Virtual Server Consolidation

Virtualization Training: How to Get Started

Monday, February 22, 2010 by Matt Hunckler

I been having some good discussions with a few people on twitter about getting started with cloud computing and virtualizing servers with VMware. There seems to be a lot of curiousity about how to implement your own virtual server and get in the cloud, so I got with Jake Robinson (one of BlueLock's implementation specialists) and we did a short whiteboarding session with the flipcam.

In this short clip, Jake and I discuss the basics of virtualization as well as some of the first steps for those who want to virtualize their own server. We talk about some of the industry's most popular tools, like VMware Player and the VMware Appliance Marketplace. Enjoy!

Let us know what you think. Is the video helpful? What other things would you be interested in learning in a whiteboarding session?

See you next time.

What Are You Looking For In The Cloud?

Monday, February 15, 2010 by Jon Schackmuth

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.

We Serve to Support, Educate and Blog

Thursday, January 21, 2010 by Greg Cripe

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.

IT to go "strategic" in 2010

Tuesday, December 8, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

A recent survey of business leaders, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and commissioned by Accenture, revealed what those IT and business leaders are discussing in their closed-door budget meetings. The results hint at one thing when it comes to IT: strategy.

These IT and business leaders are the same people who worked to slash their IT expenses in 2009. They may now be looking at IT as a strategic tool to reduce other business expenses, increase revenues and provide other kinds of value to the business. Will this strategy correlate to the top IT strategies for 2010?

Accenture’s research shows that strategic areas for IT spending in 2010 will include server virtualization and consolidation, business analytics and intelligence, and more customer self-service e-business automation projects. These are all good steps towards building a lean mean fighting IT machine.

Many are faithful that 2010 will bring about a recovery. Most companies are approaching 2010 with conservative optimism in light of that "faith." With lean IT that does its job, many companies could be in a good position to ride that recovery fruitfully.

What is your company planning to do in 2010 to make IT work better and harder?

Is your company planning to bring virtualization and/or cloud computing into their IT mix?

Advantages of Cloud Computing Meetups

Thursday, December 3, 2009 by Matt Hunckler

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

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

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

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

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

Email Functions: The Big Cloud Consumer

Monday, November 16, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

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.

Why Virtualization is Green

Friday, September 18, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

Server virtualization not only makes sense economically, but also environmentally. Is your organization dedicated to a green initiative? Recycling, biking and other green trends will definitely make an impact, but not quite as much as an impact if your IT virtualizes its infrastructure. Green IT is growing in importance and virtualization is easiest way to get your company on board with the movement.

Gartner estimates that over the next 5 years, most enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy as they do on hardware infrastructure. With that ratio, every dollar you spend on the infrastructure means another dollar spent on power and cooling. That’s a tough ratio to work with.

Analyst firm IDC3 states that the unutilized server capacity equates to approximately $150 billion and over 20 million servers (traditional servers use only 5-15% capacity). The unutilized servers produce a total of more than 80 million tons of CO2 per year.

Why is virtualization green? Servers get consolidated, drastically saving space and power and cooling costs (read: saving energy). Also, virtual servers consume 60-90% of the normal workload even when idle. Your organization is able to increase its IT capacity and save money while going Kermit-the-Frog green at the same time! (Companies can save up to 80% on infrastructure costs using virtualization.)

BlueLock uses VMware virtualization technology to reduce our carbon footprint, simultaneously reducing yours as a client. We’ve got your financial and environmental needs in mind.

For more information on Green IT, visit this site.

What’s the difference between cloud computing and virtualization?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

Cloud computing and virtualization are many times used interchangeably. While they intersect in fascinating ways, they aren’t exactly the same thing. Server virtualization provides flexibility that is a great match for cloud computing, and is actually one of the greatest enablers of the technology. Moreover, cloud computing can be defined based on the virtual machine containers that is created with virtualization technology. But that doesn’t make virtualization cloud computing.

Fact: Virtualization is not always necessary in cloud computing. Google and others have demonstrated that the cloud doesn’t require virtual servers. They can architect their infrastructure using other techniques that achieve similar results to provide higher level services to users.

