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!

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

“To meet our clients’ business requirements, we need to be able to scale up and scale down very quickly with no disruptions. The only way we can do that is with the architecture we’ve built using VMware and F5 BIG-IP LTM.” - Pat O’Day, Chief Technical Officer, Bluelock

As a provider of Virtual Datacenters hosted in the public cloud, Bluelock needs to be able to seamlessly deliver traffic across servers for heightened performance and efficiencies. BIG-IP LTM provides intelligent traffic management that efficiently distributes traffic across virtual machines to optimize server utilization. By offloading SSL processing from the virtual servers, BIG-IP LTM also frees up server capacity to handle other processes.

Check out a recent case study video where O'Day talks about the benefits of F5 load balancers for cloud computing.

“BIG-IP LTM helps us maximize the efficiency of our virtual environment so we can pass those efficiencies along to our clients, all while ensuring the high performance and availability that our clients require,” says O’Day.

The National Democratic Institute (NDI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in Washington, DC and works in every region of the world to strengthen democratic institutions, safeguard elections, advance citizen engagement, and support open and accountable government.  In a recent joint case study with Bluelock and VMware, NDI highlighted some major technology improvements they experienced after moving to VMware vCloud Director using Bluelock Virtual Datacenters.

Chris Spence of NDI commented:
"VMware vCloud Director helps us better serve our users, including those in developing countries. We can configure virtual servers, point to URLs, and fire up applications within a matter of minutes. It's less costly for us and less time-consuming, and because it's a virtualized deployment, the hosting costs are low."

NDI needed to deliver applications to users across the globe who lack the infrastructure and resources to host them. The organization was also charged to drive efficiencies in the application delivery process so that it can focus on core activities; an important effort for a nonprofit organization. By using vCloud Director with Bluelock VDCs, NDI is now able to act quickly by provisioning new, stable environments within minutes, they've minimized hosting costs and freed up their engineers to focus on higher value tasks.

Read the full case study.

Learn more about NDI:
http://www.ndi.org/

Bluelock is dedicated to providing a challenging and stimulating work environment to help employees succeed both professionally and personally. Our team is always on the lookout for qualified, hardworking professionals with a keen entrepreneurial spirit that are passionate about delivering client success. Bluelock offers a variety of employment opportunities for growth and development.

Do you like to achieve high levels of performance through collaborative teams, yet function independently in areas of specialty? Bluelock's stimulating culture may be what you're looking for. Bluelock is seeking an experienced Systems Engineer to join the Operations Team. Candidates need experience in virtualization and VMware products with knowledge of servers, networks, virtual machines, and storage.

Duties for a Bluelock Systems Engineer include installation, configuation, monitoring, and backup of Bluelock product environments for our clients to meet SLAs. Leverage your critical thinking skills to troubleshoot complex issues to ensure delivery of client services. Drive your technical knowledge and develop your skillset in our fast-paced environment.

Learn more about becoming a Systems Engineer well as other opportunities at Bluelock team on our careers page.

VMware’s July release of both a product upgrade and new software suite consolidates options for enterprise virtualization. The Palo Alto powerhouse in cloud computing technology announced its latest advance for the hypervisor program, vSphere®5, featuring significant capability improvements. Corresponding to the new version’s introduction was the innovative bundling of five supporting software programs, previously sold independently. As just under half of all server operations are currently performed virtually, this latest technology development is a bid to position VMware and its software provider companies in a strong position to capture future enterprise integration.

VSphere®5 noteworthy expanded capacity stats:

• 32 virtual CPUs
• 1 Terabytes (1,000 M) of memory
• 1 Million I/O operations per second

VSphere®5 Suite components:

Analogous to Microsoft’s bundling of personal computing software, VSphere®5 adds to its standard vCenter Operations three other programs previously sold independently as well as an optional fourth:

• vCloud Director – Allows the flexibility of having two virtual machines with similar tasks separate operations only after the tasks begin to differ, with the second virtual machine deployed to independently operate once the need arises.
• vShield Security – Recognizes and differentiates compliance and security certificates and separates critical data into the appropriate level of security.
• vCenter SRM – (Site Recovery Manager) Advanced disaster recovery capability, automated to reduce recovery time, ensure timely storage of critical information and maintains system reliability.
• VSphere storage option – Allows multiple small to mid-sized businesses to store information in dedicated storage space while ensuring that data is not compromised with other enterprises.

