By TN Ashok
New Delhi , August 01: Even as Amazon and Google hype plans to launch their version of cloud computing in a big way, an enterprising Indian enterprise has introduced a commodity type exchange where computer users and cloud computing service providers can come on a common platform and interact to mutual benefit .
The exchange went into operation on June 15 this year. They have eighteen corporations doing trade on this platform now. More are coming.
The exchange platform going under the name of India Compute Interchange or acrorynmed as ICLx will be the first of its kind in India and the first outside United States. ICIx has created an electronic spot exchange to help enterprise organisations and cloud service providers manage their financial IT risk exposure by trading the cloud using standardized contracts, Dr Bharat Swami, the brain behind the exchange and Chairman of ICI says.
Dr Swami says that time has now come to move the IT infrastructure to the cloud, get out of the legacy of in house infrastructure, and create the need to take control of one technical operations to benefit all financial operations. CFOs, CIOs and CTOs, all need to talk a common language to understand and budget IT expenditure, Dr Swami said in an exclusive interview.
It may sound like a difficult transition process but its inevitable, so why waste time, Dr Swami asked.
What is the advantage of the ICIx and why would anyone want to migrate to a new platform when one can deal directly with the cloud computing service providers. ?
Simple, says Hemal Mewada, the Technology Director at ICI, as it would benefit both the end user and the cloud service provider. How, you may ask. The ICI will use a measurable index for computing actual usage on a cloud against the current system of using allotted space. The measurable index is actually a meter you have at home for measuring the units of electricity you consume to pay your monthly power bill.
Called the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC), it is a unit of measure. The meter is known as the UC6 meter and it helps in measuring and monitoring the compute resources of one’s infrastructure, says Mewada.
The WAC, explained Mewada, is an open, impartial and consistent view of IT infrastructure resource consumption and the output yields a single representative unit value of actual consumption. “The WAC aggregates the six underlying utilisation metic required to operate any software application”, he said.
WAC comprises six compute resources – CPU, Memory, Storage , Disk I/O , Lan I/O, and WAN I/O. WAC becomes the Commercial Standard to quantify supply and demand of compute resources. Here is what a WAC Meter Output would look like : Real Time Utilisation : CPU 423 MHz, Memory 1160 MB, DISK IO 65kbps, LAN IO 11 kbps, WAN IO 0 kbps, Storage 480 GB.
This would in terms of WAC meter output would amount to 12 WAC/h.
When asked what is the single biggest advantage of switching over to the ICI, Dr Bharat Swami said, for the user such as a business enterprise or a government department heavily dependant on a computer and internet network where data usage keeps piling up day by day and they become hard pressed to add more servers for storage, ICI is the simplest solution. How? The enterprise does not have to add more servers but buy space from the cloud service provider and pay only for as per their usage on the cloud.
For the Cloud Service Provider, Dr Bharat Swami pointed out, he would benefit by getting a larger number of users of space .
