Private cloud: get it right and exploit its energy economics

a whitepaper from Computer Weekly

By the end of 2012, more than half of the workloads in datacentres will have been virtualised, providing the foundation for private

cloud computing capabilities to cut datacentre costs and increase energy efficiency. However, TechTarget’s Data Centre Decisions 2011 survey found 57% of UK and European users are not using or considering using private cloud computing over the next 12 months. So are energy-efficient private cloud datacentres at an industry tipping point, or is it all merely market hype?

Contents

How to exploit the energy economics of page 2private cloud

Jenny Williams looks at the reality of cutting energy bills with private cloud datacentres

How to decide your cloud strategy page 4

Clive Longbottom sets out the issues that must be addressed by companies moving their applications to private cloud

Tips for getting private cloud right page 6

James Staten addresses some misperceptions about investing in private cloud environments and driving adoption

These articles were originally published in the Computer Weekly ezine.

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aprivate cloud tipping point will be reached by the end of 2012. According to Neil MacDonald, vice-president

and Gartner fellow, more than half of the workloads in datacentres will have been virtualised, providing the foundation for private cloud com-puting capabilities to cut datacentre costs and increase energy efficiency.

However, TechTarget’s Data Centre Decisions 2011 survey found 57% of UK and European users are not using or considering using private cloud computing over the next 12 months.

its capital budget by removing disas-ter recovery (DR) and server replace-ment costs.

“We save roughly another 80% on power compared to what we would be using if our servers were not virtu-alised,” says Dan Byne, IT manager at Palmer’s College.

Analyst Gartner believes private cloud platforms will further enhance server and storage virtualisation ener-gy efficiencies. Private cloud plat-forms allow businesses to protect

“Hillingdon’s consolidated server environment has reduced energy costs by approximately £94,000 a year”

How to exploit the energy economics of private cloudJenny Williams looks at the reality of cutting energy bills with private cloud datacentres

data using an internal, corporate net-work behind a firewall.

In a report titled Shrinking Data Centers: Your Next Data Center Will Be Smaller Than You Think, Gartner analyst David Cappuccio says private clouds and resource pooling enhance vertical scalability in the datacentre, while at the same time improving the productivity-per-kilowatt ratio.

By 2018, Cappuccio predicts data-centres will take up only 40% of the space they occupy today, mainly

With so many private cloud infra-structure offerings on the market – from VMware’s vSphere to Microsoft Hyper-V and System Centre and new products such as Dell’s pre-packaged private cloud for datacen-tres, vStart 200 – are energy-efficient private cloud datacentres at an in-dustry tipping point, or is it all mere-ly market hype?

Virtualisation for private cloudVirtualisation is being used to sig-nificantly reduce power usage in datacentres. According to Computer Weekly’s sister title, SearchVirtualDa-tacentre, Palmer’s College in Essex re-duced over 20 IBM servers to three in a server virtualisation and datacentre consolidation project.

The datacentre now uses VMware vSphere 4.1 servers and saves 19% of

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A major user of energy in the IT sector is the abundance of datacentres operated by organisations around the world, including corporations and academic institutions. According to Rich Lechner, IBM’s vice-president for energy and environment: “Energy use in datacentres is growing 12 times faster than worldwide energy use.”

A key metric in streamlining datacentres is power usage effectiveness (PUE). A PUE of 1 is perfect (that is, all of the energy is being used to drive computation). According to Bill Weihl, Google’s green energy czar, a PUE of 2 is considered good in the industry, but Google maintains a PUE of 1.2 by building its own servers and datacentres, which is one of its competitive advantages. In describing the energy wasted in most datacentres, Weihl explained that “servers waste, for no particular good reason, an enormous amount of power.”

Nevertheless, a PUE of 1.2 means that 16.7% of the energy is being used for purposes other than computa-tion – much of it wasted.

The GreenLight Project at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology is seeking to address the environmental concerns that arise from modern datacentres by developing an instrumented datacentre that can serve as a test bed for better power management process.

Fortuitously, building new generations of supercom-puters relies on better power utilisation, so the interests

of developers of new kinds of computers are well aligned with the search for sustainable power.

