Enterprise Colocation

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.

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.

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.

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.

Transitioning from Traditional Computing Architectures to Cloud Architectures

Thursday, July 1, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

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

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

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

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

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud: We’re Not In Kansas Anymore

Thursday, June 24, 2010 by Jon Schackmuth

Every year during the months of June and July the Midwest gets hit with tremendous storms in the late afternoon to early evening. If you have never experienced this type of weather pattern, it is quite alarming. It can be sunny and ninety degrees while sitting at work or spending time at the pool with the kids when dark storm clouds roll in and strong winds blow across the hot blacktop. If there were tumbleweed lying around, many suburban neighborhoods would look like an old western shootout.

Within moments, raindrops and hail the size of marbles are pelting down on anything and everyone in sight. Lightning streams across the sky and the tornado horn sounds; Welcome to the Midwest. Whether you experience this type of weather or any other extreme storms, you need to ask yourself, what kind of back-up generator do I need to keep my data center up and running?

Just last week, I was talking with a new client who is in the process of moving part of his infrastructure into the cloud. He had recently experienced a four hour power outage at his office, leaving their on-site systems inoperable. When most businesses operate without a disaster recovery plan due to financial constrains, I always ask the question - what is your threshold for pain? It may sound a bit dramatic, or maybe it’s the ex-military in me, but in the end, the question is valid. Most companies can work though a few hours of power loss, but when the clock keeps ticking and trucks aren’t rolling or vendors can’t pay for days or weeks, the pain threshold is diminished and tensions rise.

Cloud hosting has become well accepted in every size business. What most CEO’s/Owners may not realize is that they don’t need to put all their proverbial chips in the pot, they can do a hybrid approach to maximize their existing infrastructure or simply utilize the cloud as a pure disaster recovery solution without spending large amounts of their budget on collocation equipment. I have never understood why companies buy equipment for disaster recovery and let their hard earned money depreciate, let a true cloud company flip the bill for the equipment and as the business owner or CEO, reinvest your CAPEX back into your business.

Next time you hear the tornado horn sound, think about a company like BlueLock that is rated for an F5 and ask yourself, "Are We Still In Kansas?"

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

Breakout: The Costs of Traditional Computing

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

Many unfamiliar with Cloud Computing view it just a new flavor of colocation or traditional hosting solutions. The real advantage of Cloud Computing, especially when using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering which provides managed services as part of the solution, is that you're saving on more than just communications, power, cooling and facilities. You're moving hardware and (potentially) software costs to the service provider as well as the most expensive part, the staff-related costs.

What happens, then, to those IT professionals? Does the mass adoption of cloud computing mean that jobs will be eliminated? How are IT pros optimizing their time and talent to stay relevant in the new, cloud-dominated world? Matt Hunkler and Jake Robinson tackled this tough topic in a Whiteboard Wednesday two weeks ago. Check it out here.

Cloud computing could cost more than using your own systems | ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/cloud-computing-could-cost-more-than-using-your-own-systems/1862

Staff related costs often were 50% to 70% of the total cost over a period of three years. Cost of communications, power, cooling and facilities could add up to another 30% to 40% of the total. Hardware and software, when combined, usually represented somewhere between 20% and 25% of the costs.

Start-ups, Enterprise Companies and The Cloud

Thursday, June 10, 2010 by Brian Wolff

Ping Li from Accel Partners wrote a very interesting article this week about how some of the companies that his firm have funded are leveraging cloud computing. He made a couple of points that I find particularly interesting:

The first is that VC companies are making it a “pre-condition” of funding that the funded company leverage the cloud vs. buying traditional infrastructure.

Even more interesting and more powerful is his second point: that most of these companies didn’t need that encouragement – there is no way their company could exist if they didn’t launch in the cloud – it just wouldn’t be possible to build the scale, complexity or cost without using a cloud infrastructure provider.

