FD Insights Issue 4 | Page 48

Huffing and puffing: Is cloud
computing infrastructure
made of brick or of straw?
By Ian Wells, Director, Northern Europe, Veeam Softwarew

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loud computing is on its way to being the dominant
means of accessing IT in the 21st century, and so a
major source of revenue for IT resellers, integrators
and service providers. The reasons for this are clear: the
cloud can offer a flexibility and scale of IT services and
implementations that are irresistible to most organisations.
Increasingly resellers and integrators are seeing the benefit
of providing customers products and services from the
cloud, with an ease-of-use and cost efficiencies that are
impractical, if not impossible, in the traditional model of IT.
They get the all-important recurring revenue stream and
meet the demand for increased flexibility. However, in order
to build trust and increase adoption of the cloud model, the
channel must ensure the foundations of its cloud infrastructure are not built on quicksand.
As the channel moves to providing services from cloud
infrastructure it must become expert in the supporting
technologies. Of all of these, virtualisation has done most to
help make the cloud a viable solution. Without virtualisation,
implementing the vast bank of physical servers needed to
underpin a strong, reliable and most importantly flexible
cloud infrastructure is a costly exercise. However, management of this virtual cloud infrastructure is absolutely critical
to long-term success. Without the appropriate management
the risk of failure is greatly increased. This could cripple a
public cloud and ruin the re putation of its provider.

ment tasks such as backup and recovery, adding and removing machines, and monitoring and allocating resources
becomes extremely slow and cumbersome.
This massive time lag not only increases the potential for
failure (e.g. slowing the ability to identify and remediate a
problem occurring in a vast sea of virtual servers) but is
also extremely costly in terms of the number of administrators needed to effectively service a cloud infrastructure.
With this in mind, margin will quickly erode if the channel
has to keep employing more people to build and maintain a
cloud as the business grows.
Resellers looking to transform their business by building a
cloud platform using virtual data centres could quickly find
themselves going to the wall if they apply physical world
management techniques to virtual world problems. Before
making any such commitment, resellers must ensure their
dreams of the cloud are thoroughly grounded with solid
management tools and techniques.

Many businesses are now realising that virtualisation
cannot be adequately controlled using the same tools and
techniques that have served so well for physical environments. In comparison to the several hours it takes to build
a physical server, a virtual machine (VM) takes literally
minutes: indeed, IDC has predicted that virtual servers will
outstrip physical for the first time in 2010. Without adapting
to the virtual environment, performing traditional manage-

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