Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS or RaaS) is big on the hype meter right now, and cloud computing providers are clamoring to find solutions to fill the gap. The biggest driver in DR in the Cloud is the utility-like aspect of purchasing infrastructure, because you only pay for what you use. Disaster Recovery lends itself well to the concept of cloud computing, because you want to keep that insurance premium as low as possible. Virtualization has enabled some pretty amazing things in regards to Disaster Recovery as well. Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) have dropped significantly since virtualization became mainstream, without adding cost. 

On to the practical application: How on earth do I replicate my data to a public cloud provider?

Replication is essential to a low RPO. Doing full backups across a WAN link is going to result in a lot of data loss. There are methods to only replicated changed blocks, but even then you could have some pretty hefty loss.

Here are the 4 levels of replication currently out on the market:

Application

Replication at the Application level has been around for some time. Relational database servers such as Microsoft SQL are a good example. You can replicate database transactions to a remote server, and restore the database when disaster strikes.

Pros: Public Cloud-friendly, very low RTO and RPO, can be physical to virtual, or any combination of the two.

Cons: Target server must be running in the cloud. OS and application must be set up properly and maintained (patches, OS, etc).

Guest OS

Vision Solution's Double-Take product is a good example of this. The OS, application, and data can all be replicated on a block-level basis to a target machine. The OS files are "staged" on the target machine, and upon clicking the failover button, the target machine "becomes" the source machine. Pretty cool technology indeed.

Pros: Public cloud-friendly, Low RTO and RPO, physical to virtual, or any combination of the two. One click failover.

Cons: Agent overhead on source machine (CPU, Disk and Memory), license cost, target server must be running in the cloud.

VM/Hypervisor

There are two strategies at this level. The first is snapshot based replication. Veeam is a good example of snapshot-based replication. A virtual machine snapshot is taken, much like a normal VM backup is taken, and the changed blocks are replicated to the target VM.

Hypervisor-based replication is new to VMware vSphere 5. ESXi 5 now has a low level driver to capture VM disk data writes at the SCSI level. This is incredibly cool because it means I don't need to rely on snapshots. VMware SRM VR takes advantage of this, as does the ultra-cool Zerto.

As we move down the stack, this is the first replication level we have to think about VMware vCloud Director and it's meta-data. At the time of writing this blog post neither VMware's VR or Veeam replication have solutions for vCloud Director. Zerto supports vCloud Director in both private and public cloud scenarios.

The challenge for DR to public vCloud providers is direct access to the SAN. Most of the hypervisor level replication solutions have been built around the enterprise, not around a multi-tenant cloud. The public cloud is certainly NOT going to give you self-service, open access to the SAN.

Pros: Public vCloud friendly (Zerto), very low RTO and low RPO replicates entire servers, storage agnostic, target VMs powered off and not consuming resources.

Cons: NOT public vCloud friendly (VMware SRM, Veeam), Snapshot rollups can hurt performance (Veeam), virtual only, not hypervisor agnostic.

SAN/LUN

SAN-based replication is a great solution for Enterprises looking to back up all or part of their infrastructure. The source and target in this case is not a VM though. It's an entire LUN. Typically you have multiple VMs running on a single LUN, which is nice if the group of VMs require data/time consistency. VMware SRM uses SAN replication to achieve a fully orchestrated DR solution, and even physical servers with disks on the SAN can be replicated.

As stated previously, no public cloud provider is going to give you access to the SAN, which leaves you needing to buy another SAN of the same make and model, and slap it in a colocation rack.

But wait...SAN vendors also have virtual storage appliances (VSA), which DO run in the cloud. So if you run SANs such as EMC, Nexenta, or HP, there is a possibility you could at least get your data off-site. The only challenge there is you can't run the VMs in the cloud from the VSA. There would need to be a seperate script to migrate VMs from the VSA to the public vCloud provider through the vCloud API. It's not impossible, but it would certainly add some time onto the RTO. 

Pros: Public cloud friendly (maybe with a VSA), Low RTO and low RPO, replicates virtual and physical machines

Cons: NOT public cloud friendly (hardware SAN-to-SAN), NOT hardware, SAN, or hypervisor agnostic.

Don't forget Failback!

Just an additional note that you should always ask about how to failback once your primary site is healthy. You don't want to be stuck in DR mode forever, and most of the above mentioned solutions require full replication of the systems back to your datacenter. Make that a top ten question when looking for a DR solution. The Disaster Recovery is not complete until you are back in your production datacenter!

