Instead, purchase your software from one provider, but have a direct relationship with the host. Some of our customers are starting to do this with us and Zimbra. Zimbra is sort-of like Google docs, but open source, and they host it with us, and backup to a third-party host (which is cheap to do).

Good for resellers too

Managing the backup and hosting process might be a new way that resellers can differentiate their offering or add value to the supply chain as more and more businesses look to protect their data as they move to a Cloud Computing model. Ensuring ease of data migration between cloud providers is paramount for businesses moving forward.

By not being tied to one provider, a business could easily migrate to another host, or if Zimbra becomes unsupported, for example, they would not lose their data, and we would carry on hosting while they work with us to find a new software solution. If we fail, they still have their data and Zimbra can help them get set up again. We (the managed hosting provider in this example) would not own their data even if we did fail, but no harm in belt-and-braces.

Hosting commoditisation is here

Software providers cannot realistically compete in today’s commoditised hosting market place, and instead should stick to their strengths. This also applies to migrations – when moving customers between hosts there are now companies that specialise in the migration itself but have no interest in selling software nor hosting. One such company is SEM Solutions, with whom we have recently started working.

Another big win from supply chain disintegration is that you gain total price transparency; no more getting stitched up by one provider who is just whacking a huge mark-up on a commodity service like hosting (yes, I’m talking to you, local government CIOs .

Not only does it show you which bits cost what, thus allowing you to compare with the market rates, but disintegrating the supply chain also makes migration to a new Cloud / managed hosting provider easy since you just need to work with the software supplier to migrate to the new host, and are not tied in to one provider. Equally, since you own the data on the service (because you are buying the hosting direct), moving to a new software provider is greatly simplified.

Eating my own dog food

So, do I take my own advice? Yes; Memset is one of the fastest growing technology SMEs in the country, and all our business critical information and systems are hosted in the Cloud (or at least our little bit of it) and accessed over the Web. None of my staff have Microsoft Office, we do not pay for any software, and we do not need servers in our office for administration applications. Everyone has a laptop, and since all our systems and documents (we use a Wiki for the latter) are hosted online everyone can work from home without the complications of a VPN. We do not use any paper for internal communications either, thus minimising “the printer has broken” type problems.

We also use Trac project management and documentation management system for all our internal documentation, task and project management. It is free and simple to host yourself with any managed hosting provider. Simple, scalable systems like Trac have also made it easy for us to obtain and maintain our quality, security and environmental management systems (ISO9001, ISO27001 & ISO14001 accreditations).

I was at the preview of this tool on 30th April in Southampton Street, and it is an amazingly powerful tool. It allow you to rapidly put together a simulated version of your data centre (including characteristics of everything from power cables to server virtualisation systems to external temperature variation), and then ‘run’ it over a period of time to see the costs and power requirements.

During the demonstration in April, Liam & Zahl (the technical and business brains behind the project) used the tool to great effect, neatly and intuitively demonstrating some of the following:

• The inadequacies of DCiE/PUE as useful a metric due to variation with light work loads; you need to measure facilities power and IT power separately.
• How virtualisation drops the total cost of a datacenter by 75% or more (or you can migrate to us and save >85% of course .
• How simply changing from nameplate (typically >400W on the label on the back of a£1,000 1U server) to peak power provisioning (most modern 1U servers never use more than 150W) reduces the 4-year lifetime server cost from £8,000 to just £5,000.
• That a modular build-out is good, but to be most energy- & cost-efficient you really need a dynamic modular approach so that you can switch M&E equipment on/off with diurnal load variations.
• How data centre costs vary with geo-location! Putting it in Iceland does not save you much after all, contrary to popular belief.

The simulator itself is a pure command-line driven tool that has been released under an open source software licence (OSL V3.0), but there is a Web-based interface that is now available to DCSG members, here, although you will need to read the user guide first unless you have a brain the size of a planet.. If you are a member of the BCS but not of the DCSG, you can find out information here: bcs.dcsg.org. If you are not a member of the BCS but are British and an IT professional, then shame on you!

The beta test is likely to last until Autumn, and feedback is welcomed so that the tool can be further improved and any bugs ironed out. Also, the Carbon Trust and BCS are looking for members willing to trial the tool on a case-study basis over the next few months. If you are interested, visit the Carbon Trust data centre sub-site.