During a keynote at the recent VMWorld EMEA event, in Cannes, Dr. Wolfgang Krips, VP, SAP Managed Services postulated that the Cloud Computing industry could become like the airline industry - not in terms of its energy consumption as has been speculated by various environmental groups and analysts but in terms of the way IT managers buy Cloud Computing services.

• Today there are full service airlines ( seat reservation, in-flight meals, luggage handling - the works ) and low cost airlines ( open seating, bring-your-own food & pay extra for hold baggage ) - you pay your money and take your choice as to the type of service you want.
• Ticket prices vary enormously depending on routing and day/time
• Over-booking is an accepted practice and having a ticket does not always guarantee a seat
• Departure/Arrival times are variable - weather, air-traffic delays etc
• You can but your tickets from the airline directly , via a portal ( www.expedia.com, www.opodo.com etc ), as part of a complete package - flight, hotel, car etc, last minute or discounted from a bucket shop .

When you think forward as to where the Cloud Computing industry is going it quite easy to imagine that all of these elements could be applied to future cloud offerings

• Prices will depend on the SLA offered - guaranteed uptime, data integrity or just take lowest cost compute resource available.
• Portal sites will act as brokers for the various services available and sell capacity - we are already seeing this from companies like Zimory ( www.zimory.com )
• Underutilised data centres may sell off excess capacity at discounted rates just to fill their facilities or the popular services may raise price to limit demand
• response time/completion time of a job run in the cloud will be non-deterministic - dependant on network traffic and system loading

So, definitely food for thought as to what the future of Cloud Computing will bring and how IT might interact with the various providers on the market place.

Are there other business models being proposed for Cloud services - I would be interested in hearing your opinions.

I am writing this sat in the departure lounge at Nice Airport, awaiting my flight home after having spent the week in Cannes at VMworld EMEA '09, which has just finished. Focus of this years event was somewhat different from last year, last year everything was 'Green' this year we were all living in the Cloud, or at least that ís the way the keynotes painted the picture. Most of exhibitors and attendees however still seemed to have their feet firmly planted on the ground in the reality of using todayís technology.

Sticking with the keynotes, last year they were very product and feature centric whilst this year one got the impression that VMware were providing more of a vision of where they see their software taking the industry - and this was most definitely into the cloud !

Another shift was in the client space where last year VDI was the buzz word and thin clients would solve all our business needs, this year there seemed to be an acknowledgement that the rich client has a place ( even if it might be virtualised ) so for those PowerPoint junkies amongst us who want all the cpu power they can get at their fingertips whenever and wherever they are this is good news. In terms of virtualising clients one bit of news from the conference was that VMware plan to develop a bare metal ( type 1 ) hypervisor for clients that takes advantage of Intel's VPro Technology to provide amongst other things out-of-band management and authentication of the hypervisor.

Back into the clouds, 'IT as a Service' was one of the keynote themes with VDC-OS and Vcloud enabling this. For those that didn't attend the event the keynote videos are here. To support the 'IT as a Service' story SAP presented on their IT infrastructure, of particular interest was the proposition that in the future Cloud computing would become much like the airline industry with low cost providers competing with full-service providers,  pricing varying by time and demand, aggregators ( a.k.a bucket shops ) selling off excess capacity and resource over-commit becoming a feature of using the cloud.

Walking the show floor it was clear that if VMware were in the clouds most of the rest of the folks in Cannes were clearly facing up to today's reality of deploying technology to enable their business's. Much of the focus this year seemed to be on storage and back solutions, with management and networking also be key topics. It also felt like there was a more technical bias amongst the attendees than last year - maybe due to the current economic climate.

One parting thought is that what ever else is happening in the IT industry the momentum behind the virtualisation train continues to grow and its something we all need to be taking into consideration when planning our IT strategy.

I often get asked what type of server a customer should use when landing their virtualised infrastructure, the immediate response is an obvious one, given I work for Intel - an Intel based server ! But beyond this the answer is a little more complex and to some extent depends on the philosophical approach the data centre manager wants to take to architecting their data centre.

There are a number of choices that can be made when using standard Intel based server hardware - ignoring the obvious decision as to the hypervisor vendor - DP ( 2-way ) vs MP ( 4-way ) servers, rack mount vs blade.

Ultimately any server decision is the right one ( so long as its an Intel based solution ) but some of the factors that will influence the decision are :-

• How many virtual machines ( VMs ) are you prepared to host onto a single server - MP servers can host substantially more VMs than DP - over 2x more depending on the workload within the VMs - this is down to the better memory capacity and larger number of I/O slots that MP servers typically support compared to DP servers. Against this using a DP server may be a better solution as 2 DP servers may cost less than an MP server, and combined host as many VM's whilst not having as many VMs hosted onto a single server.

• Density & Form factor - DP servers typically have a higher density form factor than MP servers - at the expense of less I/O & memory capability. But you need to take into consideration that an MP server can host more VMs than a DP server so within a given rack space use of a lower number of MP servers may well enable hosting of more VMs than using more DP servers.