 

Bluelock is excited to announce that it was recently named to NetworkWorld's list of "10 most powerful IaaS companies." Writer Christine Burns assembled the list with help from analysts at Cloud Technology Partners, Current Analysis, Enterprise Strategy Group, Gartner, IDC and Neovise. Those analysts named companies they believed have the most influence in the public cloud infrastructure as a service category.

Bluelock continues to prove itself in its ability to draw in enterprise customers to the benefits of using public cloud resources. While serving a wide variety of use cases, Bluelock Virtual Datacenters have enabled many mid-size and large organizations to test new waters with cloud computing. In another article by Christine Burns at NetworkWorld, "IaaS making slow headway," she references a number of enterprise deployment trends mentioning public cloud IaaS use cases that Bluelock continues to see time and again.

Bluelock's very popular Public Cloud Diaries built in conjunction with VMware detail a number of interesting use cases, many resembling the NetworkWorld list. Our list of case studies also continues to grow with our most recent piece featuring PatronPath and Bluelock's role in enabling them to meet strict PCI-DSS compliance requirements for it's online ordering solutions for restaurants.

We continue to see large enterprises going to the cloud to enable greater agility and flexibility, but also for the cloud's ability to provide a level of visibility and control these organizations had never experienced before. Bluelock Portfolio has proven to hit the mark for customers in their quest for that visibility, and it has even begun to change organizational behavior in very large companies.

What would your organization do with the ability to see what your IT resources really cost -- broken down by region, site location, line of business, application, resource component or even by Virtual Datacenter?

To learn more about Bluelock's public cloud infrastructure as a service solutions visit www.bluelock.com.

NetworkWorld articles referenced in this blog post:

10 most powerful IaaS companies

IaaS making slow headway

 

Bluelock offers public cloud newsletter featuring Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IaaS report.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way enterprises consume information technology. We've already seen the ways cloud services create new efficiencies and transform datacenters into IT game-changers. Improved infrastructure agility, security, and efficiency enable enterprise business strategies. Companies can better compete in evolving markets. But, adopting a cloud model can be confusing for enterprise users.

The first thing any organization needs to consider when evaluating a cloud computing model is which approach to take. One size cloud does not fit all. Choosing the right private, public, or hybrid cloud can transform IT into a significantly leaner, more responsive business entity.

Bluelock now offers our "Choosing the Right Approach to Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service" newsletter to guide cloud adoption. The newsletter also includes a complimentary copy of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service report.

Discover how a tailored cloud solution from Bluelock can keep pace with your specific business needs.
Download Bluelock’s Newsletter featuring Gartner research »

It’s been a busy few weeks for the team at Bluelock and a lot of exciting stuff has been happening, one of which was CRN naming Bluelock to its 2012 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list. The comprehensive list highlights the most innovative cloud computing companies across the five major categories: cloud platforms, cloud infrastructure, cloud storage, cloud security and cloud software. This is the second time in as many years Bluelock has been named to the cloud infrastructure list. Be sure to check out the list in the March 26 issue of CRN Magazine as well. Here’s what they had to say about Bluelock:
 
“Bluelock embraces the public cloud for its enterprise cloud hosting offerings using its Bluelock Virtual Datacenters to help companies get up and running in its SAS-70 Type II datacenters. Bluelock also boasts the distinction of being among the first certified VMware vCloud Datacenter service providers.”
 
Also this week, Bluelock announced the availability of VMware vCloud® Director™ 1.5 within its VMware vCloud Datacenter Service which has been well received in the media. The announcement was covered on Data Storage Connection, Talkin' Cloud, ServerWatch, HostSearch, TopHosts.com and MyHostNews.com  to name a few.

2012 has proven to be an exciting year for Bluelock clients! In January, we introduced the cost projection feature within our Bluelock Portfolio cloud support tool. Today, Bluelock continues the tradition of cloud innovation with the upgrade to VMware vCloud Director 1.5. This upgrade delivers increased cloud agility and makes it even easier to adopt a cloud computing model leveraging existing IT investments.