His article got me thinking about all the other companies in the “universe” and the book by Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch. In the book, Nick tells the story of Henry Burden and “Burden’s Wheel”. Burden realized in the late 1800’s that he could locate his manufacturing company next to a river, build a huge water wheel to generate electricity and then automate many of the manufacturing processes, thereby lowering his cost, increasing production and crushing the competition. Mr. Burden, no doubt, needed a very specialized group of people to build and maintain this elaborate “power system”, however, by the early 1900s, commercial power was introduced that turned his internal power generating systems into an enormous cost that other manufacturers did not have to bear. Sound familiar?

Many others have done a better job than I could in this post about the difference between power and data - that really isn’t the point. The point is that there are companies today that have launched very successfully without any internal IT systems – which means no IT capital costs, no/minimal IT labor costs and maintenance costs that larger companies today bear with their own internal IT systems. There are other differences, of course, namely, that large established companies have huge legacy systems that may not necessarily be appropriate for the cloud, however, they do have very large costs supporting other systems that are considered important but not critical that may be perfect candidates to be migrated to the cloud. By moving these environments to the cloud they have the opportunity to reduce their overall cost and enable their existing IT departments to focus on building more valuable systems to drive more business value.

In start-up companies, pure cloud hosting is the preferred route to market – in large companies it’s not going to be an all-or-nothing proposition – it’s going to be a “hybrid” approach. With a hybrid approach, enterprise companies create a secure connection between their private cloud and a public cloud (today a secure VPN or MPLS connection) and then move less critical workloads to the public cloud.

At BlueLock, we like to say that we’ve been in the cloud a “lifetime”, and we have the good fortune to be serving many companies in both of these camps: start-ups (many that are SaaS companies specifically); and large enterprise clients that sought to leverage the cloud to lower their costs and focus their valuable IT resources on projects and systems that drive more business value.

In July, I’m going to be presenting to software company CEOs at SaaS University in Washington, DC on the topic of “Infrastructure Choices”, where I’ll put a spotlight on the cost differences between building your own internal infrastructure vs. moving to the cloud. I will also be discussing many considerations that companies face such as security and SLAs, two issues that should be top of mind when deciding which cloud is right for you.

If you’re interested in attending the event as BlueLock’s guest – register for the event and use this code: BLUELOCK100 to receive a $100 discount off the cost of registration.

If you have a comment or would like to contact me, you can reach me at bwolff@bluelock.com.

A Cloudy Future for Relational Databases

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by John Ellis

I remember quite vividly IBM's competition for SQL compliance on their AS/400 platform. 20-some years ago, databases had to be relational, tying together a vast sea of disparate columns. Relations between tables enforced a kind of consistency and normalization. No more brute-forcing random data into your corporate accounting system... now you had to obey the rules!

...or so the thinking went at the time.

Slowly, deep in the seedy database underground, seditious computer scientists sat stewing. They waited for the day when engineers realized that sometimes the process of normalizing data mutated it past the point of recognition. They knew one day some devious developer would see that relationships were too computationally expensive and slow. And one day... ah yes, one day... people would give up their crazy ad-hoc "Standard Query Languages."

While these computer scientists and software engineers were shoved to the margins by enterprise computing a few small companies took note of how well these rogue database systems scaled to the millions of users and petabytes of data. Lilliputian firms such as "Google," "LinkedIn" and "Facebook" started to lead a No-SQL revolution, running contrary to the dominant relational databases and instead storing mind-boggling amounts of data in non-relational tables and retrieving them faster than RDBMS' one-hundredth of their size.

Non-relational databases have become incredibly effective, especially when backed by a scalable pool of resources of a cloud computing provider such as BlueLock. If one takes a look at Redis - a powerful key-value store that can scale to a massive size - such a sense of scale quickly becomes apparent. By removing constraints one can get rid of building a huge number of indexes and instead deal out content quickly and efficiently. Craigslist has already leveraged Redis to an exceptional amount, and VMware sees quite a future in it as a platform as well.

If we take a step beyond we can see an entire landscape emerging: key-value stores such as Redis, Voldemort or Cassandra, hierarchical stores such as Zookeeper and tuple stores provided by JavaSpaces and Apache River. The number of choices seems to grow every day, and without a farm of servers it becomes quite a daunting task to evaluate which one fits your project best.

