BlueLock has been named to Nine Lives Media Inc.’s third-annual MSPmentor 100, a
distinguished research report identifying the world’s most progressive managed service providers.

“We are honored to be recognized by MSPmentor as one of the world’s most progressive managed service providers," said John Qualls, President and CEO, BlueLock. “We believe our selection is recognition of our continued company growth over the past year and further validates our business plan and the market’s need for different classes of managed IT and cloud hosting services. Three years of cloud experience has allowed us to deliver true cloud computing services that enable developers to Fortune 500 enterprises to deploy and operate their applications on a highly available and scalable platform that is tailored to the
needs of their apps.”

The free MSPmentor 100 report, available at www.MSPmentor.net, is based on data from MSPmentor’s global online survey, conducted October through December 2009. The MSPmentor 100 report recognizes managed service providers based on a range of revenue and management metrics.

Founded three years ago, BlueLock was one of the country’s first providers of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enabling companies to provision and manage their technology infrastructures more efficiently and cost-effectively. Delivering pre-configured, secure and resilient virtual IT environments which scale ondemand,

“Despite the challenging economy, MSPmentor 100 companies generated more than $700 million in combined recurring revenue and managed services revenue, up 31 percent from the companies’ combined results in 2008,” said Joe Panettieri, editorial director, MSPmentor. “Our report also reveals how MSPs are already profiting from SaaS and cloud services.”

MSPmentor, produced by Nine Lives Media Inc., is the ultimate guide to managed services. MSPmentor features the industry’s top-ranked blog, research, Webcasts, and FastChat videos. It is the number one online media destination for managed service providers in the world.

Over the past two years, BlueLock and Apparatus have built a strong and dynamic partnership with their complimentary virtualization and data center expertise.  By joining forces, the teams are able to work together to wrap services around BlueLock's cloud hosting solutions to better serve clients.

Due to our great success together, VMware asked BlueLock (a VMware Hosting Provider) and Apparatus, to take the stage during the keynote session at this year's VMware Partner Exchange to share our story in front of 2500 conference attendees. The VMware Partner Exchange is an annual partner conference dedicated to educating and enabling partners for success with VMware. 

Brian Wolff, VP of Sales at BlueLock and Casey Watson, Chief Evangelist at Apparatus went on stage and showed the virtualization community at the Las Vegas conference what Indiana's technology Community is all about - innovation, trust and execution.  That's right, Indianapolis is a virtualization hot-bed.

flexibility, security, & possibly reduced capital expenditure…

By Jon Schackmuth

Savvy business owners looking to get in the cloud are looking for flexibility, security and reduced cost.

The underlying question is:  Can small and medium sized businesses find what they are looking for in the cloud at a price they can afford?

Let’s start with flexibility in the cloud.  Simply put, this is what the cloud does best.  When the marketplace changes and we all know it does, the cloud allows business owners to turn the dial up or down as needed.  As an example, if a business jumps from 1,000 hits to 50,000 hits on their website and it’s positioned at a cloud hosting company like BlueLock, running on virtual machines, they can call the 24/7/365 operations staff and spin up more virtual servers – scalability on demand.  Conversely, if traffic slows in six months, simply turn the dial down and pay for the services being utilized – the beauty of metered usage…

Now that we have established that the cloud is flexible, the true objection of the cloud must be security.  Security is paramount when it comes to companies like BlueLock.  If in doubt, schedule a visit and see the layers of security BlueLock has to offer.  BlueLock’s privately owned building is made of poured concrete with a steel and concrete roof.  The actual servers are secured behind six levels of security and are accessed on a need-to-know basis. - TOUGH.

The use of Check Point firewalls and SAS 70 certification is the gold standard in the IT world and BlueLock utilizes both to protect its clients.  Ask yourself:  Where are my servers stored and who has access to them?  What if your servers crashed today?  What is your disaster recovery plan and how long could your servers be down before you start losing one customer?  What is the value of that customer?  These questions may be hard to answer, but the results could save your livelihood.  BlueLock has all of them answered for you, 24/7/365.

