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!

 

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 »

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.

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.

Are you a competitive self-starter with strong interpersonal and communication skills? Bluelock's Account Executive position is calling your name. As a certified VMware vCloud Datacenter Services provider, Bluelock delivers enterprise-class cloud computing and managed IT services. Leveraging VMware technology, Bluelock enables hybrid cloud strategies for the enterprise.

Account Executives collaborate with Bluelock's VP of Sales to prepare and execute quaterly sales plans. Through a consultative approach to selling our cloud services to a variety of influencers and IT decision-makers, Account Executives help shape and refine the sales process as the company enters our next growth phase.

Results-oriented individuals with five to ten years technical sales experience are encouraged to apply. Adaptability and problem solving intuition in the fast-paced cloud computing space offers a variety of opportunities for personal and professional growth. This client facing role will respond to and strive to meet customer needs. Bluelock's intimate work environment means all employees can contribute to a positive and fun work atmosphere.

Account Executives hands-on approach involves understanding prospect's specific business needs and matching our cloud hosting services to those needs. Bluelockers evangelize the advantages of virtualization and cloud computing. Think you got what it takes? We'd love to hear from you!

Excellent benefits and opportunities await you at Bluelock! Play an integral role in our growth team's success. Learn more about becoming an Account Executive well as other opportunities at Bluelock team on our careers page.

7Q4Y45ARWEGD

On-Demand business intelligence and management reporting organization to utilize BlueLock’s cloud computing services for Disaster Recovery

(Indianapolis, Indiana – January 19, 2011) – BlueLock, an experienced provider of cloud hosting and managed IT services, announces that iPartners, an on-demand business intelligence and management reporting company for the property and casualty insurance industry, has selected BlueLock as its cloud provider. With the announcement, iPartners will use BlueLock’s cloud-based disaster recovery services to back up their data and systems hosted in Atlanta, GA.

“After a lackluster experience with a different cloud provider, we knew we needed an organization with superior customer service and processes and procedures in place to ensure our data and systems are up and ready when we need them,” said David Zebrowitz, director of technology, iPartners. “We look forward to not only utilizing BlueLock’s highly available, scalable and secure platform for our disaster recovery needs, but also their vast cloud experience as we see them as a trusted and proven partner.”

“We are excited to work with iPartners and help them achieve their business goals cost-effectively and with the enterprise level of service they require,” said Brian Wolff, vice president of sales, BlueLock. “BlueLock’s cloud-based disaster recovery offers them the flexibility and scalability they will need as they continue to grow, with the performance, security and client services that is backed by our world-class BlueLock team.”

Delivering pre-configured, secure and resilient virtual IT environments which scale on-demand, BlueLock’s VMware-based cloud services offer enterprises world-class infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. BlueLock is a VMware vCloud Datacenter Services certified provider.

About iPartners
iPartners was founded in 2004 by a group of industry veterans with over 10 years of successful business intelligence and data warehousing consulting experience. iPartners, a software-as-a-service company, strives to change the way P&C companies collect the information they need to make decisions to make the entire process straightforward, reduce the investment of time and money and deliver a solution that adds value to the businesses they serve. Today the organization is leading the P&C industry with “on-demand” management information and analysis solutions, serving over 35 customers and processing over 15 million policies. The “on-demand” business model provides major advantages over traditional on-premise technology products. For more information, visit www.ipartners.net.

Mega-awesome BlueLock engineer Bill Barbour recently posted a great snippet from marketing guru Seth Godin on the BlueLock quote board:

This Seth-ism is true not only with user interface design and information overload, but also reflects how the constant bombardment of tools that promise to make you "cloud-ready" can make this whole cloud technology thing seem needlessly complex. The current media coverage and blog blitzes about creating cloud-ready applications can make you feel woefully unprepared if you don't have a build grid dedicated to continuous integration, on-demand provisioning via some programmatic first-order language, a MapReduce cluster, a 100-node NoSQL database fabric and an immense automated dashboard notifying you to every quantum tunneling event.

It doesn't have to be this hard.

I think a good deal of software engineers and infrastructure gurus are excited about the possibilites that accessible cloud technology brings. That excitement has powered a ton of innovations, notably the current devops revolution that is accelerating software engineering and delivering applications faster than ever before. We now have applications like Pallet and Chef that can provision and re-provision cloud computing infrastructure in a dependable and repeatable manner. However, just because Pallet and Chef now exist does not mean you have to use them in order to fully leverage a cloud hosting strategy.

If you can move faster with bash scripts via SSH, go with it. If your provisioning strategy consists of deploying the same vApp template over and over again, rock on. If you can do configuration management just as easily with Git or Subversion, have at it. If you wish to provision your cloud computing infrastructure with the same slipstream ISO used for your physical hardware, do so to your heart's content. One of the advantages of cloud computing is that you have the latitude to manage your hardware as you see fit, unbound by the constraints of a capital expense form every time you want to expand. Create your own Linux distro, load up enterprise applications from the 1980's, build a virtual machine from a series of floppy disks.

One of the advantages of BlueLock's VMware Cloud is that you can begin hosting your applications just as you always have, even if you're accustomed to a physical data center. As your needs expand and you wish to try out different devops approaches, you can easily do so with little risk. With cloud hosting you can manage your infrastructure however you want while still having room to try something new and accelerate your applications when you feel the whim.

First off, I wanted to thank VMware for giving my blog post a home last week. I appreciate the feedback we recieved from the article - we're looking forward to working with VMware on a blog series coming up!

I focused a lot on the pragmatic last week; now my brain has bounced the other way and started to wonder about what managed cloud hosting will look like in the future. Today there is a huge amount of interest from enterprises in leveraging Infrastructure as a Service in order to have a more agile datacenter without the capital expense, but what will be the next big thing?

Currently bubbling up from the cloud crowd is a lot of interest in upcoming Platform as a Service offerings that are increasingly vendor-agnostic with a wide range of supported languages and frameworks. CloudBees RUN@cloud promises to be the PaaS to watch in 2011, especially considering how well the team has done in implementing continuous integration services with cloud technology. VMware's OpenPaaS initiative might be interesting as well, judging by their announcement at RubyConf. Still, I have to wonder if building PaaS as a layer on top of IaaS is the way to efficiently architect a Platform as a Service solution.

Bare-metal hypervisors, like VMware's ESXi, provide hardware and even processor architecture abstraction to the virtual machine it hosts. Traditionally a VMware BIOS bootstraps a guest operating system within a virtual machine, then we install a software stack into that guest operating system. For example, we may create a virtual machine within ESXi and install RedHat Enterprise Linux 6. After the machine is built we may install our runtime environment, maybe the frameworks and libraries to host a vFabric application. Then we install our own application running with tcServer, tweak configuration files and hook it up to our deployment scripts. True, we can do this setup once and then save this application as a vApp for future use, but we consume a lot of memory, compute and (especially) disk space for the guest OS, runtime environment and framework libraries.

What if we removed the guest OS setup, BIOS and runtime environment installation? What if we ran our runtime environment directly within the hypervisor, bypassing the OS and going straight to the cloud computing infrastructure itself? The Java runtime environment itself runs within a self-contained virtual machine of its own - does it need an OS to add another layer of abstraction?

Work already done by IBM, BEA and Sun have demonstrated a Java runtime that interacts directly with the hypervisor can yield significant gains. BEA (and now Oracle) provide a way for the JRocket JVM to skip the OS entirely by using LiquidVM and WebLogic Suite. IBM had a slightly different route with Libra, creating an isolated execution environment that could host a Java virtual machine. In my mind the ultimate solution was Sun's Project Guest VM, allowing the JVM to sit entirely on the hypervisor with no operating system at all... only a microkernel augments the Java virtual environment. The VM itself is entirely written in Java, allowing for a highly optimized Java runtime residing within a cloud computing infrastructure.

