In the spring of 2010, when Yaletown Ventures was moving, its partners decided to outsource all of the company�s IT needs to the cloud.
Its offices in Vancouver, Calgary and Seattle have no servers. Their computers are connected to a RackForce data centre in Kelowna that provides all of its hardware and software needs. Even its VoIP (voice-over-Internet protocol) phone service works through the cloud.
The venture capital fund manager specializes in clean-tech and Internet technology sectors, so moving to the cloud was something of an exercise in walking the talk, said Yaletown partner Mike Satterfield.
�We invest in companies that do things in the cloud, and it just occurred to us that we should probably, as the saying goes, drink our own Kool-Aid,� Satterfield said.
Outsourcing the company�s IT needs to a cloud hosting service gives Yaletown more horsepower per dollar than it could have secured if it had invested in its own servers.
Peer 1, a Vancouver-based cloud computing and Internet hosting company, recently did a comparison that showed the cost of buying and maintaining eight servers to be $105,000 compared with $90,000 when outsourced.
But saving money was not Yaletown�s primary motivation for consolidating its data in an off-site location – accessibility was. The fund manager now has offices Vancouver, Seattle and Calgary, so centralizing its computing capacity in the cloud made sense.
�Putting it up in the cloud meant that it was relatively more accessible to the remote offices than it would be if it was here,� Satterfield said.
Yaletown is something of an early adopter when it comes to moving wholesale to the cloud. That migration has been much slower than predicted two years ago.
�At that time, people were saying the cloud is going to grow at 10,000% per year, and very quickly, 100% of IT tasks will be in the cloud,� said Duncan Stewart, co-author of Deloitte�s 2012 technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) predictions.
Those predictions, Stewart said, have turned out to be �more than hype, less than hyper.�
Larger companies and organizations that have already invested heavily in servers and IT departments – financial institutions, for example, and government – have been the slowest to embrace the cloud.
There is a partial migration underway, however.
These days, when IT department managers ask for more money for new servers or software, they might be told instead to use a server farm or SaaS (software as a service) provider.
Some functions are consequently being farmed out to cloud computing companies, with the rest kept in house – using what Stewart calls a �belt and suspenders� approach.
�Cloud is almost a substitute for the word outsourcing,� said Robert Miggins, Peer 1�s senior vice-president of business development.
Headquartered in Vancouver, Peer 1 has 18 data centres in 12 cities in North America and Europe (with a total of 30,000 servers) and more than 10,000 customers.
Miggins said many of the company�s customers are looking to the cloud because �they don�t want to buy any more hardware.�
Smaller high-tech startups with big data needs are among cloud computing�s biggest beneficiaries, because they can avoid some of the upfront capital costs that, until recently, were one of their biggest financial obstacles.
�You can start a tech business without purchasing anything more than a laptop and an Internet connection,� Miggins said.
In some cases, a company or sector�s needs are so specialized that standard off-the-rack data processing doesn�t cut it. Gaming and the film industry are good examples.
Making high-definition and 3-D movies takes a lot of data and requires specialized software for rendering, which is why a consortium of Vancouver studios recently invested $4 million to build the RenderCloud server farm at Great Northern Way Complex for the local movie industry.
The new data centre will have 600 servers when it opens and will ramp up to 1,500 by summer.
It will have a total potential capacity of 5,000 servers, according to Scalar Decisions, which is handling the design and management of the data centre in partnership with a consortium that includes Rainmaker Entertainment, Digital Domain and Imagine Engine.
The rendering that integrates film and digital animation requires �monstrous� amounts of data, said Darren Sharp, Scalar�s general manager for Western Canada.
�The movement to high-def and 3-D animation is really triggering an influx of horsepower needed for rendering.� �
