Very anti-cloud/IaaS article

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Pietrasanta, Mark

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Mar 2, 2012, 1:38:16 PM3/2/12
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I was surprised to read this article today:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/232601889?cid=nl_IW_btl_2012-03-02_text&elq=8bed93cdadb54ca88b64019ec99ec00b#

 

His arguments are mostly theoretical, and also underestimate the labor, cooling, space, etc. costs.  But it’s interesting, and I’m curious what others think about it?

 

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Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal

Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland

 

Amy Wohl

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Mar 2, 2012, 3:02:44 PM3/2/12
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So let’s see, he’s assuming you can take advantage of today’s prices every day – in fact, you’d be using the same hardware for on average, in corporate environments, three years or more.  Then there’s the labor cost of doing the upgrades.  It’s not that he’s wrong that compute and storage can take advantage of cheaper hardware prices today – that’s true.  Rather, it’s not taking into account normal hardware replacement policies and labor costs.

 

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Geoff Arnold

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Mar 2, 2012, 3:07:46 PM3/2/12
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It's a really lousy analysis. Completely hand-waves away the question of opex, and ignores the costs of lead time, long-term DC or colo contracts, procurement delays, etc. Clearly availability or disaster recovery are not part of his model either.

Geoff

Oya SANLI

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Mar 2, 2012, 3:25:37 PM3/2/12
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Hi Mark,
I agree in any case IT people need very sharp pencile for the calculations. Any provider while calculating their prices they are also taking the all related prices in the consideration. So they are finding a way of additional payment like for reading/writing. But, it is really interesting to see how raw storage prices lowered. And I believe they will be lowered more.
The comparison as you said not included the operational expenses, I believe with those expenses prices would be head to head. So choosing Amazon services will be save from many headaches, for that reason it is worth it. 
Best,

 

Oya Şanlı

General Manager

PayDeg

@oyasan @RollOutCloud

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From: Pietrasanta, Mark
Sent: Friday, March 02, 2012 8:38 PM
To: mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Very anti-cloud/IaaS article
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wayne pauley

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Mar 2, 2012, 4:00:17 PM3/2/12
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mark,

I think you will find this article provides a few insights into what makes the comparison interesting - based on workload patterns:


Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Very anti-cloud/IaaS article
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 18:38:16 +0000

Miha Ahronovitz

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Mar 2, 2012, 3:39:35 PM3/2/12
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The article from Information Week shows that in-house hardware is lower cost than using IaaS services and uses only Amazon storage as illustration.

Charlie Oppenheimer, Matrix Partners has a similar, but much more thorough calculation, which I summarized in my post  Amazon or self-hosted? http://bit.ly/yoZjVy The conclusion is that in some cases Amazon is better and in others the in-house private cloud is better.

The deciding factor is data-transfer fees over the network.

Why people pick up Amazon as Universal example of IaaS?  One reason they are the largest player. The second reason is damn complicated to compare prices among IaaS providers. But IaaS "street prices" when one shops around properly are significantly lower.

Art Wittmann  Managing Director, Information Week Reports   and the author of the article  must receive some credit, He is a modern day Moses-like, who challenges biblical Pharaoh - AWS  that he is not Gd

 Because of the brand name and reputation, AWS has much higher prices . I hope Information Week article will open ways to discover other IaaS providers and all Geo-s, who can make the IaaS  real value obvious.

Miha Ahronovitz
Ahrono Associates
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Pietrasanta, Mark

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Mar 2, 2012, 7:36:18 PM3/2/12
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I saw that article as well - GigOm is a very academic source of information.

Again, they completely ignored the labor costs, and their bandwidth assumptions are crazy. 

It's like these articles are taking one aspect (bandwidth, storage), scaling it to crazy levels, looking at it in isolation, and then drawing conclusions about Cloud providers.

You really need to look at a complete *realistic* solution, and compare *total costs*.

I can say, for sure, that in many (most of my customers') real life scenarios, moving to the cloud from in-house saves 50-75% or more of the total costs, including labor and O&M.

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Kiran Kamreddy

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Mar 3, 2012, 1:07:25 AM3/3/12
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I partially agree with some of the points in the article that IaaS does not make sense in all the situations. I am working on a research project at an acedemic institution to evaluate IaaS offerings and if it makes sense to move the current on premise IT to Cloud offerings.

we tested both Amazon and Rackspace offerings and found that the yearly cost was atleast more than 7-8 times the cost of maintaining on premise infrastucture. Some of our findings were as below.

1, IaaS makes more sense when these are economies of scale. for example, the environment that we were looking at had only 150 servers. They also had free licenses from MSFT for OS and database servers. these freebies are lost if they move to IaaS. The vendors which we evaluated refused to offer bare bones infrastructure.