At this point, if I haven’t given you enough to think about with flexibility & security, you are probably in the mindset that it’s too costly!  Consider the amount you pay for your infrastructure.  Excessive CAPEX (capital expenditure) can bankrupt a company faster than a lack of customers.  What does it cost to build your own data center plus a back up site and then maintain it at the level that allows you to sleep at night?
 
Depending on the situation, the business may be a start-up or they may be upgrading existing servers. If you are a start-up, what do a full time IT employees cost?  If you build for today and you hit the home run you planned for, your company may be crippled.  If you spend too much CAPEX on IT infrastructure, you may not have enough left over for marketing and sales generating programs.  Once the original hardware purchase has been made, switching to outsourcing and OPEX (operating expenditure) is sometimes a difficult decision.   At some point, enough is enough when it comes to excessive CAPEX - you may need to go in a new direction and outsource – you may need to put your business in the cloud.

Having been a small business owner in the past, I can attest to each of these topics.  Flexibility is paramount in any business, security is critical when clients trust you with their personal data, and cost overruns will bankrupt even the well-informed business owner.  Having choices in the cloud is something that hasn’t been available in the past… Until now.

Fresh off center stage at VMware Partner Exchange 2010, BlueLock introduced its latest surprise, BlueLock CloudSuite.  After years of offering a robust enterprise-level service, businesses can now have the flexibility and price competitiveness of the newly introduced Bluelock vCloud Express.  For those who want managed services with varying levels of scale, security, and performance - choose between Virtual Cloud Professional and Virtual Cloud Enterprise.  A business that requires onsite control of their own isolated cloud can try the Virtual Private Cloud, you own it and BlueLock manages it.

If you have questions about BlueLock's enterprise cloud computing options, please contact us.

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.

Adam Stone over at Software CEO wrote a very timely article compiling the opinions of several respected industry experts into 15 tips for understanding cloud computing. 
I thought Adam’s article highlighted several ways that BlueLock thinks about the cloud differently (or the same in some instances).  I plan to break the 15 tips down into three blog posts providing my perspective on each point he makes.

Tip #1:  Be Careful how you use the term. 

Adam’s point is that “cloud is not cloud is not cloud” – so it’s best to think about what you need most for your applications and then look for cloud computing service(s) that solve those specific needs.  For example, if you need a better CRM system – you’re probably looking for a SaaS (software as a service) application.  If your developers are spending way too much time writing code for functionality that is not core to your software package – you’re probably looking for a PaaS (platform as a service) – an opportunity to use someone else’s code to extend your core software’s functionality (billing comes to mind).  If your developers or infrastructure team are spending too much time managing failed servers, network or patching OS’, or if they can’t keep up with the growth of your very successful company – you’re probably looking for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Tip #2:  Make the Trendy Pitch. 

The din of people talking about Cloud Computing is deafening, even Dilbert has gotten into the act.  No doubt, your CEO and CFO have even been thinking about the proposed advantages of cloud computing and how they might help the business.  There are ways for almost every company to leverage cloud computing.  There are most likely servers or processes in your company that could be improved by a provider of SaaS, PaaS or IaaS, so take a look around, find a business need and explore ways that a cloud provider might be able to help cut costs and increase efficiencies - this should make your CEO and CFO happy.

Tip #3: Take One Step at a Time. 

One misconception/mistake that I see over and over again is that companies evaluate sending their most mission critical systems to the cloud first.  You should think about your IT environments and applications plotted on a graph of concentric circles with your most critical environments/applications in the middle.  As the number of users goes down or the criticality of the applications or the amount of attention an application receives from your IT staff goes down, move those applications to the outer circles.  The applications in the outer rings should be the ones that are evaluated for cloud first.  There’s less risk, less integration (maybe) and a higher chance for success with these environments.  We’ve built a very crude tool (that will be refined over time) to help you evaluate your applications and where they fit on the “circle of risk."

