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.

How do IT administrators manage servers that have been migrated to the BlueLock Cloud?  Using either virtual private networking (VPN) or point-to-point network connectivity (MPLS, Metro Ethernet, etc) can make managing a cloud-hosed server virtually identical (no pun intended!) to managing a server that’s on-premise.  That's one of the benefits of working with a speciality vendor which provides Infrastructure As A Service offerings: custom networking requirements and dedicated wide-area connectivity needs can usually be accomodated rather easily.  Once connectivity is in place, administrators can use their existing tools (like Remote Desktop Protocol [RDP] for Windows) to connect to cloud-based server images. 

At the same time, what we’re also seeing in the market is a slew of new products and companies focused on this management aspect, providing a “single pane of glass” that allows things like provisioning/de-provisioning/management of systems to be seamless across not just a single cloud IaaS provider like BlueLock, but potentially between multiple cloud providers and between public/private clouds.  Jclouds is a good example: they provide an API that allows you to freedom to programmatically manage a large number of clouds including Amazon, VMWare (including BlueLock vCloud Express), Azure, and Rackspace.

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.

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!

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.

The vCloud API is an emerging but already very useful standard for managing virtual infrastructure within a hosted environment. The API itself isn't VMware-centric (although VMware is obviously a huge fan), but instead it was submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force for adoption as an industry standard. The plan is that a single, consistent, platform-independent API could allow a myriad of cloud technologies to effective talk to each other without much fuss or massive message transformation.

The API implementation itself is REST-based, meaning that transactions are stateless and submitted with XML over HTTP. The benefits of using a REST API isn't that it is cutting-edge tech, but instead that it leverages well-established methods for communicating over the Internet. Since REST keeps communication between components simple, poking holes in firewalls and hand-crafting messages can be done very easily.

Let's walk through an example to see just how easy this can be, using only the command line utility curl. Assuming you have a BlueLock vCloud Express account (and, let's face it, all the cool people have vCloud Express accounts) you can simply type:

 curl -u 'your_username:your_password' -v -d "" https://express.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/login 

And voila! The command line parameters you passed along simply tell curl to send your username and password as parameters to a HTTP POST at a given URL.

With the above command you are not only logged in to your vCloud Express account, you also get some advice on what URLs you can try out next:

< Content-Type: application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.orgsList+xml
< set-cookie: vcloud-token=1234567890abcdef; Domain=.bluelock.com; Path=/
< Via: 1.1 express.bluelock.com
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OrgList xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8
    https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/schemas/vcloud/organizationList.xsd">
    <Org type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.org+xml" 
        name="your_username" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/31415"/>
</OrgList>

Let's follow one of those links and see what we get. We can use curl to perform an HTTP GET on the link referred to as part of the Org element:

curl https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/824

<error message="Session Key is not found" 
    majorerrorcode="403" 
    minorerrorcode="Bad Request">
</error>

We encountered an error... basically vCloud Express doesn't know who you are. That's where the "stateless" aspect of REST comes into play... subsequent vCloud API calls don't remember who you are.

In the earlier login call we received an HTTP Cookie as part of the response. That "cookie" is a value that reminds the vCloud API of who we are and that we are actually legit, logged-in users. With every subsequent request we send we must also send along the cookie, as in:

curl --cookie "vcloud-token=1234567890abcdef" https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/31415

And now we receive back the response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Org href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/org/31415" 
    name="your_username" 
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8 
    https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/schemas/vcloud/organization.xsd"
    xmlns="http://www.vmware.com/vcloud/v0.8" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/catalog/0" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.catalog+xml"  
        name="System Catalog"/>
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/catalog/51413" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.catalog+xml"  
        name="your_username Private Catalog"/>
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/tasksList/123" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.tasksList+xml"/>
    <Link rel="down" 
        href="https://express3.bluelock.com/api/v0.8/vdc/456" 
        type="application/vnd.vmware.vcloud.vdc+xml"  
        name="testvdc"/>
    <Description></Description>
    <FullName></FullName>
</Org>

More links for us to follow! Awesome!

The full vCloud API specification is available on VMware's site, and the 0.8 version of this API is available on BlueLock vCloud Express. REST easy!

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.

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.

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

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 (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:

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!

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.

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.

Jake and I brought out the flip cam once again to build on last week's post on storage redundancy and scalability.

One of the major benefits of virtualization is that it allows you more flexibility to scale your virtualized environment on demand. Cloud computing not only allows you to scale your storage, as discussed last week, but it also allows you to scale your processing power and RAM.

If you've ever wondered about the differences between commoditized cloud computing and the enterprise cloud, Jake and I outline some of variables of cloud computing performance and dissect what is commonly referred to as "the resource pool." 

So, watch the video, and let us know what you think!
 

UPDATE: Jake put together this handy visual aid, which he references in this vid:

In my last post, I tackled tips 1-5.  This week I’d like to take a look at the next five tips Adam Stone referred to in regards to "Making sense of the cloud: 15 tips for software CEOs" and provide you with the BlueLock perspective on what companies looking to migrate to cloud computing should be thinking about.