There are lots of different technologies that create a cloud…virtualization is and enables many of them. As noted, it’s not required, but here at BlueLock we think it’s pretty cool that our environment is fully virtual.

Virtualization – The Cloud Computing Enabler

Thursday, July 30, 2009 by Brian Wolff

The technology that makes cloud computing possible is virtualization. The main objective in cloud computing is to improve resource utilization by sharing available resources to multiple on demand needs. Virtualization abstracts the underlying resources such as the memory, storage, network so that multiple operating systems (Windows, Linux) can be run on a single physical system simultaneously. This improves resource utilization – traditional servers utilize about 20% of its resources, whereas a virtual machine (these individual operating system instances we referred to above) uses an average of 80% of its resources.

The cloud is proving to be the future medium to deliver technology. Today, cloud service companies are a dime a dozen – they’ve all spun up to capture some of the large cloud market. The advantages of virtualization go beyond just resource utilization - virtualized servers consume less power, have lower cooling costs and require less space (all great things for the environment). And virtualization is the underlying technology that allows for rapid provisioning, on demand resources, utility-based cost structure, and the reduction of capital expenditures.

To learn more about virtualization and cloud computing, click here.

Why VMware Virtualization is so cool

Wednesday, July 29, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

To all of you Mac lovers, or to those of you who can appreciate the Mac vs. Microsoft commercials, VMware put together a nice little spoof to shed some light on why VMware virtual servers are so much better than your traditional production servers.

Here at BlueLock, we get it. We know that VMware is the new, cool and hip product to be using - but its also got the technological now-how behind it to stick through just being "trendy." VMware virtualization technology has been a key agent in the overall movement towards virtual cloud computing and BlueLock is proud to run a VMware cloud in our facility.

BlueLock Featured in Gartner's Hype Cycle

Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by Brian Wolff

BlueLock, a provider of cloud computing and managed IT services was featured in a July 23, 2009 Gartner report entitled Hype Cycle for Business Continuity Management, 2009 in the Cloud-Based Recovery Services section.

The report features findings on the increasing costs and risks of business disruptions and how they continue to drive the importance of effective business continuity management operations for business and technology executives. BlueLock was featured as a cloud services company able to cost-effectively solve business continuity issues using cloud computing and virtualization technologies.

“BlueLock has worked hard over the years to build a cloud computing platform that enables businesses to easily and efficiently integrate a cost effective disaster recovery solution into their IT infrastructure,” said Pat O’Day, CTO of BlueLock. “It’s nice to get this kind of recognition from a highly recognized and respected source such as Gartner.”

BlueLock’s disaster recovery solution is built on virtualized servers and uses virtualized storage. The two solutions work together to provide rapid recovery and performance on demand enabling BlueLock to readily adjust to client needs and quickly provide production capacity should a disaster occur. A couple of BlueLock’s local disaster recovery clients include Marian University and Wooden & McLaughlin, LLP.

“Using a combination of VMware and HP technology, we’re able to clone a bootable copy of a client’s production environment and move it hundreds of miles away to a disaster recovery site. When they declare a disaster or want to test their recovery plan, we simply boot them into production. You can’t do that without virtualization,” said O’Day.

Your Infrastructure Choices: A cloud is not a cloud…is not a cloud

Thursday, July 16, 2009 by Brian Wolff

Cloud computing providers differ in two main ways: people and control. No two cloud services are alike for that very reason and people and control are the two variables that differentiate cloud computing providers from one another.

The definition of cloud computing varies everywhere, but some main characteristics of “the cloud” are: virtualization, capacity on demand, shared resources and subscription-based pricing. If you fit that bill you’re a cloud, but which segmentation of cloud?

