Friday, November 29th, 2013

Time	Event
1:00p	Going to the Mall to Buy Some Cloud Mark Thiele is executive VP of Data Center Tech at Switch, the operator of the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas. Thiele blogs at SwitchScribe and at Data Center Pulse, where he is also president and founder. He can be found on Twitter at @mthiele10. MARK THIELE Switch In the perfect world,  you would push any workload that your applications and business teams can dream up into “the cloud.” Unfortunately, the vast majority of cloud buyers today are largely in the dark about how to compare the capabilities and benefits of one cloud against the other. In many cases, they aren’t even sure what questions they should ask of the provider. What’s needed is something akin to a “one stop shopping” cloud marketplace or mall provider. This “mall” would give the buyer quick access to multiple cloud options with tools to compare everything from pricing, and sizing options to location. Why is a Marketplace or Mall Approach So Important? If you go back to the original intent of a marketplace, it was not just about multiple choices from a single vendor (like Amazon Web Services) but a plethora of choices from an array of vendors just like you’d find in a farmers market or a modern mall. An open marketplace must be independent from the providers and create a democratized model of access and purchasing for the buyer. The vast majority of cloud buyers aren’t Zynga, Netflix, or eBay, They’re small, medium to large (SML) businesses with dozens to hundreds of applications. Each of these applications is likely running on 10 servers or less. These buyers don’t have a large team that can go out and spend days, weeks, or months investigating the “best” cloud option. In the Zynga example, the scale of the application justifies significant upfront research and investigation. As a smaller team, you need to be able to make fairly quick buying decisions for relatively small amounts of cloud capacity. Any significant investigation and research effort could blow the value equation entirely. Since you’re not investing weeks determining the I/O performance consistency of one cloud vs. the next, having a comparison tool can really come in handy. If you’re only making a small monthly investment, the best approach is the one that gets you what you really need in a very short period and at low risk. Key Players There are several startups with very large big brothers that are building solutions to support a commodities type market for cloud buyers. This commodities market with things like hedging and futures will likely be useful for the large buyers who have application environments that are characterized by large variances in their scale (significant elasticity). In this commodities type market the two big primary leaders are 6Fusion & Zimory. On the SML businesses side, where you’re looking to buy a few hundred instances or less, the best solution I’ve seen is Computenext. It’s also true that Computenext is focused on enterprise or B2B type workloads. What a Marketplace Platform Can Provide A marketplace approach to cloud capacity acquisition gives IT teams the ability to recognize the nuances that make the right selection of resources important. Without the marketplace, IT staff are much more likely to accept with pragmatism the fact that they don’t have the time to invest in being sure. And so goes the beginning of pragmatic decisions, the bane of IT teams everywhere. Making solid, quick decisions that don’t hamstring your operations teams, hurt performance or lock you in to the wrong solutions is critical to becoming the agile organization we all want to be. We all want to be the agile organization that can respond quickly to business needs while maintaining a better mix of “keep the lights on” expense versus “innovation” investment. Making a Cloud Selection Today there are tools available that will allow you to select from multiple clouds based on a wide range of requirements. Choices include, but aren’t limited to: Size of instance Time increment of charge O/S Support Virtualization platform choice Cloud management platform Scale up versus out options I/O performance options Guarantees of performance Disk size Geo-Distribution Location Latency Prices across the board Search options Exit options Among others… The above list is just a taste, a good taste but still just some of the options you might need to review, compare and utilize before you put a sensitive production workload in the cloud. Imagine trying to create spreadsheets with comparisons of cloud capabilities, and then maintain it (guilty). This type of manual review is exactly what small teams can’t afford to do and with the speed of change in this market it will only get harder to maintain accuracy. What a Cloud Mall Does Not Do The cloud mall doesn’t change the fact that you need to have a clear understanding of what your company’s applications require to provide the appropriate price, performance, and risk mitigation. With anything worth buying, it’s worth being clear about what you need, before you go shopping. The last thing you should do is show up at the mall hoping the stores there will provide you with an answer. If you take the wrong approach you’re likely to come home with that sweater that doesn’t fit well and that you’ll never wear. Customer Requirements for the Success of the Cloud Market We’re nowhere near being in a spot where all the clouds in the mall are “one-size-fits-all,” and we likely won’t be for many years to come. In the mean time we need to have tools that help us navigate the store fronts and selections so that we can fill our closets with the compute capabilities that fit our businesses perfectly or at least well enough to keep us in the game. Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library. (Comment on this)