Tip #6:  To Avoid vendor Lock-in, stick to open standards. 
This one makes a lot of sense to me – in the end, you need to make sure that whatever you put in the cloud you can get back easily and intact.  While some may argue that deploying VMware technology locks you into VMware’s virtualization platform, I would argue that VMware is the defacto standard for virtualization technology for the enterprise, by virtue of their large market share.  Deploying VMware gives clients a lot of flexibility to move that server to another VMware host if they wish to move.  We even have cases where companies wish to protect themselves from something happening to BlueLock as a cloud provider.  In that instance, we’re replicating the entire virtual machines to a neutral third party, Iron Mountain.  If a triggering event were to occur, the company simply contacts Iron Mountain and receives immediate access to the virtual machines, which can immediately be loaded on servers running VMware.  That’s just one straight-forward example of how “portable” the environment is as a result of running in a VM ware-based virtualization platform.

Tip #7:  Location, Location, Location. 
Yes, indeed, it’s difficult to bend the laws of physics and the speed of light.  This tip talks about two real issues – the first is latency and the second deals with the laws that govern the location where the data center sits, in both cases, BlueLock has engineered solutions to address our client’s specific challenges.   We have clients that need to have the data closer to them than our data centers in Indianapolis, IN or in Salt Lake City, UT for speed or data privacy issues.  For these clients, we introduced our version of a private data center called The BlueLock Box in October 2007.  This private cloud solution entails installing an HP C3000 blade chassis with redundant SAN shelves behind the client’s firewall.  This solution provides them with the same benefits of BlueLock’s public cloud such as fault tolerance and scalability, but puts the data closer to them for speed and/or privacy issues. 

Tip #8:  Consider using a middleman. 
I agree with Adam – there is a huge opportunity for cloud brokers or companies that have expertise in helping clients make thoughtful decisions about what can and/or should go into the cloud and then to actually help architect and deliver the cloud solution.  We’ve worked closely with several partners who have trusted advisor relationships with large fortune 1000 clients that have chosen BlueLock as their cloud solution.  In fact, we’ve been asked to present next week in VMware’s Partner Exchange keynote on the topic of how partners can work with a cloud providers to deliver real value to their clients.  I will be sharing the stage with Carl Eschenbach, EVP of Worldwide Field Operations and Casey Watson, VP Business Development for Apparatus to talk about how BlueLock and Apparatus have built a sizable business delivering cloud integration services for large clients.

Tip #9:  Monitoring uptime isn’t enough, you need an action plan. 
We couldn’t agree more with Adam on this point.  From day one, we’ve had a resolution-based 99.99% uptime SLA in place for our clients.  This means that not only will we respond quickly to the issue, but we’ll promise resolution of that issue.  On top of that, we’ve also patented a portal that we call “the VITAL signs portal” that provides our clients with an overall view of the health of their environment, as well as an ability to drill into each aspect of their environment, to see what’s actually happening.  Finally, we have also built capabilities in the portal to send alerts and alarms when something goes wrong or when the environment has reached a pre-determined limit on things like CPU, RAM and storage.   If those measures aren’t enough, we’ve also built tailored metrics for some clients that wish to monitor additional key metrics in their environment.

Tip #10:  A clause may look good in the contract, but be useless in the real World.  Adam’s tip in this area covered a “useless” escrow agreement.  In tip number six, I shared how we’ve put an escrow agreement in place that can be tested and actually works.  Having said that, I agree that empty legal promises are not the way to make sure you’re protected.  Testing the system is the best way to insure what’s being set aside actually works.  In addition to the escrow agreement, we also have numerous disaster recovery clients that have performed successful tests of our geographic failover disaster recovery service.  In the end, you want the “promise” in writing, but then you want to do a test to make sure it performs as expected.  Reminds me of an old Reaganism – “trust but verify”.

Next week, I’ll take us down the homestretch and walk through the final five tips for migrating successfully to the cloud. 

Tip #11:  Set financial penalties for downtime
Tip #12:  It takes time to see ROI on SaaS development
Tip #13:  Savings are not in the cloud, but in headcount
Tip #14:  Follow the cloud into new markets
Tip #15:  Let the cloud lead you to new innovations

If you'd like to read the original post by Adam Stone, go here.

Having worked in IT for over 10 years, I've seen my share of ugliness. It generally has taken the form of botched configuration files or ill conceived program interfaces. Looking back, though, nothing could top the server hardware upgrade for sheer wretchedness. Coordinating the downtime necessary to start the upgrade required gargantuan effort and endless compromise. Finding the correct parts sent the technician through an endless maze of charts and arrays of compatibility. Performing the actual upgrade was at least interesting and sometimes fun. Praying for the server to power up without a hitch afterwards was not. And still, the job wasn't quite done. Little tweaks were needed here and there, then we had test to ensure the server was ready to reenter the world of the living. All told, a weekend was probably shot and a few gray hairs were earned in the process.

