Europe. HP provides and manages the technology infrastructure for Amadeus, which pays not just for the use of CPUs, but also for storage and networking. “It’s up to us to add more equipment as the business requires it, and when it scales down, we take infrastructure out,” van der Zweep says.
iBM rEsPOnDs: Lutz agrees that customers will naturally want to plug and play among different vendor models of on-demand. He suggests that customers ask a lot of questions before signing on with a vendor. First, make sure the vendor is committed to open standards such as Java and Linux. Second, be sure the vendor’s virtualization and server consolidation strategies are distinctly cross-vendor. Lutz points to IBM’s Orchestrator product, which supports multiple Unix flavors as well as Windows. Third, in order to ensure that you aren’t steered in the direction the vendor happens to offer, be sure po-
tential partners offer a continuum of capabilities, including hardware, software, hosting and services.
HP rEsPOnDs: “Our objective is to understand that data centers are heterogeneous,” van der Zweep says. He claims that HP’s set of products that virtualize the data center support many types of storage, networking, hardware and software offerings, including those of Sun and Cisco Systems Inc.
sun rEsPOnDs: The key to avoiding lock-in is to build around open standards, such as Web services standards and open languages like Java.
iBM rEsPOnDs: That’s a valid concern, Lutz says, and IBM has responded by helping customers move off those platforms and onto IBM’s. Five years from now, he says, today’s strict license model will be replaced with the delivery of hosted and more granular pricing models. “The customer pressure for
change is right, and vendors will need to get with the program,” Lutz says.
HP rEsPOnDs: Van der Zweep points out that some software vendors, such as SAP AG, charge on a per-user basis, which is compatible with on-demand models. But many don’t. HP’s virtualization capabilities do, however, minimize software costs. For instance, consider a customer who has 40 four-processor systems, all running an instance of Oracle, and who is paying for 40 licenses. But if the customer runs it in HP’s virtualized mode, it would have a 20-processor server pool that would share the processing load, thus paying for just 20 licenses. “Even though Oracle hasn’t changed the pricing scheme, the customer pays for half the amount of CPUs,” van der Zweep says.
sun rEsPOnDs: Mooz points to efforts Sun has made to align its own pricing with on-demand. In the past nine months, it has switched to a per-user pricing model with its Java Desktop System middleware and desktop suite. It has also changed its software release
schedule to accommodate the challenges of configuration and patch management in an on-demand environment. Sun has moved to a common quarterly release schedule, so that all releases will come out on the same day each quarter. “This is as important as a licensing model in terms of how you run a utility environment,” he says.
sun rEsPOnDs: There’s no question that there’s a tremendous amount of hype around on-demand and that there are technologies at different stages of maturity, Mooz says. However, it’s a mistake to assume that all the technology is immature.
For instance, dynamic partitioning and hot-swappable CPUs have been around for several years, he says. Mooz suggests that customers look closely at vendor claims but have an open mind about what’s real. In addition, customers should build around open standards so they can take advantage of incremental improvements as they happen.
References:
Archives