My recommendation is to take a step back and see which solution best fits the problem you are working within. Re-evaluate your needs and objectively ask yourself:

What business or logic problem am I really trying to solve?
How large is this data going to scale within a year? Are we talking about megabytes or petabytes?
How fast does the data need to be retrieved?
Do I really need to perform a bunch of ad-hoc queries? Or am I just looking up values based on their primary key?
Which solution is easiest to deal with? Which makes the most sense to me?
Do I need relational data? Do I need hierarchical data? Do I even care?

Once you build a matrix comparing each solution you will find some implementations quickly sink to the bottom and others become very tempting choices. Once you have determined a top list of possibilities, it is best to fire up a data store and write a few quick proof-of-concept test applications. A convenient way to do this is to login to your BlueLock vCloud Express account, spin up several virtual machines and load up an array of Linux boxes to test each solution out. Measure how easily the product can be installed and test how easily it can be scaled to multiple servers. Do some performance testing against sample applications on your own fenced network and watch your local resource utilization.

Very soon after you use your vCloud Express account to test the top candidates you should be able to feel one or two "fit" in a much more natural way than other solutions. For example, Zookeeper may be the natural fit for someone wanting to house a slew of centralized configuration data. At this point you can take the next step and test this alongside your web applications and judge more accurately the level of effort to get things running.

If at the end of this arduous process you still can't decide between a couple of top candidates do what I always do: pick the project with the best mascot. You simply can't go wrong.

Don't forget - once you select a data store implementation you can have your own scalable, elastic cloud to grow into. BlueLock can not only help you horizontally scale your data tier, BlueLock can also help design server layouts that best fit the sometimes eclectic world of non-relational databases. Whether it be heaps of disk or mountains of RAM to remain resident within, the BlueLock Enterprise Cloud can help your cabal of data power the next big thing.

Healthcare Software Providers in the Cloud

Friday, May 28, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

BlueLock's healthcare-related client base seems to continue to grow - and they each have one specific need in common: security.

Recently, BlueLock produced a case study with Pathagility in regards to their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application which facilitates the generation, management and reporting of clinical data between healthcare providers and healthcare institutions. Early on in the company's life, they realized that it made more business sense to forge a relationship with a provider who could secure and manage their IT infrastructure environment rather than spending capital on purchasing, implementing and managing their own. At BlueLock, they were especially happy with the ability to scale and pay as they grew in a secure and SAS 70 compliant cloud hosting environment. Pathagility's success was dependent on their ability to focus on the development of their SaaS solution and get to market quickly rather than directing their talent towards the day-to-day IT operations.

A very similar story unfolds with a new client, AmeriVeri CR. AmeriVeri CR is an in-depth , fully automated method for verifying the coding accuracy of healthcare claims. The company saves their clients an average of 4% in healthcare claims simply by identifying coding errors. They also needed a highly secure and SAS 70 compliant cloud hosting solution. The company just got its official start in January of 2010, but after quickly receiving funding and attracting great interest from clients and prospects, the comany needed to be able to expand its offering quickly. Enter BlueLock.

These are just two of many healthcare-related clients BlueLock currently has running in its Enterprise Cloud platform, but each tells a similar story and proves that yes, the cloud is secure.

Cloud Computing Power — Keeping Your Cloud Available

Wednesday, May 19, 2010 by Matt Hunckler

Jake and I are at it again this week with another edition of Whiteboard Wednesday. Cloud computing enables a level of infrastructure uptime that simply can't be matched by traditional traditional physical servers or colocation services.

In this short video, the Kings of Cloud outline the engineering behind high availability (HA), disaster recovery, and the fully redundant cloud. We cover a wide range of topics — including cooling, power, storage, and other resources.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments or on twitter at http://twitter.com/bluelock. Here's the video:

Cloud Computing for the Enterprise?

Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

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

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

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

Today's data center benefits:

Trust
Control
Reliability
Security

Cloud Computing benefits:

Dynamic
Cost-efficient
On-demand
Flexible

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

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

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

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

Learn more about private cloud computing today.

Tech for Tech's Sake?