Tip #4: Keep Your Eyes Wide Open. 

I agree, due diligence on the provider is key.  As the gold rush continues, there are many companies rushing into the space to claim their fortune.  Many will come up with sand and dirt when they realize there’s a huge difference between running a data center and running an entire infrastructure with many, many clients.  In addition to all the points that Adam made about the questions to ask, my experience tells me that time in the market as a cloud provider (not just a co-location provider) is one of the best indicators of stability and staying power.  You’ll want to choose a provider with minimum of three years of success as a cloud hosting provider.  It was around the 2-year mark when we really started to hit our stride around managing the scale of our cloud environment, stabilized implementation and refined the management of our capital effectively, proving we could run a profitable business in the cloud.

Tip #5:  Make sure to get live support.

We’re a live support kind of company – because it’s relationships with our clients that matter, however, I would take a slightly different angle on this.  This is where I’m back to the criticality of the environments/applications.  If you’ve chosen a system that is less critical to the business, it might be perfectly acceptable to use chat, email or other means to get support from your cloud vendor.  Of course, they have to be responsive, that goes without saying.  But if you’ve chosen wisely, you may not need to talk to someone in order to get your problem resolved.  One caveat of course is that if you’re going to run mission critical applications in the cloud – then live support is a must.

So that’s the first five points around understanding cloud computing – stay tuned for the next five.  If you’re interested in learning more about how we do things at BlueLock  - send us a note here.

Coming in future posts:

Tip #6:  To avoid vendor lock-in, stick to open standards
Tip #7:  Location, location, location
Tip #8:  Consider using a middleman
Tip #9:  Monitoring uptime isn’t enough, you need an action plan
Tip #10:  A clause may look good in the contract, but be useless in the real world
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.

  Support - Done Well

The word 'support' has become cringe-worthy, much like 'Vista' or 'Millennium Edition.' Opinions seem to fall on one side or the other of a distinct dividing line - no vendor's 'support' is merely adequate these days. It's either phenomenal or terrible.

It's crazy to think that vendors strive for an utter lack of excellence. Still, many end users report just such an attitude in their communications with support personnel. Too often, customer support calls are considered unavoidable nuisances in an otherwise productive day. Of course, no one would ever admit they feel that way. But the attitude is pervasive, and it is all too easy for customers to detect, whether in voice inflection during phone calls or while reading hastily prepared e-mail responses. Worse still is getting no response at all.

BlueLock works very diligently to avoid falling into that trap. Working the front lines for a VMware hosting provider is a unique opportunity. Customers can contact us via e-mail or by telephone and all sorts of queries come in which keeps things interesting. Much of our work is generated automatically by our monitoring system. It's important for BlueLock Support personnel to be able to juggle several roles each day and we employ several tools that make it easier to provide top-level service. 

Don't Hesitate, Educate!

We understand that Cloud Computing is a fairly new concept, so one of the primary roles that we perform on the support desk is education. It takes time to become familiar with virtual servers, online disk expansions, and balloon drivers. At BlueLock, we can help make such concepts more clear - and it's as easy as calling the Support Desk.

The most popular topic for education at the BlueLock Support Desk is snapshots. Proper use of snapshots can make an administrator's job much easier. In a nutshell, each virtual machine on our environment is comprised of a file - that's right, the entire server is essentially a file running on a host system. Snapshots serve basically as restore points for those files. This is useful mainly when making major configuration changes or installing new software. When a snapshot is created, what really happens is that a 'change file' is generated. All subsequents changes to the virtual server are written to the change file. When testing is complete, the snapshot must be either committed or reverted. Committing the snapshot merges it with the original server file. This happens on the fly with no interruptions to service. Reverting essentially destroys the change file and returns the server to its state before the snapshot was taken.