It's either:

SaaS (Software as a Service) – The web-facing software that users interact with (i.e. SalesForce or Google Apps)
PaaS (Platform as a Service) – a platform that helps utilize cloud resources (i.e. RightScale or rPath)
Or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – the actual infrastructure behind the cloud, the virtualized servers and network (i.e. BlueLock, GoGrid or your internal cloud)

For purposes of this post, we’re going to focus on Infrastructure as a Service (makes sense because that’s what we’re experts at). From here, there are also a few different type of IaaS clouds (surprise, surprise!) and their characteristics, to make things just a little more interesting. Here they are:

Private internal cloud:
-    Limited Capacity
-    Expensive
-    Highly Secure
-    Enterprise Features
-    Self Managed

Public utility cloud
-    Limitless Capacity
-    Lower cost
-    Self Managed (DIY)
-    No/DIY SLA
-    No/DIY Security

Full-service public cloud
-    Large Capacity
-    Fully Managed
-    Customized Security
-    Enterprise Features
-    Enterprise Services
-    SLA

Back to IaaS cloud differentiation – again, all about people and control. First, you have to decide how much control of the infrastructure you want, can manage or more importantly, can afford. Then take a look at the other components that will affect your costs in the cloud (some of these you may already have):

-    Hardware & software
-    Licenses
-    People
-    Place

If you’re looking at a do-it-yourself platform like Amazon EC2, you’ll have to purchase your own people and they’ve have to monitor, control and manage the infrastructure. With this option you’ve got a lot more control, but a much higher TCO – because those people are going to cost you lots of money. But if you don’t have the people, or you want them to focus on something else, like your core business (i.e. your software solution) instead of the infrastructure then a trusted full-service cloud option like BlueLock makes a lot more sense and could save you about $50,000 a year.

How’s that even possible? When you purchase a BlueLock solution, you’re not only purchasing the infrastructure and place to house that infrastructure, you’re purchasing the people and expertise behind it – meaning less employee costs for you (or more beneficial employee costs). Some would argue you lose a little control because your people, your team isn’t the one working on the infrastructure, but others think that a partner like BlueLock is just an extension of their own team – and a better use of their IT budget at that. Take Projetech for instance – watch this video and you’ll see that they really see BlueLock as an extension of their company not just another vendor, and that’s the way we like to think about it too.

Misconceptions of Cloud Computing

Monday, June 8, 2009 by Brian Wolff

Mary Hayes Weier wrote a piece about the misconceptions of cloud computing in InformationWeek’s “Plug Into the Cloud.”

Conventional wisdom says that small and midmarket companies are more interested in cloud computing due to their tighter infrastructure budgets and constraints while larger companies want to keep everything inside their walls (i.e. private cloud computing performed in-house).

However, she argues, Forrester’s research shows that thinking is wrong.

Myth #1: Smaller companies are more interested in cloud computing.
Forrester’s research shows 1 in 4 large companies with 1,000 employees or more plan to employ an external provider or have already done so for pay-per-use computing of virtual servers, AKA infrastructure-as-a-service (lately also called computing as a service). In comparison, only 18% of midmarket and 15% of small businesses have plans for IaaS, from a survey of more than 2,600 hardware decision makers at organizations.

Myth # 2: Larger Companies are more interested in internal or private clouds.
Forrester’s research shows that 33% of large companies plan to outsource their IaaS while only 24% want to run their own clouds. 44% plan to use a mixture of both. (Hint: we believe a mixture of public/private will be the solution that will make the most sense for the most companies going forward, along with different types of public clouds for different needs – production, test/dev, etc.)

Another finding I find not too surprising: the larger the company, the greater the awareness of pay-per-use cloud computing.

Company size & percentage of those unaware of cloud computing:

20,000 +: 21% of respondents
5,000 – 19,000: 23%
500 – 5000: 20%
100 – 499: 26%
100 or less: 31%

VMware Leading the Way in Virtualization

Thursday, June 4, 2009 by Brian Wolff

Mr. Stephen Herrod has been quite a busy man steering the virtualization giant we call VMware. IT and enterprise organizations everywhere are flocking towards virtualization in order to consolidate and maximize their IT infrastructure - and VMware keeps up by continuing to add to their virtualization portfolio.

While VMware is known for being the most advanced and widely adopted server virtualization platform, Herrod is pushing the organization further by working to tap into new virtualization markets such as desktop, smartphones and the most obvious…cloud computing. VMware does a lot to lay the groundwork for cloud computing considering the fact that virtual machines are the enablers of the technology, so Herrod has quite a hefty job ahead of him.

