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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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. 

I saw an interesting article on multi-tenancy last week concerning this from Lori MacVittie.  In the article she writes, "Tenancy becomes more granular and, at the very bottom layer, at IaaS, you’ll find that the tenant is actually an application and that each one has its own unique set of operational and infrastructure needs. Two applications, even though deployed by the same organization, may have a completely different – and sometimes image conflicting – set of parameters under which it must be deployed, secured, delivered, and managed."

Many times multi-tenancy is tied in the cloud computing world is tied more closely with technical architecture considerations than it is the business drivers behind how applications are deployed.  In order to reap the advantages of cloud computing, though, it's important to understand not just the technical complexity of deploying an application in a cloud hosting environment but also what the potential benefits and/or challenges of that deployment will be as it relates to the business impact.  When choosing candidates for the cloud, you must understand and base your decision on both.

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

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

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

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

SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70) is a widely recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). A SAS 70 audit represents that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of their control objectives and control activities, which often include controls over information technology and related processes.

Service organizations, such as a data center, elect to go through either a Type I or Type II SAS 70 audit.  Both audit types list controls that are in place at that point in time.  A Type II audit goes one step further and evaluates the effectiveness of those controls within a defined period of review (typically six months).

A SAS 70 audit can provide several advantages for a service organization:

• Establish credibility within the business community
• Build trust with clients by having controls independently verified by a third party
• Identify operational areas for improvement

To learn more about BlueLock and our SAS 70 Type II certified data center, visit our website!

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

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

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

Yeah, Google officially abandoned the project today.

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

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

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.

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

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

Last week I attended Softletter's SaaS University in Washington, D.C.  It was a great event aimed at helping SaaS companies learn how to better market, sell and deliver their cloud computing solutions using the Software-as-a-Service model.  BlueLock was asked to deliver a session on the infrastructure choices that SaaS companies face when deciding how to host their application. 

The numbers from the 2010 Softletter SaaS Survey revealed that SaaS companies have many infrastructure choices to make, from highly virtualized (Cloud) server farms to highly managed service systems and many variants in between. My session analyzed the choices available to SaaS providers and and gave some realistic numbers, checklists, and scenarios that hopefully helped them make the best choice for their operations and peace of mind.  Infrastructure As A Service offerings can be a great benefits to SaaS companies in that they can help them move opex expenses to capex expenses, lower their overall costs, align their expenses with revenues, improve their speed-to-market and provide a competitive advantage.

Here's a link to the PPT and the presentation on SlideShare.

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

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

The other day I was driving home from work and had one of those major "ah-ha" moments. I was reflecting on my first six months at BlueLock as CMO and started to think back to ten years ago at this same time when I had six months under my belt at another exciting and emerging company. The company was founded in 1999 right before the dot.com bust in April of 2000. Our mission was to help make "e-business" a central part of our client's operations. We were providing value to our clients by helping them integrate their business with the Web.

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

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

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

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

At a recent event here in Indianapolis, also known as "Sili-corn Valley" to some, a friendly attendee named Kay submitted this question: "How can cloud computing be an advantage to a startup business?"

Let's start with the basics. What is cloud computing? According to the NIST Cloud Computing Project, cloud computing is "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." Yes, there are lots of definitions of cloud computing out there, but this one is very suitable and widely accepted.

Now, what constitutes a startup? Startup companies can come in all forms, including those that are simply life-style companies, but the phrase "startup company" is often associated with high growth, technology oriented companies. Investors are generally most attracted to those new companies distinguished by their risk/reward profile and scalability. That is, they have lower bootstrapping costs, higher risk, and higher potential return on investment. Successful startups are typically more scalable than an established business, in the sense that they can potentially grow rapidly with limited investment of capital, labor or land. - via Wikipedia.

Now, let's talk about that last line about successful startups. Successful startups need to be scalable, with the ability to grow rapidly with limited investment in capital, labor or land. We are beginning to get the heart of our friend Kay's questions. Cloud computing sets startups up for those core abilities to control their investments (and keep them "limited").

