July 13, 2010 at 9:38 am
I worked for a call center that had a seasonal product. 99% of their business happened From June first to July 30th. The call center would go from a small call center with 30 to 60 operators to many sites with 3000 operators answering calls.
Inorder to accomodate the "Peak" season we'd spend Janurary through may building up the infrastructure to handle the peak. We'd spend August collasping down the infrastucture. During the build up circuits would have to be ordered, workstations re-imaged and sent out to the various sites we'd set up, phone infrastucture built and temporary workers hired. The server side stayed the same but we'd expand what we needed based on the previous years peak and what the forcasted change would be. In this scenario it may of been much better if we could of done something like a private cloud being that there was no real reason to maintain the additional servers during the off peak months. VM's have become much better than back then maybe just having everything virtual would have been enough. It would of been nice to have been able to scale up and down as needed and only pay for what we were consumming when we were consumming it.
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July 13, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Private clouds are perfectly reasonable evolution of in-house IT services. In fact, this may be inevitable for some organizations (or applications) before they consider public clouds. Most private clouds will have some public access to remote locations, applications, users, etc. The main issue I've encountered regarding private vs. public is if the hardware and the network infrastructure the cloud runs on is private or public.
July 13, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Are we talking about the Cloud or virtualization? In a virtual environment I still work with discreet "machines". In the Cloud, my understanding it's a mystical service you plug into. Is the line blurring? Is there are difference?
For me, rather than dealing with different machines or instances I would like to connect to a service, create a database, and be on my way. There would be a service for development - let's call it "STRATUS". And a service for production - let's call it "CIRRUS". (Get it? HA!) I don't have to worry about where the machines live, the OS version, the SQL version, backups, network config, etc. Just connect, create, and go.
And I would like all of it to be reliable, secure, and robust. This is where I lose faith in the public cloud. However, I can totally envision it as a private cloud.
James Stover, McDBA
July 14, 2010 at 12:22 am
I can't wait for the folks from one the companies that I worked at, that continue struggling with Month End performance, to try such a thing so that we can find out that it doesn't matter where it lives nor how expensive or expansive the hardware may be, crap code isn't going to run much faster. They previously found that out when they went from a 4 CPU "toy" server running the Standard Edition to an 8 CPU fire breathing monster running the Enterprise edition.
Returning to the subject at hand, with VM (it seems), you have "Virtual Cloud Computing" all ready to rock and roll. Still, there's that crap code thing... 😉
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
July 14, 2010 at 12:44 am
As far as I can tell, the real future for cloud lies in SaaS (software as a service).
The seasonal example was great for showing a compelling reason for buying massive server space for only a couple of months. I've heard of people with a relatively simple one-off task requiring massive horsepower to again buy massive power for a few days or weeks rather than letting something crunch on for months of realtime on a single physical server.
Another great one I've heard of is buying managed MS Exchange services on a domain-plus-per-user basis. For non profit orgs that are big enough to want shared address books and some collaboration features, but not large enough to make it worth forking out the odd $10k to buy the SBS hardware and licenses, this looks like a great option, especially when you consider that it effectively pays maintenance as well.
There is always the internet-connection-vulnerability issue, but in terms of ROI that may be outweighed.
Not to mention the recent incident with the total client data loss on the T-Mobile network reminding us that we are now at the mercy of someone else's diligence in backing up, or of trying to back up out data through a thin pipe.
July 14, 2010 at 12:57 am
It seems that the cloud and VMs could really benefit from true load balancing in SQL Server. When that finally happens, then we have quite a potential for the cloud. It would be real easy to ramp up or down based on application load or requirements.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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July 14, 2010 at 1:19 am
ben.mcintyre (7/14/2010)
As far as I can tell, the real future for cloud lies in SaaS (software as a service).The seasonal example was great for showing a compelling reason for buying massive server space for only a couple of months. I've heard of people with a relatively simple one-off task requiring massive horsepower to again buy massive power for a few days or weeks rather than letting something crunch on for months of realtime on a single physical server.
Another great one I've heard of is buying managed MS Exchange services on a domain-plus-per-user basis. For non profit orgs that are big enough to want shared address books and some collaboration features, but not large enough to make it worth forking out the odd $10k to buy the SBS hardware and licenses, this looks like a great option, especially when you consider that it effectively pays maintenance as well.
There is always the internet-connection-vulnerability issue, but in terms of ROI that may be outweighed.
Not to mention the recent incident with the total client data loss on the T-Mobile network reminding us that we are now at the mercy of someone else's diligence in backing up, or of trying to back up out data through a thin pipe.
I have to ask... what happens when everyone using such a thing suddenly needs to ramp up to solve a seasonal load? Will the cloud provider(s) actually have enough hardware behind the scenes to keep up with all the customers with the same seasonal demands? Even clouds have borders.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
July 14, 2010 at 1:29 am
True, but it's the same with every service. What happens when everyone picks up the phone at the same time and wants to dial interstate ? What happens when everyone want to call in their margin loans at once ? 🙂
It's not invulnerable, but I would imagine, the bigger the group, the more the local trends tend to smooth out, especially when the service is provided to the world.
Here in Australia, we end our financial months on the 15th. 😉
July 14, 2010 at 9:10 am
Ben,
That's exactly right. We've seen this happen with web servers, with a lot of success (and other issues). We recently did it here with the need for Sharepoint, but not enough need to justify the $10-20k for hardware and licensing. We just bought a hosted service.
July 14, 2010 at 10:19 pm
I just left a "lecture" on "Azure". I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in some of the restrictions and lack of features (like a backup) even though it has a pretty serious high availablility redundancy.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
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