2, There is not much variability in terms of server usage in the current IT environment. We factored 75% as the most pessimistic usage and still the costs of Aamzon/rackspace were to the tune of 6X.

3, The server sizes offered by vendors are often restrictive ( some times too small and some time too large). for example, Rackspace has only 4 sizes of server offerings and often they are not exactly met by the usage servers 

4, The IT environment has a small team of IT management team ( 6 in total ) and they do not see it changing ( for various reasons ) even if they move to IaaS.

5, The network and backup costs are considered in the ROI calculations which will even skew the numbers in favor of on premise. Also, the transition costs ( training, culture change etc ) to Cloud from existing environments were another considerations which will only add to IaaS costs.

6, Since not all the applications can be moved to external environment, there is additional overhead in developing and maintaining applications which will talk to private and public environments.

regards,
Kiran

Ian Mills

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Mar 3, 2012, 8:29:01 AM3/3/12
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The flaw in his argument in is the first line, he writes
'Infrastructure as a Service' and then compares its cost with
Infrastructure as lump of metal. The same logic would have companies
overall IT spend halving every other year, which is clearly not true.

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Ono Adiohwo

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Mar 3, 2012, 12:51:49 PM3/3/12
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Some interesting points thus far but the writers views has to be taken in its entirety.

At the end of the day if money can be saved in this current economic climate then companies would buy into it.

Bernard Golden

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Mar 3, 2012, 7:42:28 PM3/3/12
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His argument is, essentially, the cost of on-premise storage has
dropped a lot over the past five years, much more than S3. From that,
he concludes that on-premise is a better model.

While I wouldn't say, by any means, that S3 is always more cost
effective than on-premise, I would say that one has only to look at
the scale and growth of S3 storage to recognize that a large user base
finds it a compelling value proposition. Amazon has .75 *trillion*
objects in storage (as of Q411) and S3 is growing at well over 100%
per year. That is enormous demand. From that real-world perspective, I
would conclude:

Firstly, if, as a provider, one of your major challenges is just
installing enough equipment to keep up with demand, reducing prices
significantly is a poor strategy. For one, it's obvious that the
market sees what you're offering AND the price you're offering it at,
as attractive. There is no need to reduce price to attract customers.
Moreover, reducing price would only increase demand. Since you're
having trouble keeping up with the demand you see, why would you want
to increase it further, especially as an inability to offer the
service would affect all customers and impose market dissatisfaction
with your service?

Secondly, with such a large user base, one should accept the market's
judgment that S3 offers a valuable enough service at its current price
points to make it more attractive than the other options, which
include on-premise storage. The article's perspective reminds me of
the old economist joke that goes like this: Two economists are
discussing some real-world phenomena. The first says to the second:
"Sure it works in the real world. The question is, will it work in
theory?"

Shawzer

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Mar 3, 2012, 11:28:02 PM3/3/12
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This is a good example of bloggers v. Do-ers.

I can spin numbers all day to support either side. Any armchair
quarterback can. However, to understand the true cost you must include
OpEx, and I mean support of the product(s). XaaS is the means by which
you transfer "supporting" cost to a presentation layer SLA. In other
words, moving to IaaS the client is not concerned, or paying for, the
care and feeding (people, upgrades: hardware/software, MTBF parts,
etc) of the infrastructure.

DR Shaw

Jeanne Morain

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Mar 4, 2012, 2:02:34 AM3/4/12
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Dr Shaw and Bernard,
Both are great points. Unfortunately, those that are doing have less time to blog and pontificate. The joke is befitting. About 2 years ago - I asked a customer that had worked with me to create one of the first HIPPA compliant clouds with Amazon and a Private cloud. The poor guy was roasted by several arm chair jockeys on his architecture. The architect received a patent for it and built a company around the solution. Walmart is his biggest customer... Better to do than to preach :-).

Perhaps is looking at it from the wrong angle or needs to dig deeper into what is causing hybrid cloud stall. Most customers I have worked with have sited license and compliance (regulatory - particularly with tougher HIPPA mandates) as a bigger issue.

Cheers,
Jeanne
Www.client4cloud.com

Sent from my iPad

Joseph Kulandai

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Mar 4, 2012, 2:20:30 AM3/4/12
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In the recent years hardware cost has reduced and in future it will go down further, but that is an advantage shared by both.
Whether cloud providers pass on the cost benefit to consumer is a question of business and not technology.
When resource gets shared and the volume of service is huge, it will always be better than own infrastructure.
Amazon is an early entrant. Cloud provider market space will get more competitors in future also small players will emerge, forcing cost reduction.
Regards,
Joseph Kulandai

Sent from my iPhone

On 04-Mar-2012, at 6:12 AM, Bernard Golden <bernard...@gmail.com> wrote:

> this

Oya SANLI

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Mar 4, 2012, 3:24:09 AM3/4/12
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Hi to all,
I agree, I bought my first notebook at 1995 and it was about $3,500 with
60mb disk and with windows 3.11 and so on :) Two years ago bought new one
intel core i5, 3Gb memory and 300gb disk and so on and was about $1,500.. As
I'm following the market for cloud computing last four years many new
vendors are in the market. Even in Turkey we have 5 new vendors last year.
With innovation and competition prices would be much lowered so cloud
computing would be worth more using it. Especially publicly.
Best,
Oya Şanlı
http://about.me/oyasanli
-----Original Message----- From: Joseph Kulandai Sent: Sunday, March 04,
2012 9:20 AM To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com Cc: Cloud Computing
Subject: Re: [ Cloud Computing ] Re: Very anti-cloud/IaaS article

Vic Winkler

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Mar 4, 2012, 8:00:13 AM3/4/12
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Agreeing with what you say. But what is left out of these discussions and "calculations" is at LEAST as important as the relative costs. 

To wit: Most organizations aren't REALLY in the IT business, IT shouldn't be in their CORE STRENGTH realm (their business is business, not IT) and they can't really be expected to deliver to the degree of assurance and security that they SHOULD be meeting.

The more appropriate bottom line? 

Unless your business IT footprint is large enough to allow for appropriate investment, your security and IT operations costs will be out of whack with your needs. In contrast, a public cloud services provider can do exactly that (as can a community-service).

Countless small businesses and startups have faced this decision and have decided against making investments in both people and IT and elected to spend their IT dollars with public cloud services -- thus leaving IT in the hands of a professional staff they never need to hire or manage.

This is all a great simplification of the matter, but there is a good deal to this that plays into the new calculations as to cost... 

-- Vic Winkler
V...@VicWinkler.com   
Cell: (703) 622-7111
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Miha Ahronovitz

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Mar 4, 2012, 9:31:41 AM3/4/12
to cloud-c...@googlegroups.com, Bernard Golden, mij...@sbcglobal.net
Excellent, clear post Bernard. You paint the S3 situation as this:

> For one, it's obvious that the market sees what you're offering AND
> the price you're offering it at, as attractive. There is no need to
> reduce price to attract customers. Moreover, reducing price would only
> increase demand. Since you're having trouble keeping up with the
> demand you see, why would you want to increase it further, especially
> as an inability to offer the service would affect all customers and
> impose market dissatisfaction with your service?
What you describe is a monopoly and it is a just a question of time
before powerful alternatives will force the price down, because "price
of storage went down" and most important the price of data ubiquity
across wide geographies will go down.

For example, in Feb 2012 see SpiderOak takes on Amazon S3 in archival
storage � Cloud Computing News http://bitly.com/wt2Tcf.

The following URL lists tens of S3 alternatives - contenders, including
MyBox (that runs on S3)
http://www.cloudsurfing.com/site/576-Amazon-S3-Simple-Storage-Service/competitors/

To challenge Amazon in general and S3, IMO there will be a consolidation
of companies around some newer players who have the ambition and the
managerial ability and the freshness of thinking to match Amazon. The
names in my mind are Joyent, Virtustream, as long as they make it on
their own and are not acquired and thrown into oblivion by very large
companies

Google announced with great fanfare an S3 competitor , it is now live,
but really did not affect customers preference for S3

But one point to make, if you at the price calculations example on
google.com
https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms

You see a bill in this example $8.2K for storage and $6.5K for network
costs. This proves the point I made in many posts, namely that about 50%
or more of total cost of operating a cloud is network costs

http://bit.ly/yoZjVy
http://bitly.com/wWVtC9

Assuming Google charges as a promotion $0 (zilch) for storage, there is
still a charge $6.5K for network

People don't like - I agree with Bernard here - to go to one supermarket
to buy tomatoes, to another one to buy coffee and to a third place to
buy bread, just to save $1.73, while using a 1 gallon of gas at $4.30
here in California. Besides, it is the personal inconvenience.

Miha

Ditlev Bredahl

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Mar 4, 2012, 11:34:10 AM3/4/12
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Seen from our perspective AWS is sitting ~50% of the IaaS market for 3
reasons, (1) they have more scale (2) better geographical reach and
(3) a wider product breadth - than any other player in the industry -
the entry barriers to a matching position requires more resources
(money, knowhow, infrastructure, etc) than any single player in the
market are able to put up.
We (onapp.com) put 3-5 new public cloud providers live every single
day, and we see that those succeeding actually do it by not competing
with AWS, not trying to beat them on their own game, but find new
niches and slimmer segments that put's them in a unique position.

