How the cloud improves data center efficiency

How the cloud improves data center efficiency

Cloud computing continues to be a buzzword

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

among IT leaders, due to promising benefits such as increased efficiency and reduced costs. So, what data center improvements can your organization expect after a move to the cloud? Access this e-guide for an in-depth look at the advantages of cloud computing, along with expert advice for aligning your cloud strategy with business goals. Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility
By Faisal Hoque It's nearly impossible to pick up a technology magazine or sit through a strategy meeting without encountering a reference to what some consider the next and greatest wave in enterprise computing: the cloud. Cloud is a fitting term for something that's shrouded in mystery and hard to grasp. We're not helped by the plethora of buzzwords that seem to accompany this concept: grid, utility, service-oriented architecture (SOA), service management, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and so on. It's easy to get lost in the wonders of the technology and the lofty promises of the new age it will usher in, but we must stay anchored: This ultimately is a matter of business, not technology. And, as such, its usefulness must be assessed in the context of the enterprise as a whole. New ways of thinking are required. Investment decisions and the measurement of success will not be about individual technologies or projects or even about the IT department itself, because the cloud is about the whole organization. Cloud computing can be thought of as processing and storage done "elsewhere," meaning physically removed from the user, typically off-site. Users don't need to think about the hardware at all; that is selected and made available by the company that maintains the cloud. In some cases, users won't need to think about specific applications; they will just specify the

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functionality they need. In still other cases, business-side end users will employ the functionality without a technology department acting as an intermediary; the strategic and tactical guidance now performed by internal technology departments will reside in the cloud. Efficiency and agility While efficiency and cost savings are legitimate motives for pursuing cloud computing (and will be the initial motives for most companies), some see the cloud as an enabler of innovation and agility. If hardware and software are available instantly and always up to date, and if reliability and privacy are guaranteed, firms can focus all their energy on new business models, experimenting on the fly and learning from new approaches to finding and satisfying customers. Factoring in the computing resources needed for a new initiative will be a matter of when to push the button. It's best to not get too wrapped up in parsing the various terms associated with the cloud. Utility computing, for example, refers to the pay-per-use or metered approach that Amazon.com uses. Electric power is often used as an analogy: You plug in your appliance and don't really care how the electricity is created or who is doing it. Grid computing refers to the linking of thousands of computers to which pieces of a gigantic problem -- today often scientific in nature -- are distributed. The grid offers processing power and storage unavailable in a typical single organization. In practice, organizations will move to the cloud incrementally, shifting portions of their computing needs to it over time. Smaller companies will see an immediate payoff in moving completely. Larger companies must wrestle with proprietary systems that are strategically critical and extremely complex, and with unique business processes that have been built up over time and can't be easily handed off. Work will change What we cannot avoid -- and it's something much more difficult than buying servers and software seats -- is the changing nature of work itself. Leading companies are moving toward converging their management of business and technology. This simply means that decision makers are conversant in each

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

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and act on each to advance a strategy. For them, technology is no longer a mysterious activity hidden away in a glass house.

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

Computing tools in the cloud will be represented to end users virtually and in nontechnical ways so they can use them without excessive specialty training. At the same time, users will be ever more knowledgeable about the potential of the tools and ever more adept at manipulating them. Entering the cloud Deciding to move to the cloud and using it wisely will require creating an architecture of the enterprise, both its current and future desired states. This is known as a strategic enterprise architecture (SEA). An SEA is a story of what the organization is trying to accomplish and how. It includes both its business purpose and the enabling technology -- that is, a business architecture and a technology architecture mapped to it. At the highest level, an SEA is expressed in nontechnical language anyone in the organization can understand. An SEA lays out all business processes end to end, incorporating external partners and customers. Most organizations have various documents describing what they do, from the thick notebooks of long-range plans gathering dust on shelves to various mission statements. An SEA makes sense of those islands of information. It should clearly show where contradictions in purpose and redundancies in execution lie. At its most granular level, the SEA becomes technical: It specifies the various information technologies in use. In leading organizations, these now are expressed as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- that is, software is maintained as modules that can be combined to create applications as needed, sometimes by business users. A SOA can reside within the organization or in the cloud. A SOA is not a necessity to work in the cloud, but it adds tremendous flexibility as the organization senses and responds to changes in its environment. At some point, the enterprise will need to answer the big question: Is the company as a whole better off? Is it finding and retaining good customers? Is

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it delivering new, innovative products to them? Is it adjusting on the fly to changes in customer demand, marketplace realities, new technologies and competitor moves? Beyond that, what are changes in management and technology doing for the bottom line? Taking the holistic measure of an enterprise's performance is a rather straightforward process. This measurement can be combined with interim assessments about the efficiency of individual business processes currently and in a projected best state, and with the costs of internal versus external computing. In no case should such measures be made in isolation from their impact on customers and the firm's overall purpose and strategy. My opinion of IT is well-documented throughout my writings, so I can certainly empathize with many of the cynics who profess the end of IT departments as we know them. However, I believe it is more likely that what we are seeing come to an impasse is the role of CIO as we've known it. Technology is far too crucial to every business to simply go away, but how it is perceived, utilized and leveraged in support of driving value is a daily moving target, signifying a critical shift in focus from a basic necessity to a growth enabler of business. So, before ascending into the virtual world of puffy, white haze, be sure your strategy is clear enough to keep your business focused.

