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Software-Defined Data Centers Might Cost Companies More Than They Save
storagedude writes "As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less. That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used. The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues."
GTFO.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Because when people read the label and see that the food is lower calorie or "more healthy"; they eat a larger amount of the food because they feel less guilty due to it being "more healthy"; and the additional consumption more than offsets the decrease in calorie count of the "healthier food"
So eating lower calorie foods makes you less healthy....
In the early 1950's, there were only a few computers (mainframes). The idea that we would now have only a few dozen computers in the world, which would each cost a fraction of a cent due to Moore's Law, sounds pretty dumb, doesn't it? Obviously the ability to do more is at least as important as declining cost for a fixed capability. Nothing new at all.
Virtualization makes it easier to stand up a new "server." True.
This simplicity will lead to using more "servers." Granted.
But those virtual servers require far less hardware than the old physical servers. Many of these virtual servers are used only a small percentage of the time. Depending on the load, 10, 20, or even more servers can run on one physical piece of hardware.
So even if we use, say, five times more "servers" with virtualization, we will be using fewer physical units--fewer "resources."
In short, the math is not so simple.
Since engineers have always worked on efficiency so pretty much everything you use these days is more efficient that the equivalent item from 30 years ago. However people in the US use more energy per capita than they did 30 years ago.(So for example instead of 4 people in a family watching the same 25" TV during prime time each one of them has their own and or they watch it more. End result is the amount of energy used to watch TV is greater even though the actual TV uses less power.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Refreshing that old quote: You implement Cloud, the new network structure, where they pay dollars an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls, etc., and you're going to hear a giant sucking sound of US admin jobs being pulled out of this country. We have great telco agreements across the world. :)
Do US admins, technical staff, CS graduates, staff with double degrees really think US multinationals will let you work overtime with Seattle civilian aircraft engineers like wages for generations?
The "creativity and innovation" will be in security/privacy cleared front companies based in the USA to offer legal cover for huge out sourced backhaul.
Agility will be more in finding a "self-service model" faster based on ever cheaper staff in say a Vietnam or Laos.
Will the US end user see any price savings? The cost per core, per seat, per VM will be rental and with their 24/7 'local' hardware support for your software rental:
cost will chart in one direction: Up
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Jevon's paradox is valid, but only under specific economic assumptions.
It's only true so long as there is more demand for the resource, and it's only a problem when the resource has a cost attached. Essentially, it's true in a "scarcity" economy, but not true under "post scarcity".
We've achieved "post scarcity" for several resources already; for example, phone calls and computer time.
Phone calls used to be expensive and billed by the minute, but nowadays it's virtually free. Similarly, computer time used to be metered and charged - in college, the CPU time for each program run was deducted from your account. Nowadays people can have as much un-metered computer time as they want.
CPU time and phone service aren't literally free, but the cost is so small as to be negligible.
Despite this, we do not see infinite consumption. People have a certain level of need for a resource, and when that need is met they stop consuming more. Coupled with a declining population, there is no reason to expect infinite consumption.
Your company may be using more resources than it needs... but so what? Computer resources are remarkably cheap - so cheap, in fact, that it may be more effective to ignore the problem. Optimize the biggest expenses first: if that turns out to be IT resources, then take a closer look. Otherwise, just ignore it.
(For another example of post-scarcity, consider the Chinese "dollar stores" that have cropped up. The cost of goods is so small that the time and expense of price tags makes a big difference. This is almost post-scarcity of tangible goods.)
Of course helping the business get its task done is the only reason IT exists at all. If the increased usage
results in a more profitable operation, then its a good thing.
Ah, that's the problem though. Your typical corporate bean counter doesn't look at it that way. What they see is an increase in overhead, which drives profitability down. You have to have damn good data in order to prove that the increased cost actually lead to greater revenue and more profit than if they hadn't spent the money. That's the kind of thing that drives good IT managers fucking insane.
You still need to hire someone to install and configure the virtualization apps. Not much different than running all your apps on the one piece of hardware. Virtualization: A solution in search of a problem, in a saturated market ...
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Work expands to fill the space given to it.
