Benefits Of Cloud Computing

Multi-Tenancy and Applications In the Cloud

Monday, August 16, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

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.

Physical Education in a Virtual World

Thursday, August 12, 2010 by John Ellis

I will admit that "Cloud Computing" terminology is becoming confused. People are mixing together the concepts of commodity hardware datacenters, the benefits of virtualization and massively parallel systems into a blender and calling it a "cloud." The truth is that these three concepts are very disparate practices that often do not entirely co-exist. Most service providers will pick one or two of the three for their managed cloud hosting.

For example: Amazon AWS is largely a traditional infrastructure provider that leverages a massive number of commodity hardware (well, not quite, but bear with me) to offer low-cost server hosting. This allows you to spin up elebenty kabillion instances on the cheap, but the price/performance ratio many times just isn't there. A great article was recently published showing how moving a conventional Drupal installation away from AWS provided much better performance, lowered response times and was much more cost effective, even when accounting for disaster recovery. This demonstrates not how physical hardware is more cost-effective, but instead shows how performance matters when calculating cost.

When architecting an application's infrastructure it pays to remember that performance does not increase by adding more servers into the mix. Diagonal scaling is the best way to handle increasing load on a cost-effective basis, as demonstrated by Flickr and Wikimedia. Increase your hardware until you become constrained by concurrency (such as context switching, thread contention or mutex waits) or I/O then consider scaling out horizontally. Unless you are talking about massively parallel algorithms you don't need to spin up an enormous number of machines; even if you do start talking about massively parallel computation, you cease talking about infrastructure as a service and virtualization and instead move towards deploying Hadoop clusters across many physical nodes.

I would agree that vertical scaling isn't a great strategy. I would also argue that horizontal scaling on its own isn't a great strategy either. Get your money's worth for each instance you start, then keep deploying as demand increases.

SaaS Infrastructure Choices

Tuesday, July 27, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

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.

Visibility and Managing Costs

Monday, July 26, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

The two biggest concerns that most clients have when moving to cloud hosting are “control” and “visibility”. Even though they are convinced of the benefits of cloud computing, they are concerned about giving up control of applications and data and they’re worried that they won’t have any visibility into their applications and data once they move them into the cloud.

Visibility is probably the single best tool that clients can have for managing costs. We provide a web-based portal (the BlueLock Vital Signs Portal) with granular reporting to show not only what clients are allocated in terms of compute and storage capacity within our cloud, but more importantly what they are consuming. Since in the IaaS world, the amount of capacity you have reserved is directly related to the overall cost of the hosting service, providing visibility into what is actually being consumed and allowing clients to adjust their reserved resources helps you maintain costs.

Tech TV

Wednesday, July 21, 2010 by Greg Cripe

Although cloud computing is not a staple on television, there are some smart shows currently airing that could feature realistic cloud-based storylines. Showrunners seem to be taking more care in getting the technical details right and there more than a couple of shows that feature technical stories on a regular basis.

Possibly the most obvious is Eureka, which is in its fourth season on Syfy. The show's setting is a fictional Oregon town called Eureka. Virtually everyone who lives there is a scientific genius working to advance technology in some unusual way. It's a decidedly light-hearted look at both the dangers and benefits of rapid scientific progress. It wouldn't be a stretch to think that Global Dynamics, the massive company at the heart of Eureka, uses virtualization technologies extensively.

Covert Affairs is a new show on USA Network that makes good use of technology. It's set in the world of the CIA and follows the adventures of young agent as she learns the ropes of international espionage. I imagine there's more that's virtual at the CIA besides their servers.

On Chuck, the titular character is the ultimate virtual computer. He has the contents of a multimedia CIA database known as the Intersect in his brain. The NBC show doesn't focus entirely on technology, but one of the primary settings is a tech store called Buy More.

The main reality where the cloud and television intersect is seen in services such as Netflix and Hulu. They are essentially clouds themselves, offering end users a wider choice in viewing with few or no advertisements. You can tote your laptop to a friend's house and watch a movie or TV show. Bored while waiting at the doctor's office - fire up a TV show on your phone.

It's clear that as lay people begin to understand more about the technology that drives such services, there will be more acceptance. Who knows, maybe there is a future for BlueLock TV!

The Advantages of Cloud Computing for Startups

Wednesday, July 21, 2010 by BlueLock Cloud Experts

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.

Transitioning from Traditional Computing Architectures to Cloud Architectures

Thursday, July 1, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

Typical data center architectures are based around not just the functions that servers perform, but the capabilities of the hardware in performing it. In a cloud computing scenario, supported by full-scale virtualization, the capabilities of the hardware change from constants to variables. Sometimes this makes it more difficult for architects to transition larger-scale deployments, even of specific functions like applications hosting, from physical data centers to the cloud.

To some extent, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing (specifically virtualization as the enabling technology for cloud computing) does homogenize the capabilities of the underlying hardware being used. This is mostly a benefit because it provides economies of scale and allows IaaS providers to maintain higher availability for servers hosted in a cloud. It does make things like sizing or designing the deployment of applications a bit tougher because typically we deploy the different aspects of a multi-tier application on different types of platforms – i.e., small, scale-out environments for web servers and large, scale-up environments for back-end database servers.

One approach that can be taken is to build “clouds within clouds” each with different characteristics. A second approach would be to carve things like compute capacity or storage capacity up into “building blocks” so that when it’s time to deploy an application, an administrator can combine one or more of these “building blocks” to ensure that a specific part of the application is getting the performance it requires.

BlueLock takes both approaches. Within our IaaS cloud hosting offering, we have different tiers with different performance and availability characteristics – BlueLock vCloud Express, Virtual Cloud Professional and Virtual Cloud Enterprise. On the one end, BlueLock vCloud Express is great for things like dev and test. On the other end, Virtual Cloud Enterprise is a fully-managed IaaS cloud built for performance and availability and perfect for mission-critical or regulated applications. We try to work closely with prospects to understand their needs and then match those up with the appropriate service.

Cloud Computing: There's no turning back

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

A recent post entitled "Five Reasons for the Cloud Computing Boom," by John Soat on Plug Into the Cloud, an InformationWeek's Cloud Computing Destination, surfaces further evidence that the cloud and all its glory, is here to stay.

He writes the cloud is "a bonafide IT phenomenon that points to the future of organizational computing."

Gartner, a leading research firm, recently released a cloud computing report that estimates cloud services revenue worldwide will reach $68.3 billion this year, a 16.6% increase from last year’s revenue of $58.6 billion. And the industry will experience strong growth through 2014, when Gartner predicts worldwide cloud services revenue will climb to $148.8 billion.

Soat goes on to outline the five factors he believes have led to the success and buzz around this "IT phenomenon."

1. The recession which has brought on IT cutbacks and the need for innovation ways to cut costs.

2. CFO's ability to forego capex investments in technology.

3. CIO's have embraced the tactical benefits of the cloud.

4. The general acceptance of outsourcing as an IT strategy.

5. Nicholas Carr's writing which outlined the cloud computing arguments and provides one basic message: IT should be looked on as a low-cost commodity.

Comments on Soat's blog post also point out that the distributed nature of the workforce in the recent past has also promoted the cloud.

I believe we are currently seeing the beginning of an all out adoption towards cloud, which comes on the coattails of the widespread virtualization adoption. As businesses small and large begin to strategically think about their cloud options we will see more and more adopt private cloud, public cloud, or a hybrid cloud approach. At BlueLock, we are seeing a lot of traction with new (startup) companies jumping straight into the cloud and larger companies dipping their toes further and further in.

Getting to Know You: The BlueLock Clients

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 by Greg Cripe

As a systems administrator working the BlueLock Support Desk, I handle requests from a variety of clients. As a result, I have an opportunity to get to know our clientele better than other staff. It's a vital role and offers more challenges than standard help desk work. In a typical day, I will handle firewall change requests, virtual machine performance issues, IP address assignment, research, hard drive expansion and other tasks. No two days are the same and the level of activity varies from hour to hour.

