On-Demand: Buzzword or Business Revolution?

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On-Demand: Buzzword or Business Revolution?
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by Dan Scobie, Star Managed Services
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Special to theWHIR.com
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April 28, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY
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REVIEW) — Several years ago I had a boss who had all the phrases. He
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thought outside the box, real blue-sky stuff – a walking example of
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style over substance. Meetings with him became the perfect opportunity
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to win big prizes in the office game of “Buzzword Bingo.”
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One phrase he didn’t use, but that
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initially inspired the same reaction in me, is “on demand.” A couple of
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years ago I remember that suddenly, instead of having a dial-up
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account, I was being offered “connectivity on demand.” Classic buzzword
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territory – nothing had changed apart from the way marketing people
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wanted me to feel about it.
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When I first encountered “hosting on
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demand” I should have been equally sceptical. I thought I had that
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already; when I ran out of capacity, I could simply order more servers
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and expand the architecture.
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Looking into it, however, I very quickly
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realised that for the first time the phrase was more than a new
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marketing initiative, and that hosting was perhaps the first area that
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could benefit properly from on-demand provision.
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The basic premise for any hosting
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solution is that it serves a business requirement, usually specified in
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financial terms. There will be objectives in terms of revenue
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generation or there may be a functional specification. But this does
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not easily translate into a number of servers or processors, or a
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quantity of memory.
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Hosting is very difficult to specify. At
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some stage a guess will be made as to what is required to cope with an
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expected amount of load. Traditionally, the established answer was
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always to plan for peak load, as the most common specification from a
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hosting solution is that the site can never appear ‘”slow.”
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Take for example an electronic retail
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site. Capacity will have been planned to cope with the level of demand
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generated during the run up to Christmas. The difficulty comes because
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this means that for the rest of the year the site is massively
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over-specified and excessively costly.
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The other main problem is in the
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guesswork involved. Often it may be a good guess, but it’s possible
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that the person responsible will be covering their back by being
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overcautious in their estimation. This invariably leads to an excess of
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costly equipment.
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So how does an on demand environment help
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solve these issues and get closer to meeting true business needs? To
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fully understand how on demand creates a change in the hosting
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environment we need to understand the critical difference.
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Imagine you’re waiting for a bus in the
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rain. A bus arrives and it’s already full. Demand is exceeding supply.
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In a traditional hosting arena the bus company would need to order
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more, or bigger buses. In an on-demand arena the bus extends to
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accommodate all the passengers at this peak period, and then contracts
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again afterwards to ensure running costs are kept to a minimum.
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As this demonstrates, the most important
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feature of an on demand architecture is that is allows you to be
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confident about the environment you implement. Why worry about whether
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or not you can cope, if capacity can be increased as and when it is
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required?
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You can start small and then increase capacity, literally on demand, therefore only paying for what you use.
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The key to this is a process dubbed
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“orchestration.” This is the brain of the system, using various
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monitors to make decisions about the suitable capacity level for the
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environment and the requirements being placed upon it.
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That means the environment knows when to
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add hardware, and when to take it away based on predetermined levels.
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It can add additional servers to a configuration and make them
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functional in minutes.
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The best thing about such orchestration
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is that it can appeal beyond the enterprise level e-tailer, and work at
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a more basic level. It could apply, for example, to a site located on a
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shared server. When the site gets busy enough to require its own
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environment, it can be automatically promoted to that level. The system
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can be scaled to a particular need. And it means that you do not need
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an on-demand budget. In providing its service, for example, Star is
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making a commitment that we will never exceed the cost of an equivalent
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fixed-cost environment.
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There are therefore significant
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advantages to be gained, for companies of all sizes, from hosting on
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demand. It may be new, but finally a phrase has made it beyond Buzzword
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Bingo, and could instead lead a business revolution.
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About The Author
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Dan Scobie is business solutions manager
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of Star Managed Services, a division of Star Internet, a leading
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independent UK ISP with more than 4,000 business customers.
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