Rack Pack Blog

The Cloud was this year’s Black but are we any Greener?

Posted by Rack Packer - 22/12/11 at 02:12:51 pm

Living in a Material World was the Madonna mantra for the 80s. Everything was about money, buying things, and owning stuff. You could easily apply this to way that businesses first thought of their data. In-house IT departments wanted to own it, manage it and keep it away from prying eyes. Fast forward to the 2010s. Now it really is the Virtual World.  The back office servers are going and hosting companies are becoming the IT department’s best friend. 

 

So, now that outsourcing IT is officially a go-to business option, how has the notion of green IT played into this and has it moved higher up the financial agenda?

 

2011 has definitely been the year in which cloud computing and virtualisation really took off. As one prominent Gartner analyst said at a symposium recently, “The cloud is here and its utilisation is growing. Enough said.”  Staggering increases in the uptake of cloud services are predicted. According to one leading market research company, MarketsandMarkets, the global cloud computing market is projected to almost triple from $37.8 billion to $121.1 billion by 2015.

 

You only have to look at some of the recent data produced to see what a significant benefit this growth could have in terms of reducing overall carbon emissions. For instance, a recent study by the Carbon Disclosure Project showed that blue-chip companies in the UK plan to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing from 10% to almost 70% of their information technology by 2020. The study claimed that these companies could realise £1.2 billion in energy savings and 9.2 million metric tons of CO2 savings annually by 2020, that’s equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles. A US study by the same organisation predicted even greater annual energy savings of $12.3 billion if a similar uptake of the cloud took place by companies there.

 

There are several issues driving businesses to consider their environmental impact: brand reputation, cost reduction and potential punitive taxation and legislation.

 

Green IT and sustainability are no longer topics that are the preserve of the ‘tree hugger’ or ‘eco-warrior’ but rather a fundamental element in any organisation’s strategic business plan. IT has played a major role in this attitudinal shift. The internet continues to drive the world’s economy and the demand for computing power keeps rising. The IT industry as a whole, from manufacturers to service providers, is reacting to this trend by working harder, smarter and more efficiently.

 

Businesses are more aware of their responsibilities to the environment however the key drivers for any business will always be revenue generation, increased efficiency and cost reduction.  The trick is to ensure that green policy is built into a business’ strategy to ensure that it makes a visible and valuable contribution. If a CIO can take an FD through a series of IT proposals that will deliver a demonstrable reduction in cost or improve business efficiency, which has an element of environmental benefit, then they are far more likely to gain buy-in.

 

If we are talking about greener IT in a wider sense then we have to include a whole range of elements. It is not simply a power issue. We should be considering every element of the IT supply chain. Where does your redundant kit end up? In the skip? 2011 saw many TV programs and column inches about the shameful practise of dumping IT equipment in landfill.

 

In 2012 we should make a huge effort to determine how we can better sweat our assets for longer and how we can re-deploy or find alternate uses for them once we have finished with them and are ready to upgrade.  We should also be considering data overload. Do we need to store everything? And returning to the power theme, we should be considering the use of renewable energy where possible. The IT industry should be using both its influence and purchasing power to demand that the energy providers deliver a constant and sustainable supply of renewables to our data centres. 

 

Which brings us onto the subject of ‘Greenwash’ or ‘CloudWash’. One pleasing aspect of the cloud hype these past months has been the lack of dubious ‘green’ claims.  We haven’t witnessed companies shouting “The cloud is green, come and join us!” and with good reason. Approximately 60 to 70% of data centre energy is still derived from fossil fuels. In the past, many marketing claims about being green haven’t stood up to close scrutiny and I think the cloud providers have avoided this pitfall in the main. Ultimately, the best way to avoid greenwash is to present straightforward communications and messages which highlight the business benefits of the cloud.

 

What is clear is that businesses have an opportunity to use the cloud to benefit from both economies of scale and expertise. If we can remove 400 separate mini-server rooms into a cloud infrastructure, which is deployed in central purpose built data centres containing the latest cooling and energy saving technologies, we will have improved the overall environmental impact of all those disparate servers. It doesn’t make us green, but it does achieve overall greater efficiency. This is where cloud computing can help.

