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.

flexibility, security, & possibly reduced capital expenditure…

By Jon Schackmuth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my last post, I tackled tips 1-5.  This week I’d like to take a look at the next five tips Adam Stone referred to in regards to "Making sense of the cloud: 15 tips for software CEOs" and provide you with the BlueLock perspective on what companies looking to migrate to cloud computing should be thinking about.

Tip #6:  To Avoid vendor Lock-in, stick to open standards. 
This one makes a lot of sense to me – in the end, you need to make sure that whatever you put in the cloud you can get back easily and intact.  While some may argue that deploying VMware technology locks you into VMware’s virtualization platform, I would argue that VMware is the defacto standard for virtualization technology for the enterprise, by virtue of their large market share.  Deploying VMware gives clients a lot of flexibility to move that server to another VMware host if they wish to move.  We even have cases where companies wish to protect themselves from something happening to BlueLock as a cloud provider.  In that instance, we’re replicating the entire virtual machines to a neutral third party, Iron Mountain.  If a triggering event were to occur, the company simply contacts Iron Mountain and receives immediate access to the virtual machines, which can immediately be loaded on servers running VMware.  That’s just one straight-forward example of how “portable” the environment is as a result of running in a VM ware-based virtualization platform.

Tip #7:  Location, Location, Location. 
Yes, indeed, it’s difficult to bend the laws of physics and the speed of light.  This tip talks about two real issues – the first is latency and the second deals with the laws that govern the location where the data center sits, in both cases, BlueLock has engineered solutions to address our client’s specific challenges.   We have clients that need to have the data closer to them than our data centers in Indianapolis, IN or in Salt Lake City, UT for speed or data privacy issues.  For these clients, we introduced our version of a private data center called The BlueLock Box in October 2007.  This private cloud solution entails installing an HP C3000 blade chassis with redundant SAN shelves behind the client’s firewall.  This solution provides them with the same benefits of BlueLock’s public cloud such as fault tolerance and scalability, but puts the data closer to them for speed and/or privacy issues. 

Tip #8:  Consider using a middleman. 
I agree with Adam – there is a huge opportunity for cloud brokers or companies that have expertise in helping clients make thoughtful decisions about what can and/or should go into the cloud and then to actually help architect and deliver the cloud solution.  We’ve worked closely with several partners who have trusted advisor relationships with large fortune 1000 clients that have chosen BlueLock as their cloud solution.  In fact, we’ve been asked to present next week in VMware’s Partner Exchange keynote on the topic of how partners can work with a cloud providers to deliver real value to their clients.  I will be sharing the stage with Carl Eschenbach, EVP of Worldwide Field Operations and Casey Watson, VP Business Development for Apparatus to talk about how BlueLock and Apparatus have built a sizable business delivering cloud integration services for large clients.

Tip #9:  Monitoring uptime isn’t enough, you need an action plan. 
We couldn’t agree more with Adam on this point.  From day one, we’ve had a resolution-based 99.99% uptime SLA in place for our clients.  This means that not only will we respond quickly to the issue, but we’ll promise resolution of that issue.  On top of that, we’ve also patented a portal that we call “the VITAL signs portal” that provides our clients with an overall view of the health of their environment, as well as an ability to drill into each aspect of their environment, to see what’s actually happening.  Finally, we have also built capabilities in the portal to send alerts and alarms when something goes wrong or when the environment has reached a pre-determined limit on things like CPU, RAM and storage.   If those measures aren’t enough, we’ve also built tailored metrics for some clients that wish to monitor additional key metrics in their environment.

Tip #10:  A clause may look good in the contract, but be useless in the real World.  Adam’s tip in this area covered a “useless” escrow agreement.  In tip number six, I shared how we’ve put an escrow agreement in place that can be tested and actually works.  Having said that, I agree that empty legal promises are not the way to make sure you’re protected.  Testing the system is the best way to insure what’s being set aside actually works.  In addition to the escrow agreement, we also have numerous disaster recovery clients that have performed successful tests of our geographic failover disaster recovery service.  In the end, you want the “promise” in writing, but then you want to do a test to make sure it performs as expected.  Reminds me of an old Reaganism – “trust but verify”.

Next week, I’ll take us down the homestretch and walk through the final five tips for migrating successfully to the cloud. 

Tip #11:  Set financial penalties for downtime
Tip #12:  It takes time to see ROI on SaaS development
Tip #13:  Savings are not in the cloud, but in headcount
Tip #14:  Follow the cloud into new markets
Tip #15:  Let the cloud lead you to new innovations

If you'd like to read the original post by Adam Stone, go here.

  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.