The primary drawback of snapshots is that they tend to grow very quickly. Thus, BlueLock has a retention policy of 24-48 hours during which the snapshot must be committed or reverted.

VMware virtual servers are unique entities, especially when backing them up. Backups at BlueLock work much differently than with standard, physical hardware. We perform a combination of snapshots, disk-to-disk and tape backups to protect customer data. The current system is complex enough for its own blog posting, so I'll cover that in more detail at a later date.

BlueLock is poised to double workforce and revenue in 2010 as cloud computing continues to gain traction.

In 2009, BlueLock's workforce more than doubled and there are no plans to slow down.  Spurred by the growth of the cloud computing industry and combined with the continued need for IT expertise and infrastructure, BlueLock looks to capitalize on the growing shift toward cloud computing from on-premise IT with current and future product offerings, as well as bringing on top engineering, developer and sales talent in 2010.
 
"We are thrilled about BlueLock's growth over the past year and our recruitment of top talent, growing from eight employees in 2008 to 22 in 2009." said John Qualls, CEO, BlueLock. "We believe our 2009 growth is a testament to our innovative products and services and further validates our business plan and the market's demand for Infrastructure-as-a-Service. As cloud computing continues to grow, companies will continue to demand different classes of service for different tasks and BlueLock is perfectly positioned to make even bigger strides in 2010."

Topping Interactive Data Corp's (IDC) technology predictions for 2010, cloud computing is forecasted to see strong growth in the coming years. A recent IDC report found that the current worldwide revenue for IT cloud computing services stands at $17.4 billion, a number that will jump to $44.2 billion by 2013.

Interested in working for BlueLock? Contact us at jobs at bluelock.com

By 2015, ABI Research predicts that more than 240 million business customers will be leveraging cloud computing services through mobile devices, reaching revenues of $5.2 billion.  According to ABI Research, an evolving IT supply chain, business adoption of cloud platforms for IT services, and greater business use of handsets and smartphones are creating new revenue streams for both IT and mobile suppliers serving businesses.

ABI Research practice director Dan Shey said, "The immediate opportunity lies in leveraging cloud platforms to develop mobile applications, particularly mobile applications that leverage enterprise data. Directly and indirectly, Microsoft and Google are major players both influencing and enabling these developments. Mobile operators have the most to gain through offers of cloud services to the enterprise leveraging their networks, application enablement, and data centers."

I can think of many applications we use at BlueLock that would be great to be able to access on a mobile device.  We've also begun to see a number of clients asking for mobile cloud options.  I can definitely see this trend taking hold in a big way.  What do you think?

If you have questions about BlueLock's enterprise cloud computing options, please contact us.

Link to the original article.

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.

"The cloud" is still in its youth, maybe adolescence, so its easy to point fingers and scream when an outage occurs.  Just recently, Amazon Web Services had an outage in its Northern Virginia data center due to the failure of a power supply in an "availability zone" as well as a second failure of a component in the redundant system.  Outages happen, so it shouldn't have been as big of a shock as it was made out to be. 

However, when companies are beginning to outsource data center operations, they have high expectations, which is why zero failure is a good standard for providers to aim at in the clouds.  The fact is, all internal systems fail too, but there is no one to point the finger at.  When real people and real technology is involved, outages will occur.  I strongly feel that the cloud, outages or not, will have higher up-time and availability than most, if not all, internal systems.  High-profile clients, sensitive data and the fear of hundreds of clients yelling and screaming is enough motivation for any infrastructure as a service provider to architect a bullet-proof cloud. 

At BlueLock, we like happy clients, that's why we promise 99.99% up-time and push every day to make our cloud bigger, better and stronger.

If by now, moving into 2010, you are an IT leader and are still confused with all of this cloud computing stuff, rest assured you are probably not alone.  This brings us to this new top five list to help acclimate everyone to to basics of what you should know about the cloud computing market.

Cloud Computing can in fact enhance performance. 