Ben Miller, our Product Solution Director, reviews the new features and benefits vCloud Director 1.5 provides to Bluelock clients:

Key Features of vCloud Director 1.5

• UI Enhancements – General user interface enhancements, including improved browser support and usability, make building and managing enterprise-level cloud solutions a snap.
• Self-Service VPN – In addition to creating VPN tunnels for hybrid cloud communication to your Virtual Datacenter, you can now automatically configure both sides of the VPN tunnel to reduce time and labor.
• Source-based Firewall Rules – vCloud firewall rules now include source IP address, port, and protocol for increased network granularity and control. Unique network designs in your Virtual Datacenter also benefit from static routing within firewall configurations.
• vCloud API 1.5 – Added vCloud API functionality improves automation and consumption of cloud resources. The new Query API increases developer efficiency and support for free tools like PowerCLI 5.0.1 and vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 sweeten the deal.
• Network Adapter control – You can now specify network adapter type within vCloud Director to take advantage of the universal e1000 adapter, or the more powerful VMXNET3 adapter.

vCloud Director 1.5 allows Bluelock clients to build and leverage secure hybrid cloud resources with ease. We're excited to provide these new virtual datacenter features to our clients! Learn more about vCloud Director 1.5 at Bluelock »

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Registration is now open for Bluelock's upcoming cloud webinar "Hybrid Cloud: A Pragmatic Approach for the Enterprise" on Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 4:00pm EST. Register for this webinar for a chance to win a free Kindle Fire! This webinar is presented by Bluelock's CTO, Pat O'Day and Senior Systems Engineer, Jake Robinson.

Portfolio, Bluelock's vCloud portal and decision support tool just learned a new skill: Cost Projection!

Bluelock already excels in providing predictable costs in the cloud, but what about those months you need to burst by adding additional resources to your capacity? Portfolio is now outfitted with helpful run rate calculations, allowing you to see early on what your costs will be at the end of the month.



By knowing your cost projection well in advance, you'll be able to dial back the resources in use, or for example, see what adding 100 new users worth of resources to your application will cost you on a monthly basis.

Also in this release, we've added some granularity to your organization costs. Previously, catalog storage was combined with the rest of the organization costs, but now catalog costs are completely transparent to you.




By breaking catalog storage costs into it's own column, you have even more visibility into how your virtual datacenters at Bluelock are being utilized.

Want to know more about Bluelock Portfolio, or virtual datacenters powered by VMware vCloud? We'd be happy to help you discover a path on your cloud journey! Just visit www.bluelock.com.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of Cloud Wars: Friendly Fire, we covered some of the challenges cloud advocates and early adopters are experiencing within their own organization as well as some of the reasons that they may be receiving pushback. In this third and final segment of the series, we'll cover some additional challenges and offer some potential strategies to work around or work with your IT department that might help you move ahead in your adoption of cloud computing.

"Can you wait six months? We're building a private cloud."
More and more frequently we are hearing from our user community that their IT organizations are building or evolving their existing datacenters into what are commonly known as private clouds. These private clouds are generally based on VMware technology so they are pretty efficient and augmented by the addition of tools like vCloud Director which adds self-service and tools like VMware Chargeback to help make the cost more transparent. While we do believe this is a great step in the right direction, it often takes time and there are numerous examples of failed and delayed private cloud implementations. Simply stated, change like this isn't easy and still ends up conflicting with other critical IT priorities. In all likelihood IT will get their private cloud up and running internally so your best approach is to make sure that anything you place into the public cloud is fully compatible with the technology they are using to build the private cloud. A very common technology for both public and private cloud environments is VMware vSphere. It is essentially a cloud operating system. So any applications you run in the public cloud, as long as you work with a VMware vCloud Provider, will work if and when you need to move them back into your private cloud once IT has it up and running. (a link to a directory of VMware vCloud providers is at the bottom of this post)

"Security, security, security."

If all of the previous attempts to slow you down in your cloud journey are not effective, someone in the organization will ultimately throw down the security gauntlet and take a stance that the cloud is less secure than the existing IT datacenter. I've seen two effective approaches to resolving this. The first of course would be to only run workloads in the public cloud that fit within the level of security capability that IT has today. So if your IT department is SAS-70 Type II, PCI compliant or HIPAA compliant then you should choose a vCloud service provider that meets or exceeds those criteria. The other approach, that takes a bit longer but is a better strategic play is to work with IT to break down exactly what the level of security needs to be in detail. This allows you to determine a checklist of security capabilities you can use to evaluate cloud computing providers as well as pick which additional managed services you might need or be interested in--assuming that they provide them. The list would address things like the regulatory compliance standards mentioned above but also more specific items like firewall, intrusion prevention, data encryption and logging levels.

A more interesting but less common approach would be to look at the cloud as a hybrid solution. We have seen some business units control the workload and application itself, but use their IT department as their managed service provider for security services. That way if your organization has a firewall vendor preference for Checkpoint, they can simply extend their existing management to include the Checkpoint firewall you have in your cloud environment.

If you're interested in digging further into cloud security, we recently released a new whitepaper with VMware titled "Security in the Hybrid Cloud: Putting Rumors to Rest." You can download it and other cloud whitepapers here.