 

Five years ago hosting providers were seen as the enemy of the IT department. Most organisations didn’t understand what their IT departments did, they almost had a magical/mystical quality about them and whatever they said was acted upon. If the IT department said the business needed 10 extra servers, then you needed them. But that has changed. IT is very much viewed as a business enabler now and there is a wider acceptance that virtually every technical service can be acquired, many at lower cost with greater capability, from third parties.

 

Today, as budgets are being pared back, the IT department has come to view the hosting provider as their friend.  This is where we have a true cloud benefit. It gives you the flexibility to make an informed choice. For example businesses such as charities which traditionally run seasonal campaigns, can use the cloud to cope with expected traffic demand at peak times rather than investing in expensive hardware which becomes redundant once the campaign is over, yet has to be left powered up and consuming energy. These are the benefits that the cloud can bring to both an IT department and the environment, and no you don’t have to be wearing open toed sandals and hessian underwear to enjoy them!

Why we need to get behind Scotland’s new E-skills Initiative

Posted by Rack Packer - 01/12/11 at 06:12:31 pm

The UK Government has this week finally thrown its weight behind the campaign to improve the teaching of computer science in our schools. As it reviews ICT provision in the curriculum it will be the responsibility of government to work with industry to ensure that computer skills are now taught properly.

The government’s statement follows the publication in February of the Next Gen report co-authored by Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope, which highlighted the poor quality of computer teaching in schools as one of the biggest obstacles to growth for the video games and VFX industries in the UK. Next Gen reported that only one-in-five ICT teachers described themselves as being able to write or modify even basic computer programmes. Ian Livingstone, who’s the life president of British video-game publisher Eidos, wrote a compelling article about the issue in this week’s Independent.

Video gaming has been the pulse at the heart of one of Scotland’s cities, Dundee, for many years but it’s not just the gaming industry that can benefit from better teaching of computing skills, it’s the whole of the Scottish economy. 

The IT industry already contributes something like £3 billion to the Scottish economy and at a time when the devolved government is making a concerted push on all things digital it’s important that youngsters hear the message about how IT skills are key to their future as well as that of their teachers.

What better message could there be at a time of economic difficulty than one that says there are jobs out there, there are opportunities to be creative and innovative and earn a decent salary in a sector that’s growing and here to stay?

iomart is one of a number of IT companies in Scotland that’s been asked to help address these issues. Along with organisations like Microsoft, Oracle, Logica and the Scottish Government, we’ve helped e-skills UK launch a new website called Big Ambition Scotland which showcases the different careers that are available in the IT industry here.

Michael Kowbel, e-skills UK’s Director for Scotland, said: “Over the next five years we need over 400,000 new IT professionals to meet the demand of Scottish businesses.  The launch of BigAmbition Scotland is just the first stage in the development of a fantastic resource to give young people in Scotland the inspiration and ambition to pursue the fantastic career opportunities IT can offer.”

At its launch some worrying figures were presented. The numbers of children taking computer related subjects at schools in Scotland has fallen by 13% in the last five years, while the number of applicants to study computer-related Higher Education courses in Scotland has fallen by 33% since 2002. Computer science it seems is a very uncool subject for Scottish schoolchildren.  

There’s also a lack of young women coming into the industry in Scotland, where two thirds of teenagers studying for computer-related Highers are boys. In the UK as a whole, women make up only 17% of the IT workforce. 

iomart has been fortunate to have a number of talented women join its technical teams. One of them is Group technical manager Anne Bryson. She says, “Women are naturally very logical and good at communication so IT should be a natural career choice.” Anne wants more girls in Scotland to consider IT as a career and can be seen talking about her role on the new Big Ambition website.

The overall problem appears to be one of perception, with many youngsters still believing that IT spells GEEK (see the great e-skills Geek video here ), combined with the poor standard of computing courses available in schools, not only in Scotland but the whole of the UK.  