Sunday, May 2, 2010 by Katie LeGrand

I attended a conference recently in which one of the speakers, a representative of a major American tech firm, made the statement, "The ROI is irrelevant."

What??

Aren't we in business here in order to recieve a return on the capital we have invested? I am not a tech person; I am a business person. I cannot imagine a scenario under any circumstances in which the ROI is irrelevant.

I do understand that new product development is an art form and perhaps this is doubly true in the tech world. But unfortunately we cannot let our enthusiasm for the creative process distract us from the real reason all of this exists. Technology does not exist for its own sake alone. Technology is a tool that allows us to achieve our real world goals with ever higher levels of efficiency. Those goals are not limited to monetary gain; technology has
allowed us to save lives, to decrease suffering, to cure disease, to fill empty bellies, to liberate the oppressed and bring justice to the world. While not measured in dollars and cents, these things are nevertheless a return on investment.

Sadly, the "ROI is irrelevant" attitude is all too prevelant among techies. It affects their products and their ability to serve their customer (you).

At Bluelock, we understand that your technology infrastructure is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We help you realise your goals, and don't confuse the role that technology plays in your enterprise. We don't do tech for tech's sake; we do tech as a tool. We make meeting your technology needs as simple and effortless for you as possible.

Our outstanding customer care and world class expertise allow you to focus on your personalized return on investment, whether it be measured with dollar signs or smiles.

Cloud Computing: The chargeback model

Friday, April 30, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Cloud Computing has been experiencing a lot of buzz, but the "Chargeback Model" within Cloud Computing has not quite seen the same excitement. Chargeback and metering refers to the ability for an IT organization to track and measure the IT expenses per business unit and charge them back accordingly.

This allows for better ability to accurately represent the ROI at a business and technology level. As long as IT infrastructure is physical, cost allocation is quite simple. Many enterprise IT shops maintain asset management systems and some have built out a centralized repositories of infrastructure-related cost information. With private clouds, virtualization can be handled in a very similar way as long as the virtual machines can be tied easily to physical systems. Those systems are then linked to a funding source from a business unit’s budget.

With public cloud hosting, there is no actual "physical machine" inside the organization from which to track. That doesn't make tracking impossible though. In some ways it may make it easier as cloud hosting providers continue to improve their monitoring and tracking of resources, accessible to you by a user interface where you can simply click and go, naming certain virtual machines and such based on the business unit using them.

How are you tracking your resources today? Is your organization using a chargeback model currently?

Managing the Cloud Boomerang Dilemma

Thursday, April 15, 2010 by Brian Wolff

“This is unquestionably the most dynamic time in IT history. Right now you have developers making cloud choices that will become de facto organization choices. Failing to recognize this and address it is an enormous mistake. And the (perhaps) instinctive reaction to forbid use of a public cloud is wrong and foolish. If the trend can't be controlled, the next best strategy is to guide it.”

– Bernard Golden, CEO, HyperStratus

Bernard Golden wrote an excellent piece at CIO.com a week ago entitled “IT Operations: Beware of the Cloud Boomerang” and while I don’t believe our approach can solve all the challenges that he’s describing, I will say that our three years of experience motivated us to deliver what we’re calling the BlueLock CloudSuite to address several of the issues he outlined. The crux of the article was that developers are moving to the cloud due to speed and price – they can get instances up and working far faster than internal IT generally can provision them and for a price that is easily passed through the corporate expense report system (or absorbed by them).

The rub is that once the app is ready to deploy, many inevitably get pushed to production in the cloud, without the necessary security and services plan required for a production application. Further, if the dev app is pushed to production, the developer ends up being the primary sys admin for the app or the operations teams is brought in after the fact to manage the app in the cloud without regard for the necessary standards established by operations to support a production application.

We see this all the time here at BlueLock and that’s one of the reasons we’ve built three platforms onto which different apps can reside according to their specific requirements. For example, a developer can quickly and cost effectively spin up a test/dev instance on vCloud Express and once that app has been finished, it can be migrated from vCloud Express to either the BlueLock Professional Cloud or the BlueLock Enterprise Cloud. At that point the app inherits the more robust traits and services of the two production-ready platforms, like an Enterprise Checkpoint Firewall, redundant SAS-base SAN for speed and resiliency, nightly snapshots/back-ups, high availability for hardware fault-tolerance, systems administration management for vulnerability patching of the OS and robust monitoring. The cost model changes with the migration, however, now the application is on a platform intended to host production applications.

