Latest News from Cloud Computing Journal

Moore’s Law: The Future of Cloud Computing from the Bottom Up

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:45:00 EST

I’m a serial entrepreneurial leader. It’s an art/science, left/right brain thing. I have to say that one of the most challenging parts of creating a compelling strategy, leading a company or building products is getting people to see the possibilities, transitions and tipping points. Imagineering the future calls me to look back at what made companies great -- specifically, how they capitalized on paradigm shifts while the rest missed it.

CyberMedia CEO Pradeep Gupta Innovates, Pushes the Envelope

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:23:00 EST

CyberMedia is headquartered in Gurgaon in the National Capital Region centered around New Delhi in northern India. The company has additional offices throughout India, in Singapore, and in three subsidiary locations in the US.

Terracotta – Eucalyptus to Drive Scaling in Private Cloud Environments

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:34:40 EST

Terracotta and Eucalyptus Systems have together come up with an integrated open source solution for private cloud that they say will maximize data scalability and application performance. The companies claim that their partnership is aimed at helping enterprises get a better handle on challenges related to the elastic provisioning of compute clouds on existing data center infrastructure. The joint solution specifically targets the problem that companies face due to the inability of the data layer to scale at the same rate as the compute layer. The combo stack is intended for large-scale businesses to provision private clouds on the Eucalyptus cloud platform .

CA and NetApp Build Solutions for Public and Private Cloud Infrastructures

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:15:00 EST

CA and NetApp on Tuesday announced an extension of their multi-year solutions partnership to develop management solutions for public and private cloud environments. As a result, the companies are integrating CA'svirtualization, automation and service assurance offerings with NetApp's storage management solutions. The unified solutions will further help customers drive operational efficiencies through improved business agility, productivity and service quality, while also helping to lower costs and reduce risks that are associated with virtualization and cloud-based infrastructures.

COLT to Deliver Enhanced Cloud Services with TIBCO Software

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:15:00 EST

COLT, a European provider of business communications and managed services, today announced that the company has selected TIBCO's cloud software to provide organisations throughout Europe with the ability to deploy and manage enterprise applications across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures in real-time.

Cloud: Hype, Opportunity or Disintermediation

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 04:15:00 EST

Will such disintermediation be the final straw for the ailing Telecom giants already faced with the ultimate threat of being relegated to just bit pipe providers?

BlueLock Introduces Cloud Computing Solutions with BlueLock CloudSuite

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:15:00 EST

BlueLock, a provider of cloud computing and managed IT services, announced on Monday the BlueLock CloudSuite, a comprehensive set of cloud computing solutions, offering a tailored selection of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments to best fit the specific needs of individual applications. BlueLock CloudSuite is an array of public and private cloud computing solutions.

Pervasive Software Selects Windows Azure

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:15:00 EST

Pervasive Software of embeddable data management and data integration software and in enabling revolutionary next-generation analytics, on Monday announced that it has selected the Microsoft Windows Azure platform as the future platform for Pervasive BusinessXchange WebDI, its hosted business-to-business data interchange service. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and recent “Best of SaaS Showplace” award winner, Pervasive Software recently deepened its engagement with Microsoft through participation in the Front Runner for Windows Azure Platform program and the Microsoft Metro Early Adopter Program. Pervasive WebDI, a .Net application, also applied for and was selected for the Windows Azure platform Deep Dive program, an on-site immersion experience during which Pervasive technologists gained in-depth exposure to Windows Azure platform technologies and best practices.

Customers Adopt Cisco Data Center 3.0 Architecture

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST

Cisco on Monday announced that Coca-Cola Bottling Co., Salem Hospital, ExamWorks, and University of Sydney have selected Cisco Data Center 3.0 technology to optimize data center resources, simplify data center management, and reduce the total cost of ownership, while increasing business agility and productivity.

Crystal Balls For Latest IT Growth and Impact Trends

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST

The cloud crashes make major new stories. We've got two things occurring right now. We've got a massive move into the cloud. That was my first prediction. We have the cloud providers trying to scale up, and perhaps they’ve never scaled up to the levels that they are going to be expected to scale to in 2010. That's ripe for disaster. A lot of these cloud providers are going to over extend and over sell, and they're going to crash. Performance is going to go down -- very analogous to AOL’s outage issues, when the Internet first took off. We're going to see people moving to the cloud, and cloud providers not able to provide them with the service levels that they need. We're going to get a lot of stories in the press about cloud providers going away for hours at a time, data getting lost, all these sorts of things. It's just a matter of growth in a particular space. They're growing very quickly, they are not putting as much R&D into what these cloud systems should do, and ultimately that's going to result in some disasters.

