Kais Belgaied's Weblog at Sun

Thinking Big, in order to Succseffully Serve the Small

By its size, a small enterprise can't afford to invest in a big IT infrastructure. Instead of spending a few millions of dollars in computers, network equipment, and high speed connectivity, it is more cost effective to delegate all the application hosting and web presence to out-sourcing companies.

Though still maturing in the IT arena, this concept of co-hosting is hardly new in other industries, such as textile, sporting goods, electronics, etc... It is no secret that Adidas, Reebock, and perhaps a dozen other brands of sport shoes brands are manufactured in the same fab lines in east Asia.

While the big players see the reduction of production cost as the main advantage for outsourcing, such a model lowers the bar of entry for small and medium enterprises. It allows them to experiment, and take higher risks because the cost of failure is much lower. The advantage in two fold: Investors are more willing to take the risk with them, and he company can focus on innovations in core competence - its product design, to differentiate itself from the competition, and buy pay a specialized third party for the manufacturing services. Of course, the new comer would need to rely on its manufacturing vendor to be have the equipment and skills to do the job, and be trusted not to disclose its product's unique features to the competition.

Let's take another example closer to IT. A medium size hotel, typically operates in a seasonal way. In the high season, it has hundreds of checkins/checkouts daily, with big supporting staff, etc ... It requires a few servers connected with high bandwidth pipes to handle the transactions needed to run the business. During the low season, on the other hand, the needs may go down to a fraction of the maximum capacity. Outsourcing the IT services for this enterprise allows it to better adapt to a fluctuating and periodical business.

The two examples above illustrate two main features that small and medium business look for in an IT outsourcing vendor:

- Security, because it needs to trust that the vendor doesn't mix its operations with its competitors.

- Flexiility, allowing it to increase or decrease the amount of resources utilization, at will. This is also referred to on-demand computing.

Client needs drive the requirements on the side of outsourcing companies, such as the (Application, Internet, ...) Service Providers. Such a *SPs, wants to offer to each one of its customers the illusion that they have full control over their application running invironemnt.

Additionally, they need to put a price tag on the share of resources they dedicate to each client.

The price has to be proportional to the actual utilization, thus the need for accurate accounting of all resources.

In order to fairly accommodate multiple clients, the service provider enforces the limits and guarantees of their resource consumption.

Finally, since the *SP is like any other enterprise, endeavors to grow and thrive, it needs the ability to maximize the utilization of the resources they invested in, and, when nearing the maximum capacity, they need the ability to horizontally scale its infrastructure in order to host new customers, or upgrade the level of service for existing ones.

We're talking here about the emerging need for Virtualization.

At this stage of IT's evolution, virtualization is among the fastest growing, and probably most changing areas. Since the needs were first perceived by middleware application developers, early ad-hoc virtualization solution have been developed at that level. Stepping back though, a DB management system, a directory server and a web server have practically the same virtualization needs. They all require fine grain access control, secure separation between multiple instances running in virtual domains and guarantees of resources entitlement. It only makes sense that virtualization services are getting sedimented in the lower layers of the operating environment.

Xen, Zones, BrandZ (See OpenSolaris.org), are the main OS virtualization techniques native to Solaris, or currently under development. Each serves specific customer needs, and is tailored to particular deployment scenarii. They all offer isolated execution environments for processes, and a more or less virtualization of the machine's CPU and storage resources. Networking virtualization has been rudimentary though. Project Crossbow started a few months ago in order to fill in that gap in the virtualization technologies offered by Solaris's networking subsystem. It includes the ability to share access to the networking resources (NICs, and connectivity), between multiple virtual domains, while ensuring

. fairness - A single domain gets its share of the resource, and doesn't stomp over others'.

. accuracy - A domain's utilization of resources is accurately metered.

. optimal utilization - Sophisticated hardware networking resources, such as multiple receive and transmit queues, offloading capabilities, etc ... are leveraged as much as possible.

. robustness - denial of service attacks that aim at exhausting networking resources are contained.

. flexibility - seamless and live assigning and changing attributes of networking resources to virtual domains.

At the end, successful companies are the ones that make their customers profitable. Outsourcing companies that offer Fair, Flexible, Reliable and Secure operating environment contribute to the success of for their SME/SMB customers. For Technolgy leaders, success will be measured by their ability to offer innovative solutions that empower the outsourcing companies to meet their customers need, while maximizing their Return On Investment.

Posted by kais ( May 01 2006, 03:02:50 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]