“The Theory of Cloud Relativity” by Jaymes Davis
December 2008

Cloud Relativity is an emerging movement of the current industry where the taxonomy of the datacenter will change based on the inflection-based technology of virtualization. Consolidation based on Moore’s law will continue to perpetuate and the propensity for bandwidth will continue to follow Gilder’s law. I have created a formula to allow us to easily ascertain the cost of transitioning to an internal cloud (virtualized environment managed by internal staff) or an external cloud. This is represented as (IC)2=V+S+S+M and (EC)=V+S+S+M respectively.

The theory works by inputting values for the variables against their subsequent formulas to come up with a mathematical figure to replace the values.

V = Virtualization hypervisor  (speed of processor X # cores) = speed of socket (A) / guest usage & consolidation aspect ratio  = (A X % of usage .20)   100 consolidation per socket = A1 / A1    The number of machines you want to consolidate = A2 /  create cost for sockets  (hardware cost  socket number ) + (hypervisor cost  per socket) = A3 / A3 X A2 = A4  / memory is a component of this formula  ( guest memory requirement X # of guests) =  B   / (B  DIMM density) = C x cost per DIMM = D1)/ A4 + D1 = V

S = Storage for the Environment  X .20 for snapshots and growth   Cost of SAN with replication / as well factor in bandwidth cost for replication if used for DR

S =Security / Break down security products cost per socket  = (S2 X A4)

M = Management tools / All management tools by socket = (M X A4 )

This allows all of the variables to be replaced with numerical figures and then squared to provide true 1:1 redundancy; (IC)2=V+S+S+M.

Now take this variable to the external cloud; (EC) = V+S+S+M. A hosting compute cost replaces A3 in the V formula. The storage per GB cost replaces the S2 value because they are not 1:1 anymore, as well as the M value will not be 1:1. This answer will highlight the cost in a quick apples to apples way. This does not account for growth efficiency nor get into the overall administration decrease. However, it does look at it from an enterprise workload perspective emphasizing per socket consolidation. Business continuity and disaster recovery is built-in cost as well as 1st and 2nd tier delivery support infrastructures can be outsourced.

The future that I am working toward is the Enterprise Cloud. Where enterprise workloads can be secure and function in the cloud thus bringing down the capex/opex for the virtualized environment. Also, it will reduce the barriers of adoption, for example for SMB to build a successful startup with the burstability of the cloud and the enterprise redundancy and power.