Cloud Computing

Introducing BlueLock CloudConnector, a vCloud Datacenter Service

Tuesday, August 31, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

This morning at VMworld in San Francisco, BlueLock officially released our newest cloud technology, the BlueLock CloudConnector, a hybrid cloud enabler. We are also announcing our selection as one of three North American vCloud Datacenter providers.

With BlueLock CloudConnector VMware customers can immediately realize the benefits of the next generation of cloud capabilities provided by VMware’s vCloud Director, the cloud delivery platform for vCloud Datacenter (also introduced this morning). vCloud Director adds new capabilities such as the ability to move workloads between VMware-compatible clouds (public and/or private) in a secure environment.

BlueLock CloudConnector for vCloud Director allows current VMware customers to view and manage their existing VMware environment (their private cloud) and BlueLock’s VMware-based public cloud resources in the vSphere Client control panel they already have, making the transition to a hybrid cloud even easier for existing VMware administrators.

vCloud Datacenter
As one of only three North American VMware vCloud Datacenter providers selected by VMware, BlueLock provides enterprise-class public cloud infrastructure with compatible management, security, application portability and business agility to businesses of all sizes. Use of the same VMware technology provides common management and security model enabling workloads to move between internal datacenters and the BlueLock Public Cloud.

vCloud Datacenter is an enterprise-class cloud built on VMware’s cloud infrastructure technology including VMware vSphere, vCloud Director, and vShield security. vCloud Datacenter delivers consistent and auditable security and performance through SAS-70-Type-II certifications as well as technical capabilities such as network isolation, role-based access control and directory services integration.

Read the full release.

Know Your Scaling Enemy

Thursday, August 26, 2010 by John Ellis

I've got scalability on the brain lately. Right now I've been thinking about caching strategies as a way to accelerate applications, reduce I/O and increase scalability.

A recent post on High Availability entitled "6 Ways to Kill Your Servers - Learning How to Scale the Hard Way" has been circulating the Internet's tubes lately and is an interesting read on how someone came to understand scalability for a web site. It was narrated from a timeline perspective, detailing what had to be incremenetally learned as they scaled a website to beyond one million users a month. Each iteration was a lesson on what you had to learn... or your site will die.

All the lessons had a common thread: under load, I/O will eventually kill your site. It may start with network bottlenecks, then progress to open file handles, then to filesystem I/O. Eventually reading/writing blocks to disk or the network will become the critical path for your application and make it crawl to its knees.

It may sound like a hack but the solution is always the same: cache data like mad. Put as much data in-memory as humanly possible so you don't need to read it from disk or *gasp* across the network. Cache data like there's no tomorrow.

There are tons of advanced solutions for data caching. There are centralized solutions such as memcached or distributed solutions from Terracotta, Tangosol Coherence, JBoss Cache and others, but sometimes the most simple implementations of caching are the best. Unless you actually need massive cache stores that can persist to disk you may get the best leverage from local caches that reside entirely in-memory on the same server as the process that consumes them. One example is having an individual, entirely in-memory and independent EhCache region within every running application. This implementation is very straight-foward and best of all requires no network I/O for retrieval. True, you may end up with a bunch of redundant data spread across each running application, but for me that's an acceptable trade-off for sub-millisecond access to the data I need. Even with aggressive cache invalidation the I/O savings can be huge. As Lesson #5 taught the author, caching can reduce I/O load by up to 80%. That's a pretty huge savings.

When you move into managed cloud hosting your strategies may need to change. Since you can dynamically size memory with a VMware cloud, it may make more sense to have a centralized memcached or EhCache store. Since you can shrink or expand VMs on demand you don't necessarily have to worry about a server's RAM going unused. And since a good cloud service provider (such as BlueLock) will have gigabit interconnects between VMs, network latency may be a diminishing issue. You could have twenty very lean VMs with 1 GB RAM each connecting to a central memcached server with 16 GB of RAM that has a ton of cached data. You can even pre-fill it with frequently accessed data: think calendar dates, city/state/zip combinations, customer account data, previous invoices... all the stuff that will likely not change and need to be invalidated. If a node happens to be re-deployed or upgraded you don't need to re-fetch that data either - your central cache server will still keep it faithfully in-memory.