Univa Cloud Now Supports Amazon EC2

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST

Univa UD cloud management software, announced on Monday that its UniCloud and Grid MP products now support Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, enabling users to greatly reduce public cloud computing costs by essentially setting their own price for the resources they wish to consume. “This is a win for our customers, and serves to solidify Univa’s position in enabling HPC in the cloud,” said Gary Tyreman, SVP of products and alliances at Univa UD. “Spot Instances provide an option for auction-style computing where UniCloud or Grid MP users can bid for capacity in the Amazon EC2 cloud. This will drive down costs through competition while enabling a dynamic computing option for customers whose use cases are flexible enough to take advantage of this opportunistic model.”

Voltaire Announces 32% Revenue Growth in Q4

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:45:00 EST

Looking ahead, I believe 2010 will be an inflection point for Voltaire and our markets. The principles used in high performance computing of scale-out, low latency and application acceleration is becoming the foundation for next generation, virtualized data centers and the rapidly expanding cloud computing opportunity. We believe that we are well-positioned at the forefront of a coming widespread infrastructure refresh in the data center. We aim to capitalize on this potential and I am excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for Voltaire in the coming months and years.

"iPad Summit" Colocated with "Cloud Computing Expo" in Silicon Valley

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:45:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced on Monday that the first International "iPad Summit" (www.ipadsummit.net), will take place November 1, 2010, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The Summit is co-located with the 7th International Cloud Expo and the 9th International Virtualization Conference & Expo. The iPad Summit is an intensive and content-rich one-day program designed to satisfy the growing hunger among software developers, as well as IT and "new media" professionals for a broad spectrum of sessions informing them what kinds of development options and opportunities the iPad provides. The event will be renamed as "iPad Expo" (www.ipadexpo.net) in 2011 to include extensive "developer" and "new media" tracks in addition to its 2010 summit content.

Security Isn't the Biggest Obstacle of Cloud Computing

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:30:00 EST

Frankly I’ve grown weary of the debates over the security of cloud computing. It’s not that I don’t appreciate that there are technical hurdles in front of us, but we have reached a point that a security vulnerability in a single offering, whether that offering is in the public or private cloud, results in loads of silly commentary that links the particular problem to the overall state of cloud security. I’m not sure if those involved in this commentary have a vested interest in driving this kind of dialogue, or if it happens because it is easy to write about, but in either case a majority of the discussions around cloud security have degraded to pure absurdity.

Good News for SOA - Oracle Buys AmberPoint

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

AmberPoint and Oracle share a vision of providing customers with comprehensive SOA management capabilities that support modern IT environments and are also complete, open, and integrated," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle Executive Vice President, Product Development. "We expect the addition of AmberPoint's products to Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite will provide stronger end-to-end governance that allows customers to manage the entire lifecycle of SOA-based solutions, providing visibility and management across heterogeneous environments.

1000 Ways to Skin the Cat, Either Way, the Cat’s Till Dead

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:45:00 EST

Thanks to @jadkins for the colorful ending to that cliched saying, which really got me thinking. Sometimes we just make certain aspects of architecture too difficult for no reason. Good design is important and can have significant financial impact if done incorrectly, but chances are the negative impact comes into play during the engineering effort, not during the architecture. To clarify my point, one must first understand what architecture is really focused on and how that differentiates from engineering.

TIBCO to Deliver Enhanced Cloud Computing Services

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:30:00 EST

TIBCO Software on Monday announced COLT, a leading European provider of data, voice and managed services, has selected TIBCO's cloud software to provide organizations throughout Europe with the ability to deploy and manage enterprise applications across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures in real-time. The enhanced Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings for cloud services, offered by COLT, will rapidly bring flexibility and scalability into the business, especially for organizations operating applications in high performance computing environments.