Cloud Computing is designed to increase utilization of computing resources in way that traditional data centers and traditional hosting cannot.  Corporate servers run at about 15% of their capacity, whereas by pooling those resources the servers can reach as much as 80% capacity.  Also, the cloud eliminates the licensing fees and upfront capital costs associated with IT hardware and software.  As with most outsourcing models, cloud computing is no different, it frees up resources, specifically those needed to support the infrastructure.  With lowered support costs, those resources can then be focused on more strategic IT iniatives that have a bigger impact on the bottom line.

The Private Cloud is the hot spot for cloud computing beginners.

Many organizations who want to realize the benefits of cloud computing but still want the comfort of having their infrastructure at their own facility will build a private cloud in their data center.  These in-house environments that manage workloads using cloud methods are managed within the company's own firewall.  They offer the benefits and agility of better resource utilization without the security concerns of having sensitive data residing outside the organization's perimeter.  Once you achieve a level of comfort with the cloud and can see how your applications perform, you will be better able to gain access to the advantages of hybrid and/or public cloud computing.  BlueLock offers the BlueLock Box, a private cloud that can be installed at your facility or ours.  Yes, that's right, your place or ours.  What a nice and easy way to head to the clouds.

Security is a two-way street in the Cloud.

Just because the cloud you choose is secure doesn't mean your applications are secure, and vice versa.  The issue of security in the cloud is a unique one in which both sides of the coin matter equally.  The organization embracing cloud computing needs to have the correct compliance infrastructure in place to mitigate risks associated with everything from securing corporate data to managing who has access to it, when it's accessed and if it's being transferred from the cloud to other environments.  The service provider must do the same. 

Recently, a few articles have popped up with the accusation that cloud computing vendors and providers are ignoring IT pros' concerns.

Carl Brooks recently quoted: "The results of a new Forrester Research survey show that while awareness around cloud computing has grown by leaps and bounds, the concerns of potential adopters remain the same. But apparently vendors and cloud promoters didn't get the memo."

A Forrester survey entitled "State Of Emerging SMB Hardware: 2009 To 2010" questioned around 3,000 business respondents. Roughly 51% of those respondents named uncertainty about security in cloud environments the biggest obstacle to adoption.

The concepts of cloud computing and its many benefits and advantages are becoming widespread knowledge, but the accusation is that cloud computing service providers are not doing enough to alleviate concerns around security, namely by providing specifics about how they are securing data.

Let's be frank here, BlueLock is not going to give away our "secret sauce" about how exactly we go about securing our clients' data, but I can tell you that we are completely open with the security vendors we have chosen (IBM ISS, CheckPoint, and we've got a great relationship with Shavlik Technologies).

We have clients with PCI compliance needs, clients with HIPAA requirements and more.  While we aren't out shouting about our security, rest assured, we wouldn't have three successful years of providing IaaS cloud computing behind our belts without it.  Not with our clients, that's for sure.

One of the biggest reasons most providers are not out there telling security stories is because no one wants to make their data center a target.  Clients with high security needs won't talk about their story either, for the most part, because they don't want people to know where their data is or how its being protected (because that would make them a target too).  So just because providers aren't making a bunch of noise about cloud security doesn't mean we aren't doing anything about it.  Every decision BlueLock makes when it comes to our cloud architecture comes down to a question of security.  If our clients aren't secure they aren't happy and we are no longer providing a valuable service as their trusted partner.

If you've got questions about how we can secure your data, contact our sales team at info@bluelock.com.

Read about the secure and compliant environment we built for Right On Interactive here.

To see a full list of BlueLock's technology partners, go here.

Read Carl Brooks' original post.

 Wednesday, Intel demonstrated an experimental processor that applies the principles of cloud computing.  Intel was involved with the launch of BlueLock vCloud Express back in September, so we're excited to hear about the continued advances in their cloud computing technologies.

The new processor, a 48-core processor has 10 to 20 times the processing engines contained within the most popular Intel chips and consumes the same amount of energy as two household light bulbs.

The developer community refers to the chip as a cloud computing chip because the design is similar to the organization of cloud datacenters with the linking of processing cores through a high-speed network.  

Intel Lab Head and Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner quotes, "With a chip like this, you could imagine a cloud datacenter of the future which will be an order of magnitude more energy efficient than what exists today, saving significant resources on space and power costs."

As a leading infrastructure-as-a-service provider, BlueLock gets excited to hear about these new advances in cloud computing technology.  As the market continues to grow and mature, it will be technology like this that will push "the cloud" to greater heights.  Keep up the great work Intel!

This news warms my heart.  As an Indiana University Bloomington grad and now working for a leading Infrastructure as a Service provider (cloud provider) I'm ecstatic to hear that my alma mater is heading to the clouds in a big way.  Let's not be foolish to think that IU has been out of the cloud party completely, the IU School of Informatics is on top of their game.  But now, with the news of a grant specifically dedicated to cloud computing, IU should be making some big leaps in the arena. 

Indiana University has received a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a software infrastructure and use cloud computing for a variety of life sciences and genomics data applications, IU said today.

"This research is potentially path-breaking," Peter Cherbas, a professor of biology and director of the IU Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, said in a statement.

"Cloud computing approaches are likely to change the nature of our national research computing infrastructure in the coming years," said Principal Investigator Geoffrey Fox, director of the Digital Science Center and associate dean of research and graduate studies in the IU School of Informatics and Computing. "These technologies hold significant promise in the life sciences and medical sciences as they offer the potential for greater computational power and faster speeds at a lower cost, and in a way that is easier for scientists to use than traditional grid computing approaches."

"Contemporary DNA sequencing machines are churning out data at rates that would have been unimaginable to biologists just a few years ago,” he added. “To use these data — to turn data into some kind of understanding — will demand good tools for using the Cloud and those tools will impact genomics projects worldwide.”

Ahhh...the joys and economics of cloud computing.  This is what its all about - churning lots of data at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time.  Click here to learn more about how we do just this for our clients.

Click here to read the news release about IU's Cloud Computing grant.

Its no surprise to hear cloud computing tops another top ten list, but this is a good one. 

The news alert reports that "Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt." 

This year “cloud computing” bumped “virtualization” for the number one spot on Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies list.  It should be noted that Gartner’s report is referring to virtualized computing environments (i.e. VMware, etc.) within the organization, as opposed to the virtualization that is inherent to cloud-based services delivered via the public Internet. 

Another recent report on private clouds acknowledged that companies will more than likely spend more money on internal (or private clouds) cloud computing environments than with public cloud providers.  BlueLock fits in well with this mix because with our private cloud offering we are able to deploy a private/internal cloud within your organization, but the technology allows for the private cloud to connect to the BlueLock public cloud environment for spillover or other needs.

Here is the full list of the top strategies from 2009 and for 2010:

Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 were:
 
1.  Virtualization
2.  Cloud computing
3.  Servers (beyond blades)
4.  Web oriented architectures
5.  Enterprise mashups
6.  Specialized systems
7.  Social software / networking
8.  Unified communications
9.  Business intelligence
10. Green IT
 
The research firm’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010 include:
 
1. Cloud computing
2. Advanced analytics
3. Client computing
4. IT for green
5. Reshaping the data center
6. Social computing
7. Security
8. Flash memory
9. Virtualization
10. Mobile applications

To find out more about BlueLock's public cloud and private cloud solutions contact us here.

To read the original release, click here.

Of course cloud computing would be the top technology trend to watch in 2010, that’s not a surprise at all.  As we all know, the economy hasn’t bounced back too much, so the focus is still on getting the biggest bang for your buck and making the most economical investments and that will lead us right in to 2010 when the chief issues will again be around the economy and cloud computing.

Brian Dooley points out in his article “Top tech: the trends to watch in 2010,” “the economy has brought about industry consolidation and re-evaluation of expenditure which have, in turn, affected corporate spending plans, upgrade cycles, areas of interest for new technologies and willingness to undertake large, new projects.”  It is this realm of re-evaluation and decreased corporate spending ability where companies are charged to do more with less.  The companies still need to grow, innovate and expand (or simply stay afloat if that’s the goal) and it can be very hard to grow certain areas when you have to cut others that have a huge impact on the business. 

Companies have taken a long hard look at IT spending in the past year which is a big reason why cloud computing has received the attention is has so far.  No longer can IT departments afford to purchase expensive state-of-the-art capital on demand.  It costs money to buy it and more money to manage it.  But how can the company support its efforts without the IT to back it, especially if the company’s main products are tied to that infrastructure - an infrastructure that has to grow if the company is going to grow?  Cloud computing.

What else will be hot in 2010?Funny, lots of these are related to cloud computing in one way or another…

Dooley's original article.

What makes education different from any other business with hundreds or thousands of users?  The economics are all the same, so why wouldn’t the education industry be able to benefit from the advantages of cloud computing like other organizations?  A recent article in Campus Technology entitled, “Is Cloud Computing a Credible Solution for Education?” visits that subject.

Bruce Schneier points out that cloud computing is really nothing new.  Hotmail and Gmail have been doing it for a long time; social networking sites, remote backup companies and remote email filtering companies have also been in on the game.  Schneier says, “Any IT outsourcing—network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting—is a form of cloud computing.”

Cloud Computing provides computer applications to users without the need to purchase, install or support those application.  The software and data is hosted on a remote computer.  Infrastructure-as-a-service providers such as BlueLock are able to provide substantial financial advantages as well as increased IT agility, improving collaboration and innovation within that organization.  And we’ve done that for higher education organizations already.   

Gartner Group blogger Thomas Bittman said this: "The Web, social software and cloud computing will definitely have an impact on enterprise IT--but the impact on our educational system will be astounding, and many in our educational system don't see it coming."

But the downside…

Schneier also cautioned that cloud computing forces reliance on a third party, which may not always be the best idea.  Why? Because when the computer is outside your network, you’re not able to protect it with security systems like firewalls and IDSs.  Not only that but you have to trust your vendor completely – its security, reliability, availability and business continuity.

That’s not a downside at BlueLock.

So yes, you’ll have to rely on us, a third party.  But we install firewalls and IDSs and most likely take more security precautions than you are already taking.  We are SAS 70 and PCI compliant.  Not only that, but we provide SLA with promised uptimes of 99.99%, in case you’re worried about availability.  As for business continuity, we’ve got that too, and at a fraction of the cost.  You can click here to learn more about our virtual disaster recovery solutions.  And most importantly, the trust issue.  Our clients view us as a trusted advisor.  We don’t want to be just another vendor; we want to be an extension of your organization, a partner.  That’s our goal (and we tend to hit goals over here).

And when it comes right down to successes in the education industry, just click here to read our case study on Marian University.  You could say they were more than pleased with what we were able to do for them.

New to the idea of Software as a Service SaaS Virtualization? This video from Salesfor will help bring you up to speed:

This short video clip, produced by Salesforce.com, effectively points out that managed cloud hosting is a superior way to run your business. It's clear that multitenancy is simply a more efficient way to approach IT infrastructure.

For those of you who are new to cloud, some of the major benefits of cloud computing are that your data is:

• secure
• backed up in another location (redundant)
• not limited in storage or resources

To help you better understand Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Common Craft recently put out a cool little video that is put together like School House Rock for the 21st century.

You can check it out here: Cloud Computing Hosting in Plain English

I always keep an eye open for better ways to explain the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing to not-so-technically-inclined friends as well as potential clients. I found these quick videos to be expremely helpful in succinctly illustrating cloud computing hosting.

A recent email industry survey shows how businesses are reacting to email infrastructure being migrated to the cloud.  Osterman Research found that security-related email functions are dominating the software as a service market today and that the functions most likely to be outsourced in the future, if not already, include anti-spam, bulk email, anti-virus an anti-malware.

What factors are holding companies back from migrating to the cloud?  Findings show that more companies haven’t migrated to the cloud because of privacy concerns, data retrieval concerns (will they be able to grab that data back once it’s in the cloud?), because of regulatory compliance issues and because some companies are just plain scared of losing control.  However, upon a closer glance at cloud computing - a full-fledged look at what cloud hosting can do would show that cloud computing advantages include more choices, agility, control and protection than what a standard IT infrastructure environment can provide, which is why more than 20% of the users surveyed have outsourced their email functions to the cloud already.

Here are some of the results of the survey:

• 40% of companies surveyed are outsourcing some or part of their email infrastructure
• Anti-spam (64%) and bulk email (46%) are being outsourced by most companies
• Today:
  •  20% of users are served by a SaaS solution
  • 22% of email servers run as virtual servers
• In two years:
  •     38% of users will be served by a SaaS Solution
  •     49% of email servers will run as virtual servers

I think the two year projections are somewhat low, but the general growth towards using cloud hosting for email functions and/or using virtual servers is evident.  At BlueLock we’ve seen great success in migrating email to the cloud.  For many companies it makes the most sense to get email off of their machines freeing up space for them internally and getting their IT people working on more strategic applications.  Contact us today to learn more about migrating email to the cloud. 

Read the original post about the survey.

By now everyone has heard about the T-Mobile Sidekick crash in one of Danger’s (a Microsoft subsidiary) cloud computing environments.  Just like every time Gmail goes down, there is a wide and broad brush of FUD painted across the cloud computing canvas. 

Stephen Foskett recently wrote a blog post that talks about the shocking “bubblegum and baling wire” approach that some companies take when delivering cloud computing storage.  I couldn’t agree with him more.  There are some hokey things going on in the world of cloud storage, otherwise these crashes wouldn’t happen and James Urquart wouldn’t be questioning the need for malpractice safeguards in cloud computing.

As the title of this blog post implies, this type of data loss that occurred at Microsoft is more common than many would admit.  The difference is that most times it’s not in a public cloud and it doesn’t affect thousands of people.  Why does it happen?  It happens because moving parts break and because human beings are involved.  Now, just because there are breaking parts and humans, that doesn’t mean there must be a disaster or data loss.  The question is really about whether your business is willing to pay for what it takes to insure that the data is protected or in the case of Microsoft Danger, take the extra step of providing a path to copying the data to another instance.  Data loss can be prevented; it’s just a matter of who’s willing to pay for it.  It would be wild speculation on my part to say what actually happened in the MS Danger data center - but what I can say with much confidence that an economic decision was at the heart of the loss. 

How do I know that?  Because at BlueLock we take data loss very seriously, so we have engineered redundancy into our cloud architecture and that kind of protection comes with a cost.  Some prospects choose to pay for it (we call them clients) and some don’t (we call them “lost deals”).  Go here to learn more about how we back our data up.   More often than not, the prospects that choose not to pay the cost do so because the data they are trying to protect is not worth the cost that I’m proposing to keep it safe.  Of course the converse is also true, our clients that accept the cost, do so because when they see all of  the engineering and services bundled into the price, the cost is in balance with the risk of the data loss.   

The bottom line…

Just as I discussed in a previous post about the TCO of an Infrastructure, there are many costs associated with protecting data and insuring that failing hardware or humans don’t take you down.  The bottom line is really about the risk of loss and a careful cost/benefit analysis of paying to protect the data….or not.  If you’d like help completing that analysis, send me a note or give me a call.  That’s what we do every day for companies just like yours.

Reference post by Stephen Fosket