On Monday, Kevin touched on a pretty hot-button topic in our industry when he focused on the hype surrounding “The Cloud.” It reminded me of an interesting chart that plotted where various hosting technologies sit on the “hype cycle.”
Gartner, Inc. is the technology resource and advisory company that created the five-phase hype cycle to track new technologies. Because it’s much easier to understand each of the phases if you hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, take a moment to visit Gartner’s explanation of the five phases. Once you’re done there, come on back and we’ll take a look at a hosting-specific version of their hype cycle:
“The Cloud”
Cloud computing and cloud storage are hot and are getting hotter. With the Utopian promises of the cloud making every other hosting platform obsolete, Gartner places “Cloud” between the technology trigger and peak of inflated expectation phases. In its current incarnation, regardless of what you’ve heard, the cloud is not going to do your taxes, balance your checkbook or give you a massage. I’m pretty sure that you’ll hear that it can change your car’s oil and run a marathon for you before we hit the peak of inflated expectations for the technology, but don’t quote me on that yet.
In reality, cloud-based solutions are good for delivering on-demand services with utility-based billing. This is often misrepresented as being cheaper than dedicated alternatives, but the flexibility — of being able to use as much as you need one day and then dropping to zero the next — comes at a price. Your overall spend at the end of the month may well be less than a dedicated alternative, but your $/resource used may be more. If you have a relatively constant computing workload or storage needs, you will be better off with a dedicated device or a cloud product that offers discounts for commitments on usage.
Other important tenets of cloud services are scalability and elasticity. This means the ability to get as much as you need of a certain resource – whenever you need it – and then the ability to revert to your previous usage when the demand spike drops off. Elasticity – the ability to grow and shrink provisioned resources on the fly – is probably more important than scalability for most customers. Every cloud customer benefits from the on-demand management of provisioning additional resources to accommodate unanticipated traffic spikes, and very few will ever push the limits of the system.
Virtualization
Virtualization – the use of software to create independent virtual environments on a single server – is quietly falling from the peak of over-inflated expectations. We’ve realized that the virtualization model isn’t necessarily a complete game changer, but as we head toward the trough of disillusionment, we’re starting to see the real value it can bring.
Virtualization is a great enablement technology in achieving specific business goals: cost savings through higher utilization rates and resource consolidation – plus power and space savings – are achievable, as are cost-effective disaster recovery solutions. Not everyone can save money with virtualization. To begin, you need enough servers so when they’re consolidated, the virtualization technology spend is less than the cost of the decommissioned servers. In fact, a typical outcome is the infrastructure is made far more resilient because of the inherent values of virtualization – and costs don’t drop significantly … A good outcome overall, but not the panacea that was promised a few years back.
Hosting
While the dedicated hosting model has been around for a while, it’s still growing and evolving. As an offshoot of colocation, the model seemed pretty straightforward. One might assume that the hype has plateaued, but we’re still seeing flashes of enlightenment.
We’ve realized that hosting doesn’t just apply to Web servers, but is relevant to the rest of the back office. Multiple service levels have evolved in the hosted environment, so customers can choose exactly what they need – from completely self-managed dedicated servers to fully managed hosting solutions. Many who have long outsourced their Web hosting needs are starting to push email and collaboration applications to hosting providers. Email is a great example of an application well suited to hosting– while everybody needs email, does everybody need an email server or email administrator? Many hosting companies offer email as a service too, removing the need to even plan capacity on a single dedicated server.
Colocation
Colocation has found its groove, and we can safely say it’s on the plateau of productivity. It’s tough to misrepresent the expectations and the utility of the agreement: space, bandwidth and power to your server.
One sign that colo has found its place in the market is that we can easily define who it does suit: larger customers who own their equipment and have permanent IT staffs. It allows them to save money on data center acquisition and maintenance costs, while still allowing them to control over the infrastructure they desire. On the flip side, colocation is not necessarily suitable for a small shop with zero IT resources looking for regular maintenance assistance on a couple of Linux servers.
Caveat
Just because technologies like cloud and virtualization are apparently on their way to the trough of disillusionment doesn’t mean they are of any less utility than hosting or colocation … it’s just important to understand their popularity in the context of something like a hype cycle. Heck, we just released a storage cloud platform that is going to make hard drives obsolete.
Oh … did I just inflate expectations a little more?
-Rob
Do you have any plans for Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 11:00am? 
Drum roll, please … it’s a momentous day for The Planet!