The major benefits of cloud computing are:

• Limit upfront capital costs - shifting infrastructure costs from capex to opex
• Better ability to match revenue with expenses - you pay for the resources you use, which for most companies equates to how much traffic and revenue they are bringing in the door
• Ability to scale on demand - scale resources up and down as needed, this allows for rapid growth
• Get to market quicker - the cloud enables companies to get up and running more quickly due to rapid provisioning and infrastructure experts doing what they do best
• Spend precious labor costs on people who will better your core business and applications rather than people who must run the infrastructure (we do that for you)
• No need to spend time and money housing, powering and cooling the infrastructure (this just reinforces the startup comment about the ability to grow rapidly with limited investment in capital or land, we've already discussed people)

Check out how DECA Financial Services (a startup) slashed 91% of their first-year infrastructure costs with the BlueLock Cloud.

For more info, check out BlueLock's Advantages of Cloud Computing Blog.

DECA Financial recently chose BlueLock to provide its cloud hosting services, and in the end, slashed 91% of its first-year infrastructure costs.
Founded in 2009, DECA Financial Services is an accounts receivable management (ARM) agency experienced in collecting debt of any type. After experiencing tremendous capital expenditures on technology infrastructure and personnel at a prior employer, the DECA founders searched for a cloud hosting provider that offered ease-of-use and scalability to host their technology platform. Being a very technology-driven agency, DECA needed a robust infrastructure platform to run all of its processes, while not having to deal with the IT resources, people and costs associated with owning the infrastructure hardware.

“Had we built our own infrastructure, we would have spent at least $600,000 on hardware and another $100,000 for one employee to manage the infrastructure – ultimately costing over $700,000 in the first year alone,” said James Hefty, Director of Operations Support, DECA Financial Services. “With BlueLock, our projected first year spend is around $60,000, compared to the original $700,000. Now we have a much higher quality IT environment than we would have if we hosted it ourselves - at a fraction of the price.”

To learn more about the BlueLock & DECA solution, read the case study.

Or, check out the recent news article on Computerworld about the BlueLock & DECA partnership entitled, "IT budgets pointing to the Cloud, expansion."

Over the weekend the OpenStack project proudly announced its existence and its intended goal: to create an infrastructure cloud platform that can reach the scale of a million machines. NASA has evidently dedicated a team of employees to support these efforts likely to replace their existing Eucalyptus cloud fabric controller used within their Nebula infrastructure cloud.

NASA had already been working on Nova, a next-generation cloud fabric controller, for the better part of this year. Nova had even been released as open source project for public adoption. Meanwhile Rackspace, simultaneously prepping their "Ozone" cloud infrastructure software for public release, approached NASA to see if the two could meld their codebases together. As a result OpenStack was born and now Nova seems to have gone defunct... even Nova's old home at http://novacc.org/ redirects to the Nebula cloud computing platform page.

The announcement of OpenStack has generated quite a bit of buzz. Several out in the grand Interwebs are wondering what this collective brain weight will bring. The goals are quite lofty: allow an open, inter-operable fabric for deployment and provisioning of infrastructure as a service. And while there are many cloud projects ready to pledge support, I wonder if consumer adoption is just as rampant. Will service providers spring up, ready to host an OpenStack cloud? Bear in mind while the hypervisor management may be open source and (presumably) free for use, the capital expense of a data center is most decidedly not.

My biggest wonder is how these two (or three) separate projects, up to now independently architected, will be able to merge and work together as a cohesive whole. Nebula and Ozone appear to be comprised of C, Python and C++ - each of which are definitely complimentary languages to each other - but the codebases may leverage very disparate frameworks. Will code have to be largely re-designed and re-written? Will the separate pieces just end up sandwiched together? Or are the software engineering efforts so vast that it doesn't even matter?

One thing is becoming very apparent - everyone and their mom is racing to push their cloud solution out into public light. Even Oracle just released their Cloud Resource Model API - although it seems that is barely making a din above the OpenStack conversation. Everyone established infrastructure and/or software company seems to be throwing their hat in the ring and handing out orchestration solutions. One big problem exists however: are they going to start handing out blade chassis, too?

