Two interesting points from Intel’s Jason Waxman on private cloud and cost. He cautions that building a private cloud is “quite a daunting task”, that there is no off-the-shelf hardware and interconnect solution suitable for a private cloud. He also offers a view on conventional IT costs: servers are 50% of data center outlays, electrical power and cooling are another 23%.
This suggests to me a baseline comparison of traditional IT vs. (public) cloud costs: if a unit of incremental computing capacity – say a single server – costs X per hour, then the equivalent capacity in the cloud should cost at least 2X per hour. Then the other values of cloud (non-ownership, elasticity etc.) should be added *on top* of the base cloud cost.
The article is “Intel Details Private Cloud Hurdles”, Information Week reporting on the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara.
(Maybe some folks on the list are there in person, but I have to be content with the trade press reports.)
Regards,
Joe
_____________________________________________
Joseph G. Baron, Enterprise IT Solutions Architect
11808 Mountbatten Way, Raleigh, NC 27613
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Interesting points from Jason Glassman!. But I think he and Intel have two options.
1) Figueout a way to make the daunting tasks un-daunting in building private clouds or
2) Hire a bunch of Psychologists to over come the CIO FUD! With public clouds.
Since Intel is almost a monopoly and has lot of money, it probably can do bothJ
Interesting points from Jason Glassman= !. But I think he and Intel have two options.
1) = Figueout a way to make the daunting tasks un-daunting in buildi= ng private clouds or
2) = Hire a bunch of Psychologists to over come the CIO FUD! With pu= blic clouds.
Since Intel is almost a monopoly and h= as lot of money, it probably can do bothJ
From:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] = On Behalf Of Joseph G. Baron
Sent: Wednesday, November 04= , 2009 4:08 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Intel's Waxman: "[building a private cloud is] quite a daunting task", plus some cost data=
Two interesting points from Intel’s Jason Waxman on private cloud and cos= t. He cautions that building a private cloud is “quite a daunting task”, that there is no off-the-shelf hardware and interconnect solut= ion suitable for a private cloud. He also offers a view on conventional IT cost= s: servers are 50% of data center outlays, electrical power and cooling are another 23%.
This suggests to me a baseline comparison of traditional IT vs. (public) cloud costs: if a unit of incremental computing capacity – say a single ser= ver – costs X per hour, then the equivalent capacity in the cloud should = cost at least 2X per hour. Then the other values of cloud (non-ownership, elasti= city etc.) should be added *on top* of the base cloud cost.
The article is “Intel Details Private Cloud Hurdles”, Information Week reporting on the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara.
(Maybe some folks on the list are there in person, but I have to be content with t= he trade press reports.)
> Only 27% split between labor, storage, networking, and other costs?
Ray,
It's not clear whether or not labor was included; I suspect not. The
article is pretty sketchy, maybe somebody who actually attended the
talk could fill in the details...
— Joe
Sent from my iPhone (919) 809-9542
> Maybe in TX. Most everywhere else P&C is closer to 40-45%
Ray,
That 23% seemed low to me as well, I'm used to seeing numbers that put
P&C closer to your 40-45% -- that is, about the same as (or even more
than) the cost of the server. But 23% is Waxman's number.
Possibly….but AMD is too small to make a dent on Intel at this time.
AMD needs a major M&A partner….nobody is bold enough to acquire AMD and pissoff Intel…
Microsoft atleast has some competition from Java/IBM/Sun-Oracle camp but Intel virtually has no competition.
“Do you think if Intel were broken up that there would be more business?”
Not sure. If Intel is broken up lile AT&T, this would give the proprietary HW vendors (IBM,HP&Sun) a second chance.
Is it a good thing?...Don’t know, unless the proprietary HW prices come down to the level of commodity HW.
So far Intel is keeping the prices low despite being an almost monopoly.
If the proprietory HW vendors close their (HW) shops and Intel raises/controls the prices, then the Fed anti-trust might kick-in and Intel will might be either broken up or price regulated especially if computing becomes utilities.
