My Digital Life

I was just catching up on my RSS feeds and ended up reading an old article about cloud computer by Dion Hinchcliffe over on ZDNet.   It’s quite a good article, but one bit caught my eye:

Like so many aspects of Web 2.0, the industry is moving a lot faster than most businesses are currently able to keep up with.

Being a customer looking at cloud services, that was news to me - I’d argue that the opposite is true, at least for some enterprises.

Whilst there are some maturing cloud services out there, many of the big players that Enterprises will traditionally deal with just aren’t quite there yet.  Whilst they’ll talk a good game, when you dig into the details and try and actually buy this stuff you soon find out that the grass isn’t quite as green as you’ve been lead to believe. 

It soon becomes clear that whilst many of the big players aspire to providing cloudy ’service effect’ style solutions very few are able to deliver them at the moment.  And those that do have solutions are often both limited in scope and more expensive than doing it yourself.

I’ve found that billing models aren’t developed, when you look for the simplistic £-per-user, £-per-GB, £-per-CPU/hour models you’ll find them strangely absent. 

What’s worse is that one of cloud computing’s big selling points - reduced capital investment and cost of entry -  is also quite often AWOL.  Many of big players are still reluctant to take on the cost and risk of owning the hardware layer, preferring the more traditional hosting and support style agreements.

Unless you’re specifically looking at apps that you can move to solutions like EC2 or App Engine, there are very few options available right now for delivering applications and services from the cloud.

So in my experience the appetite of enterprises for cloud services currently exceeds the markets ability to deliver them.   Or at least deliver them against the promises it’s already made.

I’ve read a few posts over the last few days which try to answer the question ‘what is the cloud’.  Not conceptually ‘what is it’, but physically what is if made off, what servers, data centres etc.

To my mind the point of the cloud is that as a customer you don’t need to know how many servers it uses, over how many data centres, supported by how many people.  All you really need to be sure of is what services you will receive, or the overall service effect that you have agreed with your provider.

By using cloud services, especially in business, you’re abstracting yourself from all the details of running the service.  Sure it’s interesting from a geek perspective but ultimately you’re acknowledging that those guys can do it better and maybe cheaper than you.  That’s a good thing, you get get on with new stuff and taking the credit! :)

Seeing as I’m involved in getting a new Data Centre at the moment this post over on ZDnet could my eye.  Looks like HP is to target a ‘data centre as a service’ product at enterprise customers. 

I’ve heard bits about this for a few years now - HP account managers will bore you silly with stories of renting computing time to Shrek - but this is the first I’ve heard about an actual product.  It sounds like there are four favours of service on offer initially:

1. A compute intensive service for number crunching applications (the Shrek example!)
2. A SAP 6.0 optimised service
3. An Exchange optimised service
4. A more generic Windows and Unix application server service

From what’s described it looks like a decent start, it’ll be interesting to see whether they start offering additional specific configurations.  Something for SharePoint would probably be a good start.  As it takes off within bigger companies more people will start grappling with the infrastructure required to run SharePoint in a big way and look for service solutions.

I just noticed that PC Magazine have posted a review of the Office Live Workspace beta.  It’s quite an interesting read and they make some fair points about functionality and beta issues. 

An interesting bit of new functionality here… the new beta of Silverlight Streaming includes the ability to upload a video file in a format not recognised by Silverlight and have a service in the cloud automatically transcode it into a wmv that can be streamed. 

(Spotted over at Angus’s Blog)

I had an interesting conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday about his PC.  It started out as one of those ‘hey Tom, you know about computers, what should I…’ chats.  He’s basically filled up his hard disk at home and wanted to know how he should upgrade.  We were looking at the prices of hard drives, and then at new PC’s so he could turn his current one into a server, then I mentioned Windows Home Server, and so on…

We came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense for him to buy local disks any more.  He’s got a wireless router, so there’s network infrastructure.  He’s not doing anything that needs disk performance so speed isn’t an issue.  And the cost difference between him buying a couple of big disks to RAID and a Home Server was small enough that he’d rather go the Home Server route. 

I’ve done network storage at home for years, but that’s because I’m a geek and used those servers and an MSDN account to learn stuff.  With Home Servers and things like Skydrive now making networked/cloud storage a realistic option for people at home, thinner computers like the Macbook Air make more sense.