So in conclusion, hopefully our real life experiences working with business units and IT organizations to figure out how to fit our enterprise cloud into their existing world will help you with your own cloud journey.   

As promised, here is a link to a directory of vCloud Providers from VMware. 

So, I'm curious... what do you think are the greatest barriers to cloud adoption?

Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is transforming the hosting industry. Traditional hosting companies and fresh service provider faces both play an active role in this emerging market. IaaS offerings taut agility for early adopters, while slower moving enterprises—still managing their own cloud—watch from the sidelines. Ever expanding datacenters, operational responsibilities and security requirements, amidst shrinking IT budgets, means traditional infrastructure often only makes sense for the largest of organizations.

1. Is the IaaS model right for you, or are you  better off with PaaS, SaaS or other cloud models?
   Disseminating IaaS from PaaS and SaaS is simplest to understand using the cloud stack model. IaaS includes all datacenter and network plumbing and service and storage hardware. A virtualization layer on top encases the IaaS offering. PaaS handles the next two layers of the stack; operating systems and infrastructure software. Finally, SaaS delivers hosted applications, ranging from personal email to full blown CRM systems. Leveraging the on-demand nature of these mdoels requires that an organization understand how they intend to develop and deploy applications. IT agility and autonomy beckons an IaaS structure.
2. Will implementing IaaS require additional IT resources?
   Adjusting from a static on-premise datacenter to a dynamic IaaS model can be a tremendous shift for enterprise IT organizations. IaaS solution providers also vary in their delivery of managed services. Providers like Bluelock offer managed services traditionally handled by internal IT to streamline operational tasks. This allows organizations to focus on their core business, not running their business. Examples of Bluelock managed services include operating system patching, load balancing, virtual machine backup and antivirus. The ease of IT operations inherent in IaaS solutions makes cloud particularly attractive to nimble startups with limited resources. Cloud investment and resources can scale with fluctuating businesses.
3. How easy is it to scale up (or down) your services?
   A key characteristic of cloud computing is scalability, or more precisely the ease with which scalability can be achieved. IaaS enables scalability through dynamic provisioning of resources on a self-service basis to meet business demands. While easy cloud offering takes a different approach to scaling parameters, all IaaS models are far more flexible than traditional one-app-per-service computing.
   A good illustration of IaaS scalability existed when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LMHI) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2008. Amist the sell off of business divisions, LMHI was left without the technology assets necessary to support the wind-down of the company. Lehmann formed an asset manager business, LAMCO. Tasked with building infrastructure able to assume peek capacity day one and slowly wind down over time, cloud computing was the logical choice. LAMCO selected Bluelock’s VMware-based Virtual Datacenters due in large part to its flexible scaling capabilities.
4. Does the IaaS provide adequate support?
   The ability to quickly and accurately diagnose and resolve issues with infrastructure not only ensures reduced downtime, but keeps one issue from threatening an entire network. Dedicated support teams ensure enterprise IT and infrastructure keep pace with your business. Keep in mind, select vendor’s customer service is not offered 24/7 or is only available at an additional cost.
   Transitioning to the cloud is no small task. A staff of cloud experts at your disposal for guidance and support may help organizations new to the cloud. Bluelock has a proven track record in providing scalability and client support.
5. What is your plan for outages?
   Outages are a problem for any computing model. On-premise datacenters are especially susceptible to outages. Designing for failure should be obvious, but each cloud providers approach to blackouts varies. For example, Bluelock offers 99.99% uptime in the cloud because our clients are enterprise-level companies with mission-critical production environment needs. You likely can’t afford the downtime that would be threatened with a provider who can only promise 99.9% or 99.95% uptime.

It's important to know that while the challenges I listed in Cloud Wars: Friendly Fire - Part 1 are very real, the core IT department is behaving that way for some very good reasons. They are struggling with not only the transition to cloud, mobile devices, big data, SaaS and social media but also with trying to do so while under a lot of duress due to economy-driven budget and headcount cuts. Being the sole caretakers of so many diverse mission critical technologies, applications and data in the company is not an easy task. In fact, some groups within core IT are running into challenges in their own department in an attempt to begin leveraging public cloud resources.

Let's look at a couple reactions you might hear from the IT department and some potential ways to address them...

"IT has capacity internally already, why can't you use that?"

