Virtual Server Consolidation

Managing Servers In The Cloud

Thursday, July 29, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

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

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

Does this application make my server look fat?

Thursday, June 17, 2010 by Bob Roudebush

In a previous post, I talked about the challenges of sizing a cloud computing infrastructure, specifically one for running Microsoft SQL Server. Because it's the back-end for many corporate IT systems and also serves as part of a lot of internet-facing applications, Microsoft SQL Server is certainly one of the more popular candidates for consideration when looking to leverage Infrastructure As A Service. It's not the only one, however, so understanding how to properly size a managed cloud hosting VM is important regardless of the application being considered. Luckily, it's easier than one might think.

The key is almost always completely understanding how the application is performing today and what hardware (physical -or- virtual) it's running on currently.

There are a ton of great tools out there to assist with these assessments. Commercial tools such as Lanamark VReady, Novell Platespin Recon and Vizioncore vFoglight are popular candidates and there are many more where those came from. VMware partners like BlueLock can even provide this information as a service offering using the VMware Capacity Planner tool which is an IT capacity planning tool that collects comprehensive resource utilization and compares it to industry standard reference data to provide analysis about what how much capacity is needed in a virtualized environment using Vmware Virtualization Technology.

One hidden gem that is often overlooked, though, is the VMware Guided Consolidation tool included as a feature of VMware vCenter. Now a module within vCenter Server, it walks you step by step through the consolidation process including automatic discovery of up to 500 servers, performance analysis, conversion and intelligent placement on the right host. Even if you aren't planning on building your own private cloud and, instead, are looking to Cloud Computing Companies to run your virtualized workloads, the VMware Guided Consolidation tool can at least help you assess your current environment if you are a small or mid-sized business. It has an easy to use interface and a more simplified approach than using hte full VMware Capacity Planner tool.

Bluelock Support - The First Line of Offense

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by Greg Cripe

Everyone knows the value of good defense - whether guarding against intruders or providing general protection. At Bluelock, the Support Team prefers to operate in terms of offense. Anticipating problems and adjusting for them beforehand provides much better protection than simply reacting to situations as they arise. It's what puts Bluelock at the top of the cloud hosting game.

We use many tools to help us analyze a client's environment and help them to avoid the time-killing inefficiencies of potential problems. In a cloud setting we can leverage these tools across many client servers to quickly determine where resources may be allocated less than efficiently.

Our monitoring solution takes SNMP and puts it to use providing data for reports on everything from storage to HTTP health checks. We can easily create custom checks that provide information that clients need to be proactive themselves.

Trending is another cloud management feature provided by Bluelock. Graphs that measure historical usage of bandwidth, drive space and CPU are available. The Support Team also monitors this data as part of its proactive approach to cloud management.

Recently, we warned a client that one of the data drives on a virtual server in their environment was nearly full. By combining the monitoring and trending data, we showed them how their space requirements were growing gradually over time. Within a few minutes we had provided a quote for additional drive space, received approval from the client and executed the order.

We make these monitoring and trending tools available to our clients via the Bluelock Vital Portal. Each client has access and can see for themselves how their environment is running at any time.

The Support Team takes managing the cloud seriously and seeks to add as much value as possible for all clients. As always, we are happy to discuss how we can best be of help.

Whiteboard Wednesday: vCloud Express Basics -- Getting Started

Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by Matt Hunckler

Looking to quickly get your application into the cloud? Want to build it on a cloud computing infrastructure powered by VMware?

vCloud Express allows you to quickly, easily, and inexpensively deploy your application to a VMware-based public cloud. In fact, right now it's free and you can get started on vCloud Express at the BlueLock website in a matter of minutes.

In this episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, Jake Robinson and I discuss the architecture of the vCloud Express platform and how you can spin up your own virtual servers -- in an instant! If you're a developer, researcher, software tester, or just a technology and cloud computing fanatic; this video is for you.

Be sure to comment below and ask any questions you might have, so we can try to answer them for you in next week's Whiteboard video.

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.

My Favorite Virtualization Myths.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by Alicia Gaba

I'm sure you've heard a lot about the many advantages of virtualization, but what are the drawbacks? Can you believe everything you hear about the technology? Well, a recent post on Forbes dove into a number of virtualization myths, and debunked them.

Here are my favorites:

Virtualization is only for large companies.
False. Virtualization can be used in almost any company, as long as you have more than one server. In addition to workload consolidation, other benefits of virtualization include high availability, live migration, streamlined backups and fault tolerance – all of which can benefit any organization by simplifying maintenance and lowering infrastructure costs.

Virtualization is expensive.
Most likely false. Virtualization is somewhat expensive on the onset, but it will pay for itself. The cost savings come over time from using fewer servers, less power, cooling & operating system licensing and reduced maintenance. TIP: Do a ROI calculation from the beginning to see how much virtualization will really cost you.

Virtualization is not secure.
Any type of software can be found not secure. In every circumstance, virtualization included, it is always important to follow best practices for network, storage and operating system configurations to produce a secure environment. If your company has its own security requirements, it obviously smart to follow those as well. In short, security measures should be followed no matter what – virtualization is no less secure than any other technology.

Interested in learning more about virtualization? Read these other posts. Or contact us.

To read the full list of myths click here.

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.