Having worked in IT for over 10 years, I've seen my share of ugliness. It generally has taken the form of botched configuration files or ill conceived program interfaces. Looking back, though, nothing could top the server hardware upgrade for sheer wretchedness. Coordinating the downtime necessary to start the upgrade required gargantuan effort and endless compromise. Finding the correct parts sent the technician through an endless maze of charts and arrays of compatibility. Performing the actual upgrade was at least interesting and sometimes fun. Praying for the server to power up without a hitch afterwards was not. And still, the job wasn't quite done. Little tweaks were needed here and there, then we had test to ensure the server was ready to reenter the world of the living. All told, a weekend was probably shot and a few gray hairs were earned in the process.

Welcome to the virtual world, where we have left most of that nonsense behind. Businesses can now rely on a well-trained team of engineers to build a thriving environment of servers, each capable of hosting dozens of virtual machines. It's not hard to tout the benefits of cloud computing. Just look at the ease of a disk expansion.

At BlueLock, we can turn around a non-system disk expansion request in minutes. When a client needs more space, the system administrators need only a few clicks to make it happen. No more downtime or worry about compatible parts. Even a system-disk (boot disk) expansion requires only a single reboot and a few extra minutes of work.

Having this kind of flexibility allows a client much more freedom in the planning process for a new server. The focus returns to the core function of the server rather than the hardware, which is Bluelock's concern. With full monitoring in place, our team of administrators and engineers strives to be proactive. A client may receive a call about a potential problem long before they would have noticed any performance degradation. It's about uptime and performance. And that's just the beginning.

The ease of expanding drive space barely scratches the surface of the benefits of working in the cloud. I plan to outline many of those benefits in subsequent posts. Communicating the advantages of virtualization is one of the easiest and most enjoyable jobs I've had since jumping into IT head-first a decade ago.

Our goals at BlueLock include staying in the vanguard of cloud hosting, so we work hard every day to set the bar higher. I hope this blog will help explain some of the nuances, many of the developments, and most of the benefits of life in the cloud.

Jason Langone did a recent review of the five official VMware vCloud Express providers. Langone is a tried and true user of Amazon EC2, and therefore was somewhat skeptical of vCloud Express (although he's a VMware expert and a fan of most all of their products).

When vCloud Express was announced at VMworld 2009 in September, it was was showcased as a portal that will allow for cloud-based virtual machines to be easily configured from a virtual hardware perspective.  What's the big deal? Well, there are millions of VMware users who can now extend their existing virtual infrastructures into a hosted and secured VMware cloud.  That's a big deal.

Langone tested all five vCloud Express cloud computing providers, including BlueLock.

His intent was to test ease of setting up an account, total time to have an instance running, basic input/output (I/O) metrics and overall user experience while using AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) to measure against.

Find out how BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II fared here.

Read the original post about his review here.

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?

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.

(Indianapolis, IN – December 1, 2009) - Indianapolis-based BlueLock, provider of cloud computing and managed IT services, announces its second round of Beta testing with BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II.  BlueLock was one of only five cloud computing hosting providers chosen by VMware to provide VMware vCloud Express services since its launch in September 2009.

BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II is a Compute-as-a-Service solution designed to support transient workloads by providing a high level of elasticity for faster turnaround time and future workload federation.  BlueLock vCloud Express will compete with services such as Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.

“BlueLock vCloud Express Beta I was an instant success,” said Pat O’Day, CTO, BlueLock. “We filled up our Beta I slots in less than two months.  With the feedback we garnered from those early users we’ve been able to make some major changes and the offering will continue to get better as we prepare to launch the public offering early in 2010.”

BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II is a reliable, on-demand infrastructure solution that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide. The technology allows users to create virtual machines as needed and add compute capacity via an online interface. The beta services are currently free, but the public offering in the future will include a pay-as-you-go payment structure where users pay only for the compute and storage space they use.

BlueLock vCloud Express Beta II is available immediately. For additional information, visit http://vcloudexpress.bluelock.com.

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.

Sad news – BlueLock vCloud Express BETA  has filled up!  We are no longer taking sign-ups until we depart our BETA status.   If you’d like to be notified when BlueLock vCloud Express is available again please send an email to vcloud_beta@bluelock.com.

Thanks again to our participating launch partners:

More information on BlueLock vCloud Express:

BlueLock’s vCloud Express (Beta) is an on-demand, pay-as-you-go virtual machine hosting service.  Running on VMware, it ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide.

BlueLock vCloud Express is specifically designed as an easy and affordable way to try a virtual cloud or host application.  This solution is perfectly suited for test and development or a startup environment.  Developers are able to use the BlueLock vCloud Express service to rapidly deploy application environments and get started quickly.  The solution retains the robustness, interoperability and reliability that BlueLock and VMware virtualization technology is known for while delivering the easy access and cost effectiveness of the pay as you go model.

To stay up to date on BlueLock vCloud Express and our other offerings, join our newsletter.

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.

After a long time of keeping quiet and silently preparing for the exciting launch of BlueLock vCloud Express, the product is now alive, running and available to developers!

