“Whereas the old chunk of software resembles a precooked meal that just has to be popped into the oven, the new architecture is more like a restaurant. It is a service in itself but also a combination of sub-services. There is the waiter who takes the order and conveys it to the kitchen. There is the cook who prepares the food. And there are the cleaners who keep the place tidy. Together they create the “application”: a restaurant.”

Source: The Economist- Creating the Cumulus.

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The project we are working in, RESERVOIR, has recently been shown as an example of partially EU-funded efforts to boost Cloud computing technologies by Neal Levitt in a recent IEEE Computer article. Its main conclusion is that, although it still has several challenges to address, Cloud computing will have an increasingly important role on the ICT field during the next years.

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Telecoms Industry is also concerned about energy consumption and its associated carbon footprint. This is not just a matter of rising energy prices in the preceding and, very likely, in the coming years, but also because networks account for up to 1% of global greenhouse emissions.

Their footprints are dominated by a single operation: keeping the network up and running 24/7. Although much more can be done to build intelligent net devices with very low energy consumption, avoid diesel-fueled generators in remote areas, remote radio-heading, replace AC with a simpler approach such as freecooling in base stations, etc. operators are feeling the need to reduce these costs as much as possible.

The Smart2020 report, published in June by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative predicts doubled emissions associated to Telecoms as adoption of handset devices increases. Also, as broadband nets are upgraded to optical fiber the fixed operators will face the same challenges.

As with cars, the focus in telecoms is no longer on performance alone, but on efficiency too. Cloud computing promises data center-related emission reduction, not only by virtualized server consolidation, but also by using clever virtual machine allocation strategies and by measuring the energy efficiency of all the server management operations, e.g. preventing energy inefficient migrations that consume a lot of network resources.

“Software vendors will have to find new ways to charge for their wares: in the cloud, tying licensing fees to the number of users, for instance, will be difficult, since services will mostly be consumed by other machines. More importantly, the corporate world has become less and less willing to buy software for large sums of money, so software firms listed on America’s stockmarkets now make most of their profits from maintenance and other services. SAP will increase its annual maintenance fees to at least 22% of a program’s value over the next few years, in line with those of Oracle, its main rival.”

Source: The Economist High and Lows.

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“On average only 6% of server capacity is used, according to a study by McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Uptime Institute, a think-tank. Nearly 30% are no longer in use at all, but no one has bothered to remove them. Often nobody knows which application is running on which server. A widely used method to find out is: “Let’s pull the plug and see who calls.”

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