So what to do. As the quote at the top of my blog post indicates, an organization needs to develop a cloud strategy even if they have no intention of running production applications in the cloud in the near-term. The fact is that if they are a large enough organization with many development projects going on at the same time – there will be test/dev apps promoted to production in the cloud. Getting ahead of this requires companies to make organizational decisions about what company can help them make a successful transition from test/dev to production – whether it’s in the cloud or boomeranging back to their internal data center.

At BlueLock we’ve thought through this problem and can help by providing your development team with an option to migrate the app to a more robust platform without it ever leaving our data center. If you’d like to learn more about our CloudSuite and how we can help you achieve the cost savings and speed at the test/dev phase, but have an option to promote the app to a production ready platform, send me a note here.

LOGiQ3 Gets the Needed Scalability and Security for Life Reinsurance in the Cloud with BlueLock

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

BlueLock and LOGiQ3, a BPO service provider to life insurance and reinsurance companies, have been working together for a couple years now. When LOGiQ3 came to BlueLock, they were looking for a secure, compliant and scalable cloud hosting solution. The company had an aggressive go-to-market strategy and they had limited time to build and implement their IT infrastructure, let alone ensure it was compliance and bullet-proof. They didn't want to spend the capital on the equipment, labor and expertise needed to get to where the were going, so they chose to outsource their IT infrastructure needs.

Why did the cloud (specifically BlueLock) make sense for LOGiQ3?

No upfront costs or lengthy contracts
The BlueLock Cloud is based on VMware virtualization technology
BlueLock is well-equipped to handle their enterprise-level production needs
The security is solid
The data center is SAS 70 Type II
99.99% uptime guarantee
Geographically diverse data centers for redundancy and disaster recovery needs

To learn more about the solution BlueLock put in place for LOGiQ3 download the case study.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (CLOUD) Costs – it’s about the people…

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 by Brian Wolff

Tom Henderson and Brendan Allen with Extreme Labs did an excellent and even-handed job of comparing three Enterprise Cloud Services. BlueLock was honored to be considered. The costs came out exactly as I would have expected and for the reason I’ve pointed out many times in previous blog posts, including this one (see tip #13 from a recent post) – we were the “expensive” option. I’m not saying that being the expensive option is a bad thing, but if you look at the bigger picture, we just aren’t. The difference is people and expertise.

Our philosophy (and pricing model) is different than Terremark and Rackspace’s cloud hosting offerings. At BlueLock we’re focused on the relationship and helping companies manage the infrastructure so that they can hire more developers and/or sales people rather than systems engineers. You’ll pay “more” at BlueLock because there’s more value (hint: people) in our offering than just raw compute and storage. If you don’t want to read further, just scroll down to the illustration and you’ll see just what I’m talking about.

In addition to delivering raw unmanaged infrastructure, BlueLock is delivering systems engineering expertise to manage the environment from the operating system down – which is all part of the bundled price. I’ve presented many times to an audience of software company executives on making the best infrastructure choices for their SaaS offering and the cost numbers I use during that presentation are almost identical to Tom’s and Brendan’s.

My point here and during the presentation is that when you load your applications to the cloud – someone (a person or people) MUST manage those environments – whether they are internal or external. When you bring them to BlueLock and load them into our Enterprise Cloud Platform, you do not need to employ infrastructure experts – that’s what we do for you. Companies that choose our competitors or Amazon for that matter must have infrastructure experts to manage the environment – and that cost is not in their numbers, so they look much cheaper.

The chart below adds a single full-time resource to the costs to represent one employee managing the environment. That doesn’t cover you if your employee would like to sleep, get sick or take a vacation, but you’ll get the picture without going off the deep end with costs.