Imagine if you no longer deployed "Windows" or "Linux" virtual machines with our cloud technology - but could deploy "Windows," "Linux," "Java 6 EE," ".NET Runtime" or "Python" as stand-alone VMs. No OS tweaks, no hacking of open file handle limits, but instead a very thin virtual machine instance that is 100% dedicated to running your application. Managed cloud hosting providers could then augment this stack with their own specialized tools for automated deployment, monitoring and security policies.

The possibilities for such a cloud computing platform go beyond just making applications easier to deploy and more efficient to execute. We can move away from worrying about hardware drivers and chipsets... our hypervisor and the new virtual machines worry about that for us. Now that we've sufficiently abstracted away the underlying physical infrastructure we can change the hardware architecture completely. Why not ditch your conventional CPUs and now accelerate our code by adding hardware for more efficient vector processing? NVIDIA is already creating "GPU clusters" so that one can have their own cloud-based super computing instances, allowing for certain types of algorithms and applications to reach unthought levels of performance and power efficiency. Why not tune the Java or .NET runtime environment to take advantage of GPU clusters as well and allow cryptographic or streaming operations to run at insane speeds?

With this type of bare-metal PaaS you can save massive amounts of disk storage, since you no longer need the entire operating system just to host an application. VMs that once needed 8 GB disks could now live inside of 256 MB, possibly less if you leverage SAN de-duplication or virtual disk technologies like linked clones. Memory overhead would be reduced, since you only need enough memory to keep your application running. Compute could not only be augmented to crazy-fast levels, it could also run with much less power consumption. Application developers also have less infrastructure to deal with, allowing them to focus on their application rather than supporting the layers the application runs on top of.

If 2011 shapes up to be the year of the PaaS, I can only hope 2012 is the year we blur the lines between IaaS and PaaS. With bare-metal PaaS, cloud technology could give every hosted application their own supercomputer.

Bill had a great post on VMworld 2010 earlier this week and mentioned a very useful session on hosting Java applications within a virtualized environment. Justin Murray's whitepaper "Java in Virtual Machines on VMware ESX: Best Practices" was released a while ago, but the suggestions are so fundamental they apply today. The steps are very pragmatic and apply to nearly any hypervised environment, although it becomes an increasing focus when your cloud computing infrastructure starts to increase its density.

One best practice that Justin cites is a perfect example of how infrastructure architecture changes in a cloud hosting environment: run one (and only one) JVM inside of a virtual machine. When thinking about density in a physical server environment this makes data center architects sweat - one JVM per server can easily lead to under-utilization. For cloud computing infrastructure this makes total sense... you can size your VM wrap around your JVM precisely, so that you won't have any wasted resources. Say your JVM is set to have a maximum heap size of 768M and your fairly minimal JeOS only consumes 128M of memory - create a virtual machine with 1GB of RAM and you've got a server that is sized precisely for it's purpose. Say you need to expand your heap size? No problem... just expand your VM accordingly! Now that you don't have to worry about pulling pizza boxes out of a rack to upgrade them, adding and even subtracting server memory is easy.

Hypervisors think about memory in a much different way, and often use transparent page sharing to allow more efficient use of a host server's memory. For example, if you have 4096 kilobytes of nothing but 0's it doesn't make much sense to reserve all this physical memory for nothing more than a span of empty space. It would be more efficient to say "I have 0 stored 33.5 million times in a row." Same thing for patterns of memory - say the eight bit pattern 10101010. We could instead assert "the pattern 10 is repeated four times." Here the pattern 10 may be considered a "page" that is shared four times in a row. We can especially do this within a consolidated cloud computing infrastructure; every VM running the same OS kernel likely will have similar memory patterns. This is one of the advantages of virtualization: you achieve superior resource allocation by sharing the page containing the same Ubuntu kernel rather than repeating its place in memory over and over again.

One hallmark of the Java virtual machine has been garbage collection. The practice and grooming of garbage collection is best detailed elsewhere, however it is best summarized as a series of batched operations that clean up and defragment working heap memory. In physical servers this usually isn't a huge issue - memory is fast and usually idle. Since we have a hypervisor that is sharing memory pages, however, this does become an issue when memory rapidly changes in large swaths. The solution is to use larger memory pages to avoid continuous swapping of shared pages. You can force the JVM to use larger memory pages by adding the argument -XX:+UseLargePages to your Java runtime (or -Xlp in the IBM Java runtime), but you also need to enable large page support in your operating system of choice. See the VMware Performance Study "Large Page Performance" for details on how to tell your guest operating system that you wish to use large page sizes.

Another optimization highlight, and one that seems contrary at first, is that fewer CPUs often means greater performance during high load times. It is important to empasize this is during high CPU load because the issue centers around context switching - the effective hand-off between parallel threads. Java itself does context switching very efficiently, especially after Java 6 Update 10 (or so I've noticed at least). Yet when a storm of hardware interrupts and thread thrashing comes around due to high load sometimes just the effort of doling out workloads to processors can cause things to slow down. Ramesh Peddakotla from HP had some great empirical data to share, benchmarking workloads against ever increasing CPU counts. Performance gains topped off at 4 CPUs; 2 CPUs seemed like the sweet spot. At a certain point the cost of orchestrating multiple CPUs outweighs the throughput of parallel threads in the midst of high CPU load.

Linux machines have yet another tweak they can enjoy to reduce interrupts: lower the clock interrupt rate. VMware worked with kernel developers at SuSE Linux to reduce RTC polling intervals and the modification has since been adopted by Linux distributions at large. The most recent Linux distributions no longer require customization or kernel flags to set the appropriate clock behavior.

Ultimately Java running on a VMware cloud can be as fast as bare hardware. Thanks to the efficiencies you may gain from isolating one Java runtime environment within a single operating system, you may even find your Java apps running faster.

YEAH! It's not just me! Whether I'm asked what I do or am working on marketing materials for BlueLock, "cloud" or "cloud computing" always comes up. I knew that people outside of the industry would be cloudy on the meaning of those terms. What I've learned in my 7 months with a pure cloud hosting company, is that the entire industry is still grappling with how to describe "the cloud."

Last week's opening session at VMworld 2010 had some fun with this reality in a video that was shown to the 17,000 attendees. Essentially, the cloud was likened to a carry-out pizza restaurant. So what were the main points in the comparison?

• You don't have to devote your own time to making it
• You don't have to provide your own ingredients
• You can order what you want
• You can order it up with a "dumb terminal"
• You can consume as much as you want

Personally, I decided a while ago that BlueLock wasn't going to spend a lot of time trying to define the cloud. We'll let others put their energies there while we focus on communicating and more importantly, delivering the advantages of cloud computing to our clients.

In case you are starving for a definition, the one I like best so far comes from Gartner. In fact, I've been able to incorporate it into my own elevator pitch for BlueLock...and it seems to be helping! 

 

"Cloud computing is a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using Internet technologies."

If the cloud and pizza restaurant analogy has given you an appetite for either pizza or more on the cloud, check out the VMware video, "Cloud Computing, Unraveled."

Bon appetit!
 
www.youtube.com/user/vmwaretv#p/c/CA3F9CF665232827

Recently, BlueLock’s Brandon Jeffress and I visited Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana to take a look at how cloud computing is being used, or could be used, in the classroom environment. Jeffress, alum of Anderson, arranged for us to meet with Professor Charles Koontz, head of the Information Technology department there. After a tour of the facilities, we sat down with Professor Koontz to discuss the role of virtualization in modern college IT training.


You can’t open a news feed today without reading something about cloud computing, virtualization, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), so Brandon and I were surprised to learn that these topics are all but absent from the modern college IT major’s curriculum. Professor Koontz explained that colleges follow the guidelines of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which sets standards for the curriculum of IT majors in order to ensure that graduates possess the appropriate body of knowledge upon entering the working world. Cloud computing, it seems, has simply exploded onto the business scene so quickly that education has not been able to keep up. Curriculum changes take time, and so it is left up to the proactive student to engage with these expanding fields through their own research and internships. 

Brandon and I weren’t satisfied with that. Even for the most proactive students, internships and independent exploration cannot compare to the engagement one gets with a project under the direction of a professor. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to introduce students to virtualization through a short classroom tutorial, allowing them to interact with the topics they were reading about in the news through actual hands-on experience? 

      
Professor Koontz suggested that the IT major’s senior capstone class might be a great place to start. He invited Brandon to come and teach a day’s class on Cloud Computing, the advantages of cloud hosting, and his role at BlueLock this fall. Brandon agreed that even an introductory level class might really help to give the students some clarity around the whirlwind of topics referred to as “cloud,” including: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). 

Additionally, Brandon suggested that the advantages of cloud computing could work in the students advantage when it comes to getting hands-on experience in managing environments. Before virtualization, it would have been impossible for an individual student to practice managing their own multiple-server environment. Even just three servers would have cost thousands of dollars in years past. But now, with virtualization, it takes just a few minutes to spin up three new VMs. If a college were to leverage virtualization in its classroom, students could manage their own multi-server environment in the cloud with ease. The student could control everything from creation of the VMs to their retirement, giving them great experience in one of the hottest fields in IT.

Professor Koontz believes such a program would be a great addition to a student’s education and would be willing to experiment with such a program at Anderson. He also recommended we investigate other local universities, including Indiana University, IUPUI, Ball State, Purdue University, and The University of Indianapolis. Together these schools could work to build a standard curriculum and pool their resources to implement this short tutorial series which might give Indiana’s recent graduates a leg up as they step out of the classroom and into a very “cloudy” business world.

I saw an interesting article on multi-tenancy last week concerning this from Lori MacVittie.  In the article she writes, "Tenancy becomes more granular and, at the very bottom layer, at IaaS, you’ll find that the tenant is actually an application and that each one has its own unique set of operational and infrastructure needs. Two applications, even though deployed by the same organization, may have a completely different – and sometimes image conflicting – set of parameters under which it must be deployed, secured, delivered, and managed."

Many times multi-tenancy is tied in the cloud computing world is tied more closely with technical architecture considerations than it is the business drivers behind how applications are deployed.  In order to reap the advantages of cloud computing, though, it's important to understand not just the technical complexity of deploying an application in a cloud hosting environment but also what the potential benefits and/or challenges of that deployment will be as it relates to the business impact.  When choosing candidates for the cloud, you must understand and base your decision on both.

There's some debate these days about whether or not you must be utilizing virtualization technology to be considered a true cloud computing solution.  Some argue that cloud computing is merely a paradigm and not a prescribed set of technologies; that while the advantages of virtualization are great you don't need virtualization to enjoy the advantages of cloud computing.  Just like I'm not convinced that one model fits all when it comes to cloud computing, I'm also not convinced that you have to be running a workload in a virtual machine for it to be considered to be "in the cloud".  At the core of it, cloud computing is just a sophisticated form of outsourcing all or a part of your IT infrastructure.  Instead of building your own datacenter or bying your own systems and software and managing it all yourself, you get along using someone else's datacenter.  Or someone else's systems and software.  Or someone else's people.

So while Cloud Computing <> Virtualization, VMs are the way that companies like BlueLock make infrastructure as a service and cloud computing a reality.  You can do managed hosting without virtualization, but the economies of scale and the ability to decouple compute capacity from the underlying hardware that virtualization provides are what makes infrastrure "convenient", "on-demand" and "elastic" - thereby making elevating it from mere managed hosting to "cloud hosting".  John Considine wrote a post on CloudSwitch's blog title, "Do VMs Still Matter in the Cloud".  It's worth reading to understand one perspective of what virtualization and cloud computing do probably deserve to be joined at the hip.

Jeff Vance wrote a great article entitled, "Top 10 Reasons Cloud Computing Deployments Fail" which was published last week on the Datamation site.  As I deal mainly with the technical challenges and questions that prospects have when considering cloud computing, I found it interesting that only one of the top 10 reasons provided had anything to do with technology.

The advantages of cloud computing are obvious to most people, but since many times it's the technical folks (like me!) evaluating providers and making recommendations it's easy to get buried in the bits and bytes and lose sight of the biggest issues when looking at cloud computing providers.  Whatever you do, though, don't get caught "failing to get off the sidelines".