:)
D

Oya SANLI

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Mar 4, 2012, 12:51:08 PM3/4/12
to cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
To be in the business providers must have some amount of unused
infrastructure and monitor and chose right time to buy new devices (or be
partner with other providers) in order to cover the necessity.
In the real life of the IT department of one of the company one may never
cover necessities while thinking the business as a whole. At that point
using cloud services I believe is the best choice..
Oya Şanlı
-----Original Message----- From: Miha Ahronovitz Sent: Sunday, March 04,
2012 4:31 PM To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com Cc: Bernard Golden ;
mij...@sbcglobal.net Subject: Re: [ Cloud Computing ] Re: Very
anti-cloud/IaaS article

Excellent, clear post Bernard. You paint the S3 situation as this:
> For one, it's obvious that the market sees what you're offering AND the
> price you're offering it at, as attractive. There is no need to reduce
> price to attract customers. Moreover, reducing price would only increase
> demand. Since you're having trouble keeping up with the demand you see,
> why would you want to increase it further, especially as an inability to
> offer the service would affect all customers and impose market
> dissatisfaction with your service?
What you describe is a monopoly and it is a just a question of time
before powerful alternatives will force the price down, because "price
of storage went down" and most important the price of data ubiquity
across wide geographies will go down.
For example, in Feb 2012 see SpiderOak takes on Amazon S3 in archival
storage — Cloud Computing News http://bitly.com/wt2Tcf.

Oya SANLI

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Mar 4, 2012, 12:32:41 PM3/4/12
to cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Hi Vic,
Thanks for sharing your book. I will read it. I believe so too, every provider is better taking care of security then small, medium and sometimes big companies. As far as I see only banks can keep up with them..

 

Oya Şanlı

General Manager

PayDeg

@oyasan @RollOutCloud

about.me
Linkedin Profile 

http://oyasanli.com

http://paydeg.com

 

 

From: Vic Winkler
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2012 3:00 PM
To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [ Cloud Computing ] Re: Very anti-cloud/IaaS article

Shawzer

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Mar 5, 2012, 3:14:47 PM3/5/12
to Cloud Computing
Kudos for keeping me energized on this topic. As a Do-er, I'm
constantly pulled in many business direction. I know I might have
typed too much, but this is still only scratching the surface of the
depth each of these disciplines need attention to.

Oddly enough, I just had a brief chat about <a href="http://
www.linkedin.com/updates?discuss=&scope=2925802&stype=M&topic=5581373029314732033&type=U&a=VYD6&pk=nprofile-view-feed-success&goback=%2Enpv_20690736_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1%2Enpf_*1_20690736_*1_*1_1_*1&trk=NUS_UNIU_SHARE-num-comment"
target="_new">AWS</a> recently.

@ Miha - Some good points. This is technology, like all others is a
cyclical. It will be new -> developing -> emerging -> UAT -> mainstay
-> decline. We can't label a large cloud pioneer (like AWS - argument
to ensue) a monopoly. Just like MSFT ramped up, they were not the
best of breed. But, MSFT innovated and bought there way here and are
now stagnant. MSFT has played catch up for some time in different
product lines. Heck, I've used Google Doc's and Openoffice almost as
long as I've used MSFT comparable products. As more players fill a
cloud niche, we will see cost drop. Sure, like all other innovations
when the R&D is paid. But we have to remember, as a new arena like
cloud compute opens up, there is R&D cost that must be paid for. Yes,
this means early adopters are forking over more than the latter
adopters. As cloud technology enters mainstream, the price points
will be competitive because large companies start to commoditize the
offering. As for AWS, they do charge differently per site; CA, OR,
VA. This tells me they do some level of active pricing with local
merchants (data centers, power, cooling, etc).

@ Jeanne, I think we are saying the same things. Do-ers don't have
time to blog. But those that gloss over marketing numbers and
generalization are the ones that business get sidelined by, especially
the SMB's. For example, Hey Google mail. Sounds cool because I can
have 25G email inbox. (I'd position this as application abuse and
educate on the proper placement of data, but that's for another blog)
But for a company of more than 50 people, you lose a lot of benefit
that would have had if it were locally managed, like Exchange. The
underlying license to make Google mail (for business) the same as
Exchange, you will pay more. Need a mail rely for market emails on
Gmail, another licensing and then volume cost to factor in.

@ Vic Winkler - your "calculations", if referring to OpEx support
cost, are right on. The magic number of in-house IT or not is fluid,
as you implied. Less then 10% is what is expected for IT costs. In
extra large organizations, that are not technology focused, you can
see $2BB being spent on IT. While IT is not the CORE business, it gets
the CORE business done, in turn, a competitive advantage.

Cloud does have a place in your IT budget. The questions are around
what level of risk do you wish to assume for your IT needs; ''in-
house' or 'out-source'.