Cloud Capitalism’s Threat to Cloud Computing Culture

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

Charlie Leadbeater has a terrific post on the threats posed by the fact that The Cloud (as in “cloud computing”) too often actually is a recentralizing of the Net by profit-seeking companies. The easiest example cited by Charlie is Google Books, which provides a tremendous service but at the social cost of giving a single company control over America’s digital library. The problem here isn’t capitalism but monopolization; an open market in which other organizations could (the pragmatic “could,” not the legal or science fiction “could”) also offer access to scanned libraries would create a cloud of books not solely controlled by any single company. (The Google Books settlement threatens to rule out competition because without an equivalent agreement with publishers and authors, any other organization that scans and provides access to books runs the strong risk of being sued for copyright infringement, especially when it comes to books whose copyright holders are hard to find. The revision of the Settlement is less egregiously monopolistic.)

SAP's Distress Will Make Oracle's Day

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

In a surprise move, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker, in the job on his own only eight months, has resigned after it became clear that his contract, not up until the end of the year, wasn't going to be extended. At least that's the way the company phrased it. Oracle's great competitor said Apotheker and its supervisory board came to a "mutual agreement." It did not say why. SAP is going back to the "two in a box" model and has named the head of its field organization Bill McDermott and product development chief Jim Hagemann Snabe co-CEOs. Both are already members of the company's executive board.

Adecco Connects Its UK Branches with Magic Software's uniPaaS

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:16:00 EST

Magic Software Enterprises Ltd., a provider of application platforms and business and process integration solutions, announced on Monday that Adecco, a market leader in human resource solutions, has developed MAX, a back-office system for its 200 UK branches, using Magic Software's uniPaaS application platform.

Enterprise Cloud Computing as the Digital Nervous System of the Enterprise

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST

Businesses today face a tsunami of challenges unlike it has ever faced in history: globalization, geo-political, rise of the Internet consumer, customer mind-share dynamics, proliferation of information and content to manage and maintain (with regulatory & security concerns). This requires new ways to do business: 1) provide an enriched and consistent quality customer experience; 2) conduct business over any form of electronic channel; 3) rapid adoption of new business models; 4) transact business in the most efficient & effective means possible; 5) incorporate "turn on dime" transaction workflow, and rapidly make informed decisions.

SAP CEO Apotheker Unexpectedly Quits

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:45:00 EST

SAP AG announced late Sunday that the SAP Supervisory Board has reached a mutual agreement with CEO Leo Apotheker not to extend his contract as a member of the SAP Executive Board. The company press release on Sunday read as follows: "Leo Apotheker has resigned as CEO and member of the SAP Executive Board effective immediately. "The SAP Executive Board, in agreement with the SAP Supervisory Board, has appointed two Co-CEOs: Bill McDermott, head of field organization and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development, both already members of the SAP Executive Board.

The Good and Not So Good from State of Green Business 2010

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:29:00 EST

Recently I attended the “State of Green Business Forum 2010″ organized by Greenbiz.com in San Francisco. There were a lot of Good and Not So Good discussions during the forum and I would like to share a few of them with you. Overall, I think it was a good event to attend and to learn [...]

Dell’s Reportedly Working on Newfangled CloudEdge Servers

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST

Seems we are supposed to expect a line of servers called Cloudedge out of Dell this year that commoditizes species of the custom servers it makes for sites such as Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft Azure. They’d apparently go to folks who don’t buy in such bulk for private clouds and second-tier Internet companies, according to PC World. It’s thinking very energy-efficient and small but lacking redundancy so the user’s software will have to be able to work around failure. It’s also thinking of bundling them with VMware and Microsoft. They’d compete with IBM’s Idataplex, HP’s Extreme Scale-Out machines and SGI.

Down-to-Earth Contracts that Keep the Cloud Aloft

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:45:00 EST

This article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a Cloud environment. Many standards already developed for Web services and service-oriented architectures provide to the communicating parties a good understanding and control of the expected quality of service at the most basic level of the interaction.

VM Sprawl is Bad but Network Sprawl is Badder

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:15:00 EST

We worry about VM sprawl but what about device sprawl? Management of a multitude of network-deployed solutions can be as operationally inefficient as managing hundreds of virtual machines, and far more detrimental to the health and performance of your applications. Turning them all into virtual network appliances that might need scaling themselves? That’s even badder. But all you hardware fanbois best not smirk too much because the proliferation of hardware network devices is only slightly less badder than the potential problems arising from virtual network appliance sprawl.

