HP Cloud Services, Cloud Pricing and SLAs

Source: The Register

RFG POV: HP's Cloud Compute offering for production systems is most notable for its 99.95 percent monthly SLA. Most cloud SLAs are hard to understand, vague and contain a number of escape clauses for the provider. For example, Amazon's EC2 SLA guarantees 99.95 percent availability of the service within a region over a trailing 365 day period – i.e., downtime is not to exceed 250 minutes (more than four hours) over the year period. There is no greater granularity, which means one could encounter a four hour outage in a month and the vendor would still not violate the SLA. HP's appears to be stricter; however, in a NetworkWorld article, HP's SLA only applies if customers cannot access any AZs, according to Gartner analyst Lydia Leong. That means customers have to potentially architect their applications to span three or more AZs, each one imposing additional costs on the business. "Amazon's SLA gives enterprises heartburn. HP had the opportunity to do significantly better here, and hasn't. To me, it's a toss-up which SLA is worse," Leong writes. RFG spoke with HP and found its SLA is much better than portrayed in the article. The SLA, it seems, is poorly written so that Leong's interpretation is reasonable (and matches what Amazon requires). However, to obtain credit HP does not require users run their application in multiple AZs – just one, but they must minimally try to run the application in another AZ in the region if the customer's instance becomes inaccessible. The HP Cloud Compute is not a perfect match for mission-critical applications but there are a number of business-critical applications that could take advantage of the HP service. For the record, RFG notes Oracle Corp.'s cloud hosting SLAs are much worse than either Amazon's or HP's. Oracle only offers an SLA of 99.5 percent per calendar month – the equivalent of 2500 minutes or more than 40 hours of outage per month NOT including planned downtime and certain other considerations. IT executives should always scrutinize the cloud provider's SLAs and ensure they are acceptable for the service for which they will be used. In RFG's opinion Oracle's SLAs are not acceptable at all and should be renegotiated or the platform should be removed from consideration. On the cloud storage front overall prices continue to drop 10 percent or more per year. The greater price decreases are due to the rapid growth of storage (greater than 30 percent per year) and the predominance of newer storage arrays versus older ones. IT executives should be considering these prices as benchmarks and working to keep internal storage costs on a similar declining scale. This will require IT executives to retain storage arrays four years or less, and employing tiering and thin provisioning. Those IT executives that believe keeping ancient spinning iron on the data center floor to be the least cost option will be unable to remain competitive against cloud offerings, which could impair the trust relationship with business and finance executives.