• Blades vs Rack - there is significant momentum building behind the move to bladed servers, mostly driven by the fact that the density achievable using blades is far higher than that possible use rack mount servers. Also the shared resources of a blade solution ( power supplies, cooling, network switches etc ) can lead to cost and power savings in high density configurations. The challenge with hosting a virtualised infrastructure on blade servers however is that blades tend to be limited in the amount of memory and I/O that they can support. The trade off of course is that with the increased density of a blade solution its possible with fewer VMs/Blade but more Blades/rack the overall number of VMs that can be hosted within a given data centre is greater using blades than rack mount servers.

Other factors to take into consideration are that MP servers typically have a higher level of built-in RAS ( reliability, availability & serviceability ) features than DP servers and when hosting multiple VMs on a single server the overall reliability of a servers and its ability to be serviced without shutting down all the hosted VMs becomes very important to the overall efficiency of the Data Centre.

As I said at the beginning - there is no simple answer and a lots depends on the approach you want to take in architecting your solution. Intel's own IT department has done lots of work in this area and have posted many of their results here for others to learn from their experiences.

The only thing that is for certain is that whatever decision is made on form factor the performance of the processors you specify has a direct impact on the number of VMs a server can host - the higher the CPU performance the more VMs that can be hosted and the lower the impact of the hypervisor overhead on the overall system performance, check out the latest virtualisation performance data here and here

As this is the first time posting here, here is a quick intro, I started out as a hardware designer for a UK computer company - back in the days when the PC was still a grey tin box with a 4.77MHz 8088 inside. I have been with Intel now for more years than I care to think about, with much of this time working with the OEMs and end-customers focused in the server market across EMEA.

As I trawl thru the press and listen to the industry analysts one topic that everyone is discussing is 'data centre efficiency' ( even elsewhere on this forum Intel IT Data Center Efficiency Initiative - Going Green, Data Center Efficiency ) but what's not real clear is what defines an efficient data centre - is it the efficiency of the servers, the cooling subsystems, the workload that can be handled in a given time or the operational processes that are in place to run the data centre ? And once you have decided what is considered 'efficient' how do you measure or quantify this efficiency.

Currently there are several approaches being considered by the industry to measure data centre efficiency, and I thought it would be worth spending some time looking at three elements that can affect DC efficiency - power, utilisation and process. Given the complexity of the topic I plan to take this in bite sized chunks ( rather than write a mass of text and lose the thread ). So, in this blog I will cover power and will come back to the topic in a subsequent posting to look to the other elements. If you think there are elements to DC efficiency that I am missing please feel free to chip in and provide your insights.

Power Efficiency - Measuring the ratio between the facilities load - cooling, power conversion etc vs. the IT load - compute/storage/infrastructure. Typically this approach focus's on the ratio of electrical power consumption of the various elements within the data centre. With the current focus on the 'environmental & green' aspects of data centres this seems to be the area where most of the attention on Data centre efficiency is focused.

If you look at the average Data Centre today its not just the compute infrastructure that consumes the Watts, power gets consumed by the cooling systems and air conditioners, voltage conversion & battery storage, lighting etc. All this contributes to the 'facilities load' - for many IT managers this does not hit their IT budget and they may not even see the power bill from the utility company so have no idea how much power is consumed by these key elements of their data centre. Current estimates indicate that upwards of 50% of the power that comes into the average data centre gets 'lost ' in the facilities load, more details here & here

There are several groups looking to quantify energy efficiency The Green Grid is working on metric called PUE ( Power Usage Effectiveness ) to measure the ratio of power consumed by the facilities load vs. the power available to the IT equipment in the data center - details in their white papers here. Also the Uptime Institute are doing something similar and various government institutions are getting interested as well and there's an extensive US govt white paper ( if you have a few hours spare to ingest its 150 pages) . In addition the European Union is working on a Data Centre Code of Conduct

The server OEMs are also working on a benchmark for measuring perf/watt ( http://www.spec.org/specpower/ ), these are great for measuring how good a server is on a test workload and how many transactions it can deliver for a given power input. With the increased focus on energy efficient performance this metric will become more and more important to the specifiers and purchasers of servers. With Intel's latest generation 45nm quad core Xeon processors we continue to drive up the performance a processor can achieve for a given Watt input, the challenge for the rest of the industry now is to lower the overall power consumption of the other elements within the server and to increase the throughput of the storage and I/O subsystems to complement the increase processor performance. But at the end of the day does a good perf/watt for a server indicate that a data centre is efficient ?

What's missing from this approach is that there is often no consideration made as to the utilisation of the servers within the data centre consequently it might be possible to achieve 'good' power efficiency numbers but have low server utilisation and hence not extracting the most workload out of the data centre. Here in EMEA we have initiated a Data Centre Efficiency Award to try and start to get a handle how best to identify DCs that are running best practices and delivering of power and utilisation efficiency.

I guess the question at the end of the day is do you consider that your Data Centre is efficient and how are you quantifying this efficiency ?