Yeah, I don't think so, either.

I could be rolling in free hypervisors but it always comes down to one thing: who is managing the SAN? Or figuring out the resulting layer 2 network craziness? Or keeping the cores stoked? Or keeping the backup generator filled with diesel?

At the Purdue Innovation Summit last week Ruth Nickolich submitted a great question to the BlueLock team: What are the advantages of cloud computing?

This is a question that has been asked, and answered many times and in many ways. From the BlueLock perspective, the major advantages of cloud computing are as follows:

• 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.  - via Bob Roudebush
• While security is a major concern when it comes to cloud computing, looking at a move to the cloud not only draws attention to the security measures in the cloud, but also the security measures you are taking in house. How do they measure up? A lot of BlueLock clients get better security from the cloud than in-house. - via Alicia Gaba
• Cloud Computing allows you to shift capital-intensive infrastructure costs to operating expenses, which can save your organization thousands of dollars in the long run. Check out how DECA Financial cut 91% of their infrastructure costs in the first year alone
• Better matching of revenue to expenses
• Rapid provisioning and speed to market
• Competitive advantage - they are able to spend IT time on their application and core business drivers rather than the day-to-day worries of managing the infrastructure

Still looking for more? Check out BlueLock's "Advantages of Cloud Computing" Blog.

Gartner recently released six "rights" and one "responsibility" for cloud service users/clients to help enable better business relationships between vendor and client. This list, although short, is actually quite exhaustive in terms of outlining some major topics a client should cover BEFORE entering a cloud hosting agreement.

Gartner's list of Cloud Computing Rights & Responsibilities:

The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data - Service consumers should retain ownership of, and the rights to use, their own data.

The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes - All computing services - including cloud services - suffer slowdowns and failures. However, cloud services providers seldom commit to recovery times, specify the forms of remediation or spell out the procedures they will follow.

The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes - Every service provider will need to take down its systems, interrupt its services or make other changes in order to increase capacity and otherwise ensure that its infrastructure will serve consumers adequately in the long term. Protecting the consumer’s business processes entails providing advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and granting the consumer some control over when it makes the switch.

The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front - Most service providers do not fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations so that after consumers have committed to a cloud service, they run the risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment.

The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates - If the cloud provider stores or transports the consumer’s data in or through a foreign country, the service consumer becomes subject to laws and regulations it may not know anything about.

The right to know what security processes the provider follows - With cloud computing, security breaches can happen at multiple levels of technology and use. Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not subvert security at another level (such as the network).

The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements - Providers and consumers must come to an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured.

This list brings light to what BlueLock is already doing right to better our relationships with our own clients. Based on the Gartner list provided, we are certainly in the right place.

Server hardware manufacturers and software makers have always touted scalability as a feature.  For cloud hosting providers such as BlueLock, this feature moves to another level: elasticity.  Elasticity is loosely interepreted as implying the capability for services to ramp down as needed as well.  Since most administrator mindsets and tools are geared for provisioning and scaling up, organizations are sometimes concerned that there might be pitfalls they encounter when suddenly being given the ability to scale down at will or as necessary.

Within the BlueLock Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) Cloud, compute clusters are carefully divided into building blocks called “cores” and these cores are assigned to customers – never assigning more “cores” to a computer cluster than are actually available.  This is the primary issue in the debate between dedicated versus shared cloud computing models – just throwing everyone in the compute pool without regard to expected performance isn’t a good idea.  It’s important to ensure that the capacity available to application(s) is both dedicated and somewhat dynamic.  At BlueLock, once one or more of these “cores” is assigned to a client they are combined together into a resource pool. 

This model of cores and dedicated resource pools, along with the abstraction of physical hardware from the resources assigned to a virtual machine, allows clients to provision (and pay for) only what they need.  As their needs change, additional cores can be added (or removed) to grow (or shrink) resource pools and add (or subtract) to their application’s overall computing capacity.  Since this happens at the virtualization layer, it’s entirely transparent to the underlying operating system and application.  It requires much less prior planning and architecting than building dynamically scalable applications and deploying them on a PaaS cloud.