“Until Nehalem, Intel was at a significant disadvantage to AMD in the MIPS per WATT arena. Dense DCs choosing blades frequently chose Opterons solely because of the thermal envelope.”
Sure, technologically AMD had done a great job especially never letting Intel become complacent, but it is unable to steal the market share from Intel.
There are other things that might come into play when you make Cloud scale business decisions. How long will AMD last?....if you buy 50 to 100,000+ servers from AMD for your cloud and AMD files for bankruptcy, isn’t your cloud in a mega melt down?....
@Jan said: So does Intel have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo (server sprawl)?
Certainly, which is why this piqued my interest – Waxman’s views run *counter* to what you would think is Intel’s vested interest. That is why I think this is an honest assessment of private cloud from Intel-the-consumer-of-huge-amounts-of-IT-stuff, not a marketing spin from Intel-the-chipmaker. If it was a spin, you would expect Intel to say “Private clouds are great!”, because Intel would tend to benefit more from private cloud and traditional IT status quo than they would from large-scale adoption of public cloud. But Waxman says exactly the opposite, to paraphrase: “Private clouds are hard, there are no off-the-shelf [server and infrastructure] solutions”, and “Public clouds have done a very impressive job of engineering to make this all work, which would be very hard and very costly to duplicate in a private cloud”. A roundabout way of saying “Public clouds are great!”
BTW, if you are of the mind that cloud computing shares a lot of DNA with HPC, batch clusters, and high-throughput-computing, Intel has a great deal of experience in this area. Chip design schedules are constrained by the number of logic simulation and verification cycles you can afford to throw at the problem, and as a result, Intel has been in the high-throughput batch cluster business since, well, forever – certainly long before this kind of thing was practical on x86 architectures. So if any company on earth ought to be well-equipped to build a private cloud, it ought to be Intel. Yet Intel says building a private cloud it is a “daunting task”. Interesting…
Perhaps this gives some justification for the EMC / VMware / Cisco Vblock joint venture, to put the hardware and software infrastructure together in a way that is intended to make sense for cloud?
– Regards,
Joe Baron +1 (919) 809-9542
From: Ray DePena
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Two interesting points from Intel’s Jason Waxman on private cloud and cost. He cautions that building a private cloud is “quite a daunting task”, that there is no off-the-shelf hardware and interconnect solution suitable for a private cloud. He also offers a view on conventional IT costs: servers are 50% of data center outlays, electrical power and cooling are another 23%.
This suggests to me a baseline comparison of traditional IT vs. (public) cloud costs: if a unit of incremental computing capacity – say a single server – costs X per hour, then the equivalent capacity in the cloud should cost at least 2X per hour. Then the other values of cloud (non-ownership, elasticity etc.) should be added *on top* of the base cloud cost.
The article is “Intel Details Private Cloud Hurdles”, Information Week reporting on the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara.
(Maybe some folks on the list are there in person, but I have to be content with the trade press reports.)
“Storage and interconnect will emerge as the critcal areas in cloud infrustructure while CPU fades in importance”
It is like saying hands and legs are more important than brain….did not happen so far in the human history!.
From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ray
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009
8:49 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Re:
Intel's Waxman: "[building a private cloud is] quite a daunting
task", plus some cost data
Of course. Storage and interconnect will emerge as the critcal areas in cloud infrustructure while CPU fades in importance for the first phases.
Ray
On Nov 4, 2009, at 6:02 PM, Jan Klincewicz <jan.kli...@gmail.com> wrote:
So does Intel have a vested interest im maintaining the status quo (server sprawl) ? Would CC (public) favor less expensive AMD procs?
From: Rao Dronamraju <rao.dro...@sbcglobal.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:10 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Re: Intel's Waxman: "[building a private cloud is] quite a daunting task", plus some cost data
Interesting points from Jason Glassman= !. But I think he and Intel have two options.
