Comments on: Cloud, sand and scale

By: Matthew Reed

Matthew Reed — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:48:09 +0000

Mr. Fitch, I would definatley appreciate any information or your input on what you see as the de facto standard for IT DR/BC strategies. Please feel free to email at mreed@extron.com

Thanks

By: John Fitch

John Fitch — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:20:04 +0000

I have done a lot of cost comparisons to physical, VM, Utility/Grid, Cloud (hardware, app, and user), and Business continuity / Disaster recovery strategies around them all.

Concerns come to compliancy, tiering resiliency, tiering downtime, storage, replication, and offloading recovery of data and systems.

The further you drill down costs to the systems that can suffer 12+ hours of data restoration, the more effective you make your system cost, and derive the appropriate licensing for the 0 to 1 hr, 1 to 4hr, and up recovery time objectives.

Operationally tiering with DR platforms in place allow for true utilization of cloud apps, subsystems, and save on management.

I spend all day shifting designs between multiple purviews, and honestly the real solution is a solid mix of cost effective technologies.

If anyone would like some baselining and industry trend information, including DR / BC ideas please feel free to contact me.

By: jh

jh — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:20:08 +0000

From my experience, companies start to lose track of the time and costs that go into their IT infrastructure as they move from a handful of people to tens of people. They may think that their costs are relatively modest but they tend to forget the cost of management in planning IT, minimize the time & cost of outages and other hidden costs. I think that the real determiner of when you need to move from cloud to sand is when the privacy implications start to be a major issue. Otherwise, the level at which you can stay in the cloud should only increase.

By: Pete Steege

Pete Steege — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:16:38 +0000

Seems like IT is bifurcating between clouds and sand. The requirements are different, the deliverables too.

We’ll see a limited group (IBM, Cisco, EMC, etc) in the cloud, with a wider variety of solutions from a wider variety of players in the sand.

By: Robin Harris

Robin Harris — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:48:05 +0000

Noah, good question. I tried to (quickly) find that reference when I did the post and no luck. Still not finding the reference that I remember, but James' presentation Internet-Scale Service Efficiency (pdf) hits the high points in slide 4. I'm remembering a more detailed blog post or paper, and I can't find either. Maybe a reader can help me out here. Robin

By: Noah Campbell

Noah Campbell — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:31:17 +0000

Can you provide a reference to your statement: “James Hamilton’s numbers that large-scale, purpose-built scale-out systems are significantly cheaper – like 1/6th – than standard enterprise kit?”