Why the Cloudband launch hides a dirty little secret
Steve Cassidy, November 25, 2011 Blog
The recent CloudBand launch from Alcatel-Lucent is an indication of the paucity of high-speed links
We have already conveyed the facts of Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand service, but I’m reasonably sure that the impact of the announcement hasn’t been quite as widespread as the Paris-based telecommunications giant might wish.
As I wander about (largely aimlessly, I am prepared to confess) listening to people’s reactions to how the cloud affects their lives and businesses and reading cloud business announcements I am always struck by the zoom speed problem.
The what?
Zoom speed. Long ago, when flares were in fashion the first time around, TV cameramen discovered that they could impose hokey, not to say nauseating, live “special effects” on Top of the Pops by waggling the zoom rings on their TV camera lens packs.
You can still find the odd YouTube clip with this effect visible, but it was mercifully short-lived in the history of television, because a rapid rise in complaints soon put them off the idea. Humans don’t like being zoomed in and out, it seems. There’s an upper limit to the whoosh rate – the speed at which one’s focus of perception is dragged through a field of regard.
The zoom speed problem in cloud computing works like this: If all you have been seeing is a steady stream of salesmen seeking to repackage dodgy web-hosting deals with the “C” word, then when something as vastly, enormously huge as the Alcatel announcement comes up, your first reaction is to stagger back, mutter “woah” or similar, and go off in search of something more bite-sized.
Since the field of regard through which we are zooming here isn’t a visual thing, but more of a conceptual framework that spans business sectors, computing architectures, and product construction (from unrelated concepts such as protocols, links, software stacks and billing structures) it’s really not fair to just slap the word “vertigo” on the problem and walk away – it’s not about real dizzying heights, after all. Its business scales.
So what should you take away, sitting trying to sort the wheat from the chaff in cloud announcements, from this outburst of French innovation?
There are a couple of important things to notice. The first one is that CloudBand is hardware backed. Alcatel-Lucent is releasing a platform which uses new custom-designed hardware to broker cloud service access. This is in direct contradiction to the pronouncements from VMware at October's VMWorld in Copenhagen which said that the future of the datacentre was entirely virtual and entirely x86 powered.
Let’s remind ourselves at this point precisely who Alcatel-Lucent is, so that the more stereotypically driven of you don’t dismiss the French announcement as the computing equivalent of a Citroen 2CV.
The part of Alcatel that’s in play here is the American part, the Lucent part – and when we say Lucent what we mean here is Bell Labs. When Bell Labs engineers start work on something chip-orientated, it’s quite likely they understand the difference between what they are making and something that can run as a software-only solution inside an Intel-powered VM courtesy of a hypervisor.
The second thing to understand is that Alcatel is a very interesting operation. It’s a French telecoms company - a simple statement to make that hides a whole universe of exclamation marks – and while France has not deregulated its telco marketplace with quite the same Thatcherite zeal as the UK, Alcatel’s list of acquisitions are really most un-French in their global reach and diversity. Lucent, of course, would be a significant player with or without Alcatel.
Reading between the lines of the CloudBand announcement, it seems to me that Alcatel is confessing to a dirty little secret in the telco sector: one that all of the people I meet from smaller businesses are only too aware of.
The fact is, once you are outside the bigger conurbations, the Internet experience can be pretty dire. Only last week I drove half an hour out from the M25 and sat down for an afternoon’s upgrading and troubleshooting at a new client – only to find that his sustained bandwidth wasn’t much over 100k: a far cry from the commonly accepted minimum of 512k, never mind the headline speed he’d been sold his link on. It’s that kind of gap in experience which drives a lot of the cloud incredulity out there in businesses: How, they exclaim, can we be expected to rely on links like these, never mind the services on the other end of them?
That’s what this announcement is about. For a local carrier to make an upgrade to a connection – which may be strong in one type of service, and weak on another, or simply very old and unmaintained – can be a painfully expensive and risky business.
As a planner inside a telco you have to work out how many subscribers will buy into the technology you‘re about to spend real money to deploy. What’s more, telco hardware really doesn’t look or feel like the stuff you’re used to seeing inside your company WAN. Telecoms engineers are working with transmission methods, protocols and service requirements that make IPv4 with QoS look like paper cups and string.
So, what’s the takeaway here?
There are two. One is, be very aware of the limitations of that sweeping VMware statement I mentioned.
No it is not universally certain that everything will magically de-evolve into Intel based VMs just because there’s a certain subset of computing jobs for which this is a no-brainer. This announcement shows that this just ain’t true.
Takeaway two: Despite the Telco world being a very distant and strangely unfamiliar place, given how important it is to all of us, it is true that even one or two bits of jargon to drop into a conversation with a connectivity salesperson can completely change the outcome of a purchasing meeting.
Being able to say, “how old is the kit in our nearest Exchange? Would it benefit from CloudBand in the near future?” is a great way to see whether that salesman knows – and forgive me the French stereotyping here – his onions.
cloudpro.co.uk
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