Our primary goal is always to provide excellent customer service. One of my goals to that end is to be as pleasant and reassuring as possible. Though I may not be able to find a quick solution for a given issue, I have resources readily available to advance the process. Keeping the lines of communication open between involved parties is a special challenge. If a request is overly complex, I may need to involve the Engineering Team and administrative staff. The support desk acts as a coordinator for these tasks, ensuring progress toward an acceptable solution.

Virtualization and the Cloud are still a part of the wild frontier and I strive to help ease the transition for new adopters. Whether I'm explaining how VMware stores files or detailing the backup process, I consider the comfort level of my audience. I answer many questions over the phone, but others may require exchanging documentation. Our flexibility helps build goodwill and confidence in our offerings.

To help our clients achieve the true benefits of Cloud computing we have to bring something special to the table every day. These roles that I've detailed all go toward creating a special relationship. When a client signs on the dotted line with BlueLock we become a part of their organization start building that relationship immediately. By fostering that common connection we are making a serious commitment to success for all involved.

On One Of The Hottest Memorial Day’s In History

Friday, June 4, 2010 by Jon Schackmuth

Track temperature was hovering around 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the crowd of almost 300,000 race fans were settled into their sets with stocked cooler chests, and on Memorial Day weekend, Americans did what they do best, they evoked their freedom of speech; they broke into a chant… U.S.A. - U.S.A. – U.S.A…

On one of the hottest Memorial Day’s in history, you could not pay me enough to leave the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but for a fleeting moment I did think about work and how cool our server room is. When giving site tours to prospective clients and explaining the benefits of virtualization, I recalled stepping into the fully enclosed concrete room and getting hit with a blast of arctic air – man what a feeling. In a blink of an eye, all thoughts of work past by me at 224 mph, like a burst of light, as 33 Indy Cars roared through turn one.

Now that I am back in the office and out of the heat, I think back to Sunday and wonder how many business owners lost their servers on Memorial Day weekend due to lack of cooling. I have been in several prospective companies that have server rooms with little or no cooling and the concept of a server room is simply a new designation for an old broom closet. If your IT business plan does not call for raised floors, integrated connection of chillers, compressors, and air handlers, ask yourself this – Have I made the best investment in owning and operating my own equipment vs exploring the advantages of cloud computing? Ask yourself, when my service contract is up or my servers need upgrading, should I consider outsourcing to a VMware infrastructure company like BlueLock or make the financial investment on a total data center upgrade? These are not easy questions to answer and may involve stepping outside the comfort of what many of us have done for twenty of thirty years.

For more information on BlueLock, visit our website or call me directly at 888-402-1980 ex. 127

CloudCamp Nugget

Friday, June 4, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

I attended my first CloudCamp event last night as a BlueLock employee. I am thankful to have been about to participate in plenty of good discussions around cloud hosting, the advantages of virtualization and the benefits of cloud computing. During the Cloud Computing Security unconference session there were a lot of great ideas shared - one in particular from a CISSP (security) type who does security and compliance audits of companies.

If you're into IT security and compliance, you should really check out the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They have a library of publications on a variety of topics - you can see them all here. You can narrow your search to specific topic areas like Computer Security, Information Technology or even Disaster Resilience. It's certainly worth bookmarking.

Cloud Computing for the Enterprise?

Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

I don't believe anyone really thinks all enterprise data centers will begin rushing to the clouds anytime soon (although there are a few that already have). That's quite far-fetched. However, that doesn't mean they won't begin testing out the waters (or the clouds).

However, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci explained at EMC World, "IT infrastructure has gotten too complex, too inefficient, too inflexible, and too costly...You’re managing a lot more with the same or less resources.”

A recent article outlined the benefits of the enterprise data center alongside the benefits of cloud computing.

Today's data center benefits:

Trust
Control
Reliability
Security

Cloud Computing benefits:

Dynamic
Cost-efficient
On-demand
Flexible

“In a way, the attributes of one are the negative of the other,” Tucci said.