Caching strategies in a physical datacenter world are very different than in the cloud computing world. That's a good thing - lines between servers become blurred with cloud computing infrastructure, making "cleaner" solutions like centralized caching strategies more practical. Picking the right caching strategy is a big win for everyone; you end up doing more with less, you reduce response times and make customers happier for it. Everyone wins!

CloudWorld (aka VMworld) - Just around the corner

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

As many of you virtualization and cloud experts know, VMworld is just around the corner - next week to be exact. BlueLock is thrilled to be so involved with the event this year, especially with its heightened emphasis on cloud computing with the VMware vCloud iniatives we've already been hearing so much about. We've been beta testing one of their most talked about technologies (no I'm not telling what...) and we have a little product launch surprise of our own too. You'll hear all about the newest cloud technologies bright and early on the morning of Tuesday, August 31.

If you're attending the event, come check us out on the showroom floor at booth #639 or check out our cloud demos in the Cloud Pavilion. Not attending? Register to see the keynote sessions for free here. Don't worry - we'll be tweeting and posting throughout the conference too! Just follow us on twitter at @bluelock to hear the latest cloud gossip from the show.

We're just as excited as all of you for this year's big VMworld event. Hope to see you there!

Cloud Computing to Scale

Thursday, August 19, 2010 by John Ellis

There are very, very different ways of architecting cloud infrastructure so that it can scale. Prior to deciding on a cloud strategy you should ask one big question - why does your infrastructure need to scale?

About five or six years ago scalability migrated from an architectural property to a widely-discussed buzz word. I would occasionally be in a meeting where someone would ask if my application was "scalable." At times I was met with an incredulous stare when I asked to elaborate on what was meant by "scalable." It should just scale! Scales! Like... er... fish skin?

Scalability is a critical thing when designing your infrastructure and your applications, no doubt. What if I build an amazingly scalable Web application that can handle 10 million concurrent requests from users and could still double amount that in a blink of an eye... but my MySQL database quickly filled up with 1 billion user records? I may have amazing throughput and pass my JMeter load tests with flying colors, but if I don't prepare for the massive amounts of data my application might need to dig through in order to serve a query all the HTTP connections in the world will just serve to pour salt into the wound.

There are options for scaling your data layer and vastly reducing query time, as mentioned earlier in our discussions about non-relational databases in the Cloud. You can even expand to 10,000 node clusters like Google has done with Dremel. However, unless you are ready to build a league of data centers filling the Atlantic Ocean, you may want to consider what your upper limits of scaling really are. Don't automatically assume that a 10,000 node cluster of servers means more power, and definitely be careful of using technology that your application may have difficulty using properly. Non-relational databases won't fit well if your application already uses ORM tools for populating data, and sometimes you need to completely re-think how data is represented (as in Dremel) and move from simple rows of delimited data to nested columnar storage. It can make one's head explode. Mine already has twice this morning.

Cloud Computing infrastructure gives you a quintillion servers at your fingertips, but consider your diagonal scalability strategy first. Are we talking about syndicating or publishing content that is modified maybe 10-20 times a day but viewed thousands of times? Creating a series of read-only MySQL clones will work fabulously, even more so if your application caches data aggressively. Are you going to deal with a ton of transactions that need to be immediately written to your database? Architect your database layer using a sharding strategy that allows you to distribute the transactional load across multiple databases, even relational databases. Are you going to deal with massive amounts of data that will need immediate retrieval? Perhaps a non-relational database is a good idea, allowing you to distribute your data across multiple nodes and retrieve it by using a non-relational key. Need to perform full-text search? You may instead want to index your data in something like Lucene.

I can appreciate the need to standardize an organization's database tools, especially in an enterprise, but it is always good to be open to new solutions for unique problems. When it comes to scaling an application no single technology fits all situations... you need to predict why scaling might need to occur, then open up a path to remove potential bottlenecks before everything grinds to a halt.

Cloud Computing in the College Classroom

Wednesday, August 18, 2010 by Brant Howell

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next dot.bomb era around the corner?

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 by Brandon Jeffress

As I entered my career in the early 1990’s, software companies were making huge strides with the development of the Microsoft windows operating system. As we began to reach the second half of the 90’s, internet-based companies were beginning to explode everywhere. It’s an era that for many remember it being call the dot.com and later the “dot.bomb era”. It was appropriately named as start-up after start-up software companies launched new products to market with monies invested by investors who thought they had found the next goldmine. Finding investment in your new dot.com was as easy as showing a demo to some investors (so it seemed).

Rumors of start-up companies who had limited success and were purchased by another company for record returns, later motivated this frenzy between investors and start-ups. Just as we experienced in the last few years with the real-estate market, the market in the late 90’s adjusted and record number of technology companies folded. Investors got weary and companies over-spending habits caught up to them. Customers got burned by buying underdeveloped/vaporware applications that were over-promised and under-delivered. The market plummeted.

4 years ago when BlueLock started this mission of offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS), they went to market there were very few companies nationally who were leveraging virtualization and providing cloud hosting services that leveraged OpEx over CapEx. For four years BlueLock has worked with VMware to help aid in the development of this model. Four years later, with many successes and even a few failures over the past few years, BlueLock is a smooth running machine and is feeling the rewards of being an early evangelist of IaaS.

As the idea of cloud computing continues to go mainstream, history may be on the verge of repeating itself. As in the dot.com era, everything was about dot.com and moving to the web. Today everything is about cloud computing and making sure you are a cloud provider. You can’t skip a rock without hitting a technology/colo hosting company who now claims to have a “cloud offering”. Buy some licenses of VMware, put in two SANS, place it all in a rack, and VOILA - a new cloud provider!

It is true that technically many of these companies are cloud providers, as equal as it was true that many of those dot.bombs were technically software companies. As software companies in the late 90’s learned, it takes more than having a basic product and a good sales guy to sustain business. Now the new “cloud” companies are learning the same. I have talked to a handful of these new “cloud hosting” companies who after investing close to a million dollars in cloud infrastructure now realize that they can’t sustain the capital constraints.

I am not stating that every company besides BlueLock who claims to be a cloud provider is falsely representing themselves. There are some very good companies out there, who are doing this the right way. I am stating there just aren’t many who are doing it right and may not survive. The crux of this post is - be careful where your company invests its monies. While the providers you talk to might all sound the same, look beyond the words and look at the core of the business to get to the real truth. Is this “cloud” just a rack in their collocation business? You might be putting your trust in the next dot cloud computing bomb.

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.

VMworld 2010 - it's right around the corner!

Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

The BlueLock team is hard at work preparing for an exciting VMworld 2010 in San Francisco at the end of this month. This year's focus for the conference is largely dedicated to cloud computing, lucky for BlueLock.

As VMware' Service Provider of the Year (Americas), we are involved in a number of exciting projects and presentations at the big event. As you might remember, last year we were a part of the big vCloud Express announcement. This year we'll continue to make a big splash and we're thrilled to share even bigger news with everyone!

If you're interested in registering or learning more about the big event, visit the VMworld 2010 site.

If you attend, make sure to stop by the BlueLock booth (#639) and check out our demos in the Cloud Pavilion for your chance to snab a Flying Cloud Monkey!

Does Virtualization = Cloud Computing or Vice Versa?

Tuesday, August 10, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

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

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

Awkward Social Networks

Thursday, August 5, 2010 by John Ellis

Do you remember Google Wave? The new collaboration platform from Google that was supposed to be what e-mail could have been if only cloud computing had existed thirty-seven years ago? The real-time Internet architecture that fully exploited commodity servers spanning the globe and administered by unicorns? The Google Wave that developers gave a standing ovation to and was "dripping with ambition" at the Google IO Conference in 2009?

Yeah, Google officially abandoned the project today.

I'm not going to claim this is altogether bad. While the architecture was indeed fantastic and, from a software engineering / architecture standpoint, was what every developer dreamed of having. While it was a fantastic platform and a genious design it just didn't fill a need. For example, take a glimpse at my Wave inbox:

2009-10-15 - Welcome to Google Wave

2009-11-05 - Got my invite today!
2009-11-06 - This is a test
2009-11-06 - Here is that document I am working, I never was working
2010-07-15 - Invite others to Google Wave
2010-07-15 - Have you started messing with this yet?
2010-07-15 - Finally got an invite to wave

That's right - every single message was either a) from Google about Wave or b) a test message. That's somewhat because Wave was always an invite-only beta; they never opened it to the public. Yet I have a feeling that plenty of invites went unissued... I still have 25 invites to hand out. This stands in start contrast to GMail, where I got all kinds of schwag in exchange for invites.

Does this mean that the cheering masses at Google IO in 2009 were duped? Not at all. It was architecturally well designed and had fantastic features to it, plenty of API hooks and an open, extensible implementation. While I definitely agree with good ole' Steve Ballmer that developers are integral, you have to keep your eye on the ball. Elebenty kabillion developers won't help if the public won't use your product.

