created a cloud computing product that has left a lot on the table for the customer seeking enterprise-grade results. While many business problems can be adequately addressed by Cloud 1.0, there are a large number of business applications running in purpose-built data centers today for which a price-focused infrastructure and delivery model will not suffice. For that reason, we see the necessity for a new cloud service offering focused on providing value to the SME and large enterprise markets. This second-generation value-based cloud is focused on delivering a high performance, highly available, and secure computing infrastructure for business-critical production applications, much like the mission of today’s corporate IT departments.

This new model will be specifically designed to meet or exceed enterprise expectations, based on the knowledge that the true cost to the enterprise is not measured by the cost per CPU cycle alone. The reasons most often given by industry surveys of CIOs for holding back on adopting the current public cloud offerings are that they do not address complex production application requirements such as compliance, regulatory, and/or compatibility issues. To address these issues, the value-based cloud will be focused on providing solutions rather than just compute cycles.

Cloud 2.0 will not offer CPU at $0.04/ hour. Mission-critical enterprise applications carry with them a high cost of downtime. 2 Indeed, many SaaS vendors offer expensive guarantees to their customers for downtime. As a result, enterprises typically require four-nines ( 52 minutes unavailable a year) or more of uptime. Highly available computing is expensive, and historically, each additional nine of availability doubles the cost to deliver that service. This is because infrastructure built to provide five-nines of availability has no single points of failure and is always deployed in more than one physical location. Current cloud deployment technologies use n+ 1 redundancy to improve on these economies up to the three-nines mark, but they still rule past this point. Because the cost of reliability goes up geometrically as the 100% mark is neared, many consider five-nines and above to be nearly unachievable (and unaffordable), only

the current myopic
focus on price has
created a cloud
computing product
that has left a lot
on the table for the
customer seeking
enterprise-grade
results.

deserving of the most mission-critical applications. In addition, there are significant infrastructure challenges to meet the performance requirements of the enterprise, which significantly raise resource prices.

Technology challenges faced by Cloud 2.0 providers. The number-one problem that Cloud 2.0 providers face is supplying their enterprise customers with storage that can match the performance and reliability they are accustomed to from their purpose-built data centers at a price point that is significantly lower. When traditional storage technologies are used in a cloud infrastructure, they fail to deliver adequate performance because the workload is considerably less predictable than what they were designed for. In particular, the randomness of disk accesses as well as the working set size are both proportional to the number of different applications that the storage system is serving at once. Traditionally SANs have solved the problem of disk read caching by using RAM caches. However, in a cloud application, the designed maximum RAM cache sizes are completely inadequate to meet the requirement of caching the total working sets of all customer applications. This problem is compounded on the write side, where the caches have traditionally been battery-backed RAM, which is causing storage vendors to move to SSD technology to support cloud applications.

Once the storage caching problem has been solved, the next issue is getting cloud applications’ large volumes of data out of the SAN into the server. Legacy interconnect, such as fiber-channel with which most SANs are currently shipped, cannot meet the needs of data-hungry Cloud 2.0 infrastructures. Both Ethernet and Infiniband offer improved performance, with currently shipping Infiniband technology holding the title of fastest available interconnect. Storage vendors who eschew Infiniband are relegating their products to second-tier status in the Cloud 2.0 world. Additionally, fast interconnect is a virtual requirement between servers, since enterprise applications are typically deployed as virtual networks of collaborating instances that cannot be guaranteed to be on the same physical servers. 1