The question is - how does the enterprise access the best of both worlds?

The answer is simple, and it probably the same if you were to ask someone from EMC, VMware or BlueLock. The answer is private cloud computing.

What is private cloud computing? It refers to what some call internal cloud computing and describes an offering that emulates cloud computing on private networks which allows companies to access the advantages of cloud computing without the pitfalls, such as data security, corporate governance and reliability concerns. Companies must still buy, build and manage the cloud, which isn't the case in the public cloud realm, but there are still many benefits. One of those benefits that BlueLock clients have accessed, is the ability to connect their private cloud to the public cloud for bursting and/or disaster recovery.

Learn more about private cloud computing today.

Cloud Computing: IT's role in governance

Friday, April 30, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

With cloud computing becoming more and more pervasive, IT's role is morphing towards one of governance rather than control. Internal departments are going out and accessing resources from the cloud rather than waiting on their internal IT departments to come around and get to their requests. IT must be more and more aware and ready to govern the use of outside IT resources such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which in some companies is a fire-able offense.

Internal IT must make decisions - they need to choose what to provide (SaaS & IaaS) and make those options easy and accessible to their business units. Why? Because leaving those business units to their own devices can be a huge risk. They may be putting the company or its client's data at security risk.

There are many benefits of cloud computing, but the right people must make the right decisions around where your data is stored and what options are OK for business units to use. Cloud computing security must always be top of mind, especially when sensitive data is involved.

What Every Software Leader Should Know About Cloud Computing.

Friday, April 30, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

By now you’ve probably heard about cloud computing, possibly even from your own IT department. Join Brian Wolff, Cloud Hosting Professional and Co-Founder of BlueLock to learn more about this nebulous concept called “The Cloud.” Brian will speak your language and share real-life examples of what other software companies are doing to leverage the cloud in his upcoming webinar.

This webinar is for the non-technical software executive who wants the 30,000-foot view on leading your company into the cloud.

You’ll walk away from this webinar with answers to these important strategic questions:

• What is the cloud?

• What are the benefits of moving my software business to the cloud?

• What are my options in moving to the cloud?

• What are the risks I should consider?

• What do I need to have in place to be successful?

Please reserve your spot now and we look forward to you joining us.

Whiteboard Wednesday: What is the VMforce Cloud Computing Platform?

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 by Matt Hunckler

Yesterday, VMware and Salesforce held a joint unveiling of a new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, dubbed "VMforce."

The term "cloud computing" is often overused and overhyped, but this offering appears to be a true cloud play. The VMforce platform is powered by Spring Cloud and enables Java developers to rapidly deploy their applications to the cloud.

To help you understand what VMforce is all about, and what its implications are on the cloud technology landscape, BlueLocker Jake Robinson and I put a quick video together (see below). We outline some of the key benefits as well as the potential downfalls of VMforce. Let us know what you think.

Will you use VMforce for your next Java project?

Cloud Computing: Elasticity does not equal flexibility

Wednesday, April 21, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Many cloud computing providers provide the ability to burst, but many times you must re-write your application or play within their fairly strict rules. At BlueLock we focus on flexibility and work with our clients to ensure they can be successful, knowing that one cloud does not fit all applications. Elasticity does NOT equal flexibility.

This is the primary driver of the BlueLock CloudSuite. At BlueLock we recognize that one size (hint: cloud) does not fit all applications. You can't force-fit an application into any cloud and expect to receive all the wonderful benefits that cloud hosting touts (read: elasticity). Your application has certain needs and those needs must be met to make sure your investment in the cloud pays off.

For more information on how to better ensure your application is in the right cloud, contact a BlueLock Cloud Expert today.

Cloudy with a chance of...

Tuesday, April 20, 2010 by Wade Fosnot

Cloud computing (virtual cloud or "vCloud") is buzzing everywhere now, but what is it? InfoWorld has a good article about "What cloud computing really means". I find it to be a rather helpful overview, here is a quick snippet from the post:

Cloud computing is at an early stage, with a motley crew of providers large and small delivering a slew of cloud-based services, from full-blown applications to storage services to spam filtering. Yes, utility-style infrastructure providers are part of the mix, but so are SaaS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. Today, for the most part, IT must plug into cloud-based services individually, but cloud computing aggregators and integrators are already emerging.