The UK Government has finally woken up to that fact and Scotland too has pledged its future to a digital economy. We don’t need to dress up, spray on the tan and speak with transatlantic accents to make IT glamorous, we just need to tell it like it is. It’s exciting, it’s innovative, it has a job role for virtually everyone and it’s rewarding both financially and creatively.

As Mark Feeney of e-skills UK said at the launch: “We’ve got so much great talent in Scotland but we need to nurture it.”

At a time when some of the greatest innovations in IT are allowing our children to live, learn and play in a way we never dreamed of, we should be telling it like it really is “IT is sexy and we know it!”

The travel industry flies the flag for the cloud

Posted by Rack Packer - 03/11/11 at 08:11:23 am

Remember the times when you used to go down to your local travel agent and return home with a pile of brochures a foot high which you then spent days leafing through to find your dream holiday?

These days there’s no time to sit gazing at all those glossy shots of glistening sands, palm trees and infinity pools. Instead it’s a short click to a website to punch in details of your family, your holiday dates and your budget while a quick search reveals the available destinations …in a sense the holiday probably picks you now rather than the other way round.

The burgeoning of cheap flights and price comparison sites means the internet is now the shop window for all your holiday requirements.

As the internet has created this magical way to widen your holiday or travel company’s customer base so it has meant that making sure your website is fully available every minute, of every day, from anywhere in the world, has become crucial to maintaining your revenue streams.

One trend that is becoming apparent is the steady rise in the number of travel and holiday companies looking for scalable and reliable support for their online presence. Indeed the travel sector as a whole seems to be leading the way when it comes to moving to the cloud.

Accessing flexible computing power via the cloud allows them to scale up the number of servers available at times of seasonal rush, such as for school holidays or Christmas, and scale back down again when the spike recedes and demand isn’t quite so high. It also gives them the ability to move fast to launch new products without incurring large additional costs or delays. All this means greater efficiency, lower energy use and a smaller carbon footprint.

One such travel company that has made the cloud transition is Skyscanner. The UK based company specialises in cheap flights and deals on over 600 airlines, competing for airspace with fellow search engine providers such as ebookers and expedia. The company’s website is visited by over 14 million people every month, is available in 27 languages, and has recently reached peak traffic capacity, leading to a call to arms for help with the demand for its service.

Phil Dalbeck, Infrastructure Architect at Skyscanner, explains: “Migrating from a traditional physical infrastructure platform to a fully virtualised private cloud provides the business agility Skyscanner needs to support our exceptional growth. Capacity planning is no longer the headache it once was, and the business can now expect to see additional server resources deployed within minutes rather than weeks.”

Many analysts predicted that the smaller SME would form the cloud ‘hot spot’ and that larger organisations would be somewhat reluctant to embrace the concept, but this is now appearing to be wide of the mark.

If the travel sector is indicative of other industries, then we are witnessing a sea change in attitude towards cloud computing. Not only is this sector embracing the benefits of scalability, cost reduction and flexibility for its own consumption but it also utilising the cloud for new services and products to offer its customers, as evidenced by airline giant Lufthansa. The company has developed CloudStream, a cloud-based service which enables its passenger’s to create a ‘playlist’ of assorted cached content prior to departure, which can then be enjoyed once onboard via the airline’s FlyNet Internet access.

In its 2010 Annual Report, the airline opens with: “Even as the global economy picks up again, companies in all industries are faced with the challenge of cutting their costs sustainably and improving their adaptability in a volatile economic environment. One prerequisite for doing so is further optimisation of business processes, for which the IT sector plays a key role, irrespective of the industry.”

The report then states: “Airlines are faced with a particular need to increase their efficiency and flexibility in order to combat competitive pressure and price erosion. There is nevertheless no sign that IT spending in the airline industry will increase significantly in the years ahead. The overall IT market is under considerable and sustained pressure to change as a result of many factors. Key technological drivers are cutting-edge technologies such as tablet PCs and cloud computing. However, by making targeted investments in IT infrastructure and product development, Lufthansa Systems is nevertheless creating the conditions for its customers to benefit from the advantages of new technologies.”

