Will the cloud take your job?

[LizardKing]

Cant see the cloud taking my job, as i'm the one working on a in house project dealing with grid computing
Currently refining a solution that will add all our desktops and any other spare pc/server around to the grid network over night and release them when users need them.

It should have the opposite affect and open many doors to me.

 

[morfmedia]

Cant see the cloud taking my job, as i'm the one working on a in house project dealing with grid computing
Currently refining a solution that will add all our desktops and any other spare pc/server around to the grid network over night and release them when users need them.

It should have the opposite affect and open many doors to me.

I take it that's for some form of financial modelling, sounds very cool, read about one of the investment banks doing similar including using their DR site's CPU cycles whilst not being used for anything in particular.

Hopefully won't take my job (EMC SAN admin) but we'll see.....

 

[LizardKing]

I take it that's for some form of financial modelling, sounds very cool, read about one of the investment banks doing similar including using their DR site's CPU cycles whilst not being used for anything in particular.

Hopefully won't take my job (EMC SAN admin) but we'll see.....

It will be used for semantic processing but not limited to, it makes perfect sense rather than spending massive ££ on servers that would equal the processing power of all our desktop pc's.
Just don't tell the green brigade!!

 

[aln]

The cloud already has taken my job.

On that matter, anyone with interest in cloud computing may want to head over to http://www.cloudcamp.com/. There one in edinburgh on the 23rd, and london on the 24th. I believe FOWA 09, is also on in london at the end of the month.

 

[Yamahahahahaha]

The Cloud is a boon for small to medium sized businesses.
It's very hard to recommend multi-site server configurations when you can get cloud based applications, email and public folders for £38 a head per year.

The only thing that remains to be seen is reliability, which (so far) has not been as good as providing in house services.
For a lot of companies this will be economical and beneficial.

Makes my job easier, it's a case of looking at inhouse costs and the cost of downtime vs. the savings of moving to the cloud.

 

[Stolly]

Personally, I cant see directors willing to let 3rd party suppliers have access to all their corp data.

Then you have a big surprise coming. At large corporates IT is often outsourced already. Often the servers are in remote datacenters not even owned by the end client, very often it is a shared DC with servers belonging to many clients. The clients don't even know or care where their servers are.

It is in effect cloud computing, it has been done for years before the term came along.

Also at other places certain aspects of the IT service are done by different companies. All the backups at BT are done by HP. Sun do other parts. I sat in a room at BT with people from 4 different companies, all managing different aspects of the BT environment.

 

[bigredshark]

The Cloud is a boon for small to medium sized businesses.
It's very hard to recommend multi-site server configurations when you can get cloud based applications, email and public folders for £38 a head per year.

The only thing that remains to be seen is reliability, which (so far) has not been as good as providing in house services.
For a lot of companies this will be economical and beneficial.

Makes my job easier, it's a case of looking at inhouse costs and the cost of downtime vs. the savings of moving to the cloud.

Actually I'd question that very strongly. Most small businesses have IT managed badly in house or managed by small external companies who don't have that much knowledge and in the event of a disaster or even moderately serious problem they could be without services for a substantial period of time. Specialised hosting providers are usually in a position to offer far greater reliability.

That's before the benefit of having kit in a datacenter as opposed to on the end of an ADSL line - office burns down then everybody works from home. No (or at least one less) problem.

The problem with support and availability will come from people going to cheap man in a shed outfits rather than professional providers thinking it's a good economy. Same problem with web hosting today.

 

[daz]

Something quite interesting is that the largest cloud providers (services and infrastrcture) are the likes of Amazon and Google. Have you ever tried to call Google about a problem with Gmail? Do Amazon have a phone number for EC2? And how long for a reply to an email?

I hope they can up their game with regards to customer service.

 

[#Chri5#]

Something quite interesting is that the largest cloud providers (services and infrastrcture) are the likes of Amazon and Google. Have you ever tried to call Google about a problem with Gmail? Do Amazon have a phone number for EC2? And how long for a reply to an email?

I hope they can up their game with regards to customer service.

I think that's a very good point. An enterprise using outsourced services is very much different IMHO to a SME/SMB.

As a worse case scenario, what happens if the data-centre your kit is co-lo'd gets a visit from the authorities? I know this example is US based (so I don't know how our Police would handle it) but if you owned one of the 220 servers the FBI siezed, oh dear...

Cloud based applications at £38/month obviously have a real financial attraction. Whilst there might be an SLA, how good is the SLA? Jon Honeyball went over the MS hosted one in his blog and it gots more holes in it than your Grandma's net curtain.

 

[daz]

Police can be extremely heavy handed when it comes to certain things uploaded. Anything to do with child porn for example, you'll find the servers that the porn was uploaded to confiscated (not just the disks) as well as any backups.

Try explaining a SAN and "the cloud" to a police officer with a warrant to confiscate your kit from the DC.

 

[bigredshark]

Police can be extremely heavy handed when it comes to certain things uploaded. Anything to do with child porn for example, you'll find the servers that the porn was uploaded to confiscated (not just the disks) as well as any backups.

Try explaining a SAN and "the cloud" to a police officer with a warrant to confiscate your kit from the DC.

Actually (perhaps surprisingly) that's not the case in my experience, I'm currently working for a very large hosting company and we have a very cordial relationship with most police forces in the UK (as we pretty much have to - we receive a dozen or more requests of one type or another in the average month). Most are fairly clued up and reasonable about it.

There are a few which are totally clueless (take a bow Lancashire constabulary for particular ineptitude recently) but most are fairly reasonable to deal with.

The equipment seizure is a risk at the end of the day, my information is that in most of the examples cited, the company wasn't quite as innocent and legitimate as the owner claimed. Certainly we've never had equipment seized and I don't know of any similar companies who've had any taken.

End of the day, if it's a mission critical service I'd much rather have it in a datacenter than in the office and I'd advise any SME the same while also urging them to spend the money and do it right rather than picking the cheapest solution.

 

[Shaz]sigh[]

I've been re-pondering this lately and I may have been hasty.

From an Enteprise POV, until the Opex wins are proven, the SLAs are in place and achievable, the performance is shown and the standards open then the Enterprise will probably adopt an approach of 'borrowing' the best from the public cloud and basing the private cloud upon them.

For SMBs, the Opex wins seem to already be there. Still need someone to manage the systems ofc but no kit, no dc, no power, no cooling.... mm.

 

[#Chri5#]

I've been re-pondering this lately and I may have been hasty.

<snip>

For SMBs, the Opex wins seem to already be there. Still need someone to manage the systems ofc but no kit, no dc, no power, no cooling.... mm.

"no dc"? As in no datacentre? Which SMBs have been you visiting?