If this is the reaction you recieve when you seek approval or get caught using cloud, IT will try to address your needs from an internal infrastructure standpoint and want to know how much memory, compute and storage you need. One of the main reasons you wanted to leverage cloud in the first place was so you didn't have to know what you needed, because you could only pay for what you used. This is a wildly foreign concept in most IT organizations that are accustomed to doing a lot of work to determine your resource needs. This process can often take several weeks if not months. They need to gauge not only your initial requirements when the project starts, but also how much it will grow over time because they have to buying enough hardware and software for the three years over which accounting requires them to depreciate the assets. They may also have to determine if they need to hire additional people. What kills it here is that your $1000 a month idea suddenly becomes a $250,000 or a Million dollar major project. If you tell them that your starting budget is only $1000, they will wonder why you are  wasting their time and move on. Note that IT will come back at some point if and when your project is successful and the dollars become more "real" from their perspective. Transparency is a good approach even though it may seem challenging and if you have the time, it is a better long term play. Bypassing IT or being allowed to try cloud under the guise of a pilot project shouldn't be considered lasting lasting approval.  

"Cloud is more expensive!"

More efficient cost is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing. When comparing the cost of cloud computing infrastructure to traditional IT costs, the IT organization typically won't include the cost of people and operations management because those costs are hard to scope down to a specific department or application. Recurring costs like these are frequently spread across all lines of business in some form of allocation. This means marketing is paying for Oracle support whether they use Oracle or not. This is why it makes sense to get ahead of the total cost of ownership (cloud TCO) discussion. To do that, take the capital cost they are showing to you and add to that the entire cost of IT that was allocated against your business unit in the budgeting process. I'm pretty sure that will make this a big number. Now compare that to the cloud costs. If you have multiple applications in your business unit or if you use the general IT services like e-mail, you may have to factor those out somehow, but it will likely still be a big number. Now you have the basics to dig into a real TCO discussion and comparison. The good news is that this is going to be much more painful for them than it will be for you. You can simply bring your bill to the meeting, or if you haven’t made the leap yet, bring some vendor quotes.   Top cloud computing providers will have already broken down your cost and have line items like this:

RAM    $320

CPU  $150

Storage Tier 1 $400

Storage Tier 2 $202

Internet $50

Managed Firewall Service $125

Etc.

We provide our VMware Cloud customers a free tool called Bluelock Portfolio. Portfolio breaks cost down by application, component, or even by business unit.

IT generally also thinks in terms of fixed not dynamic capacity. As shown below, the red area represents fixed cost that you pay for whether you are using it or not. In the cloud, you only pay for what you need and that red area can either result in savings or be used for additional projects.

 IT as a Service (ITaaS)

This may seem like an oxymoron and it is one of the biggest challenges for traditional IT departments as they evolve in the cloud era. IT traditionally determines their priorities, and therefore where your support ticket or your project request fits into their queue, based on overall organizational priorities. That would seem to make a great deal of sense. The challenge is that IT is generally highly under-resourced and under a great deal of pressure to be more efficient so deferring smaller more tactical needs and department requests unfortunatley become a recurring byproduct of this approach. With cloud computing, your cloud computing provider is highly incentivized not only to deliver a good service becuase you are voting with your dollars every day or month when you pay your bill. They are also very eager to ensure your success because typically if you have a good experience you will not only stay, but if your project does well it will grow or earn your cloud provider the chance to do additional work for you and grow their own revenue stream. In the future, IT may work this way as technologies like VMware Chargeback and Showback become more prevelant and the cost of IT becomes easier to understand. While this may take some time, you can use the cloud today and even share your experiences with IT to help them understand some examples on how they might evolve their service to better fit the business.

In the third and final chapter of Cloud Wars: Friendly Fire we'll cover the myths and challenges around security, private cloud and hybrid cloud.

VMware recently released their first installment of ‘Public Cloud Diaries.’ We’re proud to announce that Bluelock offered up nine of the sixteen cloud entries. This project documents business situations and challenges that companies experience when moving to the public cloud. Entries capture the clients' key requirements for selecting a cloud vendor and the business benefits they experienced with a public cloud solution.

Battles over formats and standards in the technology industry aren't new. Whether it was e-mail, word processing, graphical images or even some more current like the apps on your smart phone, each new innovation typically starts out somewhat proprietary and incompatible.

Today we live in a world where a lot of those battles have been fought and won while some are only starting to heat up. Formats tend to resolve themselves through standards so that things like e-mail and web pages "just work." That or at a minimum the technology we use evolves and hides it all from us via various forms of automatic conversion. In a world where so many technologies seem to get along - why shouldn't clouds? The answer isn't so simple and, as is often the case, history has a way of repeating itself.