Give it no definable boundaries?
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IT is really important and users need IT services even though they don't think they do, says IT services company
An accountant in my company is often bitching about the slow speed of internet banking, and the problem is there are a lot of bottlenecks between here and where the local bank holds their sensitive data on servers in India. It's the same with a lot of data entry of medical records.
I'm not suggesting it's a good idea but merely pointing out it's an idea that seagull management (makes noise, shits on everything then flies out) implemented in a lot of places at least five years ago.
Using more resources is exactly what happens... As hardware gets faster, software gets slower. While some of the slowness can be attributed to additional features and larger data sets, much of it is down to using higher level languages. Very few people bother writing efficient code anymore, on the basis they can always throw more hardware at it.
I have personal experience with a few games that were deemed too slow and rather than try to improve the code, they were simply shelved for a couple of years until the average hardware had caught up.
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> then cutting the price of the resource in half will be met by more than twice the original quantity demanded
In the history of computing so far, this has happened 'naturally'. Moores law up to this point has lead to a doubling of chip sizes (and therefore processing power) every 18 months. Your gas analogy is not compatible with the general trend of computing technology. Users would be surprised if there next car they bought didn't get double the gas mileage (halving the price of gas in usage) in digital computing.
The question then turns in to 'is there still tasks that can be made faster or better with more computing resources'. That answer varies greatly depending on the business, but in theory the amount of computing we could find use for is much much larger then the amount we currently have.
>Back in 2000, the rule, and it worked, was one app per server.
Which was great at 2000 memory and processor levels where I might have a 32 bit operating system and a few gig of ram on a server. For the same price in U.S. dollars I can buy vastly larger hardware resources now.
>Now assholes are piling on the virtual servers
Or people who would rather buy fewer boxes and use the resources efficiently and be able to easily manage and migrate the virtual infrastructure. If you don't know how to use your resource monitoring tools, it doesn't matter if you have 100 or 1 computer systems.
>and piling as many apps as possible onto each server.
Assholes have always done that. 'Oh look, exchange, AD, and file serving all on the same installation, hmm I wonder why this doesn't work'. Bad design is timeless. There was never 'the good ole days'.
But everyone else is adopting agile, so if we choose to have longer architecture phase, we will fail to adapt to the evolving market, and lose out.
I suppose it's a tragedy of commons, with time-to-market as the abused resource.
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The whole idea of SDDC and Cloud Computing is to basically end up with "IT as a Service". The rest are just marketing words. The goal is to have a service pretty much like electricity: you don't necessarily care where it comes from or how it's delivered to your premises. All you care is that it's there, it's reliable, it's consistent and you know exactly how much you are paying for.
The problem I've seen in the 10 years I've been in this particular industry, is that very few large companies are doing chargeback from IT to their internal customers or business units. IT has been historically seen as a shared cost for the company which adds tremendous pressure every year to cut more and more and try to leverage economies of scale whenever possible. Once you implement chargeback (even if it starts as a showback only) you can effectively pass that cost to the internal customer so you end up shaping their behavior depending on their own funds allocation, not IT's.
The next step is to have accurate forecasting so you know exactly how much infrastructure to have available, particularly if you implement service tiering. This doesn't mean that IT will have a free ride, and it will still be expected to be competitive with external cloud providers, but at least is something more manageable than the status quo.
"Might"
"Might" cost more than they save based on data gleaned from coal burning plants. I was going to call this an apples-to-oranges comparison, but those two things are actually fairly similar. This is more of an apples-to-hemidemisemiquaver comparison.
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Yes, I am picking this nit: OP, you mean "might end up using more resources, not fewer". The rule is, if you can count it (like marbles), use "fewer", if you can't count it (like water), use "less". This is basic English, not rocket science. C'mon, people!
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Sticking stuff in teh cl0ud makes accounting clerks and order pickers transmogrify into software engineers?
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No it isn't. The exponential is a function that describes the relationship between two variables (e.g. time and number of rabbits). It doesn't describe the difference between different values of the same variable (number of rabbits on Monday and number of rabbits on Wednesday.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."