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Cloud computing is a key component to IT efficiency

Tony Chan | October 15, 2008 | 0 Comments

The emerging capabilities of cloud computing environments holds the potential to drive efficiency of IT infrastructure as much as 100 fold, according to estimates of one application services provider.

READ the full interview with Graham Weston here

According to the chairman of Rackspace Hosting, Graham Weston, cloud computing, by driving up the utilization of data centre infrastructure, can demonstrate massive efficiency gains verses traditional stand alone systems.

“Most of the time, it (a traditional server) just sits there – this is the really wasteful thing,” Weston said. “The power demand rises obviously when the server is working harder, but only marginally. The ideal thing is to figure out a way to smooth out the demand, so we have the server running at full throttle all the time, because you can get more work done for the same amount of energy.”

The way that can be accomplished is through cloud computing, which means that resources are “pooled,” he explained. “It means that if you have 1000 servers and you have a Terabyte drive in each one, so you have 1000 Terabytes of data storage – that’s an unbelievable amount of storage and the whole city of Hong Kong probably didn’t have 1000 Terabytes of storage five years ago. Then you have dual processor with four cores, so you have eight cores per server – that’s 8000 cores. These two resources can be used full throttle all of the time, or they can be used in a slight way. If they are used in the traditional way, the servers sit around and runs at 50%, 60%, 70% utilization with the air conditioning running, with the batteries being charged, with the routers running, everything has to run. It’s like leaving your car on idle all day long.”

Cloud computing is a way to get those same servers to run at higher rates, for more amount of time.

“The real opportunity I think is, ‘look, instead of having a thousand servers doing this, doing a certain amount of work. How can we make the 1000 servers do more work?’ The answer is by using virtualization and cloud computing to level out the load.”

While he initially estimates the work load of cloud computing over traditional systems at 4 times, a back of an envelope calculation for a hotel with 100 employees and Rackspace’s hosted email service reveals an efficiency gains of up to 100 times.

100X EFFICIENCY GAINS
The company’s cloud computing service consists of an email hosting offering that allows companies to outsource the email accounts of employees to Rackspace. By consolidating the email boxes of multiple companies onto its servers, the company is currently supporting 800,000 mail boxes on between 400 to 500 servers.

“That means we are running 2,000 mail boxes per server. Think about the server in the average business, it is running 10 mail boxes,” he said. “So if we use mail boxes as a measure of work, say a hotel has 100 employees divided by one server, is productivity of 100. We have 2,000 mail boxes on a server, so that is 20x. Also, they are not running it all on one server, it’s a factory. Because if you want to run mail correctly, you need an inbound server, an outbound server, a virus server, a spam server and in some cases, there’s a Blackberry server, so it’s really five servers. So 100 divided by 5 is 20. So it’s between 20 accounts per server, compared to 2,000, so its 100x.”

When it comes to measuring efficiency, Weston says that what matters is utilisation.

“When we first started we had bandwidth that we had to pay for all day long, but that was only peaking at say, 7 pm, and the rest of the day, it was underutilised,” he pointed out. “So we opened up our UK office so we can sell the excess bandwidth during off-peak hours (because the peak hours for the UK is different from the peak hours in the US), because it’s free anyways. What we did was change the utilization curve to get more utilization out of it.”

He added: “And this is the same basic idea with servers. Cloud computing, or pooled computing, will allow us to have the peak to trough utilization much better. Today, Rackspace has 40,000 servers, most of them dedicated to customers running in a curve. But if we can take the 40,000 servers and have them run like our bandwidth, we can do way more work. That’s the function of green, how we can use cloud computing.”