In a couple of paragraphs, the airline has succinctly and overtly made a case for cloud. The travel industry may have been subjected to economic pressures rather more quickly than some other sectors – many consumers consider holidays a luxury item when money is tight – but it certainly has been quick to address the situation, and cloud is forming an important element of its recovery plans.

Who would have thought a few years ago that the industry whose services we all use to seek sun, sand and sangria would be welcoming the arrival of clouds?

Why recent storms do not mean the cloud has burst

Posted by Rack Packer - 25/07/11 at 12:07:04 pm

 Is the cloud inherently insecure? Should we be yearning for the Good Old Days?

Hackers and outages have certainly made sure it has rained on the cloud parade in recent months. Repeated attacks on Sony’s Playstation network have rekindled the debate about the security of the cloud as have cloud failures at Amazon, Google and Microsoft.So, has the padlock come off? Is the cloud inherently insecure? Should we go back to the old days?

The answer is no, no and no.

The Cloud approach continues to offer a unique opportunity to business. Managing and maintaining complex hosting environments in-house can be time consuming and costly so handing that over to a company that specialises in hosting services not only reduces a big burden on management, it can also be an effective way of reducing costs. The key comes when that handover takes place. Like handing over your new born baby to someone else for the first time, can you trust them to protect it from harm?

Good cloud services are intrinsically secure.

They are built by experts from the ground up with scalability and reliability at the fore. Security plays a big part in that built environment. What we need to do is reassure and educate our end users and work with them to create trust around the cloud. The key to this is “shared responsibility” between cloud providers and cloud users, according to organisations like the Cloud Security Alliance.

Industry analysis suggests there are six perceived risks around the cloud that need to be addressed:

Vendor Trust
If a business is seeking cast iron guarantees over the security and location of its data assets then it needs its cloud provider to meets those requirements via the Service Level Agreement and contract. You need to seek out cloud providers who only deal with suppliers who provide best of breed hardware and software layers backed by the most stringent Service Level Agreements. You can then engage with a cloud supplier offering a SLA, with the confidence that their suppliers are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Legislation and compliance
Retention of data within geographical boundaries is becoming far more important so there is a need to comply with local standards. In the UK, ISO accreditations give clear signs to customers about the management of data and the physical infrastructure being used.

Distributed infrastructure
The key issue here is that customers must be convinced that all architecture is engineered with no single point of failure. Maintaining resilient infrastructure for all areas of the service across the data centres and cloud platforms provided is vital.

Web threats
These can only be countered with appropriate access control and management at the network and hypervisor level. What weakens defences is clients with code issues or poor internal policies on the storage and utilisation of critical system information.

Data leakage
This should be handled by Hypervisor technology. Guest operating systems within the hypervisor should be kept separate through the fundamental aspects of the hypervisor technology itself.

Shared infrastructure
There is an additional onus on service providers to ensure proper segregation of user data in other shared technologies such as the SAN and backup platforms.
Recent research by Pearlfinders has shown a big increase in the number of ICT decision-makers showing an interest in buying cloud-based solutions. For all that the Industry can do to reassure businesses though, they must realise that they have a responsibility to ensure that their own internal systems and processes are safe and secure and comply with the regulatory and audit requirements of their own sectors.

As Tier1, the US-based technology research specialist, concludes: “Moving to the cloud does not absolve an organization of its responsibility to defend itself against the inherent risks of pushing workloads beyond its own walls.”

The rules and policies for data protection don’t change because a company opts for using the cloud over other methods.

By demonstrating that we can provide a safe environment and emphasising to customers that they share that responsibility, we can banish the storm clouds and make hosting in the cloud a more attractive proposition over the next few years.

Control.Store.Delete

Posted by Rack Packer - 02/06/11 at 04:06:07 pm

Change in behaviours needed to address data explosion.

When it comes to accurately targeting existing and potential customers there can be nothing truer than the mantra that data is king – ask anyone who’s been in business for longer than 10 minutes and they’ll tell you the more information you have on your target market or customer, the easier it is to sell to them.

Businesses of all sizes are experiencing more rapid data growth than ever before; growth rates of over 100 percent per year are no longer uncommon. Driven by the three key factors of business continuity, regulation and data protection, there is no sign that storage growth will slow down some time soon, and this exponential growth is causing IT departments to re-evaluate their practises and policies….fast.