Finally, I recently competed against and beat one of these two cloud hosting companies mentioned in the Network World article (link) and based upon my discussions with the client the other guys did have an implementation fee….I’m just sayin’.

Outsourcing: Three key decisions a CIO should consider…

Tuesday, April 6, 2010 by Jon Schackmuth

By Jon Schackmuth

Every company has weekly executive meetings covering various topics. The sales department is responsible for the generating revenue, The CFO is responsible for positive cash flow, and the IT department is responsible for the IT infrastructure; applications, desktops, emails, and so-on. In the weekly meetings, every department head is faced with the deadly question: “Can you do more with less, and if so, how will it impact our overall business?”

There are no department heads hit greater by this discussion than the CIO. With margins getting tighter, CEO’s need to make tough decisions on which budget gets cut first. Unfortunately, the IT departments have to find creative ways to keep the infrastructure stable while staying ahead of the curve with respect to the product development and information security.

There are three key decisions a CIO should consider in the next few years, ensuring his or her company stays competitive in a dynamic business world.

First: Looking beyond the bells and whistles of the data center they built from infancy, a CIO must objectively stand at a white board with a group of non IT employees and ask two simple questions: What is our mission statement and what is our core business? In those two simple questions, a CIO should be able to derive that data center management is probably not the company’s core business and if not, why are they continually investing capital funds in it.

Second: If owning and running a data center is not the core business, than what does a CIO do with the corporation’s sensitive material? According to CIO.com, enterprise level data is expected to increase by 400%-500% over the next five years and companies don’t have the infrastructure to properly secure it. Companies like BlueLock are built around securing sensitive material and have the needed SAS 70 Type II certification to ensure proper security in the cloud. More state & federal agencies are putting their data in the cloud and understanding that outsourcing is not only secure but far more cost effective - so why aren’t more corporate CIO’s putting their infrastructure in the cloud?

Third: Coming to the realization that redeploying an IT staff and their resources can be both productive and cost effective, CIO’s now need to make the final decision. “Am I willing to give up control to an IaaS company?” Once this epiphany occurs, the true cost savings can start. Saving capital expenditure and employee costs by moving those expenditures into operational costs will save corporations over time. Depreciating equipment over four to six years while technology continually passes you by can drain a financially strong company, not to mention a company that is financially strapped.

If you'd like to learn more about cloud technology, feel free to reach out to anyone at BlueLock! Or follow us on Twitter.

Jon Schackmuth

Is the Cloud Too Big for You?

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 by Katie LeGrand

Cloud computing has been getting a lot of media buzz lately. Words like virtualization, scalability, load balancing, and enterprise level solutions are hanging in the air. Sounds like something for big businesses, running huge databases with complex applications. How can cloud computing impact or be of value to the small business? Is cloud computing just for the big boys?

Absolutely not! Cloud computing is a dream come true for small business and start-ups. Small biz has some of the same IT issues as the big boys, and in some instances the need for cloud computing services is even more critical for small biz. Data loss could mean the death of your business. Security breaches might very well be the end of your enterprise. Controlling your cost structure is often a critical break-point.

First lets talk about scalability. What does this really mean for the small business? It means that you don't have to purchase and maintain excess capacity. The typical server utilizes about 20% of its resources. Can you afford any sort of capital investment that is only 20% utilized? Probably not. Why purchase a lot of computing fire power that you will not likely use? You can't afford the waste. Run your data and applications on a virtual machine, you will be utilizing on average 80% of the capacity you are paying for. If you think you are going to need greater capacity later, that's cool too. With Bluelock, you can scale up anytime you need to, for any increment you need, in hours, not weeks. Our cloud computing solutions allow you to respond to the real time demands of your business, lowering your investment risk, and giving you greater flexibility.

The flip side is also true--hit a dry patch in your business, or perhaps in response to expected seasonal fluctuations, you can scale down your capacity just as easily. No wasted investment. No capital commitment. No idle equipment. Total freedom in how much you use and when. In its essence, cloud computing offers a form of fiscal liquidity yielding a competitive advantage that your business just can't live without.

Video: Resource Scalability with Virtualization

Thursday, March 4, 2010 by Matt Hunckler

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: