Cloud Data Centers: Build, Buy or Borrow?
“Orange wasn't as big of a move to the Cloud as was made of it,” Posey says. “It was only the digital advertising piece of things. The pay-as-you go Amazon route was a business decision rather than a corporate strategy.”
Posey also stresses the distinction between an enterprise-class data center and a service provider-class center. Aside from basic quality-of-service (QoS) considerations, she says, service
providers need to look at how much power they will actually need to handle orchestration, networking and computing and find a data-center solution that will be adequate.
“The enterprise data center doesn’t have the scale; the total amount of power can be lacking. Is the enterprise scale up to the challenge of service-provider scale?”
In the past handful of months some service providers have shifted to hosted-cloud solutions. Burdened by legacy systems cobbled together following a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, the
digital media group at Orange, for instance, decided to move to Amazon’s hosted-cloud offering. But what might look like a harbinger of things to come, Posey says, is really an overstatement by
the media, not to mention the industry, about the importance of the move.
“Orange wasn’t as big of a move to the cloud as was made of it. It was only the digital-advertising piece of things. The pay-as-you-go Amazon route was a business decision rather than [an
overall] corporate strategy.”
Posey adds that the main Orange unit in France has built a 40-megawatt data center in Normandy to meet huge computing requirements as well as stringent EU regulations regarding data
protection.
The virtual data center
Sanjay Kumar, head of telecommunications industry solutions at VMware, points to both the need for service providers to be agile in rolling out new services quickly and the demand for
in-house IT staff to focus on creating new apps and services rather than keeping the network running.
“Specialized software is replacing specialized hardware in the data center,” he says. “The future will be virtual data centers. It allows for a level of change.”
He adds that virtual data centers offer huge operational (OPEX) and capital (CAPEX) savings, but most importantly, they support changes in business and free up IT manpower to create
service-differentiating apps.
But what about quality of service? It’s outstanding, says Kumar, simply because of the ease of scalability and the fewer mechanical parts that can fail when there’s more redundancy.
Posey is more skeptical. She says that because no one cloud solution has emerged as a best practice, the industry is in a wait-and-see mode. When it comes to virtual data centers, “We’re just not
there yet.”
OSS/BSS integration
Once a service provider has determined its needs surrounding cloud services, it’s critical to consider the integration challenges of marrying a data center with traditional OSS/BSS functions.
“Are your OSS/BSS vendors ready to scale for a cloud deployment?” asks Posey.
The entire OSS/BSS architecture will need to seamlessly integrate with any cloud data-center solution. So if OSS/BSS systems are already part of a service provider’s customer appeal, perhaps
building a data center tailored to them makes sense.
“Again, integration is an issue,” says Ade McCormack. “Whilst it would be easy to simply select best-of-breed public cloud services, there is a danger of poor integration between the services.
Using world-class cloud-based collaboration, CRM [customer relationship management] and billing services will have limited business value if these services do not interoperate.”