Businesses to Watch in 2010

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST

Ever get that sense of déjà vu – you know, where you think you’ve been somewhere before, seen something before… but can’t place it? Well, that’s what CNET Blog Network writer James Urquhart must have felt about his predictions for cloud businesses to watch in 2010: he forecast them already in 2008, and it seems many [...]

Google Whistles Up the Cavalry

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

Google reportedly called up the black ops National Security Agency (NSA) after the Chinese – perhaps the Chinese military – broke into its computers apparently to steal its secrets for their Great Leap Forward. Google wants help improving its, well, security, according to the Washington Post. Everything is – shhh! – very hush-hush; the terms of their liaison are reportedly still being worked out.

Oracle Shoots Down Sun Cloud

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:15:00 EST

Amazon’s EC2 and S3 have nothing to fear from Sun. Oracle says it’s going to blow the Amazon-aping Sun Open Cloud away. It doesn’t want to pursue the on-demand service, announced last March, a month before Oracle agreed to buy Sun, and promised for the summer, as a worldwide public cloud using OpenSolaris, Linux, Windows, Sun Grid Engine, ZFS, MySQL and Java running on Sparc and x86 blades complete with open APIs.

Microsoft XDrive Betas

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:15:00 EST

Microsoft has started beta testing its so-called XDrive as Windows Azure Drive. It’ll let users run their Windows apps in the cloud using standard Windows NTFS APIs to make migrating to the cloud easier. Microsoft said for the beta release, customers will only be billed for the storage space used by what it calls page blobs (defined as a drive formatted as a fixed NTFS VHD between 16MB and 1TB) and the read/write transactions to the page blob.

Azure Opens for Business

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST

Windows Azure and SQL Azure went commercial in the wee small hours Tuesday Greenwich time in 21 countries to face off against Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, Google, Cisco, EMC, VMware and Rackspace. And 99.95% Service Level Agreements (SLAs) kicked in and partners, ISVs and business-betting start-ups could start selling Azure-based solutions.

Integration Concerns No Barrier to Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:30:00 EST

Study from Mimecast Finds that Security and Integration Concerns are not Preventing Enterprises' Cloud Computing Adoption

London - February 4, 2010 - Mimecast®, a holistic email management company offering SaaS-based email archiving, continuity, security and policy control, today announced the results of its Cloud Computing Adoption Survey, which examined the perception and adoption of cloud computing solutions among 565 respondents responsible for managing their organization's IT operations and budget across the U.S. and Canada in the Fall of 2009.

Data from the recently completed online survey highlights the complex, often contrasting, thought process of IT decision makers regarding cloud computing. While security and integration issues are clearly users' biggest fears about cloud computing, these concerns have not dissuaded companies from implementing cloud-based applications within their corporate infrastructure. The well-known fears with cloud computing appear to be at odds with reality, as the survey findings suggest strong satisfaction with cloud computing once it is installed. 70 percent of IT decision makers already using cloud computing are planning to move additional solutions to the cloud—most within the next 12 months—indicating that those respondents have come to quickly recognize the inherent ease of implementation, robust security features and cost-savings of cloud computing.

Survey Results

Those That Have Used Cloud-Based Services are Coming Back for More

• 70 percent of companies already using cloud computing solutions are planning on moving additional applications to the cloud—and a majority of them are looking to do so in the next 12 months. This shows that respondents that have used cloud-based solutions have seen their business and operational value and want to expand that success to other application areas.

Companies' Cloud Fears are Waning...

• 62 percent of all respondents have considered or are considering cloud computing.
• When asked what would change their minds about cloud computing, respondents ranked more mature solutions and better integration with existing systems as their top two needs (33 percent for maturity, 32 percent for integration).