To learn more about VMware, their virtualization portfolio and what lies ahead according to Stephen Herrod in this great article in ComputerWorld.

BlueLock is a VMware vCloud partner and we can say from experience that VMware has got what it takes to help make sure virtualization and cloud computing get bigger, faster, easier, smarter.

More Cloud Computing – Fewer Headaches.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 by Brian Wolff

In the last few months we have been working on a series of cloud computing case studies, documenting projects with clients like Wooden McLaughlin Law, WebLink and Marian College move some or their entire infrastructure to an environment comprised of virtual servers. While each business and their applications presented unique challenges, there are several consistent themes which run through the cases studies: When they turn to BlueLock we worry about their infrastructure, so they don’t have to. We manage the equipment, insure there is enough capacity available when they need it, configure the software, balance loads, and free them to work on their core product or service.

In a recent post, Bob Warfield includes many of these same elements in his list of "10 Things You Don’t Need to Do In the Clouds." His list includes:

1.    De-duping and backup;
2.    Server power consumption;
3.    Little iron vs. big iron ( what size server)
4.    MIPs ( how to make your system run faster)
5.    Bandwidth costs
6.    Load balancing;
7.    Hardware monitoring;
8.    Creating redundant data center;
9.    Configuring complex software;
10. Engineering time spent on keeping the lights on.

While I am not sure I agree with his assessment that the cloud will completely replace traditional servers the way word processors and laser printers killed typewriters, liquid paper, and Linotype machines I do agree this business model will significantly reduce headaches for more and more companies in the years to come.

The Virtual Data Center and Cloud Computing

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

In a recent post by Jason Hiner on zdnet, Hiner examines the keynote at EMC World in Orlando by CEO Joe Tucci. Here’s an overview of the virtual data center and cloud computing from “The Next Big Things in IT” according to EMC, with some BlueLock commentary.

Virtual Data center:
EMC believes in the future all servers will be virtualized servers – whether in the cloud or in a private virtual data center. This is highly likely, although it’s going to be a long process. While EMC believes 80 percent of workloads will remain in private corporate data centers, that doesn’t leave the cloud entirely out of the mix.

Our VP of Sales and Marketing here at BlueLock talks a lot about the fact that people are going to become more knowledgeable about what data and workloads should go where – which will entail choosing different clouds for different purposes. Some of those clouds will be internal and others will be external. Good IT executives will do what makes the most business sense with their data and operations. The economy is driving executives to make these decisions now we just have to enable them with the right technology.

Cloud Computing:
EMC is right, “cloud computing means different things to almost everyone who talks about it.” When EMC talks about the cloud they’re referring to the backend infrastructure that runs the applications, but I love the definition they provide in regards to where they think cloud is going:

“…a future in which cloud computing represents the service providers’ data centers – completely virtualized and available to serve a variety of specialized applications on-demand. It sees cloud computing data centers connected to private data centers via VMware so that virtualized server workloads can go back and forth between the two.”

Yep, we totally agree. That’s what we’ve been experiencing (hint: Marian College video and case study). BlueLock’s fully virtualized data center is a prime example of how this can work. We build a “packaged data center” called the BlueLock Box that works as a mini private cloud for our clients, and use VMware to allow the BlueLock Box to talk to our BlueLock Cloud when clients need spillover or want to exchange workloads. It’s the perfect solution for companies who want at least some of their stuff on premise. In the future you’ll see a lot more of this with more clouds talking to each other and more options for clients. They have their test-dev in Amazon, production at BlueLock and in-house data at their on-premise virtual data center. It’s all about leveraging technology to make the most out of IT dollars.

Green IT: Cloud Computing

Thursday, April 2, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

The green movement has lost a little bit of its fervor with all of the economic problems going on. However, BlueLock still thinks being green is great when it comes to IT infrastructure. Not only does being green help save the environment, but it saves your company money. With the economic situation in hand, green (cloud) computing is a win-win game all companies should be playing.

So how do we make our data center green? Two major things: VMware virtual servers and HP LeftHand SAN. BlueLock has realized a strong "green technology" benefit in terms of reduced power and cooling consumption and space requirements.