Bringing the whole industry toward more sustainable practices is the challenge, starting with examples such as Google’s and improving on them. On Google’s green efforts, Weihl added that “the real issue here is one of scale… how do we do it in a way that is scalable and will work for everyone else?”

The Consumer Electronics Association has produced a sustainability report that provides an overview of how products are being designed with smaller environmental footprints: “Among the highlights are companies developing more energy-efficient products, using recycled and easily recyclable materials to build their machines, and cutting back on materials used for packaging.”

Additionally, there are numerous opportunities to make the way people use computers more sustainable. According to IBM’s Lechner, on average a single piece of data is saved 30 times in a given corporation, on various people’s computers, servers, and so on. Data deduplication software could reduce this redundancy and increase efficiency.

This is an edited extract from Greening Through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability, by Bill Tomlinson, published by The MIT Press in February 2012.

Greening through IThousing core business services.Sanjay Mirchandani, EMC CIO and

COO, believes deploying a private cloud environment drives energy ef-ficiencies. In 2010, EMC started mi-grating data from 47 older Clariion storage array systems onto 11 newer, greener Clariion arrays. The migra-tion took two years to avoid applica-tion disruptions. Mirchandani says it would have only taken a few weeks to get the greener systems online if it had used a private cloud.

“At each point in the process of evolving from a physical old-school datacentre to a private cloud environ-ment, you’ll be incorporating green efficiency enhancements related to power use, cooling, floor space recov-ery, storage, servers and the net-work,” he says.

Private cloud efficiencyLondon’s Hillingdon Council opted for a private cloud platform for its datacentre to cut costs and power consumption.

The council deployed a private cloud after virtualising its infrastruc-ture of 180 servers in two locations, reducing the server estate to five. The council subsequently reduced its car-bon emissions by 171 tons.

Roger Bearpark, assistant head of ICT at Hillingdon, says: “Hillingdon now uses 80% less power. The con-solidated server environment has re-duced energy costs by approximately £94,000 a year.”

Bearpark says its private cloud also allows the council to prepare for using public cloud platforms, as it does with Google Business Apps.

Limitations of private cloudBut not all experts are sold on the green benefits of a private cloud. Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, says: “The Uptime Institute reports that most datacentres have a power usage effectiveness of 2.0. This means that, for every watt delivered to the serv-ers, one is wasted in overhead.”

Companies must therefore be su-per-efficient to cut energy costs and usage for a private cloud housing data and applications. Gartner advis-es companies to virtualise as many applications as possible, using stor-age efficiency technologies such as data deduplication and buying serv-ers that maximise space and power.

Alternatively, Accenture claims companies using a public cloud’s multi-tenant environment can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30%, compared to run-ning Microsoft enterprise applica-tions on its own infrastructure.

Using a public cloudCompanies such as digital signage provider Signagelive.com are using a

public cloud from infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) supplier Rackspace, which runs its OpenStack cloud in-frastructure platform.

Jason Cremins, CEO at Signagelive.com, says the firm previously had a private cloud infrastructure with dedicated replicated machines host-ed in a UK-based datacentre. Now it has an infrastructure around six times more powerful for half the cost of the original set up and with the ad-ditional ability to activate and scale-down servers on demand, cutting costs and keeping availability high.

Companies such as Signagelive.com are also finding the pay-as-you-go and self-service payment model that IaaS encourages is significantly less wasteful.

Dirty energy powers the cloudHowever, some experts believe the overall environmental benefits of cloud-based infrastructures are ulti-mately limited by cloud suppliers.

While companies such as Micro-soft, Google and Amazon have incor-porated renewable energy into their cloud strategies, Gary Cook, Green-peace’s international IT analyst, be-lieves “dirty energy” is tarring the green benefits of the cloud.

“The rapid expansion of global tel-ecom infrastructure and datacentres that power cloud technology is driv-ing significant energy demand, much of it from dirty sources such as coal and diesel,” he says.

Speaking at a TechTarget webcast on private cloud adoption in data-centres, Simon Campbell-Whyte, ex-ecutive director of the Data Centre Alliance, said datacentres have changed dramatically over the past five to 10 years.

From servers running under your desk to virtualised environments, dedicated servers and cloud environ-ments, he says many companies are still fearful of public cloud adoption.

