A real-world cloud user shares his findings

I subscribe to a number of mailing lists from my alma mater. A few weeks ago, an alum "John" posted a request for recommendations for a cloud computing vendor for his small investment firm. What follows is his email to the group following responses he received.

This is an incredibly illustrative peek inside of the "real world" of cloud computing, and what prospective SMB users are looking for and concerned about. As well as what's "Good Enough". I've not edited anything....


I had many requests to share our findings so I figured I would share with the group. I appreciate all of the input I received. It has been really helpful.

~ John


Having looked into cloud computing solutions for our small investment firm over the past few months, we have learned a lot about the growing movement towards remote data storage and accessibility. Our goal has been to find a cost-effective solution for our IT needs that would make it convenient for employees of our company to access our shared network (documents and emails) all over the globe without much hassle, difficulty, or expense. While the cloud computing landscape is still relatively new, what is already available is exciting. Both Google, Microsoft, and other companies have products available such as Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live, but neither has fully come to the point of being able to handle our business needs. We are currently in the process of setting up a Google Apps trial period, through a consultant, to try out business e-mail and calendar via Google’s Gmail and Google Calendar. We will do this test while retaining our current Microsoft Exchange server.

There have been many issues to consider as we have been speaking with various consultants and researching all of the available alternatives. First, since we are an SEC-registered investment adviser with lots of confidential and sensitive information on our hands, issues regarding the security of our electronic files – both in terms of disaster recovery as well the integrity of the company with whom we are entrusting to house our data – are paramount. This also ties in with the issue of record retention, which is equally important to us. In terms of data storage and backup – our current system is not ideal. We need to retain copies of all e-mails and files for at least seven years, if not more, and this information needs to be secure and easily accessible. There seem to be some progress in this area (Google Postini and Amazon S3, for example), but as of yet, there is not yet one system that can do all of these things in the way we’d require.

Second, since we currently are not pleased with our current remote network access - we would like an easy and inexpensive way to access email and our network drive from any computer with Internet access. We have discovered that while web-based, unlimited e-mail and calendar storage are currently available from multiple providers, a solution for mass file storage that would essentially replicate our shared network drive and allow large files for multiple software applications to be stored/backed up in the cloud does not yet exist at an attractive price. In particular, a system where we could modify docs in the cloud without having to download and upload/re-save the file each time it needs to be edited.

One interesting product we discovered during our search is called Dropbox. You download Dropbox to one computer, save any type of file you would like to a “Drop Box drive”, and it syncs up automatically with the Web. Then, when you are at home or traveling, you can access those docs through a web browser... or you can download Drop Box onto another computer anywhere and you can edit the docs directly in Drop Box. The only glitch is that Dropbox does not yet have file storage capacity for a company with over 200GB of data to store and seems to be geared more for individual users. Word on the street is that Google will be coming out with a new product soon that has similar features to Dropbox, but on a much larger scale that would be useful for businesses.

In terms of cost and ease, Google Apps seems to be the best solution for us right now (it comes out around $50/user/year), at least for the e-mail and archiving component. Microsoft’s upcoming 2010 Web Apps platform seems appealing as well, particularly because we might be able to edit complex Excel documents directly in the cloud from anywhere.

Bottom line, what we have learned is that this rapidly-developing option for IT is not yet 100% ready to cover all the bases our business needs, but it will probably get there sometime in the next year or two. For the time being, we are going to see how the e-mail works and go from there.

Alternative Recommendation for DCeP "Service Productivity"

Back in February of this year, The Green Grid published a paper listing proposed Proxy measures for data center productivity, specifically Data Center Energy Productivity (DCeP).

This paper followed a much earlier output from the group in 2007 - which helped define the now much-used PUE and DCiE metrics which I wrote about back then. Those metrics were (and are) nice if what you care about are "basic" efficiencies of a data center -- simply how much power is getting to your servers relative to all of the other power being consumed by infrastructure systems (e.g. lighting, power distribution, cooling, etc.). But the shortcomings are they don't quantify the "useful output" of a datacenter vs. power input. So, for example, you could have a fantastic PUE... but with a datacenter full of idle servers.

Again, enter The Green Grid to take analysis to the next level. The excellent paper published in February details 8 "proxy" approaches (i.e. not necessarily metrics) that could be used by data center operators to begin to baseline efficiencies based on "useful output". The Green Grid also set up a survey where they have been soliciting feedback from users regarding the appropriateness, usefulness, etc. of these proxies.

Why 8 approaches? Because not everyone agrees on what "useful work output" of a datacenter really is. Should it be Bits-per-kWh (proxy #4)? Weighted CPU utilization (proxies #5 & #6)? Compute units delivered per second (proxy #7)? Each has its pros and cons. Fortunately, the Green Grid recognized that nothing's perfect. Says the paper: "...The goal is to find a proxy that will substitute for a difficult measurement, but that still gives a good-enough indication of useful work completed."

In addition, the Data Center Knowledge blog pointed out:

The new goal is to develop a simple indicator, or proxy, rather than a full metric. The Green Grid compares the proxy to EPA mileage ratings for new cars, which provide useful data on energy efficiency, with the caveat that “your mileage may vary.” The proposals “do not explicitly address all data center devices and thus fall short of a complete overall measure of data center productivity,” the group says.

To this end, the issue was also recently dealt with extremely eloquently in Steve Chambers' ViewYonder perspective on datacenter efficiency - and has the right idea: Why not base efficiency on the service provided (as opposed to CPUs themselves, or some abstract mathematical element). This approach is very similar to what I proposed a year ago February, Measuring "useful work" of a Datacenter"

In short, the proposal is to compare the data center Service's SLAs with the power the overall datacenter consumes.

Why use the "SLA" (Service Level Agreement)? Two reasons. (1) The SLA is already part of the vernacular that datacenter operators already use. It's easily understood, and frequently well-documented. (2) The SLA encapsulates many "behind-the-scenes" factors that contribute to energy consumption. Take this example: Not all 1,000 seat email services are created equal. One may be within a Tier-I data center with a relatively low response rate requirement and allowing users only 500MB of storage per mailbox. Another enterprise with the same email application may be operating in a Tier-III datacenter environment with a rigorously-controlled response rate, a full disaster-recovery requirement, and 2GB of storage per mailbox. These two SLA examples are quite different and will therefore consume different power. But wouldn't you now rather compare apples-to-apples to see if your particular instantiation of these 1,000 mailboxes was more efficient to another enterprise with the same SLA?

How would such a proxy/measurement be accomplished? The approach is somewhat analogous to the Green Grid's proxy #1 ("Self-assessment reporting"), coupled with peer-reporting/comparison of data as is done with the DOE's DC-Pro tool.

Thus, data centers would
1) quantify the number of Services and SLAs for each,
2) measure overall power consumed,
3) upload these numbers to a public (but anonymized) database.
After a while, there would be statistically-significant comparisons to be made -- say a "best practice" energy efficiency range for a given Tier-III email application with 2GB storage and disaster-recovery option.

I'm open to other suggestions of how to pragmatically apply application SLAs vs Watts to gauge overall datacenter energy efficiency - again, my earlier proposal of this is here. But it seems that the SLA encapsulates all of the "output" related service metrics, while being agnostic to the actual implementation. Seems elegant, if you ask me.

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