1:15p	Holiday Shoppers Increasingly Choose Mobile Over Mall: Rackspace Study With Black Friday in the bricks-n-mortar space increasingly chaotic, many shoppers opt for online purchasing for the holidays, and more are using mobile devices. This post original appeared on The WHIR. More than three-quarters of shoppers plan to skip the lines at the mall in favor of sitting in front of their computer or tablet to do at least some of their holiday shopping this year, according to a new Rackspace Hosting survey. The survey of 4,000 UK and US adults released this week found that 69 percent of respondents intend to buy gifts online, while 14 percent are planning on shopping online to purchase travel tickets to see family and friends over the holiday season. Tablets & Mobile Impact Purchases With 18 percent of shoppers in the survey planning to use their tablet to shop, check-out procedures and website performance on mobile need to be a major consideration for ecommerce shops, particularly at this time of year. Last year, only 10 percent of respondents planned to shop this way. Sixteen percent of shoppers this year plan on using their smartphone to make purchases, up from 10 percent last year. Despite the popularity of shopping online around the holidays, 55 percent of shoppers experienced online frustrations last Christmas, with 44 percent abandoning their purchase, and 34 percent trying a different website. Complicated check-out procedures and slow-loading websites account for the majority of shopping cart abandonment, according to Rackspace. “Our study suggests that this may be the most connected Christmas ever. This means that all businesses with an online presence – not just retailers – need to ensure they have the hosting infrastructure and support in place to deal with inevitable traffic peaks over the entire festive season,” John Engates, CTO Rackspace said. “Imagine the frustration if you are unable to shop at a certain website before Christmas, or use an app with your brand new tablet on Christmas Day. With so much to gain or lose over the festive season, it’s high time for businesses to ensure that such frustrations do not become unwelcome Christmas traditions.” Of course, performance is only one piece of the puzzle. Consumers should be aware of mobile security risks when using devices to shop online. A recent Trend Micro report showed that the growth of online shopping on Android and Apple devices, increasingly a target for cybercriminals and mobile malware. This post origThis post original appeared on the WHIR. (Comment on this)
5:39p	Gray Thursday: Internet Retail Traffic Spikes on Thanksgiving Evening This chart from Akamai shows Internet traffic to retail sites surging on Thanksgiving evening in the US. (Image: Akamai) Gray Thursday is the big trend this holiday shopping season, reflected by a large spike in traffic to online retailers on Thanksgiving Day. The surge in retail traffic  indicates that a growing number of Americans clearly want to shop on Thanksgiving. That helps explain why more retail chains have opened their doors on Thanksgiving Day, risking the scorn of some to preserve their market share in an ongoing battle between Internet stores and brick-and-mortar shops. Compuware APM noted a very large spike this year in Thanksgiving day traffic: There was a 95 percent jump in iPad traffic compared to the day before, compared to a 23 percent spike the year before. iPhone traffic jumped 69 percent on Thanksgiving.   “Thanksgiving continues to be one of the fastest growing days for mobile commerce (m-commerce) during the holiday season,” said Steve Dykstra, senior product manager for Compuware. “While we’re seeing some pages optimized for mobile, some critical pages are overloaded, have too many roundtrips making them slow on mobile devices.” Mobile Shopping Continues to Rise The continued growth of shopping through mobile devices. Nearly half (49 percent) of smartphone and tablet users intend to use these devices to search for and buy gifts this year, according to a Harris Interactive poll. Keynote saw a 20 percent increase in mobile shopping last year, and will provide growth numbers after Cyber Monday. Shopping Beginning Earlier and Earlier Shopping started even earlier than Gray Thursday. Compuware APM noted a significant increase in shopping traffic during the weekend leading up to Thanksgiving as well. On the Saturday (11/23) before thanksgiving iPad traffic jumped up 47% and iPhone up 22% over previous 3 days On the Sunday before Thanksgiving iPad traffic jumped up 90% and iPhone 42% over those same days Retailer Websites Performed Slightly Slower This Year on Gray Thursday The Thanksgiving day traffic was higher than anticipated, which might be the result of some performance hits. Thanksgiving page load times averaged more than 8 seconds, a decrease in performance from last year when the average was 6 seconds. It was in line to two years ago, when the average was 8 seconds. This suggests the retailers weren’t as prepared for the additional traffic they are seeing this year on Thanksgiving day. Average page load time (response time) for Thanksgiving day was more than  10 seconds for mobile web sites across the Top 50 US retailers Average page load time for Thanksgiving day was more than 18 seconds across the Top 50 US retailers to conduct a multi-step transaction that includes accessing the home page, conducting a search, viewing a product description, adding items to the shopping cart and reviewing the order. These are valuable seconds. According to Compuware, with the average page load time (response time) over 6 seconds, the page abandonment rate increased from 12 percent to over 20 percent. According to a Harris Poll, 37 percent of consumers will go to a competitor if the response time is more than 3 seconds. Another storyline  is about complexity.  the slowest pages have many more objects and 3rd Parties. The slowest 10 websites, which accessed an average of 60.1 hosts, achieved an average page load time (response time) of 15.8 seconds. The 10 best accessed an average of 11.8 hosts and had an average page load time of 5.9 seconds. Companies such as Compuware APM and Keynote will continue to monitor both the Internet and the health of the major shopping sites during this busy period, providing intermittent reports. Good performance from data center to end device for both native and mobile shopping sites is key to success for online retailers, as every second counts. Data Center Knowledge will keep track of all the action, delving into the impact of both Gray Thursday and the increasing usage of mobile devices. Last year, the big issue identified during the holiday shopping season was “time to paint” on mobile devices, with slow load times causing many to abandon sites and their shopping carts. So far, performance on Thanksgiving day seems to have taken a step back. Now it’s time to see if the retailers that struggled during last Black Friday did some fine tuning this year. (Comment on this)

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