A glance into the (near) future of information management?

With estimates placing enterprise virtualization near the 50 percent level, pricing follows function for most of these product choices involving a hybrid of virtual and hardware processors. The new release comes with a reduced number of subscription options, allowing companies the scalability they need as they integrate into the cloud.

Existing VMware customers and potential enterprises looking to invest in the transition from computers dependent on hard operating systems, servers and storage to virtualization can adapt the innovations available with vSphere®5 to their own positioning strategies. By weighing ROI expectations and the flexibility of a platform that allows an “all in” approach to cloud computing, even companies just beginning to test the waters of a this revolutionary trend will be well-served.

SOURCES:

http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2011/07/vmware-unveils-vsphere-5-and-the-cloud-infrastructure-suite.html
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/vmware-shows-its-cloud-strategy/
http://gigaom.com/cloud/vmware-exposes-its-plans-to-be-the-os-for-the-cloud/  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/12/vmware_cloud_infrastructure_announcment/  
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Virtualization/VMware-vSphere-5-Delivers-AllinOne-Virtualization-Storage-Package-280187/

A guest post by Nand Mulchandani, CEO, ScaleXtreme

ScaleXtreme is the first cloud-based systems management product, and we're excited to announce support for Bluelock Virtual Datacenters as an integrated, preferred platform. With ScaleXtreme, Bluelock clients can manage their servers directly through a web browser, giving them the ability to:

• Connect your Bluelock account to ScaleXtreme and use it to launch new vApp's directly through the system
• "Live Browse" the file system on your server and conduct a variety of operations on files, as well as look through application/package inventory on those systems
• Stats and monitoring of your machines for key variables such as CPU, Memory, Disk, Network and Processes
• Upload scripts (shell, command shell, Powershell, etc.) into the cloud - fully version controlled and ready to run across multiple systems
• Schedule and run scripting jobs across multiple machines and record historical data
• Use the integrated App Store to get one-click access to a rich library of scripts including popular packages (JBoss, etc.) and Bitnami stacks
• And more!

Instead of using "command shell" or other manual techniques, you can use ScaleXtreme to do many of the tasks that you would otherwise do manually. Bluelock clients can signup for free at http://www.scalextreme.com/register to start managing machines in a few minutes.
 
ScaleXtreme is also hosting a free webinar on July 12 @ 10am PDT where we will take clients through the product and show how to signup and start managing machines with Bluelock in a few minutes. Registration link is http://bit.ly/jR2WhX.

About ScaleXtreme:
Built from the ground up to be simple, scalable, and social, ScaleXtreme’s product aims to transform the way IT admins manage their Amazon EC2, VMware virtual machine and physical server deployments. ScaleXtreme was founded by a team with deep expertise in enterprise software and systems management, including Bladelogic and VMware, and is backed by Accel Partners.

Virtualization is a technical innovation that allows increased levels of system abstraction. Adding a virtual layer on top of physical hardware offers scalability and better workload management in an environment to maximize the utility of computing resources.

Think of virtualization as the multiplier effect. Rather than silo workloads on a single operating system with a given set of applications and components, you can specify unlimited combinations and amounts of virtual machines (VMs). Stuck working on a Windows machine? No problem! Leveraging VMware’s virtualization platform, end users can create a Linux-based VM in minutes. Struggling with driver compatibility or CPU architecture? No problem. Spin up a VM to spec for your application needs.

VMware vSphere delivers datacenter resources and applications on command. Reduce capital costs and increase energy efficiency. Virtualization’s abstracted layer allows end users to migrate both VMs and workloads through an administrative console.