BlueLock Cloud Hosting lets you choose which cloud service works best for you (see this article from ReadWrite Cloud - BlueLock Lets You Customize Your Cloud Infrastructure). Using the "Cloud" means choices, and using BlueLock gives you the benefits of choices.

We are a hosting service provider in the cloud space. Some call it Infrastructure-as-a-Service, others call it cloud hosting. Whatever you call it we manage, maintain and run the IT infrastructure from the operating system down so you don't have to. What do you do with all that extra time? Focus on your core business!

Application Scaling In The Cloud - Part II

Monday, April 19, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

In this series of posts (see Part 1 of the series), I'm looking at moving applications to the cloud and the scalability concerns around that.

The interesting part is that these problems aren’t unique to cloud computing at all. On one end of the spectrum, the promise of cloud computing and its expansive computing capacities has led customers to believe that simply moving their application to the cloud is going to solve all of these problems. On the other end, clients who have very important applications running on-premise are concerned that when they move their applications to the cloud they’ll have to share all that wonderful computational goodness with hundreds or thousands of other clients and their applications’ performance will suffer. Regardless of which perspective you may be coming from, there are two things to focus on when looking at moving to the cloud.

The first is raw computing capacity. At BlueLock, we’ve chosen to build our cloud computing platform on VMware virtualization technologies. One of the benefits of virtualizing applications on VMware is that multiple workloads (running within virtual machines) can be configured to run on very high-end server hardware and storage architectures – perhaps mutli-socket, multi-core server hardware with 32GB or 64GB of RAM and high-performance SAN(s). Those physical hosts can then be combined into clusters and that computing capacity can be even further aggregated. It’s important to understand how that computing capacity is assigned to your application(s).

Is infrastructure being “over provisioned”? Since it’s possible to abstract the underlying hardware from the workload running within a VM it’s also very easy to do things like allocate more memory or compute power to the VM than is actually available on the underlying physical hardware.

Can computing power be scaled (up and down) if needed? As the business grows, the demand on application performance may grow with it? It should be easy to assign and re-assign things like CPU and RAM resources.

How high can the underlying hardware platform scale? Different IaaS and cloud computing models are based on different technologies – VPS (Virtual Private Servers), dedicated physical hardware and virtualization platforms like VMware all work differently, for example. How much CPU and RAM in total (usually different based on the underlying model being used) can be assigned to the application(s) has an impact on the decisions you make about scaling.

Within the BlueLock IaaS Cloud, compute clusters are carefully divided into building blocks called “cores” and these cores are assigned to customers – never assigning more “cores” to a computer cluster than are actually available. This goes hand-in-hand with dedicated versus shared computing models – just throwing everyone in the computer pool without regard to expected performance isn’t a good idea. It’s important to ensure that the capacity to application(s) is both dedicated and somewhat dynamic. At BlueLock, once one or more of these “cores” is assigned to a client they are combined together into a resource pool. This pool of CPU and RAM can then be divided among one or more virtual machines, assigning priority to different workloads if necessary and providing the ability (if needed) change how much of the resource pool each VM is allowed to consume. Behind the scenes, cool features of VMware’s virtualization platform like VMware DRS move VMs around from one physical host in the cluster to another without taking VMs offline. This ensures that a particular physical host is never over provisioned and that, if needed, the amount of CPU and RAM assigned to a particular VM is always available to it.

This model of cores and dedicated resource pools, along with the abstraction of physical hardware from the resources assigned to a virtual machine, allows clients to provision (and pay for) only what they need. As their needs change, additional cores can be added to grow resource pools and add to their application’s overall computing capacity.

In the next post, I'll look at the second item to focus on - application architecture.