1) = Figueout a way to make the daunting tasks un-daunting in buildi= ng private clouds or
2) = Hire a bunch of Psychologists to over come the CIO FUD! With pu= blic clouds.
Since Intel is almost a monopoly and h= as lot of money, it probably can do bothJ
From:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] = On Behalf Of Joseph G. Baron
Sent: Wednesday, November 04= , 2009 4:08 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Intel's Waxman: "[building a private cloud is] quite a daunting task", plus some cost data=
Two interesting points from Intel’s Jason Waxman on private cloud and cos= t. He cautions that building a private cloud is “quite a daunting task”, that there is no off-the-shelf hardware and interconnect solut= ion suitable for a private cloud. He also offers a view on conventional IT cost= s: servers are 50% of data center outlays, electrical power and cooling are another 23%.
This suggests to me a baseline comparison of traditional IT vs. (public) cloud costs: if a unit of incremental computing capacity – say a single ser= ver – costs X per hour, then the equivalent capacity in the cloud should = cost at least 2X per hour. Then the other values of cloud (non-ownership, elasti= city etc.) should be added *on top* of the base cloud cost.
The article is “Intel Details Private Cloud Hurdles”, Information Week reporting on the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara.
Ray,
You are , without being aware, a Marxist. The Monopoly is one of the few solid contributions to economics that survive time, from Karl Marx. The anti-Monopoly Law in US has its’ origin in the teachings of Karl Marx
“Marx's view was that capital accumulation, economies of scale, the growth of credit markets, and the dominance of the corporation in business organization would lead to the concentration and centralization of capital into fewer and fewer hands. Competition would end by destroying itself, and the large corporation would assume monopoly power. With the large corporation would come a separation of ownership and control, along with a number of undesirable social consequences:
a new aristocracy of finance, a new sort of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators, and merely nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation juggling, stock jobbing, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.7 Possibly no other vision of the future of capitalism advanced by Marx has been more prophetic than his law of the concentration and centralization of capital”
http://www.economictheories.org/2008/07/karl-marx-concentration-and.html
Miha
From: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com [mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Ray DePena
Sent: Friday, November 06, 2009 5:08 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Please don't try to rewrite history. This thread started with Intel's
attempt at competitive positioning, and differentiation has been an
essential part of it ever since. It's not anyone else's fault if you've
failed to realize that.
> The question was whether CPU will fade in the
> clouds in relation to networking and storage.
Yes, and that can be interpreted two different ways - as a statement
about CPU's effect on system performance or as a statement about ability
to differentiate.
> No it does not. Infact if you
> see the developments in clouds including Google, Yahoo and Amazon, one of
> the most important cloud technologies and architectures talked about is
> map-reduce/Hadoop etc. Now this is clearly a CPU centric/bound technology.
> With multi-cores and massive parallelism it is has been the CPU land so far.
That's true, but has no effect on the argument at hand. Let's say, for
the sake of argument, that having CPUs that are twice as fast would
improve overall performance by 50% but having an interconnect that's
twice as fast would only improve overall performance by 25%. Thus, you
could say that CPUs are twice as important as interconnects in terms of
system performance. However, if there is no CPU twice as fast as what
your competitors but there is an interconnect three times as fast (e.g.
QDR IB vs. 10GbE) then interconnect is more important as a
differentiator. Get it?
> If networking was so important in the clouds, how come we have not heard any
> major technological developments in it other than regular 10Gig. Storage
> probably fared better with pata byte and beyond storage scaling. In
> networking we have not even heard about 100GigE and on the WAN side it seems
> to be the same old T1, T2 & T3....
Yeah, there's no such thing as IB or DWDM. Welcome to this century,
Rao. Look around a bit, there's some cool stuff.
Enough with the broken analogies, already. I've personally worked on
dozens of systems and applications where network bandwidth - and even
more often network latency - affected overall performance as much or
more than CPU power did. It's part of the competition; "only CPU
matters" is a hopelessly narrow-minded view that will not serve anyone
well in the real world, and I have nothing else to say to anyone so
misguided.