... but Security Concerns and Existing Investments Remain Biggest Roadblocks to Further Adoption

• Companies remain hesitant because of perceived security issues. The findings show that security concerns were the leading reason given by respondents in all categories for not moving forward with cloud-based applications. 46 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications chose security as the main reason for not moving forward. This was also true across a majority of industries, including financial services (76 percent), energy (75 percent), government (67 percent), retail (61 percent) and technology (40 percent).
• The investments made in current IT infrastructure and worries about integration also prevented companies from taking the next step toward cloud computing. 32 percent of respondents that had considered cloud-based applications named existing infrastructure investments as the reason for not moving to the cloud; while 26 percent said that legacy/integration worries had stopped them from going any further. Between the time and effort spent building their current infrastructure and fears around integrating existing systems into the cloud, respondents and their companies have been afraid to abandon what they know for what they don't.
• Cost also continued to be a concern for those considering cloud computing, especially among government (67 percent), healthcare (52 percent) and legal (40 percent) respondents. This may have more to do with this year's decreased IT budgets than the expense of cloud services.
• However, of those that have already implemented the cloud, 81 percent of legal, 77 percent of retail, 75 percent of government, 74 percent of technology, 72 percent of healthcare and 68 percent of financial services respondents were planning on moving additional applications to it in the future—showing that these fears can be overcome.

Certain Industries are Moving Faster than Others
• The top three industries adopting cloud computing solutions are technology (with 53 percent), financial services (40 percent) and legal (37 percent). This statistic shows that respondents within heavily-regulated markets such as legal and financial services do not share the belief that cloud-based services make it harder to prove compliance with industry regulations.
• Government has the smallest adoption, with only 19 percent using cloud-based solutions.

Additional Notable Findings

Email and CRM Applications Add the Most Value

• Among the respondents already using cloud computing solutions, email (23 percent) and CRM (18 percent) proved to be the most valuable.
• 33 percent of this group have moved email management to the cloud, 26 percent deployed cloud-based CRM systems, 26 percent moved email archiving and 22 percent have moved storage functions.

Cost is Still the Primary Motivation for Moving to the Cloud, but Agility is Gaining

• Cost savings (54 percent) are still the primary motivation behind the adoption of cloud-based services. However, there is evidence that the other business benefits of cloud computing are gaining ground. One of the major benefits of the cloud is its ability to make an enterprise better prepared to react and respond to unexpected changes—or to easily add-on new services as needed. The findings show that 49 percent of respondents support this idea, indicating agility/scalability as a main reason for moving services to the cloud. In addition, respondents also rated efficiency (39 percent) and streamlined administration (36 percent) as key reasons. As the adoption of cloud-based services grows, so does the understanding of its value.

"This research shows that once enterprises experience cloud-based applications, their fears about integration, reliability and costs are immediately alleviated," said Mimecast Chief Executive Officer, Peter Bauer. "The survey's results point to a bright future ahead for cloud computing as more and more companies look to the cloud to create an efficient and agile organization."
For a research brief detailing the full results of the survey, please go to: http://www.mimecast.com/cloudsurvey

- ### -

About Mimecast
Mimecast (www.mimecast.com) delivers SaaS-based enterprise email management including archiving, discovery, continuity, security and policy. By unifying disparate and fragmented email environments into one holistic solution that is always available from the cloud, Mimecast minimizes risk and reduces cost and complexity, while providing total end-to-end control of email. Founded in the United Kingdom in 2003, Mimecast serves approximately 2,500 customers worldwide and has offices in Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and the Channel Islands.

Contact:
Saul Konviser
GolinHarris
+44 (0)207 067 0472
skonviser@golinharris.com

Positive ROI with URAD Cloud Computing Solution

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:00:00 EST

QBOS, a developer and provider of innovative web-based management solutions serving large and small businesses, announced that Cbeyond Inc. has successfully launched its TradeSpace Management System to their nationwide Field Service Partner network. The QBOS TradeSpace Management System will extend process automation, document management, workforce management and collaboration capabilities beyond corporate boundaries to Cbeyond’s field service partners who provide VoIP equipment, installation, and other communications services to Cbeyond’s 35,000+ small business customers.

Layered Technologies Receives Growth Equity Investment Led By Accel-KKR

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:15:00 EST

Layered Technologies, a leading worldwide provider of on-demand and cloud computing IT infrastructure, today announced a $20 million equity infusion from investors led by Accel-KKR, a technology-focused private equity firm. The new investment will help Layered Tech fuel further growth, which includes making strategic acquisitions. Layered Tech’s already strong product offerings in managed services, virtualization and cloud computing business will have an even greater competitive advantage by being well-capitalized and having the long-term commitment of a strong financial partner like Accel-KKR. With eight top-tier data centers around the world, Layered Tech’s infrastructure powers millions of Web sites and Internet-enabled applications including e-commerce and software as a service (SaaS). Layered Tech has seen rapid growth in recent years, and in 2009 was ranked in the top 15 percent of Deloitte LLP’s Technology Fast 500.