Different Approaches
Just as email initially emerged inside of private datacenters, so has cloud infrastructure. It was initially based on virtualization technology and, depending on what kind of IT shop was involved, you most likely ended up on VMware if you were trying to make your core datacenter more efficient by virtualizing legacy servers; Xen if you had a significant Linux or Java developer presence where the need to rapidly provision test and develop machines was important; and maybe even Citrix if you were using Metaframe for serving up applications to remote users or thin clients. For some companies, cloud adoption started outside the corporate datacenter inside of the VMware vCloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Different Platforms
These approaches initially evolved into distinctly different virtualization technologies. VMware's vSphere platform grew up in the heart of enterprise data centers so it focuses more on performance, manageability, stability and uptime. Amazon's platform is directed at rapid provisioning of instances that are great for developers and dynamic workloads. While they both promote the concept of virtual machines as the building blocks of their clouds, the formats are very different. Amazon breaks its workloads into images called Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which contain an operating system image from a limited library, memory and CPU resources. VMware uses a format called a Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) that contains not only the memory, but also a more flexible operating system image that can be based on any x86 and, as you can tell by the name, the disk storage itself. With Amazon's AMI model, any additional storage outside of the operating system image must be kept on a separate disk image on the network using either their S3 or EBS storage solutions. With VMware's VMDK, because the disk is included, you can move everything around. They call this a vApp.

Competitors
It also goes without saying that the war for cloud market share has started and is being waged in earnest. Given the amount of dollars at stake, it makes complete sense. The major players all want their share of the anticipated $241 billion that corporations are predicted to spend in the cloud over the next 9 years (according to Forrester Research). This kind of growth opportunity resembles a land grab of significant size and proportion that fosters only self-serving forms of compatibility.

History Will Repeat Itself
As we now know from the email platform wars, once the bulk of companies picked their initial email standard to implement, the green fields of opportunity started to dry up. As a result, email platform vendors found themselves in a situation where they could only gain market share by taking customers away from each other. This caused them to start offering various forms of migration services. The initial offerings were assistance with your email strategy, which was closely followed by professional services teams that could perform the migration for you. At some point, the professional services teams developed tools to make the migrations easier and those tools ended up being packaged and offered directly to end users.

We are starting to see this trend emerge in the cloud. Most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers have either a toolkit or a professional service offering that helps customers migrate from one SaaS provider to another. You can see this with Salesforce and Netsuite. VMware and Amazon are no exception. Amazon offers a tool that allows you to convert your VMDK virtual machines into AMI images. VMware has an extensive professional services offering and numerous channel partners that can help an Amazon customer migrate to a vCloud or back to their internal VMware vSphere environment if a customer found themselves locked in to the Amazon cloud.

Interoperability and Open Standards
It's clear that more help is on the way, but there may be some solutions that can help in the short term. The Distributed Management Task Force, also known as the DMTF, is a standards body that represents 160 member companies and organizations and more than 4,000 active participants crossing 43 countries. They have endorsed and are actively promoting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard for Virtual Machines(VMs) and Virtual Applications (vApps). OVF support is the foundation of the VMware vCloud and VMware vSphere 4.1. Workloads can be quickly converted to OVF and then moved or copied between clouds as the needs dictate. This gives the IT department and power users the ultimate flexibility as they begin to adopt a cloud-enabled approach to IT.

Which One Is Best?
Choosing the best cloud platform is a lot like deciding to upgrade from a tube television to a flat screen. It can be hard to choose when you see all of the different flat screen television technologies like DLP, LED, Plasma and LCD but once you've made the leap to High Definition, regardless of which technology you chose, it still puts you light years ahead of where you were with your old TV set.

How to Choose
The most important thing is to determine what the right use cases are for your organization to adopt cloud. For some companies that may be to make their existing IT resources more agile and efficient so placing some of the workloads they have already virtualized using VMware into a public vCloud make the most sense. For other companies that may need to perform thousands of calculations on a moment's notice, consuming that capacity from a commodity cloud like Amazon's EC2 might be the best fit. The real key is that this landscape is evolving and changing rapidly. Any workload placed into the cloud should conform to existing IT practices and should be able to be de-provisioned, redirected or moved as the cloud market matures and the understanding of which clouds best fit which workloads becomes clearer.

The Cloud Wars have already begun and as in all conflicts, the most unfortunate incidents are caused by friendly fire. From a cloud computing perspective, it occurs most often when people who want to try or have tried public or hybrid cloud are challenged by peers or counterparts in their own companies. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges my fellow technologists have experienced in trying to sell their public, private or hybrid cloud initiative inside an organization. I also realized that not only was this a difficult task for them during their initial project, but that they are compelled to continue to justify their cloud initiatives on an ongoing basis. I know that in most situations the team that needed to be convinced of moving forward with a cloud project was corporate IT. In some cases the "cloud champions" were trying to convince the CIO to try something new. In some cases a cloud committee or cloud strategy working group was already working on it and the project was a distraction to their process, or it ended up under a microscope as a learning opportunity instead of the business critical application that it was for the department. In other cases it was actually IT leadership trying to encourage their teams that the old world might be changing, just a little bit, but the going was pretty slow because no one was really sure what that meant.