I appreciate everyone's feedback on our earlier post about consuming cloud services. The discipline of keeping things as simple as possible seems to resonate with a good deal of people - either that or people really like my image of an Allosaurus. It was a great photo.

In keeping with the spirit of allowing cloud computing to remain simple, there is another elementary issue that is becoming a bit of a monster: how much cloud computing actually costs. If everything is "on-demand" or "pay-as-you-go," how can you actually budget for next month?

With cloud computing you basically have two types of billing: commodity billing and utility billing. Commodities are tangible things like RAM, number of virtual CPUs, disk storage, public IP addresses and the like. Utilities are rates or metrics that are tracked by how they are used such as bandwidth consumed, disk I/O operations or compute cycles. These billing models have solid analogs in the real world: I buy flash drives or grapes, but pay the gas or water bill based on how much I have consumed. Most infrastructure as a service providers mix and match commodity and utility pricing when adding up your bill; you may buy an allocated amount of RAM or persistant storage but you pay for Internet access based on how much inbound traffic you receive.

Initially it may sound like asking for completely utility-based pricing would be ideal - you only pay for what you use and your costs scale with your resource utilization. Unfortunately in real life scenarios utilization of RAM, compute and disk does not necessarily scale with how much your application is being actively used. An increase in active users doesn't have a 1:1 scale with an increase in resource utilization, a factor which hurts the predictability of your costs. In addition, unless you have great forecast and analsis reporting, it's hard to predict growth of either active users or resource consumption. If you need to draw up an operational expense budget for the next two quarters, forecasting cost with utility billing may require a crystal ball or mutant abilities. Or both.

If you're running a tight, fiscally-sound ship I believe the right cloud computing partner can offer you both predictable billing and flexible cost. Even if your managed cloud hosting allows you to spin up new servers on demand you can still accurately track and predict cost. Managed virtual servers can be thought of as a commodity without being seen as a capital expense by making most resources (namely RAM, vCPU, disk) billed on a straight allocation basis. When your invoice is based on the resources you've allocated to your virtual infrastructure there's no surprise at the end of the month.

Traditional, physical servers are seen as a commodity with a capital expense: they depreciate, they have a high initial investment and they eventually need replaced. Virtual servers within a cloud hosting service can be seen as a commodity with an operational expense. Virtual servers don't require the high initial investment, don't depreciate and don't need replacement. The cloud computing provider itself worries about replacement, maintenance and upgrades when the time arrives. An operational expense is far more agile than a capital expense, a fact that is multiplied when cloud technology begins to act like a server vending machine. Put a few coins in, get a 2 vCPU/4 GB RAM/1 TB server out.

While you may not know what next month's electric bill will bring, I'm guessing you've got a firm grip on next month's rent. Manage cloud computing costs in much the same way - make your infrastructure a operational commodity that doesn't make you dread the end of the month.

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.

Near as I can tell, Azure was launched under the premise of a .NET Platform as a Service offering. Microsoft employed some clever tricks to provide a cloud-ready relational database and provisioning tools for Visual Studio, bringing the service nose-to-nose with Google App Engine and Salesforce.com.

Bear in mind that Platform as a Service is quite different from Infrastructure as a Service. PaaS offerings focus almost entirely on the developer, leaving scalability concerns entirely to the service provider. IaaS provides a more familiar server-based architecture, allowing IT to manage infrastructure concerns as they see fit. With PaaS the secret sauce lies with the "automagic" scalability, almost akin to grid computing in some facets. PaaS providers seldom (if ever) dabble into IaaS offerings, often because the data center layouts and architecture are vastly different.

