of salt. All the cloud marketing material is
assuming that we are all idiots and that our data centers are inefficient.
Some are, but not all, and we all certainly aren't idiots. Lets just say,
when we showed the cost comparison to our COO his jaw dropped. Felt like he
been had. Asked us if we were sure? We ran the numbers again and he felt
kind of foolish that he drank the Kool-Aid.
Cloud offers some flexibility, and if you are a startup or need to position
certain apps globally then it makes sense. If you don't have room for a data
center or rent is extremely high then it can make sense. You just have to do
your homework and see what works best for your business. Private cloud could
be more cost effective than a public cloud like EC2 or Azure. At the end of
the day, Cloud is just another tool in the tool shed, another option.
Good Luck in your assessment.
Tom
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:12 PM, LB <moabrivers@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> My CEO just came back from a technology conference where his head became
> filled with lots of ideas including the idea that we should abandon our
> hosted datacenters and push everything into the Cloud, specifically
> Amazon's. A cursory review of the offerings for this show that the
> databases are hosted on Amazon virtual machines that aren't officially
> supported by Oracle and thus require a premium support contract from Amazon.
>
>
> Aside from my personal feelings on the matter (that I'd much rather have a
> tangible set of servers that are under direct control), what are your
> pros/cons for pushing or not Production level OLTP databases into the cloud.
> I notice right now that they currently only offer 11g1 on 64-bit an not 10g
> 64-bit or 11g2 64-bit so it would appear they arent covering all of their
> bases. Presently we're RAC on 10.2.0.4 64 bit and use dataguard to a
> different datacenter for geographic redundancy. I note also that Amazon
> doesnt support RAC instances at present.
>
> His driving push is that somehow Amazon's cloud will mean better
> performance throughout the world as somehow the network throughput will be
> magically enhanced so someone in Iraq will get the same speed hitting the
> application as someone in California. I don't agree with that either but I
> dont have empirical proof. Our databases presently are highly available,
> highly optimized, and highly redundant. But, they aren't buzz word stamped
> "Cloud." Sigh.
>
--
Thomas Roach
813-404-6066
troach@xxxxxxxxx
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