Cloud computing shines a light on IT money pits

Cloud allows CEOs to delve into the nitty-gritty of tech spend, EMC World told...

Cloud computing offers CEOs insight into IT spend because it gives them a set of standardised metricsPhoto: Shutterstock

After years of trying to fathom IT spending, CEOs can now use cloud computing to discover whether their company tech offers bang for their buck, the EMC World conference heard this week.

Delegates at the Las Vegas event were told that the pay-per-use delivery model offered by cloud computing is allowing companies to compare the fine detail of IT infrastructure costs and answer the question, 'Is this service worth paying for?'.

Paul Maritz, CEO of virtualisation specialist VMware, said IT infrastructure is difficult to manage at a CEO and CFO level. "The only metric you have is what percentage of revenue you are spending on IT," he said.

Maritz added that for the first time, firms are seeing the emergence of a set of standardised metrics that can be applied to IT infrastructure.

"You can go to the CIO and ask, 'How much does it cost us to provision a virtual machine per unit time or unit memory?', 'How much does it cost us to store a GB of data?' or 'How much does it cost us to provision high-level capabilities like an email box?'," he said.

"You can take what your provider gets you and look at what you could get from Amazon or Rackspace [for the same price]."

This detailed insight into IT spend will not only help businesses determine whether they are paying over the odds but will also allow spend on IT services to be matched to user demand for aspects such as availability and security of that service, according to EMC CFO David Goulden.

"The ability to have a direct correlation between IT and the business department is critically important, because you can now address the cost and the service level to a business unit, rather than across the whole of IT," he said.

He said companies will be able to "map spending back to the departments... and give them choices - 'Do you want to spend more or less?'", putting more power into the hands of managers to determine what technology and services their department uses and which are worth paying for.

EMC COO and president Howard D Elias predicted that as more companies get their IT services from the cloud, firms will have the ability to match the level of IT service much more closely to business demands.

"One of our fast-growing areas is a cloud assessment service, where we can come in with the CIO and CFO and CEO and do an inventory and run it through three filters - economics, security and compliance, and functionality," Elias said.

"Through those three filters out comes the result, saying, 'For this application you can live with this level of security compliance. You need this level of performance availability and the economics say private or public cloud is best'," he said.

"You can show a comparison of public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud, and compare that with what they could do themselves," he added.

EMC announced a range of products at EMC World designed to link to cloud-computing platforms.

New releases include VPlex Geo, which allows for data to be asynchronously replicated automatically between two datacentres as far as up to 2,600 miles apart. Potential applications include ensuring data and applications are always available by hosting them in multiple locations and balancing workloads between distant datacentres.

EMC announced the Cloud Tiering Alliance, which will allow its VNX storage products to be linked to private or public clouds based on its Atmos globally scalable storage system. The link will allow data that is rarely accessed to be moved to lower cost cloud storage automatically.

Other announcements were made about native support for cloud-friendly network protocols being added to EMC's Symmetrix VMax storage, and its Ionix infrastructure management software being updated to provide better support for public, private and hybrid clouds.

The storage firm also revealed it has teamed up with search giant Google to allow the Google Search Appliance tool to be used to find data on its VNX storage, with the benefit of data being indexed and searchable within minutes of being created or updated.