Welcome to the virtual world, where we have left most of that nonsense behind. Businesses can now rely on a well-trained team of engineers to build a thriving environment of servers, each capable of hosting dozens of virtual machines. It's not hard to tout the benefits of cloud computing. Just look at the ease of a disk expansion.

At BlueLock, we can turn around a non-system disk expansion request in minutes. When a client needs more space, the system administrators need only a few clicks to make it happen. No more downtime or worry about compatible parts. Even a system-disk (boot disk) expansion requires only a single reboot and a few extra minutes of work.

Having this kind of flexibility allows a client much more freedom in the planning process for a new server. The focus returns to the core function of the server rather than the hardware, which is Bluelock's concern. With full monitoring in place, our team of administrators and engineers strives to be proactive. A client may receive a call about a potential problem long before they would have noticed any performance degradation. It's about uptime and performance. And that's just the beginning.

The ease of expanding drive space barely scratches the surface of the benefits of working in the cloud. I plan to outline many of those benefits in subsequent posts. Communicating the advantages of virtualization is one of the easiest and most enjoyable jobs I've had since jumping into IT head-first a decade ago.

Our goals at BlueLock include staying in the vanguard of cloud hosting, so we work hard every day to set the bar higher. I hope this blog will help explain some of the nuances, many of the developments, and most of the benefits of life in the cloud.

So what is enterprise cloud computing?  How is it so different from (regular) cloud computing?

Jill Tummler Singer explains that enterprise cloud computing is "a behind-the-firewalls use of commercial, Internet-based cloud technologies specifically focused on one company’s or one business environment’s computing needs." 

It's a "a controlled, internal place that offers the rapid and flexible provisioning of compute power, storage, software, and security services to meet your mission’s demands.  It combines the processes of a best in class ITIL organization with the agility of managed, global infrastructure to make your IT faster, better, cheaper, and safer. Enterprise cloud computing gives your business agility, survivability, sustainability, and security."

Many enterprises with highly secure data and strict up-time and performance needs feel that cloud computing is out of the question.  Most of these companies questioning the abilities of cloud computing services are companies in the government, life sciences and financial services industries.  Enterprise cloud computing is the answer for them.  They need tailored, dedicated high performance environments to provide the benefits of cloud computing with the security and assurance of enterprise-class platforms.

BlueLock is a top VMware hosting provider - we use proven enterprise-class VMware virtualization technology to serve our clients no matter what industry or need level, but we are able to tailor and architect high performance, secure and compliant cloud computing environments specifically for our enterprise-level clients.  BlueLock has been extremely successful serving clients in the government, life sciences and financial services, helping them to realize the advantages of cloud computing.

To learn more about BlueLock's enterprise cloud computing services contact us here.

A recent study shows that the awareness of cloud computing in Asia is still relatively low at 46%.  That means over half of the survey respondents answered that they were not familiar with the concept of cloud computing.  This sound to me like half of Asia has never even heard of cloud computing!

So what does that mean for the market of cloud computing?  There is room for a lot of global growth.  While currently over two-thirds of the respondents say that cloud computing is "not relevant" to their businesses, I have a feeling that as the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing become more apparent, those thoughts will change, especially in a country where 95% of organizations are aware of or using Software as a Service.

“Cloud computing is the next phase in the delivery and consumption of IT-enabled services and a major evolutionary step in the maturing of the IT industry,” said Michael Barnes, vice president.. “It provides an opportunity for organisations in Asia Pacific to leapfrog competitors in other regions. We expect organisations across Asia Pacific to embrace Cloud Computing as a way to drive greater standardisation at the IT infrastructure level while simultaneously lowering the resources required to leverage technology solutions for business benefits,” Barnes added.

All schmoozing and business-card-swaping aside, there are some fantastic advantages of attending cloud computing conventions and expos. I've found meetups like Cloud Camps, ITEC, TechPoint Summits, and Cloud Users Groups to be a fuel source for both professional and personal growth.

Assimilation of knowledge through osmosis is simple.
There are usually tons of super-smart people at events like those listed above. Whether these people are cloud computing providers, vmware virtual server specialists, or others utilizing a cloud computing platform; just standing b and listening in on conversations can be a learning experience. Be curious, pay attention, and ask questions.

Networking -- the interpersonal relationships kind -- reaps rewards.
Meet some new people, nd expand your network. How can you help event attendees? I always make it a goal to make at least three connections that don't immediately benefit me in any way. While you should never help someone with the intent to gain something in return, the law of reciprocity always pays dividends.

Fluency increases competency.
The simple repetition of explaining the advantages of cloud computing has helped me build a certain level of confidence and competence around the benefits of virtualization, vmware hoted environments, and SaaS irtualization. Join in the conversation and learn to talk the talk. The act of speaking about cloud computing platforms, helps to organize thoughts, enhance comprehension, and vet new ideas.

Bottom line: get out of the office and learn somthing from somebody -- including yourself. Find the next cloud computing meetup in your area. Hope to see you there.