HEAnet Conference, 2009

Cloud

Does the ‘Cloud’ havea Silver Lining?

Gareth Eason

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Summary• Should I care about cloud?

YES!• Will cloud solve all my compute and storage

problems? Is it a magic silver bullet?

NO! (sorry!)

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Audience Participation

Q. Who considers themselves

a Cloud User?

a Cloud Provider?

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Results

User

Provider

Both

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1

Cloud Users Vs Providers

Gareth,

Could not afford the cloud-enabled audience voting pads this year, sorry!Maybe in 2010?

John

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Can Cloud save me money?• Cloud service users:

• with variable loads

• requiring scaling up and back at short notice

• want a service that’s already available as SaaS

• YES! (maybe!)

• Cloud service providers:

• generally, NO!

• unless you are selling spare capacity

• virtualisation / economies of scale might contradict this

HEAnet Conference, 2009

But what is cloud?

HEAnet Conference, 2009

What is Cloud?

Concept

HEAnet Conference, 2009

What is Cloud?

set of properties

HEAnet Conference, 2009

What is Cloud?• Elastic

• scaleable, in both directions

• Utility

• pay for what you use

• Pervasive

• access from anywhere

• state is maintained independent of location

€€€

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Classic IT Problem

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Are all clouds the same?• Facebook.

com• Google

Apps• Salesforce

.com, etc

SaaS

• Force.com• Google

App Engine

• Microsoft Azure, etc.

PaaS

• Amazon (EC2)

• Cisco (Unified

Communications)

• MANTICORE, etc.

IaaS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Why should I care?• Are you ready for the Cloud?

• Conversion of CapEx to OpEx

• variable costs

• unbounded costs?

• Ubiquitous, reliable networking vital

• though often not high bandwidth

• what‘s your campus 802.11 coverage like? Wimax?

• Security

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Sign up to AWS

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Billing?• one X.509 cert later

• Select one of >3,500 AMIs (Virtual machine images)

• http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

• Costs (OpEx):

• 1 small machine month ≈ $72.00 ( $864 / year )

• without storage

• without data transfer in and out

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Providers• Must suffer capital expense

• but might ‘overflow’ on to another cloud

• Must predict future trends

• Provision of power/cooling/housing

• Provision of compute/storage/network

• Better become a cloud user too!

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Storage

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Storage

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Storage• Transfer costs!

• Completely unlike NREN usage / costing model

• AWS (Amazon S3):

• in : $0.10 / GB

• out: 10TB @ $0.17 / GB

• 40TB @ $0.13 / GB

• 100TB @ $0.11 / GB

• >150TB @ $0.10 / GB

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Data integrity

Henry Newman

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Data replication time

Henry Newman

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Risks• Hidden Costs?

• data transfer

• per transaction cost

• Vendor Lock-in

• feature compatibility between vendors

• cost of transfer

• Lack of competition / pricing control?

• Software Licensing

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Risks• Data Privacy

• Legislative controls?

• Data Protection compliance

• User security ( twitter.com )

• Data integrity

• off-site backup

• no guarantees! (T-mobile Sidekick / Danger )

• Network failure

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Risks

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Saving money• Users

• CapEx -> OpEx

• Utility pricing

• Providers

• Cloud centric platforms (Cisco UCS, etc.)

• Virtualisation

• Save money by becoming a cloud user too

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Quality?• Gartner 2008 survey, 333 UK & Irish

businesses:

• Low level of approval for SaaS

• Overall satisfaction ‘lukewarm’

• High cost of service

• Difficult to integrate

HEAnet Conference, 2009

What have I NOT talked about?• Private clouds

• Security (in any real sense)

• Legislative compliance (in any real sense)

• Green / Environmental impact

• Comparisons between workloads

• desktop v researcher, etc.

HEAnet Conference, 2009

Next steps• Open Standards

• OPaaS

• SNIA cloud storage initiative

• Networking

• quality

• cost model

• availability

• Software Licensing

• Start virtualising

HEAnet Conference, 2009

HEAnet Cloud Strategy• Over to you!

• do you have a cloud strategy?

• how can we help?

• HEAnet Cloud Strategy

• inform us

HEAnet Conference, 2009

The Cloud• Case studies:

• Paul Doyle (DIT)

• Aidan McDonald (Cork IT)

• Ruth Lynch (UCD)

• The commercial / educational aspects of cloud:

• Michael D. King (Vice President, IBM Global Education Industry)

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