Application Scaling In The Cloud - Part III

Thursday, April 15, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

In this series of posts (see Part I and Part II), I'm looking at moving applications to the cloud and the scalability concerns around that. The interesting thing to notice is that these problems aren’t unique to cloud computing at all.

On one end of the spectrum, the promise of cloud computing and its expansive computing capacities has led customers to believe that simply moving their application to the cloud is going to solve all of these problems. On the other end, clients who have very important applications running on-premise are concerned that when they move their applications to the cloud they’ll have to share all that wonderful computational goodness with hundreds or thousands of other clients and their applications’ performance will suffer. Regardless of which perspective you may be coming from, there are two things to focus on when looking at moving to the cloud.

In the last post, I looked at the first issue - raw computing capacity. A second thing to consider is the application architecture itself. As Mr. Golden highlighted in the CIO.com article, one could even argue that this is more important than the scalability of the underlying cloud computing platform. The reason is that there is always a limit to the hardware (virtual or physical) that can be thrown at an application and a lot of applications aren’t even designed from the beginning to scale in this manner. With VMware a maximum of either 4 or 8 vCPUs (virtual CPUs) can be assigned to a VM depending on the version of ESX being used. There are even good reasons why arbitrarily assigning the max number of vCPUs to a VM isn’t the best course of action.

More importantly, if the application (and underlying OS) wasn’t built to support SMP and multi-threading, adding vCPUs will have no effect whatsoever. If scalability is a concern, ensure that all of the applications components can take advantage of a large number of CPUs and can address > 4GB of RAM. This is known as a “scale-up” model.

In highly scalable application deployments, though, a “scale-out” model is usually more appropriate. Applications that are designed to spread load across two or more hosts allow you to add compute capacity simply by adding additional servers. On the back-end, adding additional database servers and using horizontal scaling relational database tricks like database shards allow you to remedy DB bottlenecks without implementing huge SMP systems to accommodate query load. The added benefit of this “scale-out” approach is that you get higher availability of the application for free. You can take one application server offline for maintenance while not affecting the other servers in the application farm. In addition, if one application instance experiences a crash other users on other instances of the application continue to function normally.

In the on-premise, physical server world both the “scale-up” and “scale-out” approaches I’ve discussed was usually very costly. 4-way or 8-way servers with gobs and gobs of RAM are an expensive way to grow vertically and add performance and though smaller systems used as part of a horizontal scaling approach are less expensive initially, they add a whole new level of complexity and expense in terms of ongoing maintenance.   What’s more, during non-peak times all this compute infrastructure sat largely un(der)-utilized.

What is exciting about cloud computing IaaS – especially the 100% virtualized IaaS which BlueLock has built – is that this computing model is perfect for these kinds of scalability needs. For scale-up applications, clients can start small and grow into things. For scale-out applications, new VMs (running additional instances of the application) can be added and managed much more easily than they can in the on-premise world.

For more info on BlueLock or scaling your application in the cloud, contact us.

BlueLock...a GOOD Company!

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 by Kim Graham Lee

Recently, BlueLock sponsored an exciting event here in Indianapolis. It was the first Byte Night, an event benefiting NPower IN, a non-profit focused on providing technology services to non-profits. The evening was billed as:

"A fun, social gathering of the area's top IT leaders who are committed to improving and sustaining technology's impact on non-profits in Central Indiana."

Funny how different paths in life connect. Three years ago, I met Pat O'Day, BlueLock's CTO, when he joined the NPower IN Board. I began serving on the Board two years earlier. Who would have "thunk" that I would become a BlueLocker, which happened about two months ago.

I couldn't have been prouder that night both of how the evening went (Pat and I both served on the planning committee!) and of being associated with the team at BlueLock. We are doing great things for our clients by providing cloud computing. I am also working with an awesome team and a company that does care about giving back to its community.

Enjoy this video from the Byte Night event. Pat presented the awards to two deserving non-profits in the city. Not your typical prize packages!

An extra treat....We had the pleasure of hearing from Christopher Gardner, the real life hero in the book/movie, The Pursuit of Happyness. What an inspiring story! Wasn't even disappointed that Will Smith wasn't there.