Acumatica Brings Cloud ERP to Canada

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:30:00 EST

Acumatica, a provider of cloud ERP software, on Thursday announced a partnership with solutions integrators CoRealize and Les services SIPD to deliver Acumatica's innovative ERP software to the Canadian market. Acumatica allows mid-sized businesses to work from anywhere using software that can be deployed as a service (SaaS) or on-premise to reduce costs and automate business processes. In keeping with Acumatica's strategy of developing products to be sold through and implemented exclusively by VARs, CoRealize and SIPD will localize, customize, and provide support for Acumatica customers in Canada. Both CoRealize and SIPD are led by industry veterans with years of experience in delivering ERP solutions to the Canadian market. Dawson Lane, President of CoRealize, has over 20 years of experience in the Canadian mid-market software space including running country operations for Navision Canada (now Microsoft Dynamics NAV). Pierre Dussault, President of SIPD, has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has developed an extensive knowledge of building systems as the exclusive master reseller of a traditional ERP system in the province of Quebec.

RedBuilt Moves From SAP To NetSuite Cloud Computing

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:02:00 EST

NetSuite Inc. a leading vendor of cloud computing business management software suites, on Thursday announced that RedBuilt LLC, a leading innovator and supplier of engineered wood products for the commercial and multi-family construction industry, has switched from SAP to NetSuite for itsERP financial management needs. RedBuilt is the largest company to date to end its relationship with SAP in favor of NetSuite. The company finalized its ERP planning transition in under three months. RedBuilt's first-year costs with NetSuite, including licensing and professional services are just half of what the company would have paid to stay with SAP. In addition, NetSuite allows RedBuilt to avoid $275,000 in annual salary costs for SAP and database administration, as well as costly ongoing server maintenance charges.

Could Cloud Exchanges Work For Storage?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:45:00 EST

CNET's Gordon Haff wrote a great piece on the shortcomings of the exchange model for cloud computing. His prognosis is right there in his title: "Why cloud exchanges won't work." I've done some thinking and writing on the topic, and it's easy to see Haff's point: Interoperability, security, and inertia threaten to derail this new concept before it starts.

Shortcomings of the Exchange Model

Haff's concept is centered on the following three simple qualifiers for cloud exchanges:

Any platform involved in an exchange must be compatible, allowing a workload to seamlessly move between interoperable systems. This is both critical and absent with many of the cloud computing services available today. Most are incompatible on a basic level, using different hypervisors for example. No cloud exchange can seamlessly move an EC2 Xen instance to a Terremark VMware environment, although Rightscale is working on clever translation systems.
Not all service providers are equal when it comes to security and compliance, either. I've often bemoaned the fact that so many service providers are not enterprise-ready, and this will be even more of an issue with an intermediary deciding where to run a particular job. How can a buyer be sure his workload will be safe?
Haff also points out that a compelling service must be cost-effective, and certain elements stand in the way of this. He questions the value economies of scale will bring to very-large service providers. He also wisely points out that additional costs to move supporting stored data could derail the return on investment

These are not intractable problems, but they are real concerns. The issue of portability is especially thorny for cloud computing, as vendors focus more on basic functionality and innovative features than compatibility. Yet one can envision a future in which even these issues are resolved: Haff worries about service providers moving "up the stack", but this is exactly where compatibility is likely to emerge. It is easier for me to imagine a number of interoperable Java or .NET platforms than truly compatible Xen environments!

It also seems that the current efforts to define cloud service description and provisioning APIs addresses many of these concerns. If a standard API could specify compatibility, the network environment, and security requirements, an exchange could offer a wide variety of service providers with these capabilities. I imagine an airline model, where not every airport is served by every airline, but there is enough competition even at the fringes to keep the resellers viable.