And it’s a headache that companies have identified, and are only too happy to offload, with 39% of global organisations already outsourcing data storage to third parties.

Research from Gartner suggests that businesses will struggle to keep up with the ever increasing demand for data archiving as the scale of firms’ assets grows.

From a data centre operators perspective it’s not just the obvious issues of physical space, security and hardware that are focusing the mind. It is estimated that storage accounts for 26% of the overall data centre power budget so unsurprisingly ‘doing more with less’ is the common mantra. With the average company’s storage utilisation running at 50%, it is not difficult to understand why cloud storage is at the centre of so much activity.

Anyone plugged into IT news services, can’t help but noticing the rising number of stories, and market valuations, relating to storage and data growth.

Last year’s excellent IDC titled “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” highlighted the issues that we will are now facing globally. The study suggests that the amount of digital information created annually will grow by a factor of 44 from 2009 to 2020, as all major forms of media – voice, TV, radio, print – complete the journey from analog to digital. But perhaps the most astonishing statistic revealed by the study was that 35% more digital information is created today than the capacity exists to store it. This number will jump to over 60% over the next several years.

So what is the solution? Is it cloud storage, is it a combination of traditional storage models, is it bigger disks? Or is it simply that we to actually have to change our behaviours and start considering what data we do need and what data we don’t? Maybe we simply need some simple housekeeping and data discipline.

Now call me an old fashioned luddite, but I still long for the days of the 12″ Vinyl LP. Life was so simple then.

You purchased your favourite album, you kept it near your hi fi and played it when you felt so enamoured. And it took up an album’s thickness of floor or cabinet space. If you lost it or damaged it, you either bought another one or if it had been discontinued, you’d happily spend the next few years hunting it down in charity shops, on eBay or in garage sales. And the feeling of pure joy when you finally tracked a copy was simply indescribable.

Not today. Today you can buy a CD (and we’ll ignore downloads for the moment) and then rip it and store it on your pc, you then sync it up with your player/devise and store it on that. You may use some of the tracks to mix the perfect playlist. The kids decide that your taste in music is surprisingly OK – not cool but OK – and they would like a copy on their players. So you load the tracks on for them. Fearful of losing all of this data, you back it up to a portable storage devise or into the cloud and then you sit back happy. And that’s when it dawns on you that you still have the original CD on the shelf and you’ve probably eaten about 400 Mb of storage space. Did you need to?

OK a pretty simplistic example granted, but one that is being replicated a billion times each day. We now take thousands of pictures, safe in the knowledge that we never have to pay for film development costs, and we back them up – even the rubbish, out of focus ones. We’ve all become budding film directors and stars, convinced that our misguided attempts to swing over a local stream on an old tyre will make us the next big You Tube hit. And all the time, we forget or are afraid, to periodically review and delete. Far easier to buy the latest gizmo with greater storage capacity then actually apply some sensible housekeeping.

A sentiment that businesses might want to consider?

Not only are businesses storing simply everything, (I know of one large organisation that archives and stores all email including every piece of spam/junk mail received) but they are compounding the situation by asking for, and accumulating, data just for the sake of it.

Storing a degree of customer and business data has always been a necessity, of course; for both operational and legal requirements But surely there are certain data gathering activities which just don’t need to be carried out.

The public sector is particularly good at requesting information completely unrelated to what one is actually trying to do. Granted, there are times when knowing a person’s gender, age, salary, ethnicity, religious beliefs, disabilities or otherwise, could be necessary. Applying for a grant to replace lead piping with copper surely isn’t one of them? And of course the more you request, the more you store and the greater the risk of a security breach.

Some would no doubt argue that such intricate detail is required to prove that these grants are being fairly distributed, or that some other function is being performed with due carefulness. But come on?

There can be no doubt that storage demands, if left unabated, will continue to grow in line with expectations, but we need to start to think and work smarter.

Once we have determined what data we need to record, and why, we must then ensure that we take the appropriate steps to protect it and store it.

And we must be brave enough to actually consider deleting some of it!