BlueLock’s vCloud Express (Beta) is an on-demand, pay-as-you-go virtual machine hosting service.  Running on VMware, it ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide.

VMware announced the new product offering at VMworld during the keynote speech yesterday as one of their key initiatives.  VMware chose 5 hosting providers internationally to provide vCloud Express services, and BlueLock is one of them.

For more information on the service or to sign up, click here.

To read about the launch on CNN Money, click here.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Sourcefire, Inc., a leader in Cybersecurity, recently announced its Virtual 3D Partner Program, providing cloud computing companies and OEMs the ability to leverage the new Sourcefire Virtual 3D Sensor™ and Sourcefire Virtual Defense Center™ to efficiently and effectively increase customer protection.

The Sourcefire® Virtual 3D Partner Program is designed to provide hardware, software and services companies with virtual security solutions to address their customer’s critical requirements. The company is currently forging relationships with:

• Cloud computing companies – Providing these companies with the ability to easily add a virtual security sensor into their existing cloud, allowing the vendor to monitor and manage the appliance to protect customer information residing in the cloud.
• Virtual OEMs – Enabling companies that are already delivering virtual solutions or hardware with additional processing ability to add Sourcefire’s complementary security capabilities.
• Traditional channel partners – Allowing them to easily add a Sourcefire virtual security appliance, pre-loaded onto an existing server from other vendors.

“We’re very excited about the capabilities of Sourcefire’s new Virtual 3D Sensor and their Virtual 3D Partner Program,” said Pat O'Day, Chief Technology Officer at BlueLock. “Sourcefire is making it very easy to integrate their security technology into our cloud-based offerings and provide our clients with an additional level of protection for their hosted VMware applications.”

The Sourcefire Virtual 3D Partners can utilize the recently announced Virtual 3D Sensor and Virtual Defense Center, which provide users with the flexibility to deploy the company’s leading security solutions within their virtual environments for increased protection of both physical and virtual assets. These new virtual appliances can inspect traffic between virtual machines, while also making it easier to deploy and manage sensors at remote sites where resource may be limited. They also enable partners to easily implement Sourcefire’s leading security solutions on existing customer hardware or within a cloud infrastructure for increased protection.

“While security is a top concern for every organization, many require solutions that can be placed on existing hardware or in the cloud,” said Matt McCormick, Vice President of Business Development at Sourcefire. “With the launch of Sourcefire’s new Virtual 3D Sensor and Virtual Defense Center, we are enabling partners to easily provide customers with value-added protection without requiring new hardware investments.”

To read other BlueLock posts on cloud security click here.

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. 

The advantages of cloud computing include making IT more flexible, efficient and easier to use.  While the key benefits of cloud computing are the ability to pay as you go or pay per use, capacity on demand and rapid provisioning, some may say that the current lack of interoperability is a detriment to the growing cloud computing industry.  Many are asking for a set of standards that let cloud networks talk and work together.

The talks of interoperability open a can of worms for those companies who aren’t exactly “excited” about allowing that kind of technology to be incorporated into their offerings.  The main thing that cloud interoperability creates is an environment where vendor lock-in is basically obsolete.  If your clouds can talk – say your BlueLock, Amazon and Skytap environments – then there’s no reason that everything would have to say at the same space forever.  If you all of the sudden decided that BlueLock was perfect for your production environment and Skytap was all you needed for test/dev, you could just have your Amazon stuff “talk” to your other environments and just move everything to those two, no longer requiring any engagement with Amazon.  That is, in a perfect interoperable world.  So what that means is that you’re no longer locked in at Amazon, or any other firm.  This is perfect for a client, but not particularly for the vendor who doesn’t want to risk losing you or simply losing out on a chunk of money they’re already getting.

So where will the cloud computing industry go?  Ultimately, I believe that for anything to succeed you must follow what the users/buyers want and therefore we’ll see more and more interoperability technologies emerge.  Earlier this year, BlueLock partnered with rPath in a webinar focused on blending clouds with the rPath Management Console (formerly called the rBuilder) and in the webinar we demoed movement between Amazon EC2 and the BlueLock Cloud.  So I think the technology is getting there – at least there are some smart people out there working on it.

What exactly is cloud interoperability? John Brodkin recently wrote a post in Network World on cloud interoperability and discussed some of the goals on the subject:

• Moving virtual machines and workloads from one cloud compute service to another
• Single sign-on for users who access multiple cloud services
• Ability to deploy and provision resources from multiple cloud services with a single management tool
• Letting one application span multiple cloud services (such as a storage service from one cloud provider and compute capacity from another)
• Allowing data exchange between clouds
• Letting a private cloud application seamlessly obtain resources from a public cloud when excess capacity is needed

I think what rPath is working towards with their Management Console is addressing many of these things and in time we’ll see more and more of what “the people want.”