Piping it in

The move to virtualisation has all sorts of perks - availability being a major one, ie, it enables access to systems by any authorised user wherever they are via any device (if you set it up that way).

This has several implications - security, risk, governance, efficiency, productivity, happier employees who can work remotely and avoid the traffic. It has even bigger implications for your network, though, which needs to take on the extra traffic.

“The over-rider,” says MTN Business GM of infrastructure and technology Edwin Thompson, “will always be that cloud or virtual solutions require significant upstream capacity. The local loop is important. And while a lot of foreign environments may have fibre to curb, here we're not there yet. In some high-density environments, we're getting there, but mainly we're still putting down infrastructure. And acceptance is increasing - things like mail virtualisation have been around a while and are accepted; virtualisation of telephony is big and taking off at the moment; this goes into virtual PABX environments that are already a reality. Because those applications are relatively finite in terms of bandwidth utilisation, you can predict how much an office will use for voice communications, but it becomes challenging to predict how much capacity a whole office using a virtualised storage solution will need. You'll know how much storage you have, but not necessarily understand the traffic on it.”

It's early days still for the cloud in SA, though. Says Thompson: “We're still at the tip of the iceberg, and a lot more virtual products are coming out. The sluggishness of implementation in SA is still due to the local loop not making it worthwhile to the customer.”

That said, MTN Business is looking to a cloud offering in the future. “I don't think anyone won't,” says Thompson. “At the end of the day, all of the major service providers will be looking at applications in a cloud base or similar because it's the way the technology is going. We'll not just stick to providing the plumbing necessarily, the plumbing is becoming the 'by the way' type stuff and we'll obviously get more involved in the more interesting side of things.”

One of the interesting things locally is a result of the lack of power infrastructure, which makes it difficult to build large data centres, he says. “This plays into the hand of the cloud concept, being able to distribute product across multiple data centres. The local environment will probably drive telcos to delivering across multiple centres because of the utility issue.”

And that's just one of the challenges MTN Business and its peers can look forward to. As Rackspace Hosting EMEA product marketing head Simon Abrahams says: “Putting together a public cloud solution is pretty complicated from a service provider perspective. Amazon was first to market and has set expectations in terms of the price point, setting the lowest market price. To achieve that price point, Amazon, ourselves, Google and Microsoft, the four biggest cloud providers, all ended up developing our own solutions and specifying unique hardware (not based on general purpose hardware).

“It's not a trivial matter to build a public cloud,” he reiterates. “If you don't follow the route of building your own code so you don't pay licence fees and do your own hardware, you will end up with something that works but not at optimal cost, and you will not succeed in the chosen market. You need a certain scale to succeed in the public cloud, where private is much closer to general purpose IT for large organisations.”

Rackspace is US-based, and while it does business in SA, it doesn't have a local presence. “We provide services to 60 countries delivering out of the UK. We don't provide a local presence, but to a large extent the benefit of Rackspace for South African companies is that they use it as a presence into Europe or the rest of the world.” He adds that the company would certainly look at establishing a more local presence if demand merited it.

It remains to be seen exactly how local providers move into the cloud space, and how many international companies hop on the bandwagon and come join the locals out there combating power problems, bandwidth expenses and the other complications that make the data centre business an interesting place to be. Either way, though, South Africa is taking its first steps on the road to fully-fledged virtual infrastructures hosted in public and private clouds and the end result will be a very different ICT landscape than exists today.

Uncapped broadband is a first step into the cloud, says research house Frost & Sullivan. “Competitive pricing, enhanced service offerings and value-added services will start to increase competition, which is what South Africa requires in reaching international standards,” noted Frost & Sullivan ICT analyst Craig Johnston in a statement released by the company recently, in response to MWeb and other players' announcements of uncapped ADSL offerings. “This creates the opportunity for South Africa to become a stronger player in the international market,” he said.

You need a certain scale to succeed in public cloud.

Simon Abrahams, EMEA product marketing head, Rackspace

While the company says “the speed of the uncapped broadband will not immediately increase, Frost & Sullivan predicts that once there is sufficient demand for uncapped broadband, the speed and quality of the broadband will start to improve considerably.

“Small and medium enterprises in South Africa will benefit, as uncapped broadband provides expansion opportunities through access to unlimited information, applications and the ability to explore alternative forms of data storage,” Johnston says. “In particular, it provides a platform for smaller enterprises to make use of cloud computing for storage and archiving.

“Ubiquity is a feature of the cloud that allows enterprises and clients to have access to data and files at any time and at any location, provided there is access to an Internet connection. The days of not having a document for an important meeting are over, as the cloud provides the opportunity to gain access to documents via the Internet,” the research house says.

As the company notes: “Cloud computing is an Internet-based model that requires access to fast, reliable and affordable broadband in order to achieve its maximum functions. Uncapped broadband is needed for cloud computing to work as companies that would like to store information on the cloud need to transfer large amounts of data. The speed of the broadband is also important, as enterprises do not want to take days or even weeks to transfer terabytes of information due to a slow connection.”