As we all saw with the adoption of virtualisation technologies in the 2005-2010 time frame there is a gradual move toward adoption of a new paradigm in computing. As the now de facto VM Ware evolved clients put test and dev workloads into virtualised environments first. This was rapidly followed by small workloads and now any self respecting x86 application is virtualised.
This same evolution is happening in the cloud albeit at an accelerated pace, we are past the 1st wave of clients moving the first 'test' workloads into the cloud and we are now seeing more and more applications moving to the cloud. However as this 2nd wave of workloads starts to migrate into the cloud, clients are increasingly struggling to find the QoS and SLA's they have grown accustomed to with on-premise infrastructures that have been designed from the ground up to be available, secure and fault tolerant.
Every day we hear of yet another Cloud outage or security breach that casts doubt over the suitability for these mission critical workloads to be hosted off premise in a cloud environment be it public or private. Just check out http://cloutage.org/incidents and the tale of woe would and should scare any CIO.
However all is not doom and gloom, on my travels of late I have had cause to discuss QoS in the cloud, I recently chaired a panel discussion on this very topic at Cloud Expo Europe, and have some suggestions for the wary CIO. Two approaches come to mind that both have merit if your requirements for Cloud computing are more mission critical than the norm. Firstly Softlayer 'Bare-Metal as a Service' approach, this offering enables the client to gain access to an off-premise cloud environment that is dedicated, i.e. not shared or virtualised. For more details check out the website:
https://www.softlayer.com/dedicated-servers/
Why is this a good idea? Well for a start none of us likes a noisy neighbour, especially one who can consume our resources and impact our service, with a dedicated server in the cloud we are free to operate without this concern. Another benefit is that with a dedicated server you are able to do with it what you please, when you went with out having to worry. Finally by going off-premise you can ensure your precious server sits in a modern DC with the best TLC and connectivity.
The 2nd approach is to either approach a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) who is running a System z based cloud environment such as the soon to launch L3C in the UK, or any one of another group of global CSP's who are starting to offer such services or build your own on premise Linux cloud based on System z. With a compelling TCO against the likes of Amazon Web Services and competing x86 architectures and all the inherited QoS benefits from using the same hardware as the mainframe the on premise cloud based on System z is a perfect platform for the 2nd wave of enterprise mission critical workloads that need to be re-hosted in the cloud.