Imagine the surprise when the Azure team announced their "Virtual Machine Role," a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine running in the Azure cloud. This casts Azure as a weird hybrid PaaS/IaaS platform... and given how disparate those services are I'm not confident they can combine well. This either means a) Azure has always just been a league of Windows VMs or b) the ability to have individual virtual machines has somehow been wedged sideways into the platform. Either way it doesn't instill a whole lot of confidence in the PaaS solution. I can see maturing from IaaS into PaaS, but the other way around seems odd to me. Maybe Azure started as IaaS and then became PaaS and then became IaaS?

My head hurts.

I concede that I may just be a jaded purist. Still, I can't help but think that Publilius Syrus had the right idea about cloud computing services: "to do two things at once is to do neither." I wouldn't assume to say a service provider can't provide a choice between the two, but it seems awfully strange to wedge a virtual server into a PaaS offering.

vCloud Director has allowed developers to create isolated, self-contained virtual applications that are easily replicated and shared across clouds. As we increasingly bring a number of ISVs and SaaS developers onto the BlueLock public cloud I have seen an interesting trend evolving - vApps (and the OVF metadata that wraps around them) have become an increasingly convenient way to package and distribute applications.

The practice of creating ready-made virtual machines is not a new one - in fact VMware Player exists for this very reason. A ready-made and pre-configured application can very easily be bundled inside of a virtual machine, compressed and made ready for download. Bundling more complex applications that span multiple virtual machines has been a more difficult thing to do; VMware Workstation attempted to tackle the issue with the concept of "teams," but it wasn't a complete solution. It took the advent of the OVF standard and the vApp construct within vCloud Director for a practical solution to arise.

vApp encasulation has made distribution of SaaS and complex multi-server applications easy - you just freeze-dry your vApp, save your vApp to your vCloud catalog or save the entire thing to disk. Want to easily spin up an n-tier application? Just deploy from the OVF and you're up and running within minutes.

Could this capability be exploited to help with the software release lifecycle? At first this sounds like a great idea: when your n-tier application is ready for quality assurance testing just clone the vApp and hand it off to your QA team. Once the application is tested and approved, you clone the vApp once more to place it into production. No more guessing about configuration files, no more wrestling with pushing binaries or creating automated deployment scripts. One big wrinkle exists with this strategy... the mega-problem that always comes back to bite every engineer with good intentions... data is rarely portable.

Current production data can't be blown away with every new release, even with stellar database backup procedures. Even if we isolate our data tier and place it in an immutable VM you still need to tweak your application configurations to point to a new database after every development/QA/production push. Even worse - what if you forget to make these configuration changes? Your production application could suddenly be serving up QA data. It's enough to make a release manager eat the entire bottle of antacids.

Without a doubt, vApps give you extremely more convenient and agile ways of promoting applications along with the infrastructure that hosts it. This is extremely useful for development, test, quality assurance and demo environments. Still, one has to be ever mindful that binaries don't make an application. Data makes an application.

Cloud Computing was all the buzz at yesterday's TechPoint Innovation Summit. The luncheon keynote speaker, Nicholas Carr, spoke avidly about his thoughts on cloud computing, many were a review of his book The Big Switch in which he compares the movement from organizations generating their own power to utility-based power and the movement of organizations owning and managing their own servers to cloud computing.  It is, as he described, a force that will continue to take hold of the way we do computing, we just need organizations to build a bridge so that people can purposefully and efficiently move into the new world.

While the keynote focused heavily on cloud, BlueLock was also preparing for a session of our own on Innovation in Cloud Computing, featuring:
- Dave Schroeder, Director Technical Services US, VMware
- Doug Allgood, CIO/CTO, Milestone Advisors
- Mike Rudicle, CIO, Adesa
- Moderated by Pat O'Day, CTO, BlueLock

The panel focused on real uses and concerns of cloud computing. Doug Allgood talked about how he challenges the business leaders he works with as an outsourced CIO/CTO to think about the benefits and challenges of cloud computing. He also cited a specific example of a company who he helped save 91% of startup costs by going to the cloud (Deca Financial Services case study).