Last week I attended Softletter's SaaS University in Washington, D.C.  It was a great event aimed at helping SaaS companies learn how to better market, sell and deliver their cloud computing solutions using the Software-as-a-Service model.  BlueLock was asked to deliver a session on the infrastructure choices that SaaS companies face when deciding how to host their application. 

The numbers from the 2010 Softletter SaaS Survey revealed that SaaS companies have many infrastructure choices to make, from highly virtualized (Cloud) server farms to highly managed service systems and many variants in between. My session analyzed the choices available to SaaS providers and and gave some realistic numbers, checklists, and scenarios that hopefully helped them make the best choice for their operations and peace of mind.  Infrastructure As A Service offerings can be a great benefits to SaaS companies in that they can help them move opex expenses to capex expenses, lower their overall costs, align their expenses with revenues, improve their speed-to-market and provide a competitive advantage.

Here's a link to the PPT and the presentation on SlideShare.

At a recent event here in Indianapolis, also known as "Sili-corn Valley" to some, a friendly attendee named Kay submitted this question: "How can cloud computing be an advantage to a startup business?"

Let's start with the basics. What is cloud computing? According to the NIST Cloud Computing Project, cloud computing is "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." Yes, there are lots of definitions of cloud computing out there, but this one is very suitable and widely accepted.

Now, what constitutes a startup? Startup companies can come in all forms, including those that are simply life-style companies, but the phrase "startup company" is often associated with high growth, technology oriented companies. Investors are generally most attracted to those new companies distinguished by their risk/reward profile and scalability. That is, they have lower bootstrapping costs, higher risk, and higher potential return on investment. Successful startups are typically more scalable than an established business, in the sense that they can potentially grow rapidly with limited investment of capital, labor or land. - via Wikipedia.

Now, let's talk about that last line about successful startups. Successful startups need to be scalable, with the ability to grow rapidly with limited investment in capital, labor or land. We are beginning to get the heart of our friend Kay's questions. Cloud computing sets startups up for those core abilities to control their investments (and keep them "limited").

The major benefits of cloud computing are:

• Limit upfront capital costs - shifting infrastructure costs from capex to opex
• Better ability to match revenue with expenses - you pay for the resources you use, which for most companies equates to how much traffic and revenue they are bringing in the door
• Ability to scale on demand - scale resources up and down as needed, this allows for rapid growth
• Get to market quicker - the cloud enables companies to get up and running more quickly due to rapid provisioning and infrastructure experts doing what they do best
• Spend precious labor costs on people who will better your core business and applications rather than people who must run the infrastructure (we do that for you)
• No need to spend time and money housing, powering and cooling the infrastructure (this just reinforces the startup comment about the ability to grow rapidly with limited investment in capital or land, we've already discussed people)

Check out how DECA Financial Services (a startup) slashed 91% of their first-year infrastructure costs with the BlueLock Cloud.

For more info, check out BlueLock's Advantages of Cloud Computing Blog.

At the Purdue Innovation Summit last week Ruth Nickolich submitted a great question to the BlueLock team: What are the advantages of cloud computing?

This is a question that has been asked, and answered many times and in many ways. From the BlueLock perspective, the major advantages of cloud computing are as follows:

• The real advantage of Cloud Computing, especially when using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering which provides managed services as part of the solution, is that you're saving on more than just communications, power, cooling and facilities.  You're moving hardware and (potentially) software costs to the service provider as well as the most expensive part, the staff-related costs.  - via Bob Roudebush
• While security is a major concern when it comes to cloud computing, looking at a move to the cloud not only draws attention to the security measures in the cloud, but also the security measures you are taking in house. How do they measure up? A lot of BlueLock clients get better security from the cloud than in-house. - via Alicia Gaba
• Cloud Computing allows you to shift capital-intensive infrastructure costs to operating expenses, which can save your organization thousands of dollars in the long run. Check out how DECA Financial cut 91% of their infrastructure costs in the first year alone
• Better matching of revenue to expenses
• Rapid provisioning and speed to market
• Competitive advantage - they are able to spend IT time on their application and core business drivers rather than the day-to-day worries of managing the infrastructure

Still looking for more? Check out BlueLock's "Advantages of Cloud Computing" Blog.

Recently the swell folks at The Register commented on AWS' latest cluster computing initiative centered around High Performance Computing. In a nutshell this differs from other EC2 instances by providing dedicated servers with two 2.93 GHz, quad-core Xeon X5570s and 23 GB of memory attached to a 10Gb switching layer. Previously you didn't have dedicated hardware... you floated in a pool of resources, hoping that today would be a good day. While the resulting performance gains from dedicated hardware may be significant over the floating-in-the-sea approach, in the end you are just getting a higher performance infrastructure and not a high performance infrastructure.

The annoncements and analysis made me chuckle a bit. For BlueLock to drop another slew of 144 GB blades into a chassis is standard operating procedure. Does that make us HPC as well? For us private clouds and dedicated hardware has always been the order of the day. I find it very telling that the decisions BlueLock made years ago are just now emerging as popular trends for Infrastructure as a Service today.

When evaluating managed IT hosting or cloud hosting providers, it's always good to look at performance not just in terms of "small," "medium" or "large." It's not even how much compute or memory you throw at the problem. Network and filesystem I/O (especially for cloud computing) is a huge factor in overall cluster performance, and one really needs to be at peace with your physical hardware to truly take advantage of your virtual solutions.

The BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkeys Use Case contest begins today!

Former, current and new BlueLock vCloud Express Beta users will compete for these prizes:

• The first ten submissions will receive a stuffed cloud monkey
  
• The top five finalists will receive a FlipCam which they will use (and keep!) to create a recognition video for the application to compete for the Grand Prize - an Apple iPad!
  
• The Grand Prize winner will receive the engraved Apple iPad!

Open for submissions by current, former and new Beta users, the contest runs from June 16 – September 6 and looks to surface the most innovative use cases of BlueLock’s vCloud Express.

During the 12-week contest, BlueLock vCloud Express developers enter by filling out a simple questionnaire on the BlueLock Web site between June 16 and July 7 2010 that includes a description of the BlueLock vCloud Express use case and why it deserves to win. Participants can promote their own use case through Twitter and other social media outlets. Submissions will be voted on by an open community of voters and judged by BlueLock and VMware on cloud applicability, creativity/innovation, time savings and cost savings to select the top five use cases. The first ten submissions will receive a BlueLock “Cloud Monkey” stuffed animal and the five finalists will receive FlipCams with the option to document their use cases in a two minute “Recognition Video.” Finalists who submit Recognition Videos will then be judged by BlueLock and VMware for the Grand Prize, with the winner receiving an engraved Apple iPad.

“The functionality of BlueLock vCloud Express has proven to be unique and of value to our clients, driving us to design some of the same features into our other solutions within BlueLock CloudSuite,” said Kim Graham Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, BlueLock. “We are excited to not only learn more about how developers have been using vCloud Express, but to also highlight the most unique and interesting use cases.”

“As a top VMware vCloud service provider partner, BlueLock has been able to help shape vCloud Express as it continues to demonstrate that they are ahead of the curve in understanding their clients’ needs in the evolving cloud computing space,” said Mathew Lodge, Senior Director-Cloud Product Marketing, VMware. “We are looking forward to learning about how beta users have taken advantage of the dynamic combination of the industry-leading VMware platform and BlueLock’s secure and reliable cloud hosting and infrastructure expertise.”

BlueLock vCloud Express is a reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure solution that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide. The technology allows users to create virtual machines as needed and add compute capacity via an online interface. Users pay only for the compute and storage space they use. Since being selected by VMware as one of only five companies worldwide to offer vCloud Express and launching in September 2009, BlueLock has reached 1,100 beta users of the product.

Participants can be past, current or new BlueLock vCloud Express beta users and can submit more than one application. For additional contest details, visit www.bluelock.com.