In each case a lot of the core challenges were similar but there were also some differences.

Most of my fellow technologists were headed to or ended up in the cloud in the first place because they needed or place a high value on agility. I define agility as being able to:

• Act quickly
• Deal with the unknown
• Change your mind

And they generally felt like going outside of core IT made the most sense because:

• Cloud was less expensive because you only pay for what you use
• They perceived the service was better
• The response to issues would be faster
• Promises about service delivery and uptime were written with financial penalties for under-performance, typically in a Service Level Agreement (SLA ) document
• They or their team members could provision resources rapidly, and via self service
• There was transparency and true visibility on the cost of IT
• As a cloud customer, they were a priority and could vote with their dollars
• They felt wanted because multiple vendors were competing for their business
• It was a more cost effective and lower risk way to try newer technology or new idea

And though those things made a lot of sense, when they exposed their plans to the internal team or in some cases, when the internal team found out they were already using the cloud, the reaction was generally:

• We have capacity internally already, why can't you use that?
• Buy some servers and a SAN, we'll manage it for you.
• Cloud is more expensive.
• We do understand service, we can act fast, just submit a ticket.
• Our standard cloud offering is [fill in cloud vendor here], use them.
• Can you wait six months? We are implementing a private cloud.
• Security, security, security!
• They were in a busy with a big company-wide project and were unavailable for the meeting.

Those questions and challenges are legitimate and can be quite difficult hurdles to navigate especially if you are trying public cloud for the first time.

In my next post I’ll share some cloud adoption challenges in more detail as well as ways that I’ve seen people overcome them.

Global Washington’s mission is to help Washington State’s non-profits work together to alleviate world poverty, however they lacked the budget and IT expertise to build an effective technology solution. Bluelock, with Esri ArcGIS (Geographic Information Systems) and VMware, developed and launched a sophisticated database-driven GIS application delivered as SaaS from the cloud.

A membership association that promotes and supports the global development sector in Washington State, Global Washington’s vision was to create a cohesive, viable online community where non-profits can learn and collaborate with other members working in the same space. Technology implementation is especially difficult for international development organizations. Global Washington addressed this technology gap with Bluelock Virtual Datacenters, powered by VMware vCloud Director.

On-demand access to computing resources through Virtual Datacenters allowed Esri to package the GIS applications as a virtual appliance (or vApp) within 48 hours and complete the first phase of the project within two months. Future customers seeking this type of GIS cloud-based solution can now publish that vApp from the vCloud App Catalog on-demand.

The pilot was a resounding success and the GIS application dramatically improved service delivery. “With the help of Esri, VMware, and Bluelock, we’re using cloud technology from our Virtual Datacenter to help our non-profit members increase the visibility of their activities, improve communication and collaboration, and advocate more effectively for the causes they support.” stated Bookda Gheisar, Executive Director at Global Washington.

Read Entire Success Story >>

A short visit back in time to any organization’s datacenter would render images of tape carts, disk drives, paper logs and even punched cards.  Later, the datacenter used menu driven applications to take batch processing out of the computer room and onto the user’s terminal screen.

In just a few short years, the menu-driven application was gone and Graphical User Interfaces gave the user total independence from picking up the telephone and asking IT to “run a report.”  Finally, with the advent of office suites that included integrated spreadsheets, word processors and presentation packages, the IT department took the form of supporting whoever had a computer -- wherever computing took place.

Just when it was safe to relax in the recliner with the laptop running hot, a cold glass of lemonade nearby and a handful of almonds to munch on, someone somewhere in the “techy” world said the words, “Cloud Computing.” 

Take heart, all ye random access warriors.  Keep that glass close by and those almonds in the bowl, change has come again, but in a good way.

In an IT world that has rapidly evolved from challenging the company cash flow with large iron horses laying down huge “footprints” on elevated floors and climate-controlled rooms, to wireless routers and employees armed with note and netbooks, the “cloud” has arrived.

Bluelock, a provider of Virtual Datacenters hosted in the public cloud, is leading the way in cloud technology.  Providing hosted IT solutions, Bluelock gives businesses a “just-in-time” and “just-enough” approach to computing needs. 

