Moving in-house or on-prem servers into the cloud - take 1: Cost Advantages

As detailed in an earlier blog post, the next "natural" step for in-house or on-prem server workload management seems to be "the move towards "servers or virtual machines as a service" in the cloud, either in a private cloud delivery mode or in a public cloud delivery mode". 

What are the main drivers for this and what are IT-departments and businesses looking to achieve?

One obvious driver or pull factor is the obvious ease of moving virtualised work loads or virtualized machines (VMs)  from on-prem hypervized servers and on to the the same hypervised set-up with IaaS cloud providers, for use in a private, public og hybrid use mode.

Another driver is the cost of delivery or TCO between on-prem servers/VMs versus multi-hosted cloud based ones.  BAIN & Company (www.bain.com) has a great illustration of this in their 2011 article "The five faces of the cloud" based on a IDC Worldwide Enterprise Server Cloud Computing 2010-2014 forecast.  Around 2010-2011 there was a shift in pricing of cloud based servers versus on-prem servers, with cloud-based servers for the first time achieving cost benefit compared to on-prem ones, projected to reach a 30-40% cost advantage in 2014.

In addition to cost advantges for cloud based VMs, there are numerous other advantages in the areas of more flexible workload management, provisioning time, VM flexibility and auto sizing, load balancing, recovery etc, that I'll try to cover in a upcoming blog post. 

Cloud delivery mode for IaaS-based workload management

The Bluelock survey highlighted some of the usage areas for IaaS-based server utilization. An additional survey conducted at the recent VMworld seems to indicate that most users or companies is doing this in a private cloud use mode on their infrastructure, or some 48% using IaaS in private cloud mode versus only 10% in public cloud mode.

For development and pre-production work this certainly makes sense, but expect a move towards service provider based private clouds by IT-departements and projects at companies at the expense of in-house ones. And public cloud use mode, coupled with beta-launch approach, for new services beta test and launch.

We'll look further into the reasons for this in upcoming posts.

VMworld 2013 survey

Bluelock infographic: Benefits and Advantages of Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Cloud services provider Bluelock has published an interesting infographic on "Benefits and Advantages of Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service" based on a 11-question survey among 325 respondents over a period of three months.

And not very surprisingly, key benefits are in the areas of increased infrastructure reliability and performance for development, test and pre-production workloads as well as business critical applications, showing the delivery flexibility achievable with modern IaaS-based server solutions.

Bluelock: Benefits and Advantages of Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Where does cloud-based IT services and delivery come from?

What are the origins of cloud-based IT services and delivery? The system and business development paths might be said to come from many sources, participants and movements over the years, but the two main ingredients I think are server or CPU core virtualization on the system level and the for ever developing business need for greater IT and service delivery flexibility.  Also there have been two distinct development paths at play; one coming from in-house server consolidation and cost reduction using server virtualization, the other from the hosting services arena where the move from dedicated servers to virtualized private servers (one OS serving many user or services instances) to proper virtualized CPU cores (one hypervisor layer serving multiple, properly walled-in CPU virtual machines with their associated OS).

Both development paths were seeking greater IT service delivery flexibility, one for the internal IT department and it's users, the other for the hosting service provider and service provisioning & production, and both achieved much improved TCO.

Going a bit further into the in-house development path, one traditionally had IT departments using servers for single tasks, i.e. file and print, database hosting, email server, firewall, as work separation made functional sense and CPU's couldn't carry greater work loads.  Beginning around 2002 with VMWare, physical servers could be virtualized, i.e. made to carry multiple work loads, depending on time of day or some basic concurrent task switching, and the server virtualisation movement or consolidation path was started once IT admins saw the server management and cost reduction benefits.  Most companies with a in-house data center or server farm would have migrated to virtualized, consolidated server platform by now.

In the Internet hosting arena, or outsourced IT services arena for that matter, the hosting space evolved from shared hosting (i.e. multiple web domains on a single or load-balanced server) or dedicated servers for some high-capacity work load environments into the ASP market (application service provider) to host and offer higher margin application hosting and delivery.  ASP loads were in most cases tied to core business hours, and ASP servers were left idling outside 08.00 - 17.00.  Also providing dedicated servers were costly, as these servers also typically were hard at work only during specific hours during the day - business hours if the server were covering business area service utilization, 17.00-23.00 or so if the services on the server were geared towards the consumer market.

For both ASP and dedicated server hosting, server and CPU core virtualisation came in as a cost saviour or allowed hosting companies to move away from costly one server for one application or customer environments, and into virtualized work environments were work loads could be shared or shifted between fewer servers throughout the day.  Also proper CPU and OS virtualisation meant greater work load control and configuration than VPS server, where one OS install and config were tasked with serving a range of use cases and applications.  Server virtualisation lead to virtualized server platforms and in due time to virtualzed data centers, that allowed for easier load balancing between servers and data centers for that matter.

With both corporate in-house servers and data centers being virtualized, as well as server platforms for hosters, and the evolved mind-set for virtualized IT service delivery opportunities that comes with this, the next "natural" step seems to be or are the move towards "servers or virtual machines as a service" in the cloud, either in a private cloud delivery mode or in a public cloud delivery mode.  Or a mix of the two modes in a hybrid delivery mode for cloud based IT services.

And that's the topic for the next post in this blog.

Cloud Snip

Cloud Snip

Yes, it's another blog about IT cloud services, developments, users and suppliers.  

The labels gives the ToC away - enjoy!