Thx for letting me post

DR Shaw



On Mar 4, 9:31 am, Miha Ahronovitz <mij...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Excellent, clear post Bernard. You paint the S3 situation as this:> For one, it's obvious that the market sees what you're offering AND
> > the price you're offering it at, as attractive. There is no need to
> > reduce price to attract customers. Moreover, reducing price would only
> > increase demand. Since you're having trouble keeping up with the
> > demand you see, why would you want to increase it further, especially
> > as an inability to offer the service would affect all customers and
> > impose market dissatisfaction with your service?
>
> What you describe is a monopoly and it is a just a question of time
> before powerful alternatives will force the price down, because "price
> of storage went down" and most important the price of data ubiquity
> across wide geographies will go down.
>
> For example, in Feb 2012 see SpiderOak takes on Amazon S3 in archival
> storage Cloud Computing Newshttp://bitly.com/wt2Tcf.
>
> The following URL lists tens of S3 alternatives - contenders, including
> MyBox (that runs on S3)http://www.cloudsurfing.com/site/576-Amazon-S3-Simple-Storage-Service...
>
> To challenge Amazon in general and S3, IMO there will be a consolidation
> of companies around some newer players who have the ambition and the
> managerial ability and the freshness of thinking to match Amazon. The
> names in my mind are Joyent, Virtustream, as long as they make it on
> their own and are not acquired and thrown into oblivion by very large
> companies
>
> Google announced with great fanfare an S3 competitor , it is now live,
> but really did not affect customers preference for S3
>
> But one point to make, if you at the price calculations example on
> google.comhttps://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms
>
> You see a bill in this example $8.2K for storage and $6.5K for network
> costs. This proves the point I made in many posts, namely that about 50%
> or more of total cost of operating a cloud is network costs
>
> http://bit.ly/yoZjVyhttp://bitly.com/wWVtC9

Manjunathan Subramanian

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Mar 5, 2012, 4:19:17 PM3/5/12
to cloud-c...@googlegroups.com
I think the author makes a very valid point of making sure you read the entire contract with a service provider like Amazon before signing up for a long term need.  He goes on to say that for Cloud bursting it might be ok or where there is not a whole lot of computational / read - write work it might be ok but when it involves a lot of data, processing....it might be worthwhile doing the math.  While I agree with your point about labor, cooling, space, etc......I think if companies could get into some serious virtualization, consolidation....they could find a lot of money in their own shop prior to going to Amazon.  While you seem to concentrate on some of the Data Center related costs....there is a infrastructure that the company still would have to maintain in terms of network.  So, for a business, taking into consideration Amortization / depreciation, etc and control over their costs in order to be able to budget properly...a private cloud with ability to perform cloud burst might be a good route.

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Miha Ahronovitz

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Mar 6, 2012, 3:12:13 AM3/6/12
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Amazon announced, coincidentally today, a new drop in prices
Amazon Web Services Blog: Dropping Prices Again-- EC2, RDS, EMR and
ElastiCache http://bitly.com/xoYFNP

Miha

On Mar 5, 12:14 pm, Shawzer <shaw...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Kudos for keeping me energized on this topic.  As a Do-er, I'm
> constantly pulled in many business direction.  I know I might have
> typed too much, but this is still only scratching the surface of the
> depth each of these disciplines need attention to.
>
> Oddly enough, I just had a brief chat about <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/updates?discuss=&scope=2925802&stype=M&topic=5581373..."

Gabriel Pugliese

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Mar 6, 2012, 9:28:00 AM3/6/12
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It seems it invalidates someone's point in this thread. Amazon keeps reducing its price and it's very impressive for me too.
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Sassa

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Mar 6, 2012, 9:45:10 AM3/6/12
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> I can say, for sure, that in many (most of my customers') real life scenarios, moving to the cloud from in-house saves 50-75% or more of the total costs, including labor and O&M.

Yes, but what about those that don't move? Isn't this because they
can't make the same saving?


Sassa


On Mar 3, 12:36 am, "Pietrasanta, Mark"
<Mark.Pietrasa...@aquilent.com> wrote:
> I saw that article as well - GigOm is a very academic source of information.
>
> Again, they completely ignored the labor costs, and their bandwidth assumptions are crazy.
>
> It's like these articles are taking one aspect (bandwidth, storage), scaling it to crazy levels, looking at it in isolation, and then drawing conclusions about Cloud providers.
>
> You really need to look at a complete *realistic* solution, and compare *total costs*.
>
> I can say, for sure, that in many (most of my customers') real life scenarios, moving to the cloud from in-house saves 50-75% or more of the total costs, including labor and O&M.
>
> -------
> Mark Pietrasanta | CTO | o: 301-939-1152 |www.Aquilent.com<http://www.Aquilent.com/>
> Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
> Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
> Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland
>
> On Mar 2, 2012, at 4:00 PM, wayne pauley <wayne_pau...@hotmail.com<mailto:wayne_pau...@hotmail.com>> wrote:
>
> mark,
>
> I think you will find this article provides a few insights into what makes the comparison interesting - based on workload patterns:
>
> http://gigaom.com/2012/02/11/which-is-less-expensive-amazon-or-self-h...
>
> Wayne Pauleywww.linkedin.com/in/waynepauley<http://www.linkedin.com/in/waynepauley>www.privately-exposed.com<http://www.privately-exposed.com/> (blog)www.infocus.emc.com<http://www.infocus.emc.com> (EMC blog)www.twitter.com/wpauley<http://www.twitter.com/wpauley>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Mark.Pietrasa...@aquilent.com<mailto:Mark.Pietrasa...@aquilent.com>
> To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com<mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Very anti-cloud/IaaS article
> Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 18:38:16 +0000
>
> I was surprised to read this article today:http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/23...
>
> His arguments are mostly theoretical, and also underestimate the labor, cooling, space, etc. costs.  But it’s interesting, and I’m curious what others think about it?
>
> -------
> Mark Pietrasanta | CTO | o: 301-939-1152 |www.Aquilent.com<http://www.Aquilent.com>
> Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
> Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
> Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland
>
> --
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>
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Peter Spellman

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Mar 6, 2012, 10:30:25 AM3/6/12
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I don't if its because they can't make the same saving or if its:

- Fear, uncertainty and doubt about getting and being in the cloud. Inertia is powerful and there is mis-information or lack of knowledge on how best to go about it.
 
- Their apps are not well suited go to into the cloud yet.  It usually not as simple as simply reinstalling it 'up there'.

I've seen both of these dimensions in my experience.

-Peter

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Miha Ahronovitz

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Mar 6, 2012, 1:12:07 PM3/6/12
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Good point. When talking about costs, it seems like driving a plane in clouds with no instrumentation. This is why the new cloud billing sw will be necessary.

Miha


On 3/6/2012 7:30 AM, Peter Spellman wrote:

I don't if its because they can't make the same saving or if its:

- Fear, uncertainty and doubt about getting and being in the cloud. Inertia is powerful and there is mis-information or lack of knowledge on how best to go about it.
�
- Their apps are not well suited go to into the cloud yet. �It usually not as simple as simply reinstalling it 'up there'.

I've seen both of these dimensions in my experience.

-Peter
On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Sassa <sass...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can say, for sure, that in many (most of my customers') real life scenarios, moving to the cloud from in-house saves 50-75% or more of the total costs, including labor and O&M.

Yes, but what about those that don't move? Isn't this because they
can't make the same saving?


Sassa


On Mar 3, 12:36�am, "Pietrasanta, Mark"

<Mark.Pietrasa...@aquilent.com> wrote:
> I saw that article as well - GigOm is a very academic source of information.
>
> Again, they completely ignored the labor costs, and their bandwidth assumptions are crazy.
>
> It's like these articles are taking one aspect (bandwidth, storage), scaling it to crazy levels, looking at it in isolation, and then drawing conclusions about Cloud providers.
>
> You really need to look at a complete *realistic* solution, and compare *total costs*.
>
> I can say, for sure, that in many (most of my customers') real life scenarios, moving to the cloud from in-house saves 50-75% or more of the total costs, including labor and O&M.
>
> -------
> Mark Pietrasanta | CTO | o: 301-939-1152 |www.Aquilent.com<http://www.Aquilent.com/>
> Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow�s Government

> Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
> Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland
>
> On Mar 2, 2012, at 4:00 PM, wayne pauley <wayne_pau...@hotmail.com<mailto:wayne_pau...@hotmail.com>> wrote:
>
> mark,
>
> I think you will find this article provides a few insights into what makes the comparison interesting - based on workload patterns:
>
> http://gigaom.com/2012/02/11/which-is-less-expensive-amazon-or-self-h...
>
> Wayne Pauleywww.linkedin.com/in/waynepauley<http://www.linkedin.com/in/waynepauley>www.privately-exposed.com<http://www.privately-exposed.com/> (blog)www.infocus.emc.com<http://www.infocus.emc.com> (EMC blog)www.twitter.com/wpauley<http://www.twitter.com/wpauley>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Mark.Pietrasa...@aquilent.com<mailto:Mark.Pietrasa...@aquilent.com>
> To: cloud-c...@googlegroups.com<mailto:cloud-c...@googlegroups.com>
> Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Very anti-cloud/IaaS article
> Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 18:38:16 +0000
>
> I was surprised to read this article today:http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/23...
>
> His arguments are mostly theoretical, and also underestimate the labor, cooling, space, etc. costs. �But it�s interesting, and I�m curious what others think about it?

>
> -------
> Mark Pietrasanta | CTO | o: 301-939-1152 |www.Aquilent.com<http://www.Aquilent.com>
> Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow�s Government
�

Posting guidelines: http://bit.ly/bL3u3v
Follow us on Twitter @cloudcomp_group @cloudslam @up_con
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�
�
�

Sassa

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Mar 7, 2012, 5:17:20 AM3/7/12
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I do agree there are many factors. Maybe I misunderstood Mark's point.
I thought the article gives examples of application profiles that
don't fit the cloud well.

Why is the bandwidth assumption crazy? Is 50KB per click and all of
its content a long shot? It seems 10K clicks a second at peak will
generate the 1800GB/Hr mentioned. I only can't tell if that's a
typical app. Google says a typical web page is even several times
heavier (consequently, need several times less clicks a second to get
the same traffic).

It seems the traffic will depend on whether a typical app generates
web content for humans or a service response for machines, but the
premise doesn't seem unsound at all.


Sassa
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Pietrasanta, Mark

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Mar 7, 2012, 9:17:25 AM3/7/12
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It simply doesn't match the reality (or mine at least) showing substantial savings - all the time - for people shifting from in-house to cloud (including to AWS).  I don't think I've seen less than a 50% savings/cost reduction, and it's usually closer to 75% when you factor in total costs.

(Maybe it's that the architecture in his example doesn't really make sense as it's proportionately out of whack.)

Hey, I was skeptical of cloud early on, and I think you could even dig up some of my theoretical musings from way-back-when on how cloud doesn't make sense.  But now that I've been actually doing it for the past few years, with real customers and systems, it's clear that no matter what academic argument you can make, the reality is that moving the the cloud, I would go so far as to say for the majority of people, will save them substantial money.

-------
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Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
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Chris Haddad

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Mar 7, 2012, 11:24:25 AM3/7/12
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Mark,    Do you have any published case studies for us to view?    I see Aquilent's website promotes work with predominantly government entities.   What sectors, industries, and corporate profile define your real customers moving into the Cloud?

/Chris

Pietrasanta, Mark

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Mar 7, 2012, 11:36:14 AM3/7/12
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All Federal Government - civilian and some DoD.  And all in various states:
- in-house data centers with physical machines
- in-house data centers moving towards virtualization
- outsourced hosting managed internally
- outsourced hosting and management

And a few other variations.  Also all shapes and sizes - public facing websites, internal business systems, intranets, etc.  Pretty much all web-based systems though for our work.

-------
Mark Pietrasanta CTO | o: 301-939-1152 | www.Aquilent.com
Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland
 

Oya SANLI

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Mar 8, 2012, 1:20:55 PM3/8/12
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Bernard Golden

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Mar 8, 2012, 4:53:51 PM3/8/12
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Mark:

I seem to recall that a couple of years ago you felt that internal clouds would be lower cost than public offerings. Is that still your perspective, or has your experience indicated otherwise?

Would very much like to get your thoughts on this.

Thanks.

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Ray

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Mar 8, 2012, 5:36:04 PM3/8/12
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RE:  "4. The IT environment has a small team of IT management team ( 6 in total ) and they do not see it changing ( for various reasons ) even if they move to IaaS."

Regardless, those costs should not be ignored. It's quite common for businesses to ignore labor costs in their analysis. Many see those costs as fixed, not variable. 

Even if the business has no plans to reduce their labor costs, the analysis should take it under consideration because those costs along with power, cooling, real estate, etc. are borne by the service provider and are reflected in the price of the service. Many businesses and IT executives overlook or ignore these costs.

At a minimum, those costs will reflect the true cost of delivering those services in-house, and can help future analysis on how best to allocate in-house resources for various projects. 


On Friday, March 2, 2012 10:07:25 PM UTC-8, kiran kamreddy wrote:
I partially agree with some of the points in the article that IaaS does not make sense in all the situations. I am working on a research project at an acedemic institution to evaluate IaaS offerings and if it makes sense to move the current on premise IT to Cloud offerings.

we tested both Amazon and Rackspace offerings and found that the yearly cost was atleast more than 7-8 times the cost of maintaining on premise infrastucture. Some of our findings were as below.

1, IaaS makes more sense when these are economies of scale. for example, the environment that we were looking at had only 150 servers. They also had free licenses from MSFT for OS and database servers. these freebies are lost if they move to IaaS. The vendors which we evaluated refused to offer bare bones infrastructure.

2, There is not much variability in terms of server usage in the current IT environment. We factored 75% as the most pessimistic usage and still the costs of Aamzon/rackspace were to the tune of 6X.

3, The server sizes offered by vendors are often restrictive ( some times too small and some time too large). for example, Rackspace has only 4 sizes of server offerings and often they are not exactly met by the usage servers 

4, The IT environment has a small team of IT management team ( 6 in total ) and they do not see it changing ( for various reasons ) even if they move to IaaS.

5, The network and backup costs are considered in the ROI calculations which will even skew the numbers in favor of on premise. Also, the transition costs ( training, culture change etc ) to Cloud from existing environments were another considerations which will only add to IaaS costs.

6, Since not all the applications can be moved to external environment, there is additional overhead in developing and maintaining applications which will talk to private and public environments.

regards,
Kiran
On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 7:36 PM, Pietrasanta, Mark <Mark.Pie...@aquilent.com> wrote:
I saw that article as well - GigOm is a very academic source of information.

Again, they completely ignored the labor costs, and their bandwidth assumptions are crazy. 

It's like these articles are taking one aspect (bandwidth, storage), scaling it to crazy levels, looking at it in isolation, and then drawing conclusions about Cloud providers.

You really need to look at a complete *realistic* solution, and compare *total costs*.

I can say, for sure, that in many (most of my customers') real life scenarios, moving to the cloud from in-house saves 50-75% or more of the total costs, including labor and O&M.

-------
Mark Pietrasanta CTO | o: 301-939-1152 | www.Aquilent.com
Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland
On Mar 2, 2012, at 4:00 PM, wayne pauley <wayne_...@hotmail.com> wrote:

mark,

I think you will find this article provides a few insights into what makes the comparison interesting - based on workload patterns:


Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Very anti-cloud/IaaS article
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 18:38:16 +0000
I was surprised to read this article today:

 

His arguments are mostly theoretical, and also underestimate the labor, cooling, space, etc. costs.  But it’s interesting, and I’m curious what others think about it?

 

-------
Mark Pietrasanta | CTO | o: 301-939-1152 | www.Aquilent.com
Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland

 


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http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002H07SEC, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004L1755W, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002H0IW1U
 
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On Friday, March 2, 2012 10:07:25 PM UTC-8, kiran kamreddy wrote:
I partially agree with some of the points in the article that IaaS does not make sense in all the situations. I am working on a research project at an acedemic institution to evaluate IaaS offerings and if it makes sense to move the current on premise IT to Cloud offerings.

we tested both Amazon and Rackspace offerings and found that the yearly cost was atleast more than 7-8 times the cost of maintaining on premise infrastucture. Some of our findings were as below.

1, IaaS makes more sense when these are economies of scale. for example, the environment that we were looking at had only 150 servers. They also had free licenses from MSFT for OS and database servers. these freebies are lost if they move to IaaS. The vendors which we evaluated refused to offer bare bones infrastructure.

2, There is not much variability in terms of server usage in the current IT environment. We factored 75% as the most pessimistic usage and still the costs of Aamzon/rackspace were to the tune of 6X.

3, The server sizes offered by vendors are often restrictive ( some times too small and some time too large). for example, Rackspace has only 4 sizes of server offerings and often they are not exactly met by the usage servers 

4, The IT environment has a small team of IT management team ( 6 in total ) and they do not see it changing ( for various reasons ) even if they move to IaaS.

5, The network and backup costs are considered in the ROI calculations which will even skew the numbers in favor of on premise. Also, the transition costs ( training, culture change etc ) to Cloud from existing environments were another considerations which will only add to IaaS costs.

6, Since not all the applications can be moved to external environment, there is additional overhead in developing and maintaining applications which will talk to private and public environments.

regards,
Kiran
On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 7:36 PM, Pietrasanta, Mark <Mark.Pie...@aquilent.com> wrote:
I saw that article as well - GigOm is a very academic source of information.

Again, they completely ignored the labor costs, and their bandwidth assumptions are crazy. 

It's like these articles are taking one aspect (bandwidth, storage), scaling it to crazy levels, looking at it in isolation, and then drawing conclusions about Cloud providers.

You really need to look at a complete *realistic* solution, and compare *total costs*.

I can say, for sure, that in many (most of my customers') real life scenarios, moving to the cloud from in-house saves 50-75% or more of the total costs, including labor and O&M.

-------
Mark Pietrasanta CTO | o: 301-939-1152 | www.Aquilent.com
Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland
On Mar 2, 2012, at 4:00 PM, wayne pauley <wayne_...@hotmail.com> wrote:

mark,

I think you will find this article provides a few insights into what makes the comparison interesting - based on workload patterns:


Subject: [ Cloud Computing ] Very anti-cloud/IaaS article
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2012 18:38:16 +0000
I was surprised to read this article today:

 

His arguments are mostly theoretical, and also underestimate the labor, cooling, space, etc. costs.  But it’s interesting, and I’m curious what others think about it?

 

-------
Mark Pietrasanta | CTO | o: 301-939-1152 | www.Aquilent.com
Aquilent - Innovating Tomorrow’s Government
Top 50 Best Places to Work, Washington Business Journal
Government Contracting Firm of the Year, Tech Council of Maryland

 


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