I sometimes drool over cloud technology and cloud computing infrastructure; consume APIs like candy and dig into whitepapers like they were the latest Kevin Grisham novel. The most important thing our development team does, however, is actually consume everything we construct. Our team develops things that we really, really want to use. Having the power to spin up huge servers ad nauseam is huge fun and we keep coming up with ideas to add even more tricks to the mix. Firewalling! Snapshotting! Catalog management! Instant deployments! Graphing resource utilization trends! It's fun.

New social networking technologies are birthed on a weekly basis and crazy amazing cloud computing companies spring up all year. The ultimate test is looking past the press releases and actually using the service. The architecture is only as good as the need it fills.

Why do Cloud Computing Projects Fail?

Tuesday, August 3, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

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

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

Enterprise Cloud Adoption - No Surprises Here!

Sunday, August 1, 2010 by Kim Graham Lee

For the first 19 years of my professional career, I had the privilege of working with a well-known marketing research firm. I designed and analyzed many a survey in my day helping some of the largest companies in the world make better business decisions because of that information. I also learned in that chapter of my career that it was the exception rather than the rule when a survey revealed a surprising finding.

Earlier this week Yankee Group released the report from its 2010 Cloud Computing FastView Study....and there were no surprises to me. One of the more compelling statistics from the survey:

60% of enterprises say they view cloud computing as key to business innovation.

The research director from Yankee Group commented that "Cloud computing is on the cusp of broad enterprise adoption."

As a cloud hosting provider, BlueLock is seeing this movement happen firsthand. It's exciting to be a part of it all, helping our clients realize the value of cloud technology. By the way, it won't surprise me at all to see 60% jump to at least 75% next year.

BlueLock Cloud Monkeys & Indy VMUG

Friday, July 30, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Tuesday (July 27) was the annual Indy VMUG Demo Days event, and BlueLock had a ball! Not only did we have some great cloud computing conversations at our booth, but everyone loved our flying cloud monkeys - they went like hotcakes. These two quickly found a safe place though:

Below Brandon Jeffress is taking the time to show some BlueLock fans the proper way to fly our monkeys. Our new Orr Fellows, Brant Howell & Jon Corwin (pictured below as well) learned how to fly monkeys too, but they also learned even more valuable skills at the VMUG breakout sessions where they viewed VMware demos and learned about the virtualization technology that powers the BlueLock Cloud.

Want to snag your own flying cloud monkey? Meet us at VMWORLD 2010! We'll be on the showroom floor in the Cloud Pavilion and around at Booth #639.

Check out the real BlueLock Cloud Monkeys here.

Managing Servers In The Cloud

Thursday, July 29, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

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.

How are Virtualization and the Cloud Combined?

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 by Matt Hunckler

This calls for a very special edition of Whiteboard Wednesday.

VMware Users' Group (VMUG) had their Demo Days in Indianapolis yesterday and set up Jake Robinson and me to do some cloud computing white boarding. We took questions from cloud experts, employees, and enthusiasts; then hit the white board.

In this session, Jake and I take a look at connecting internal and external clouds -- the cloud with virtualized environments. Take a look:

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.

Deja vu: E-business and Cloud Computing

Sunday, July 25, 2010 by Kim Graham Lee

The other day I was driving home from work and had one of those major "ah-ha" moments. I was reflecting on my first six months at BlueLock as CMO and started to think back to ten years ago at this same time when I had six months under my belt at another exciting and emerging company. The company was founded in 1999 right before

the dot.com bust in April of 2000. Our mission was to help make "e-business" a central part of our client's operations. We were providing value to our clients by helping them integrate their business with the Web.

Funny, when was the last time you heard anyone say, "e-business"? It's been years for me! E-business became business.

Cloud computing is on this same path. Cloud computing will become computing.

Born from the ground up as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) company, BlueLock, was founded with the belief that there is a new and more effective way to provide computing power to organizations. It has been an exciting first six months for me working with my fellow BlueLockers, our clients and partners leveraging our experience with and vision for the cloud.

This market is moving fast and there is definitely a lot of hype and "cloud washing" going on. One thing I do know from my past experience, is that in the end, you have to deliver real business value to clients. Good thing too I have been through this drill before. At least some mistakes, I won't make again! :-)

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!