While reducing the investments organizations make in their technology budgets, Bluelock is providing on-demand Virtual Datacenters (VDCs) that take the place of the traditional corporate datacenter. Such structural and strategic issues as acquiring and maintaining servers, administering networks, and constantly evaluating storage requirements give way to reduced hardware costs, multiple-site file sharing and speedy decision processes.

Using infrastructure-as-a-service, businesses pay for just the resources they need instead of continually adding hardware to keep up with ever increasing database requirements.  Instead of the demands of upgrades, fixes and enhancements that keep the traditional IT staff spinning, Bluelock can host applications on its servers with maintenance either being provided by the application provider or by internal IT staff.

Another advantage to a client is the attention paid by Bluelock to data security.  Traditional IT facilities, including “hot-site” business continuity centers, are subjected to SAS 70 reviews and other security audits.  With Bluelock’s attention to security and compliance requirements, firewall installations and its production ready Virtual Datacenters, data, applications and access policies easily conform to client needs.

While the term “Cloud” at first seems an “out there” concept, it may be the best thing to happen to technology since the elimination of punch cards.

enStratus recently announced that customers can now manage 18 public and private clouds through the enStratus platform. Provided by enStratus, a cloud infrastructure management solution provider, the platform adds cloud management, governance, and automation capabilities to public, private and hybrid clouds. One such cloud supported by the platform is Bluelock's cloud. enStratus has a multi-cloud architecture that provides security, reliability and cloud independence.

Thanks to Bluelock Virtual Datacenters, enStratus now provides unified cloud manager for 18 public and private clouds. David Bagley, CEO of enStratus, stated “Bluelock’s focus on security and reliability are a natural fit for us and we look forward to working with them and their clients.” Additionally, Bluelock’s CTO Pat O’Day agreed that “enStratus and Bluelock share a focus on the enterprise market and are excited about their approach to deliver additional cloud governance and automation capabilities to vCloud users.” enStratus support for Bluelock is available immediately.

Read full press release.

Determining which applications are cloud ready and which need to stay in your datacenter can be difficult. You will need to be able to address each workload's unique infrastructure, security and performance requirements to choose which cloud offering is best for your respective applications.

VMworld 2011, hosted by VMware, is in full-swing at Las Vegas (August 29 – September 1). The largest virtualization and cloud infrastructure event of the year was just the place for Bluelock’s unveiling of their all-new cloud-aware decision support tool Bluelock Portfolio™. The first of it’s kind, Portfolio will offer customers deeper visibility into the true cost of IT resources, enabling them to adjust their Virtual Datacenters to best align spending and utilization.

With great power comes great responsibility, and cloud infrastructure is no exception. The ability to see infrastructure consumption levels is increasingly important to understanding and managing the true costs of IT. Both over-allocation and under-allocation can spiral costs out of control. Now, Bluelock Portfolio enables customers to break down their cloud costs by region, site location, line of business, application or even by Virtual Datacenter. Monitoring usage and spending has never been easier in the cloud. Over-provisioned applications and potential overages can be adjusted through the self-service portal powered by VMware vCloud® Director.

Watch the Bluelock Portfolio in action to see how you can manage and monitor your Bluelock Virtual Datacenter accounts:


You can also read the entire Press Release.

One contract, multiple providers. That’s VMware’s global cloud vision, and Bluelock’s onboard. VMware launched Global Connect, among several other new vCloud offerings, at this year’s VMworld in Las Vegas. Global Connect, an optional feature of the vCloud Datacenter service, will allow customers to use cloud services from multiple providers across the globe as if they were a single virtual cloud. Get the cloud computing infrastructure you need, where you need it, and when you need it.

Global Connect is fully compatible with VMware vSphere® and the VMware vCloud architecture. Applications will be provider agnostic, traveling to and from clouds without modification. Management of private and global public cloud resources through a single-pane-of-glass is made possible with VMware vCloud Connector console. As service provider adoption rises, geographic boundaries among clouds will continue to fall. Global enterprise hybrid cloud will deliver applications and services to a worldwide customer base.

I expect to see growing relationships between vCloud Datacenter partners through the Global Connect initiative. The service provider network is expected to grow to 25 datacenters in 13 countries by the end of the year.

Read the full press release.

Bluelock and Colt are joining forces as VMware vCloud Datacenter service providers to offer a Federated Cloud solution for global enterprise clients.

Listen to Greg Branch, director if IT architecture, Colt, and Bill Busch, director of strategic partnerships, Bluelock as they talk about the partnership and what it means for enteprise clients and the global cloud computing market.

A Federated Cloud for Global Customers | Bluelock & Colt