back to article It's not the cloud: The problem lies between the chair and the computer – Gartner

Nearly all private clouds customers build are failing – and the biggest problem isn’t the technology, it’s people. That’s according to analyst Gartner, which reckons 95 per cent of the people it polled reported problems with their private clouds. The single biggest problem is failure of organisations to change the way they …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The biggest problem is that for most businesses there is no real need to chase the latest buzz word solution so they don't really know why they're doing it!

    Anyway, in my experience most private clouds are just a re branding of the current data centers. A good way to stop the business asking too many questions....... Which type of hardware are you using? ............... You don't need to know it's a cloud!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just give us the money and shut up.

    1. Vince

      "The biggest problem is that for most businesses there is no real need to chase the latest buzz word solution so they don't really know why they're doing it!"

      Yes quite. I've had people tell us they want the cloud, but they don't know what that is, other than they're being bombarded by everyone and told it's the best thing.

  2. EssEll
    Holmes

    To channel Homer...

    ....well, d'uh.

    Those of us that have been trying to sell cloud solutions for years (and there's a damn site more than the tiny sample conducted here) could tell you that the single biggest blocker to cloud adoption has been CxO naivety or unrealistic expectations. However, what I think this points at is a continued failure to educate the PHBs by us that try to flog this stuff.

    If we flog it properly, they will buy.

  3. Extra spicey vindaloo

    I read that as.

    Users don't want a cloud, neither do businesses. It brings no more benefit than our existing infrastructure.

    1. EssEll

      Re: I read that as.

      The key benefits of cloud (if it's implemented right) are around on-demand scaling and cost transparency. It's not a new technology; very few of the bits under the hood are new, technically speaking. What is new is how it's used and costed.

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Coat

        Whaddya mean it's not new technology ? Of course it's new technology ! There's thousands of CxOs having gone to, going to, or preparing to go to fancy seminars in tropical paradises to hear about how new it is and bring the Good Word back to their sheeple - uh, I mean, people.

        1. EssEll

          Storage? - check. Servers? - check. Virtualisation layer? - check. Network? - check. Orchestration layer? - probably the newest bit.

          What have I missed...?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Possibly the fact that all that is in the companies server room - it is in ours.

            1. EssEll

              A cloud environment can be built either in a customer's DC or a suppliers. It can be managed from anywhere in the world - like any infrastructure.

              So what new technology components make up cloud?

              1. P. Lee

                >So what new technology components make up cloud?

                The architecture is specifically designed to give maximum benefit to the outsourcer, rather than to solve your problems.

      2. nijam Silver badge

        Re: I read that as.

        > The key benefits of cloud ... are around on-demand scaling and cost transparency...

        Very, very few businesses need a significant amount of on-demand scaling. And cost transparency? On the one hand, it's the exact opposite of transparency, you really have no idea your money will be spent. On the other, it's transparent because you get a trivial invoice saying what you've bought and how much you have to pay. But you're likely to pay dearly for that budgetary simplicity.

        1. EssEll

          Re: I read that as.

          "Very, very few businesses need a significant amount of on-demand scaling."

          Every shop come Christmas time. HMRC come tax return time. Airports come the school holidays. News websites when big news breaks. Apple when they launch a new product. Etc, etc, etc...

          1. phuzz Silver badge

            Re: I read that as.

            On demand scaling is a lovely idea, but it means you either have unused capacity lying around for most of the year, or you have to rent it in from somewhere else come christmas (or whenever your busy period is).

            If you're using a public cloud provider you can at least spin up a few more machines, and hope that you don't have any bottlenecks in your systems (spoiler, you probably do), but if you have a "private cloud" (aka 'server room') you're a bit stuck.

          2. e_is_real_i_isnt

            Re: I read that as.

            At Christmas every shop needs to scale up at the same time and all the students and others are traveling, so what levels that demand the rest of the time? Not Apple product announcements.

            It's like power plants and air conditioning - there's a peak demand to support, but there's no off-peak use for it. Unlike power plants the Cloud providers won't pay to have excess capacity. They may charge as if they are, but they won't deliver.

            What the Cloud providers are doing is build to meet the average demand, and since they haven't sold it all yet, they will have some scaling flexibility for the early adopters. Later, when the crunch hits and all the subscriptions are sold, they will slow to a crawl and miss their targets and apologize profusely.

      3. SundogUK Silver badge

        Re: I read that as.

        On demand scaling? - never required.

        Cost transparency? - yes, it's more expensive than what we already have.

  4. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    Business need

    "...agile clouds need agile processes – and processes aren’t changing for the more on-demand, service-oriented world..."

