Salesforce shuns virtualisation for multi-tenancy

Salesforce adopted the pod model in 2006, to assist with capacity planning.

Fisher described pods as “self-contained units”, each consisting of application servers, database servers, search servers, storage, networking and load balancers.

Each pod houses a mix of large, medium-sized and small customers to balance demand and is replicated in another geography.

“If you don’t create pods and you’re just adding capacity then you’re assuming that every part of your stack can scale infinitely,” he explained.

“You’re assuming that you can always add more app servers, always add more database servers … the world of technology doesn’t really work that way.”

Salesforce deploys new pods in accordance with its predictive models and allocates new customers to regional pods automatically.

Pods may also be split should existing customers demand more capacity. This July, Salesforce split the San Jose-based NA1 into two, moving half its tenants to a new NA13 pod in Chicago.

Salesforce’s own instance – used by Fisher and other internal staff – remained on NA1. But customers who moved to Chicago “just didn’t care” about being moved, he said.

“They shouldn’t care – that’s our goal,” he said. “It’s the cloud; you should just access it and use it and you shouldn’t really care where it’s located. And for the most part, I think that’s really the experience that our customers have.”

Salesforce’s data centre locations have been a sticking point for Australian organisations in previous years, due to concerns over the legal jurisdiction of data stored offshore.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy and finance sector regulator APRA have separately called for caution over cloud adoption.

Just two years ago, APRA stepped in to apply pressure on Perpetual Private Wealth after the firm revealed that it had implemented a Salesforce customer relationship management system hosted in Singapore. ANZ Bank removed some of its Salesforce applications due to the same pressures.

But the sector appears to have overcome its initial misgivings, with the Commonwealth Bank, Bank of Queensland and CGU Insurance outing themselves as users of Salesforce’s customer relationship management system this year.

Data centre wish list

Fisher said that Salesforce chief executive officer Marc Benioff planned to build out an Australian data centre but “we don’t know when”.

In the nearer term, he said the company would expand its US footprint to meet capacity demands and look to establish its next data centre in Europe.

Any new data centres would use Salesforce’s common data centre architecture and be built in partnership with “wholesale data centre providers”.

Salesforce colocates much of its infrastructure in Equinix data centres overseas, but Fisher said the company has moved to a wholesale model under which it managed its IT infrastructure at lower cost.

“It’s a much better price if you want to manage it all yourself. We pretty much do all the data centre stuff ourselves [but] we wouldn’t look to buy land and build our own thing – certainly not in Australia,” he said.

Fisher said the company would consider internet connectivity, power costs, seismic activity and the risk of natural disasters,  plus the proximity of its hardware suppliers when seeking out a new site.

Salesforce claims its data centres run at a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.53.