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

By Linda Tucci Just how green is cloud computing? Is cloud computing more or less energyconsuming compared with the typical local data center a company owns and operates for its own use? How about compared with a co-location facility, sited for maximum energy efficiency? Or in contrast to a managed hosting data center, where the average power usage effectiveness, or PUE, is an ideal 1.0? What's the green differential in buying services from a bevy of cloud computing providers versus consolidating the enterprise's servers and applications in a private cloud maintained behind the corporate firewall?

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Most CIOs can't answer these questions because the energy efficiency of cloud is not their problem but the cloud owner's problem. That kind of punting may be a lost opportunity for CIOs wishing to make the case that cloud computing is in the plus column for green. Until now, CIOs have turned to cloud computing providers to save time to market, to avoid costly upfront capital investments in infrastructure, for cloud computing's flexibility and to drive efficiencies through automation. Their chief concerns about cloud computing providers are security, service reliability, vendor lock-in and lack of a clear business case. Financial firms, in particular, feel restricted from using public clouds by data security legislation. Technology and pharma companies worry about maintaining control of their intellectual property. Telco firms have been early adopters of private clouds to demonstrate confidence in their own cloud services to potential customers. The green aspect is not on the table. These are the findings of a study commissioned by the Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP, a nonprofit agency that helps corporations track carbon emissions. Conducted by independent analyst firm Verdantix, the report used detailed case study evidence from 11 global firms to assess the financial benefits and potential carbon reductions for a firm opting for a particular cloud computing service. The move to cloud computing: Cutting out 5.7 million cars, $12.3 billion in costs So back to just how green is cloud computing. The results show that by 2020, by spending 69% of their infrastructure, platform and software budgets on cloud services, U.S. companies with revenue of $1 billion or more would reap energy savings of $12.3 billion and carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil -- enough to power 5.7 million cars for one year. Moving an HR application to the public cloud could save one of these companies $12 million over five years and cut CO2 emissions by 30,000 metric tons, the equivalent of getting 5900 cars off the road for a year. A private cloud could save them $5 million over five years and cut emissions by 25,000 metric tons, the equivalent of 4900 fewer cars on the road for a year. Wow!

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

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How the cloud improves data center efficiency

But how much does the greenness of cloud computing matter to the companies that avail themselves of it? Citigroup's response was typical. "Carbon reduction is one driver, but not the primary driver," Paul Stemmler, managing director of engineering and integration at Citigroup, told CDP. Less easy to quantify are the environmental benefits of cloud computing compared with owning and operating one's own data center On the face of it, the massive data centers operated by the world's largest cloud computing providers possess big advantages in power usage and cost savings over inhouse IT. "Cloud can be greener, if a variety of conditions are met," said analyst John Stanley, who covers datacenter technologies and eco-efficient IT at 451 Research. Two conditions are: The data centers themselves can be designed to take advantage of the latest breakthroughs in efficient power and cooling. The IT equipment within the data center can be more energy efficient, using 60% and 70% of the servers' brain power as opposed to the 5% to 10% utilization rates still found in many corporate data centers, virtualization notwithstanding. "Utilization rates are still nowhere near where they should be. We've graduated from horrendous to awful," Stanley said. Of course, an enterprise data center can do the same, but for most industries -- banking being an exception -- data centers are not a core business. Cloud computing providers, as the CDP report points out, are not only motivated to provide that hour of CPU, the month of storage, a customer transaction, your email, at the lowest cost (and highest margin) possible. They can also tap into cloud computing energy efficiencies that are out of reach for even the most state-of-art enterprise data centers, Stanley said, noting that: The diversity of customer workloads can help cloud providers realize higher utilization rates than companies running their own workload in an internal data center, virtualized or not. Cloud computing providers can locate their centers to take advantage of free cooling and green power sources, and the big

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

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How the cloud improves data center efficiency

players are big enough to contract with clean power sources -- a wind farm, for example.

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

"Nothing magical about a green data center" Cloud providers, in short, are well positioned to take advantage of various economies of scale. "But they have to choose these levers," Stanley said. A cloud provider worried about being able to meet user demand might feel compelled to have lots of idle capacity on hand, resulting in low utilization rates. Or may decide to locate in coal country. (See "How dirty is your data?") "There's nothing magical about a cloud data center that instantly makes everything green." Stanley's advice for CIOs interested in the green benefits of using cloud computing or whether the service provides any benefit over using one's own data center? "Ask the cloud provider to prove it," he said. Whether CIOs should lead the charge on energy efficiency and sustainability at their companies is anything but settled. We learned that from our recent series on what's new in green technology. Those in favor argue that the CIOs' familiarity with cloud computing and with big data put them in a unique position to set the green policy for their companies. Sensors allow the physical world to be plumbed through software. Cloud-based tools for measuring and analyzing energy consumption allow companies to track, modulate and predict their energy consumption as never before. If not the CIO, then who? Others we consulted (IT professionals included), however, said CIOs are actually ill-positioned to spearhead energy efficiency and sustainability across the enterprise. Reducing the corporate carbon footprint encompasses practices outside the data center and behaviors other than those that technology tools can measure. We learned that at companies where reducing the carbon footprint actually matters, the impetus almost always comes from the top -- the board of directors and CEO. And now that climate change has become part of the nation's culture wars, a corporate commitment to going green is tantamount to a political statement. Moreover, any corporate-wide policy to reduce greenhouse gases is likely to be

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accompanied by a feel-good marketing campaign. How is this the purview of the CIO?

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

Of course, using cloud services that reduce carbon emissions for IT per se and telecommunication services is the CIO's domain. Given that July was the hottest month in the history of the United States, CIOs may want to float green clouds just to help us keep cool.

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Cloud computing is the source of innovation and agility How green is cloud computing? Its time for CIOs to ask

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