I am also much less concerned about return on investment than Haff. I have seen amazing economies of scale achieved at Nirvanix (where I am Director of Consulting) and can imagine these in many areas. Cloud service providers are driving cost out of many areas by standardizing and centralizing management operation and provisioning as well as hardware and environmental costs. As cloud providers set up shop in super-efficient data centers and train highly focused management staff, they are likely to surpass the economies of even the largest abd best-run end user environment.

What About Storage?

As I wrote in December, spot pricing for cloud storage is much less attractive due to the sheer inertia of data. But an exchange model might actually be attractive even after this is taken into account. The major public cloud storage providers have already moved up from the infrastructure (bytes and blocks) to the platform (object) level, though the "ammo provider" private cloud market remains focused on the former. And many efforts are already underway to create basic standard interfaces for both provisioning and access across these major vendors.

Let's take Haff's concerns in order:

Interoperability of cloud storage is likely to come well before compute thanks to the more constrained workload involved. While a compute platform could be asked to perform almost any task, storage in general is focused on a simple usage model sometimes called CRUD: Data is created, read, updated, and deleted. This has already led to a proliferation of pre-standard or de-facto standard generic interfaces to multiple cloud storage services. SNIA's rapid work on a standard cloud data management interface shows that interoperable public cloud storage isn't that far off.
Security and compliance is much less standardized among private and public cloud storage providers. I believe that all enterprise-focused public cloud storage providers should focus their efforts on offering solid, reliable, and secure systems, but this has clearly not been the case universally. And although efforts like the SNIA CDMI would standardize provisioning of services, we will need a much more robust vocabulary to specify the level of security and compliance required for a specific application. But not every application is right for cloud storage anyway. Surely a minimum standard for security can be agreed upon by multiple providers, allowing at least some bulky applications to use cloud storage without worry. We will eventually develop a more complete mechanism which will allow more sensitive applications to use a cloud exchange.
Cost effectiveness is another thorny issue. Public cloud storage for the enterprise isn't a race to the bottom in terms of cost; it has to be about more than just cheap capacity. Indeed, the public cloud storage market is already splitting into three categories: Cheap personal storage and backup, inexpensive storage for developers and web applications, and feature-rich enterprise-grade offerings for businesses. But cost will always be a factor, and cloud storage must prove its value. An exchange that resulted in higher prices or surprise fees to move data wouldn't be a success. This last is worth noting: Since moving storage between providers will always require time and costly bandwidth, I expect such an exchange to focus on net-new data, not migration of existing capacity to a cheaper provider.

Cloud storage is significantly different from cloud compute, and spot pricing and exchanges might make more sense for data. Indeed, many of the concerns voiced by CNET's Haff are less troubling in the storage world. But the issue of return on investment remains: Could a business cost-effectively use varying cloud storage providers? I suspect some will soon set up shop and try to find out!

eSalesTrack to Exhibit at Cloud Expo 2010 East

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:15:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that eSalesTrack, a provider of on-demand CRM, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 5th International Cloud Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), which will take place on April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event since 2007, and is held five times a year, in New York City, Silicon Valley, Prague, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Alice in Wondercloud: The Bidirectional Rabbit Hole

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:15:00 EST

Emerging architectures are conflating responsibilities up and down the application stack. Who is responsible for integration when services reside in the network?

While preparing for an upcoming panel I’m moderating at Cloud Connect (in the “New Infrastructure” track), the panelists and I had a great discussion on the topics we wanted to discuss in the session. During that discussion it became increasingly clear that an interesting phenomenon has been occurring: the conflation of network and application responsibilities in the traditional “stack.”

Much of this inversion is absolutely necessary for emerging models of networking and computing to be successful. Traditional methods of handling QoS (Quality of Service) and identity management, for example, are no longer adequate in the inherently volatile world of cloud computing and dynamic networks. Interestingly, the driver behind the inversion appears to be based largely on the ability of specific layers access to context, which is necessarily replacing IP addresses as a method of client – and server – identification.

CLIMBING UP the RABBIT HOLE

Back in the day, QoS was a class of problem unto itself, with an entire market of products and solutions developed specifically to address the challenge of prioritizing traffic. Initially it was thought that the ToS (Terms of Service) bits in the IP header would suffice, but it quickly became obvious that this required every organization and provider to honor those bits as traffic flowed through and across the Internet.

Didn’t happen.