    If I understand this correctly, most of the private clouds fail because it was decided to "go cloud" for the sake of cloud and not because there was any business need.

  5. theOtherJT Silver badge

    I still don't get this whole cloud thing.

    Services run on servers. Servers are in racks. If the rack is here, then I can go prod it if it's doing something I don't like. If it's somewhere else, I have to rely on someone to do that for me.

    Just feels like a silly word for "Outsourcing" to me.

    1. P. Lee

      >Just feels like a silly word for "Outsourcing" to me.

      It is... almost.

      But hopefully you get a load-balancer for everything. That's a great idea. So good in fact, they you should really buy some for yourself and put them in your server rooms.

      Then you spread your services out. Rather than two boxes doing job X and two boxes doing job Y, you have four boxes doing X and Y so a load spike can be dealt with. That assumes you've got your resourcing right so you don't DOS the other jobs on the boxes. Then you have to buy four instances of all the licenses that you used to only buy for two systems. That all costs money and admin time, so its often easier just to buy more dedicated boxes. For example, VMWare price based on sockets in a box. Virtualising adds all the VMWare costs. Running four copies of MSSQL server is going to be more expensive than running two, even if you aren't processing more data. All this stuff works best with open source, because the licensing problems all go away.

      Upshot - get yourself some opensource, some active-active systems and a decent load-balancing system and things will be easier.

      Who'da thunk it?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Which private cloud is this?

    The private cloud you run in your own datacenter, or the private cloud running on dedicated servers in someone else's datacenter (AWS, Azure, etc.)?

    If they're referring to the former, where you own and run all your own stuff, then I'd love to know where all those "free" on-demand resources (compute, storage and networking) are coming from when the demand hits. Oh - your vendors are letting you install all that spare capacity at no charge until you use it? Sweet! Where do I sign up for that deal?

    I thought the whole point of "cloud" was access to additional resources when you needed them, paying for what you provisioned/used for as long as necessary - and no longer - and NOT paying when the resources weren't needed. That's why I never got the "private cloud" thing. In that model you're paying for spare capacity 24/7, used or not.

    As Essell noted above, take away the orchestration layer and all you have is what we've always had, but with a fancy new name and bunch of expensive resources sitting around unused.

    1. theOtherJT Silver badge

      Re: Which private cloud is this?

      "Private cloud"... Or "Server room" as we used to call it.

  7. Stevie

    Bah!

    The real problem with the personal cloud and indeed the vast majority of IT tech coming down the pipe for the last 10 years is not the technology, it's the willful obfuscation of what a given scenario actually encompasses by use of maddeningly imprecise marketing-friendly "clixby*" terms.

    "8X performance vs (insert competitor)" - Does NOT mean "8 times the performance" or there are some horrendous misprints in the metrics on the slide being shown as this is said.

    "On demand scaling" - rarely is on demand anything as it requires a negotiation of some sort in order to switch on the resources in question. That negotiation may be entirely electronic but since billing is involved look for unforeseen complications when the resource is actually needed that once in any given year.

    "Vertical (anything)" - Better check your vendor's marketing bible before you buy.

    "Fault tolerance". "High availability". These are terms that mean specific things to vendors. Unfortunately, the fine print is on a per vendor basis.

    So is it any wonder no-one is doin' it rite? If you drive a technology by aggressive marketing you can't be upset when no-one takes it very seriously after a couple of seminars**.

    * Clixby - politely uninformative The Meaning of Liff 1st edition

    ** Technical term for disguised high-pressure sales presentation.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You know what I reckon?

    a couple of business bods came out of a network presentation and the one guy asked the other what the fluffy sheep shapped thing was on the whiteboard and then the other guy guy said he thought he heard the techy guy say it was "The Cloud".

    ... and hey presto.

  9. OnlyMee

    Private clouds??

    To be honest I have never understood the concept in reality. I can see that maybe if you are big enough with many enough departments like government or really large corporate building a private cloud might make sense for 2 things. 1. Billing split between departments. 2. If departments have actually highly different needs on when they need capacity this could lead to higher utilization and bit smaller HW bill.

    However to be honest for the second part. You can already do that simply using over provisioning with your hypervisors.

    Anyone outside of large organizations I find it really hard to see what could archive with spending money building private clouds. If you need pay as you go just go public cloud.

    Even if you take something free like Openstack to build private cloud yourself maintaining it will be extra burden and potentially initially calls for outside help (cost) at least for design and build.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The cloud

    A "cheap" way of fighting for limited resources.

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