While a public cloud environment may offer greater energy efficiencies compared to running a private cloud environment in-house, for companies concerned about data security and regulation compliance issues, a pri-vate cloud is a good option for cutting costs and power usage, providing its operation is hyper-efficient. ■

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Research from Quocirca and Oracle last year showed companies’ acceptance of cloud is mixed.

Surveys were conducted in Febru-ary 2011 and again in November. Some 28% of respondents in the first cycle of the research felt that cloud either had no part in their organisa-tion’s future, or that it was just a pass-ing fad (see graph on page 5).

By the second cycle, this figure had dropped to 21% – still a sizable number, but those seeing cloud as a game-changer had also grown from 14% to 22%.

The public cloud approach uses cloud built on equipment that the organisation owns and runs. The pri-vate cloud option runs cloud-based services on dedicated hosted envi-

This leads to the oft-repeated worry of those considering cloud – security. As cloud computing is built on a platform of virtualisation, the actual place where data is stored or is in motion at any one time, is difficult to pin down.

Whereas this was a major issue in the past, it does not seem to be so any longer. A more coherent acceptance of the need for security of any data or information asset is becoming appar-ent; one that ensures the security of data and information, even when it has left what used to be seen as the protected confines of an organisa-

“The cloud is very good for lots of different workloads, but it is not right for all”

How to decide your cloud strategyClive Longbottom sets out the issues that must be addressed by companies moving their applications to private cloud

tion’s network.The first question that must be

addressed concerns whether a partic-ular application should be put into the cloud or not.

The cloud is not a universal pana-cea – it is very good for lots of differ-ent workloads, but it is not right for all. Reasons for not putting an appli-cation into a cloud may range from the technical (the application does not understand a cloud platform); through the financial (the applica-tion is licensed on a physical core basis and the vendor is not interest-ed in dealing with virtual cores); to the visceral (the application is per-ceived as being too mission-critical for cloud at this stage).

However, the key is to ensure that any direction chosen now does not stop any of these choices from being changed as time goes on and as cloud and the remaining applications ma-ture. Many suppliers are now provid-ing applications and tools that make this far easier, for example from VM-ware with its vMotion; CA with its 3Tera acquisition; and Novell with its

ronments (private clouds), using functions provided from systems and software owned and run by a third party for general shared use (public cloud) or a hybrid version of these two cloud models.

The largest proportion of respond-ents planned to implement private clouds only, with nearly 50% saying they would take a pure private cloud approach, whether on their own equipment in their own datacentre facility, or using co-location facilities. However, this brings up a range of issues that must be addressed by any-one looking to move to cloud.

PerformanceThe further the data resides from the point where it has to get to, the longer it takes to get there. Deci-sions must be made as to what data resides where, whether the busi-ness logic is best held with the data and what tools – such as caching, packet shaping and other WAN acceleration technologies – are needed to ensure users get a fully responsive experience. »

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The network is the weakest link in the cloud as, without network access, staff cannot connect to databases, e-mail or other applications, writes Antony Savvas.

While the cloud can store company data and deliver applications without the overheads of dedicated in-house servers and other hardware, the third party hosting the data or applications is not usually responsible for the network links from the customer to its facilities.

Companies must plan how they connect their corporate networks to third-party cloud providers to ensure they have enough affordable and reliable bandwidth to serve their users’ needs.

They must consider cost, service level agreements, security, network back up/fail-over to the cloud provider, network management and any specialist “network to the cloud” service offerings on the market. The Cisco Cloud Index predicts that over half of computing workloads in datacentres will be cloud-based by 2014. The Index also predicts global cloud traffic will grow over 12 times by 2015, to a mammoth 1.6 zettabytes per year.

Dr Graham Oakes is a consultant and author of Project Reviews, Assurance and Governance. Over the last 20

years he has worked on IT and networking projects for the likes of Sony Computer Entertainment, Vodafone, the Open University, Oxfam and the Council of Europe. He said: “Moving applications into the cloud clearly has an impact on network utilisation. But before buying more bandwidth, you have to do a couple of other things.”

Oakes urges organisations to understand the traffic patterns associated with each application. Some applications are “surprisingly frugal” on the network, he said, while some are “surprisingly chatty”. Making decisions based on data, not assumptions, is the key.

He recommends network managers keep track of data latency, or delay.

Often it is not the amount of data being transferred that matters, it is the amount of time users have to wait while applications render web pages or are fully loaded onto desktops. High latency means data packets must rely on multiple round trip journeys across many network portions that comprise an enterprise’s cloud operating environment.

This is an edited excerpt. Click here to read the full article online

Preparing your network for cloud applicationsPlateSpin acquisition. All offer a means to move an application from a physical situation to a virtual one.

However, such a move be seen as nothing more than a single step on the road to cloud – existing applica-tion approaches should also be re-viewed to ensure that the cloud is used to its optimum capabilities.

Flexibility and agilityCloud computing offers a more flexible and responsive platform for computing. The basic tenet of a cloud environment is that it should be elastic – that it can provision and de-provision resources to support workloads as necessary.

Large monolithic applications are not very good at managing elas-ticity. What is required is to break applications down into functional services that can be brought togeth-er as required to facilitate a busi-ness process.

This approach lowers functional redundancy (for example, multiple billing engines in various different applications) and allows cloud-based systems to manage resources at a very granular level, ensuring utilisation levels of resources are maximised.

While looking at tools that will en-able existing systems to be migrated to a private cloud, it pays to look at the existing systems management software as well. Too many early tools were based on the premise that organisations already had the physi-cal side of things sorted out and man-aging the virtual side of things could be carried out as a separate task.

Unfortunately, cloud computing – even when highly virtualised – de-pends on the physical equipment un-derpinning it. It is critical to ensure systems management tools can man-age both physical and logical con-structs and understand the contextu-al linkages between them. IBM, CA and BMC have been making strong moves to ensure their tools now cross the physical/virtual barrier.

The public cloudPublic cloud should not be over-looked. Although most organisations are not looking at using the public cloud, it does not make commercial sense to block it off completely.

Already, through ensuring that only certain data is sent through to a public cloud, functions such as geo-

analysis of customers can be carried out for free using Google Maps/Earth or Bing Maps, just using postcode data. Also other functions are becom-ing more easily available from free or low-cost cloud sources.

This does bring a requirement for integrating different cloud functions, and the buyer must decide how this should be carried out. Will their or-ganisation carry out all the integra-tion themselves, look to a single prime contractor who can act as the cloud aggregator and deal with the integration on the organisation’s be-half, or look to deal with integration on a case-by-case basis? We are see-ing the emergence of the cloud aggre-gator, but will organisations be will-ing to put all their eggs into the one remote and virtual basket?

Cloud is already becoming impor-tant, and woe betide the organisation that decides to pay no attention to it. However, those who attempt to move to cloud without sufficient planning will also fare badly.

A little pre-planning can ensure the move to a private cloud can be carried out with little adverse impact on the business, yet will provide a solid, flexible and more effective platform for the future. ■

Clive Longbottom is founder of Quocirca

»“A little pre-planning ensures the move to private cloud can be carried out with little adverse impact on the business”

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Recent Forrester enquiries from enterprise infrastruc-ture and operations (I&O) professionals show that

there is still significant confusion between infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private clouds and server virtu-alisation environments. 

As a result, there are a lot of mis-perceptions about what it takes to get private cloud investments right and drive adoption by developers.

The answers may surprise you – they may even be the opposite of what you’re thinking. Forrester sur-veys show that 36% of enterprise I&O teams are putting a high or criti-cal priority on building a private cloud this year. But there’s a catch: most aren’t operationally prepared to run a cloud.

Q. Where is the line between cloud and server virtualisation?This is the issue at the heart of nearly every question Forrester takes about private clouds. Virtualisation under-lies nearly every IaaS cloud environ-ment, and you may use many of the same tools to manage your cloud as you do your virtual datacentre. But there are a few fundamental differ-ences between the two:l Clouds are highly standardised First off, you need to conduct the main operational procedures of your cloud environment – such as provi-sioning, patching, monitoring, restart, clone and even destroy or archive – in exactly the same way every time. 

It is through standardisation that you gain predictability from the cloud and begin to lower its operational costs.l Clouds are fully automatedYour systems administrators should rarely have to get involved with your cloud environment; clouds should mostly run themselves. That’s how their economics pay off and how you deliver the fast time-to-market your developers seek. 

That means all the procedures we mention above that have been stand-ardised should be handed over to au-tomation software for execution. So long as developer requests fall into the standard operating procedures, your administrators should play no role at all.

machines still here? Because they keep working, and frankly it would cost more to try to modernise and migrate them than to just keep them running.

You could virtualise these legacy workloads eventually, but that still doesn’t mean you would drop them in the cloud, because the highly standardised, multi-tenant nature of the private cloud may not be a fit for all workloads. 

Cloud computing is just an exten-sion of the IT portfolio that provides new deployment options with differ-ent economics, degrees of standardi-sation and automation, and means of efficiency. Expect only 10% to 15% of your applications to fit in the cloud today, and for this to grow to between 30% and 60% over time.

Q. How big a private cloud should I build?Smaller than you think. First off, we recommend starting small. This helps you ramp up your cloud knowledge with less pressure, and starting small spans beyond your cloud learning curve. There are four key reasons to start small:l Expect slow buy-inIt will take time for your organisation to see the value in your cloud, and you don’t want a bunch of expensive capital sitting around waiting for this to happen. In 2010, one Fortune 500

Tips for getting private cloud rightJames Staten addresses some misperceptions about investing in private cloud environments and driving adoption

insurance company’s private cloud only supported two test and develop-ment groups to get their feet wet – it plans to expand to four groups later this year.l Maximise utilisation ratesBecause the objective of the cloud is to maximise utilisation (and therefore long-term cost savings), you want to fill it up before you expand it. This means getting your I&O team com-fortable with operating an environ-ment running at 60% to 80% utilised all the time.l Avoid cloud squattingYou want your customers to continu-ally leave your cloud. The most com-mon use of your cloud, initially, will be for test and development purposes, which are transient, and as one work-load goes you want to quickly free up the resources for the next. If the cloud is too small, then it forces developers to clean up after themselves to make room for new workloads.l Give the appearance of a sold-out showThis reason is perhaps the least intui-tive – you need to leave your customer wanting more. The cloud is a shared environment, which means you need lots of constituents lobbying for its ex-pansion to justify further investment. If they love the fast time-to-market it provides but can’t get enough, they’ll make the case for you to expand it.

Incentive to switchSadly, private clouds are not a “field of dreams”. Although a well-designed private cloud should be attractive to your developers, keep in mind that they may have experience with public clouds and may be sceptical of your effort to match that value. 

Developers may also be used to getting their own resources through the old, inefficient system and not have a clear incentive to switch to your cloud model. This means you have to market the cloud to them and you have to incent them to use it. ■

This is an extract from the Forrester report Q&A: How To Get Private Cloud Right (May 2011). James Staten is principal analyst at Forrester

l Clouds are self-serviceDon’t be scared of this concept; we aren’t talking about letting chaos reign. Self-service makes I&O lives easier and better through standard-ised procedures, fixed deployment options, a service catalogue that’s built as a decision tree, and automat-ed approval workflows. 

Each user has approval and access to request certain workflows, essen-tially building the approval process into the user permissions. If you don’t offer self-service, your developers won’t see this as anything different.l Clouds are multi-tenantPop quiz: How many private clouds should your organisation have? The only right answer is one. 

Now, how many server virtualisa-tion environments do you operate? One per business unit? Silos for dif-ferent groups? This approach keeps applications from coming and affect-ing each other’s performance, and it makes access rights easy to manage. But it also keeps resource utilisation artificially low, and no cloud should have low resource utilisation. 

Through a good multi-tenant archi-tecture, private clouds keep business units virtually separated but resourc-es highly utilised and operational consistency intact and cost effective.

Q. Isn’t everything eventually going to be in the cloud?No – not even on a 10 to 15-year horizon. How do we know this? Look at your own datacentre. Is that a mainframe in the corner? Is that dusty off-white server in the last row a Unix system running the database you first set up when only five people worked at your organisation? Why are those

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CW Buyer’s guideprivate Cloud

“How many private clouds should your organisation have? The only right answer is one”