A market emerged that moved QoS “up the stack” to Layer 4 (transport protocol). A class of devices were deployed that employed either TCP rate shaping or packet queuing technologies to control the amount of bandwidth a given “application” could consume. It quickly became apparent that this method was not robust enough as more and more “applications” began to use the same protocol: TCP. The devices again moved “up the stack” to Layer 7 (application) and began to apply QoS policies based on actually identifying applications based on layer 7 protocols and data characteristics.

In recent years even this has become inadequate because these techniques were all focused on limiting, in some way, total bandwidth for an application. While these solutions were also able to, albeit rudimentarily, accomplish rate shaping on a per-user basis, they still focused on bandwidth as their metric of choice to control. Hence a single user could be limited to X Kbps for all HTTP traffic, and further limited to Y percent for application A and Z percent for application B, but bandwidth as a meter of usage for applications today is not an appropriate measurement.

Hence, QoS has again moved up the stack and is more granular than ever. Rather than worrying about bandwidth, which has grown increasingly cheap and available for both organizations and users, QoS now concerns itself with limiting requests on a per-user basis and, in some cases, a per-client-type basis. Consider Twitter’s rate limiting implementation for its API. This is a modern implementation of QoS that attempts to equalize access to its services for all users, effectively ensuring a consistent quality of service for everyone. Bandwidth is not a factor, because the amount of bandwidth consumed by any given client is highly variable and based on what data is being requested.

Similarly we often see requests for ways in which application usage can be limited based on application layer variables, with nary a mention of bandwidth. It’s always about users and usage patterns of a specific application.

What was once a “network” function, QoS, has moved “up the stack” and is now primarily the responsibility of the “application.”

SLIDING DOWN the RABBIT HOLE

It wouldn’t be an inversion of responsibility if traditionally “application” layer responsibilities weren’t being similarly pushed “down the stack.” A good example of how this is occurring today is in the area of “identity”, which traditionally includes authentication and authorization.

In the early days of web applications, identification was based on a user name and password (sometimes IP address, sometimes a combination thereof) and was expected to be handled by the application. After all, the application knew what users should be allowed and thus is was the demesne of the application to provide those mechanisms. The use of .htaccess files was widespread as a means to achieve this functionality.

But as technology began to merge the world of the web with the internal world of IT, it became increasingly common to leverage external applications as an identity store and the means by which users were authenticated and authorized to access applications. LDAP, Active Directory, RADIUS, DIAMETER. These protocols resided somewhere between the application layer and the transport layer and provide the data necessary for applications to make access decisions.

But again, this method has run into obstacles in adapting to volatile and large environments. Scalability and the need to execute complementary access policies the network layer in authentication and authorization decisions has continued to drive identity and authentication and authorization “down the stack” and into the “network”. In a highly scaled environment, for example, it is often preferable that an intermediary Load balancer authenticate users to an application because it is increasingly painful for developers to tightly integrate application access and security policies into the application. Traditional methods are brittle, static designs that are increasingly tossed out in favor of more policy-based access that resides somewhere “in the network” rather than tightly-coupled with the application.

What was once an “application” function has moved “down the stack” and is now increasingly the responsibility of the “network.”

WHAT DOES IT PORTEND?

The conflation of responsibilities up and down the “stack” point to either an increasingly flattened application architecture comprised of services; services that may reside in the application layer or the network layer, but are leveraged by both in approximately the same way.

This is actually much of the brouhaha behind Infrastructure 2.0; behind the evolution of the network to become “smarter” and more “integrated” with the rest of the infrastructure. As the network takes on more and more responsibility from the applications, especially as is the case in an increasingly cloudy environment, the components in the network must be able to consume services provided by other components and collaborate as a means to ensure the fast and secure delivery of applications to their ultimate consumers.

One of the side-effects is that it will cause some amount of confusion in the organization, at “layer 9”, as it were, regarding what role is responsible for developing and ultimately deploying those policies. Will developers become more network-aware? Will administrators and operators begin to take on a more development-oriented role in order to integrate and orchestrate the data center using the collaborative capabilities of Infrastructure 2.0 services?

Maybe the answer to that depends on where you are, who you are, and whether you’ve drank from the bottle or not.

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Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,cloud computing,virtualization,infrastructure 2.0,load balancing,QoS,rate shaping,API,integration,network,development

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