Mike Rudicle, who was formerly an Eli Lilly executive and a practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers, spoke about his experiences in corporate IT, how he advises people to think about about cloud and why we need to fail a few times to figure out what really does make sense for the cloud.

Dave Schroeder brought another perspective, that of an enabler of cloud. VMware is the leading provider of virtualization technology, and has a mission to build that very bridge that Nicholas Carr talked about in his keynote - a bridge that will allow organizations to access a hybrid cloud computing approach that is compatible with their in-house efforts today.

On another note, a writer from InsideIndianaBusiness wrote a quick recap of the keynote session titled "Tech Writer Questions Reliance on The 'Cloud'" where he talks about a potential lack of focus by workers who are in a "state of perpetual distractedness." I'm sorry but were we watching the same presentation? I don't think the amount of Google searches IT is making has any argument against why an organization should utilize cloud hosting. Please do let me know what you think of his write-up because I'm quite sure we saw two different keynotes...

For some reason or another I keep hearing people talk about the CAP Theorem this week. So now it's stuck in my head like a top 40 jingle. Thanks Interwebs.

Ever hear the euphemism "you can have it quick, fast or cheap: pick two?" CAP is one of those cake-and-eat-it to Theorems... the postulate being that you can pick two: Consistency, Availability or Partition Tolerance. Clustered relational databases usually are a combo of Availability and Consistency, NoSQL databases are often a combo of Availability and Partition Tolerance.

In a recent blog post, GigaSpaces CTO Nati Shalom talks about how people often over-complicate scalability decisions and jump to the concept that they must sacrifice ACID consistency to achieve scalability, often by allowing batched writes to happen asynchronously. Most of the time you can achieve the speed ya need by sharding relational databases instead of moving to incosistent NoSQL databases. By sharding data you can spread data logically across your infrastructure, farming database load out to multiple servers. If you use an ORM you can hide this complexity with something like Hibernate Shards to make partitioning even easier.

The best way to design and develop against a sharded database is to start virtualized. If you leverage a managed cloud hosting provider with appropriate I/O guarantees you can easily start by horizontally sharding your data then vertically scalign your infrastructure as you need. For example, all odd-numbered primary keys might go into one shard, even-numbered primary keys to the other. Once demand for one shard or another picks up, you can add memory for caching, CPUs for parallel execution or disks for storage. The right Infrastructure as a Service partner can make relational database scaling much easier - you don't need to give up the farm to achieve massive scale.

In a week, BlueLock's CTO, Pat O'Day will be sitting down in New York for the first of several panel discussions at the Enterprise Cloud Summit (ECS) at Interop. Interop, like many technology events, has a major focus on cloud computing. This year's Enterprise Cloud Summit (ECS) has been split into two days. The first day will focus on private clouds -- on-demand, elastic, virtualized platforms offered in a self-service model. On the second day, ECS will look at public, third-party clouds, and try to understand how private and public cloud offerings will emerge as hybrid IT architectures.

The session Pat is involved with is called "Virtualizing the Platforms," and it happens at 10:45AM on Monday morning, lasting 45 minutes. "The first step in any cloud is to make workloads virtual and portable. This session will look at application virtualization in a cloud environment, from "naked" machines to predefined stacks of machine, operating system, and application." Topics that will be covered in the session include:

• What are the options for virtualization today, both commercial and open source?
• What are the implications for hardware selection? Can enterprises just use what they have, or do they need to switch things out?
• How does the data center architecture change as we embrace clouds? What does this mean for storage, network backbone, and so on?
• What functions don't the basic virtualization tools provide? How can automation improve efficiency?
• What lessons have you learned from running big virtual platforms?
• How does an enterprise move from a component-centric "virtual machine" mentality to an architectural "encapsulated application" mindset?
• How do we deal with server hoarding, application sprawl, and other side-effects of self-service IT?
• Where is virtualization technology going in the coming year?

If you are attending Interop this year, make sure to stop by this session. It is sure to include tangible takeaway information for you and your IT team.

You can find the full outline of ECS on the Interop website.