Nine Reasons Enterprises Should Run Their Apps in the Cloud

by Chris Preimesberger

Existing approaches are challenged with petabyte scale. Quantities of all kinds of data are exploding, but machine-generated data [log files, sensor data, etc.] is already massive and continues to grow. “And it’s more than just being about storing, it’s about analyzing it,” Krishnan said. “Keeping that much of that kind of data in the cloud makes tons of sense, because it’s just too unwieldy to have to handle all of that yourself.”

If you’ve got a petabyte of data in the cloud, you need to think about having the application in the cloud. When the data and the application are close together, that is when optimal movement is possible. Google has already proven this with its home-grown architecture. “How does Google spit back results, just like that?” Krishnan said. “The application is running on the cloud, right next to the data. No shoving big data around.”

Cloud storage can hold unlimited amounts of data. “And it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about private or public cloud structures,” Krishnan said. “Private and public clouds are just interesting sizzle for journalists and analysts to argue about. There’s no business relevance whatsoever; some data will go into a public cloud [Amazon, Shutterfly, etc.] and some will go into a private cloud. It’s all up to what the customer needs.”

You can gain better economies of scale if you move applications to cloud, and run them in sync with the same hardware you have in your data center. “Idle resources are expensive. Its like having Amazon EC2 and S3 on the same hardware—think of the savings,” Krishnan said.

By moving applications closer to the data in the cloud, you can essentially eliminate a whole tier of storage—thus a whole rack or several racks of arrays that need to be powered and cooled 24/7. “If you collapse your virtual compute with virtual storage, you are using fewer servers and arrays all around and will see great power savings and better manageability,” Krishnan said.

As primary applications move to the cloud, ancillary and support applications should follow. Onboard antivirus, video transcoding and others all work much better when close to the data source. If the apps run on cloud storage, they work even better as then no data needs to be moved—even within the cloud itself. For example, you don’t want to pull all the data out—even in chunks—send it to an antivirus server, and then back to storage again. That’s a real waste of time and money.

As applications move to the cloud, infrastructure usage and analysis becomes more efficient (as in No. 5). This, in turn, simplifies management.

By running your application in a cloud environment you automatically deploy a greener production solution by reducing power and cooling costs in your shop.

Distributed computing wins—whether talking about supercomputer processing, or storage nodes.