All your apps are in the cloud(s) now.  It’s OK.  Photo: Paul VanDerWerf, Potts Harbour, Hartswell, ME.  CC license. 

Hyperscale computing (HC) may sound like something only NASA and Google need.  But any business doing any kind of commerce with web sites can potentially benefit, as can brick and mortar companies who are highly dependent on 24 x 7 x 365 operations and no longer want to buy and maintain servers.

Hyperscale computing is computer processing power and storage that can be scaled up or down instantly, in large amounts.  Hyperscale computing relies on distributing computer tasks to multiple servers (distributed computing). You could do this on your own, duplicating your server environment and buying extra servers and the software needed to distribute tasks, but all of this is already available in the cloud, by many reputable firms, at costs that are not only low but predicted to go lower.

Why should you care?  Here are two scenarios where you might benefit:

1. Your product is sold at brick and mortar stores as well as your own web site.  Your retail customers (stores) use your primary site to place orders and as a selling tool in their stores.  You frequently promote your products to generate sales, so traffic and transactions on your site fluctuate a lot.  In this case you have to manage high traffic in a high- responsive way, and you need alternatives for backup if your primary servers fail.  Again, you can manage the hardware physically, but the most efficient way will be to virtualize your servers with scaleability built in, which is the whole purpose of hyperscale computing.
2. You don’t sell a thing online but your 24 x 7 x 365 operation is highly dependent on e-commerce with other companies and your own ERP system, the hardware for which is hosted by you or by an external company. Most companies have redundancy backup internally, or they make sure that apps or services they use are hosted by firms that also have redundancy backup.  But what if your vendor has the traditional one or two server backup, and one or both of those fail?  As companies more and more adopt SaaS for applications solutions, they can’t just assume that their SaaS vendor has adequate backup/scale-up capability.

Think of it this way, in simple terms: what you used to think of as big computers in some refrigerated room running all your stuff is now available online, not only in the quantity that you want, but with much more capacity and speed and at much lower cost; but more importantly agile enough to expand instantly as needed, or failover automatically — both data and software — to a redundant environment in cases of disaster, virus, or overload.

Another kind of Saas: The village of Saas-Fee and surrounding mountains, in southwestern Switzerland. Photo by Robbie Shade, CC license.

Everyone has a SaaS version of the software your business is considering, right?  Vendors know that terminology like SaaS and cloud trigger generally positive reactions from potential customers — having these options implies the vendor is up to date with the latest advances in software platforms.

Never mind what the vendor calls it.  What you need to understand right from the beginning is: who owns the software, where is it hosted, and how is it priced?

1. True SaaS is software that you do not own and do not maintain.  Some vendors will promise to maintain their software and to support your users, but the application nonetheless is installed on one of your servers.  This is not true SaaS.
2. An application that is customized just for your business, hosted by the software vendor, and whose costs are just spread out over a period of years via monthly payments, is not true SaaS.
3. True SaaS is priced like a subscription, one that is, say, monthly, and that you can cancel at any time.
4. True SaaS will have little or no startup costs.
5. A SaaS application can be what is called “single-tenant” or “multi-tenant.”  The former means you are using an application that is configured just for your enterprise; the latter means you are using the same base code or a copy of the same base code that many other firms are also using.  The former will cost more.

Why would companies say their software is SaaS when it really isn’t?  Because the term SaaS has a halo effect — it implies the solution is advanced, quickly implemented, efficient, and inexpensive.  A vendor can even make the pricing look like Software-as-a-Service (#2 above).

Know the details before you waste too much time.

Related: A Software Vendor Checklist

Photo: “Trails in the Sand,” Dubai, by Kamal Kestell, CC license

If “Humanscale” computing is managing bags of sand, “Hyperscale” computing is managing each individual grain of sand in every bag.

“Hyperscale” computing (HC) is the processing of data, messages or transactions on a scale orders of magnitude larger than traditional computing.  HC is becoming a need for many businesses.  Why?

Consider a company that sells bottled water.  Its main business used to be selling truckloads full of cases of water to big grocery chains.  It has 25 different products, or Stock Keeping Units (SKUs).  The big grocery chains then distributed cases of water to its stores, which numbered 20,000.  The data requirements for the water company’s computers was manageable, even as the company grew rapidly.

Now, the company wants to analyze the performance of its products on store shelves by measuring things like velocity (how fast the product turns), price compared to competing products, and out-of-stocks.  It’s customers — the big grocery chains — are offering to supply data from their systems on every scan of every product in every store, because they too want to improve the performance of products on the shelf.

In one month during the summer, about 3.5 billion bottles of water are sold.  A data file from just one big grocery chain runs to 3 million lines.  How and where will you process this data?  Traditional databases will be too slow.  You will need superfast databases that distribute computing to many servers — this is called in-memory, or massively parallel computing.  This is an example of hyperscale computing.

Other examples where you would need HC: selling direct to consumers through their smartphones, where you might have to process millions of transactions say, during the Christmas holiday season; gathering machine data every second to monitor a machine’s performance (a General Electric turbofan jet engine generates 5,000 data points per second, which amounts to 30 terabytes every 30 minutes); and managing millions of product-attribute combinations.

The computing tools for hyperscale will not be found in your ERP system.  Trying to engineer your existing systems to handle hyperscale data and transactions will be a costly failure.  But there are tools available on the market today, and many of them are found in cloud applications, and in application hosting providers.

Cloud application and hosting vendors usually have much larger data processing capabilities, including automatic failover and redundant servers.  You can take advantage of this capacity.  For example, you can obtain, from a leading application hosting provider, at a cost less than the monthly rent of an apartment in New York City, 30 terabytes of storage and a massively parallel computing environment.

My advice:

• Identify areas of your business that are significantly under-scaled, or where you have large gaps in business needs compared to processing capability;
• Pick one and design a pilot project (many vendors are willing to do this with you at very low cost);
• Measure results and benefits, and if beneficial, expand the solution to other parts of your business.

It’s probably not OK to ignore this trend.  Even of you don’t need HC today, think about the future and where commerce is going.  If you don’t gain the capability for hyperscale computing, one or more of your competitors probably will.

Image by Aucitron, CC license

Cloud computing is being marketed as something new, but it’s not. A cloud is simply a server – a computer you don’t own or maintain – that sits somewhere other than in your building, that you access to run applications or store data. The loan calculators that are ubiquitous on the web run in a cloud that you access via the internet. Data backup services run in the cloud, as do other web tools such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

In fact, cloud computing, technically speaking, can be considered as any software you access that is functioning outside your desktop computer and outside any server that is physically on your company’s premises or within your company’s security firewall.

If you read an ad that says: “Get more out of your data with business intelligence in the cloud,” it could be a vendor selling a SaaS application, database hosting services, or both.

Companies with limited IT resources should always consider a cloud solution. What is new in cloud applications is an expanded range of products and services – today some companies can run nearly their entire business in a cloud environment.

Instead of investing millions in a traditional on-site suite of integrated applications for sales, accounting, logistics and human resources, companies can securely access these solutions as if they were residing on a server inside their building, but without the cost and maintenance of on-premise applications.

Enterprises using cloud applications also do not need to employ a staff of experts to maintain, troubleshoot and periodically upgrade the server(s) or software – all of that is managed by the cloud application provider.

The cloud is made possible by high-speed internet connections and the huge decrease in the cost of computer processing and memory over the past decade. Stronger security methods have also contributed to the growth of the cloud, although some companies are still hesitant to trust a third party with their sensitive corporate data.

Inexpensive cloud applications are available if you can run your business with standard, non-customized applications. Enterprises can access what is called a multi-tenant version of the software – where several companies use the same software, but whose transactions and data are separated from one another by functioning in a different location or “node” of the software. This scenario is also effectively software-as-a-service (SaaS), because you don’t own the software, the vendor does, and you are simply renting it by paying a periodic access fee or a fee based on number of transactions or users.

Another option is for your enterprise to own its own customized software, but outsource the hosting of it on one or more servers and networks. This model has been around for years – many companies outsource the hosting of their applications to data centers. This is why cloud computing, for all its hype, is nothing new.