BlueLock CTO Pat O'Day explains:

"There is absolutely a green efficiency that would be impossible to achieve without the HP P4000 SAN in concert with virtualization. We have 500 virtual servers running in a footprint of one or two cabinets that would otherwise take 10 cabinets and much more power and cooling capacity."

BlueLock has created a green, scalable, cost-efficient and 100% virtual platform by utiilizing the VMware vCloud and HP LeftHand P4000 SAN solution.

Small Business & the Benefits of Cloud Computing

Thursday, February 26, 2009 by Brian Wolff

In a recent post on in Wisdom of the Clouds, James Urquat talks about small businesses and cloud computing. Using survey data from Rackspace as a starting point, he explains the problem begins with awareness, as more than two-thirds of small businesses have never heard of "cloud hosting."

What will happen as these companies begin to discover cloud computing? This untapped market has huge potential. Individually none of the projects would be very large, but collectively, there is tremendous opportunity for the right suppliers. Urquat says:

What I'd love to see is various cloud providers (at all levels of the stack) creating programs that specifically advertise and market themselves to mom-and-pop services, manufacturing shops, and so on. Targets for volume should be impressive; 100,000 customers should not be a surprising goal.

And the financial benefits for these smaller companies are significant when compared to their overall operating budgets. This is apparent when you look at the case of Marian College. The InformationWeek writer compares their environment to real cloud as "something less of a cumulous."

But this small college, with a student body of 2,100, has dipped into cloud computing, virtualized its infrastructure, made virtual servers available over the network practically on demand, and coordinated its internal operations with an outside cloud located at BlueLock. The program was begun to bring an affordable disaster recovery solution to the university - improved processing times, and ability to share information have led to other benefits as well. For more on Marian College, view this video:

Virtualization Overtakes Traditional Data Centers and Creates Demand for Support

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 by Brian Wolff

According to Eric Lundquist, of Computerworld Blogs, 2009 is going to be a big year for virtualization. If the current trend continues, by year end there will be more virtual servers then physical servers world wide. With applications continuing to expand, he sees the next big hurdle for virtualization is to reduce the cost and complexity of managing virtual servers. He says:

The ability to easily create virtual instances can quickly lead to server sprawl. Administration and management is not as much a technology trick as a procedures and process undertaking

While many companie have enjoyed the cost effective nature of EC2 and Amazon do it yourself types of applications they are quickly discovering the need for support and management. That is where full service providers such as BlueLock can help companies make sense of their virutal applications.

Stephen Prentice, VP and Gartner Fellow, agrees with the need for structure. He says:

“It’s not just about providing virtual machines – it’s about providing infrastructure for those virtual machines,”

Do your virtualization plans include a budget for support and management?

Cloud Computing – Like a Trip to the Grocery Store

Tuesday, January 27, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

Imagine it is Saturday afternoon and you are hosting a Super bowl party at your house in 24 hours. Armed with a list and determination you head to the store for football food and spirits. Without any problems you grab your items and move to the checkout lane where there is only one register open and about 30 people in line.

The cashier calls for back-up while the line gets restless. Three scrawny teens come to the front and fumble to turn open more registers. You debate leaving, but the only thing in your house is frozen vegetables and some questionable milk so you wait.

In your head you swear off this grocery store, vowing to never come back, when the lines starts moving. You quickly reach the front, check out and head home still grouchy. Although it didn’t take long once the call for more staff was made, things certainly slowed down until they did.

In a way, this scenario is similar to what we call a “cold start” in cloud computing. As you approach maximum capacity, the cloud starts another virtual server to handle the load. If you ramp too quickly you may experience a lag as the new server comes on line.

There is an alternative! Just as grocery store can have cashiers ready and waiting for the extra customers, with a “warm start” your servers can be ready as well. Turned on, but in a sleep mode, you aren’t paying for capacity till you need it. Then when you need it, the wake up is significantly faster then a cold start.

At BlueLock we have mastered the art of the warm start, while others are still working their minds around the idea of cloud computing. We have the capacity ready and waiting for our clients to expand and shrink as they need, without the wait time.