Hybrid Cloud Computing
Introduction
Gartner places Cloud Computing as the #1 topic that CIOs need to pursue in 2010 to help their organizations remain competitive. Out of the three industry recognized Cloud Models (Public, Private and Hybrid) the one that the majority of companies can utilise today for undisputed business benefit is Hybrid. Hybrid Cloud Computing sees companies placing core requirements with customer owned Data Centre investments and covering their infrequent and peaky requirements with on-demand (turn-on and turn-off) Cloud Provider based platforms, such as Amazon EC2, that are charged by the hour.
Activities well suited to Hybrid Cloud Computing include capacity overflow, Disaster Recovery & BCP, intensive batch processing and software development.
Hybrid Cloud Computing Benefits
The acknowledged benefits of Hybrid Cloud are as follows:
- Agility - rapid and inexpensive provisioning to enhance business growth
- Effectiveness - low entry barrier for infrequent tasks
- Scalability - dynamic on-demand provisioning, to cope with service peaks and online flash floods
- Continuity - cost effective BCP & Disaster Recovery capability
- Device & Location Independence - access from anywhere and bring resources closer to users
- Sustainability - improved resource utilization, more efficient systems and carbon neutrality
Budgetary constrained IT departments will have many activities that they may wish to push to the cloud over the year ahead. E-traders in particular may see the benefit of overflow systems that supplement their existing data centre investments. For instance a 24x7x365 e-trader may look to field 80% of annual online transactions (which occur 8,304 hours of the year) with its in-house systems and catch the final 20% peak load (which occurs over 432 hours) resultant from campaigns with a Cloud platform. Doing so would result in massive CAPEX and OPEX efficiencies, compared with deploying further full time in-house platforms to cope with just 432 hours of transactions.
The Challenges
The central challenge facing organizations is how to attain optimal performance, availability and security to make the cloud stand as a viable supplement to their private High Performance Computing systems. To do so the only viable solution is for enterprises to anchor and control the Hybrid Cloud with technologies in their infrastructures (thereby enabling instant switching of multiple cloud providers, regulate privileged users etc...) - treating the cloud as an extension to their systems and not an orphan.
The four problems to delivering a successful Hybrid Cloud outcome are:
- Identifying the business requirement - defining and proving the solution can be difficult
- Enabling Hybrid Cloud Computing requires diverse cross vendor skills (often including open source) along with solid security and governance experience - this is made difficult as Cloud Providers are typically focused on commodity sell with limited governance, design, deployment and complex support expertise
- Hiring new FTE's to fill the skills gap defeats the point of the Cloud business case
- Design, deployment and support mistakes could be costly - getting billed for accidental usage and systems not being operational when called
Given the challenges, then finding the right cloud is by finding the right partner with enough integration experience to known what is the optimal solution beyond the commodity.
Foehn's Hybrid Cloud Solutions
Foehn deliver highly focused solutions that efficiently close the performance, availability and security gap between High Performance Dedicated Computing and Hybrid Cloud models:
