Cloud Expo: Channel 5 IT chief says capacity planning is key to cloud success

Broadcaster's Francois Chabat urges IT leaders to 'plan for the unplanned'

Businesses will lose the cost benefits of cloud if they don't make sure they have factored in extra capacity for unexpected events, according to senior technology manager for Channel 5, Francois Chabat.

Chabat, who was speaking at the Cloud Expo conference earlier today, gave the experiences of Channel 5 as an example of this: "We established a Digital Media Group in 2007 where a digital strategy to capitalise upon online video was created.

"We approached managed service provider Claranet in 2008 and we have been running our digital services in the private cloud since last year."

Channel 5 spent five months virtualising its datacentre and reduced the number of its servers from 30 to 12.

"The main drivers for us were that it was far more efficient and costs were much lower. However, when we first started we were running at 90 per cent capacity," said Chabat.

"We soon found out that that slack of 10 per cent was not enough. There wasn't enough room to accommodate sudden peaks in programme popularity and I think when CIOs look into moving to the cloud they should work out how much they want to plan for the unplanned."

Chabat also said that although the company was pleased with its decision to migrate, more needs to be done.

"No way would we go back to the physical world but our situation is still not perfect," he said.

"We want to be able to do minute by minute resource allocation where we would be able to spin up virtual machines and kill them within minutes.

"We are in talks with Claranet about this and hope to have it implemented in the next three months or so."