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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recently the swell folks at The Register commented on AWS' latest cluster computing initiative centered around High Performance Computing. In a nutshell this differs from other EC2 instances by providing dedicated servers with two 2.93 GHz, quad-core Xeon X5570s and 23 GB of memory attached to a 10Gb switching layer. Previously you didn't have dedicated hardware... you floated in a pool of resources, hoping that today would be a good day. While the resulting performance gains from dedicated hardware may be significant over the floating-in-the-sea approach, in the end you are just getting a higher performance infrastructure and not a high performance infrastructure.

The annoncements and analysis made me chuckle a bit. For BlueLock to drop another slew of 144 GB blades into a chassis is standard operating procedure. Does that make us HPC as well? For us private clouds and dedicated hardware has always been the order of the day. I find it very telling that the decisions BlueLock made years ago are just now emerging as popular trends for Infrastructure as a Service today.

When evaluating managed IT hosting or cloud hosting providers, it's always good to look at performance not just in terms of "small," "medium" or "large." It's not even how much compute or memory you throw at the problem. Network and filesystem I/O (especially for cloud computing) is a huge factor in overall cluster performance, and one really needs to be at peace with your physical hardware to truly take advantage of your virtual solutions.

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

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

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

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

Last night's episode of This Week in Cloud Computing features BlueLock's CTO and Co-Founder Pat O'Day. In the episode the subject of application & virtual machine portability comes up several times and Pat discusses one aspect of VM deployment: allowing several virtual machines to be deployed together as a singular, orchestrated virtual application solution. In VMware parlance this kind of logical grouping is considered a vApp, or virtual application solution.

The distinction between vApps and VMs can get a bit foggy and unclear at times. Things become a bit clearer when you take a look at the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) specification, which outlines the metadata that describes a vApp. In a nutshell: vApps are ultimately not definied by the virtual machines that run within them, but instead is a way of telling your infrastructure how VMs can play nicely with each other. Should the exist within an isolated network? How should IP addresses be allocated? Do you start the database server before the application server? Where did that other sock go? The OVF format lets your cloud infrastructure know all the facts necessary during deployments, shutdowns and re-starts.

This can be especially handy for disaster recovery. Imagine a meteor strikes your primary cloud hosting facility. Even though your operations staff now has super-powers, your data center is toast. Luckily you had the presence of mind to keep your vApps in an off-site data center that automagically activates when the primary data center goes offline. Thanks to the vApp's metadata, the disaster recovery site knows how to start an entire n-tier web application in an orderly fashion so that dependent services don't start out-of-order.

This kind of virtual application meta-data is being continuously extended to include service levels and quality of service data so that vApps can be deployed or even migrate to the most ideal resource pool either based on cost, performance or a mix between the two. This specification is evolving, and so are the use cases and technology stack that supports it. As the cloud ecosystem matures we will continue to see innovative ways to focus on not just the virtual machine, but the entire virtual solution.

As a systems administrator working the BlueLock Support Desk, I handle requests from a variety of clients. As a result, I have an opportunity to get to know our clientele better than other staff. It's a vital role and offers more challenges than standard help desk work. In a typical day, I will handle firewall change requests, virtual machine performance issues, IP address assignment, research, hard drive expansion and other tasks. No two days are the same and the level of activity varies from hour to hour.

Our primary goal is always to provide excellent customer service. One of my goals to that end is to be as pleasant and reassuring as possible. Though I may not be able to find a quick solution for a given issue, I have resources readily available to advance the process. Keeping the lines of communication open between involved parties is a special challenge. If a request is overly complex, I may need to involve the Engineering Team and administrative staff. The support desk acts as a coordinator for these tasks, ensuring progress toward an acceptable solution.

Virtualization and the Cloud are still a part of the wild frontier and I strive to help ease the transition for new adopters. Whether I'm explaining how VMware stores files or detailing the backup process, I consider the comfort level of my audience. I answer many questions over the phone, but others may require exchanging documentation. Our flexibility helps build goodwill and confidence in our offerings.

To help our clients achieve the true benefits of Cloud computing we have to bring something special to the table every day. These roles that I've detailed all go toward creating a special relationship. When a client signs on the dotted line with BlueLock we become a part of their organization start building that relationship immediately. By fostering that common connection we are making a serious commitment to success for all involved.

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.

The BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkeys Use Case contest begins today!

Former, current and new BlueLock vCloud Express Beta users will compete for these prizes:

• The first ten submissions will receive a stuffed cloud monkey
  
• The top five finalists will receive a FlipCam which they will use (and keep!) to create a recognition video for the application to compete for the Grand Prize - an Apple iPad!
  
• The Grand Prize winner will receive the engraved Apple iPad!

Open for submissions by current, former and new Beta users, the contest runs from June 16 – September 6 and looks to surface the most innovative use cases of BlueLock’s vCloud Express.

During the 12-week contest, BlueLock vCloud Express developers enter by filling out a simple questionnaire on the BlueLock Web site between June 16 and July 7 2010 that includes a description of the BlueLock vCloud Express use case and why it deserves to win. Participants can promote their own use case through Twitter and other social media outlets. Submissions will be voted on by an open community of voters and judged by BlueLock and VMware on cloud applicability, creativity/innovation, time savings and cost savings to select the top five use cases. The first ten submissions will receive a BlueLock “Cloud Monkey” stuffed animal and the five finalists will receive FlipCams with the option to document their use cases in a two minute “Recognition Video.” Finalists who submit Recognition Videos will then be judged by BlueLock and VMware for the Grand Prize, with the winner receiving an engraved Apple iPad.

“The functionality of BlueLock vCloud Express has proven to be unique and of value to our clients, driving us to design some of the same features into our other solutions within BlueLock CloudSuite,” said Kim Graham Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, BlueLock. “We are excited to not only learn more about how developers have been using vCloud Express, but to also highlight the most unique and interesting use cases.”

“As a top VMware vCloud service provider partner, BlueLock has been able to help shape vCloud Express as it continues to demonstrate that they are ahead of the curve in understanding their clients’ needs in the evolving cloud computing space,” said Mathew Lodge, Senior Director-Cloud Product Marketing, VMware. “We are looking forward to learning about how beta users have taken advantage of the dynamic combination of the industry-leading VMware platform and BlueLock’s secure and reliable cloud hosting and infrastructure expertise.”

BlueLock vCloud Express is a reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go 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. Users pay only for the compute and storage space they use. Since being selected by VMware as one of only five companies worldwide to offer vCloud Express and launching in September 2009, BlueLock has reached 1,100 beta users of the product.

Participants can be past, current or new BlueLock vCloud Express beta users and can submit more than one application. For additional contest details, visit www.bluelock.com.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

In this series of posts (see Part 1 of the series), I'm looking at moving applications to the cloud and the scalability concerns around that. 

The interesting part is that these problems aren’t unique to cloud computing at all.  On one end of the spectrum, the promise of cloud computing and its expansive computing capacities has led customers to believe that simply moving their application to the cloud is going to solve all of these problems.  On the other end, clients who have very important applications running on-premise are concerned that when they move their applications to the cloud they’ll have to share all that wonderful computational goodness with hundreds or thousands of other clients and their applications’ performance will suffer.  Regardless of which perspective you may be coming from, there are two things to focus on when looking at moving to the cloud.

The first is raw computing capacity.  At BlueLock, we’ve chosen to build our cloud computing platform on VMware virtualization technologies.  One of the benefits of virtualizing applications on VMware is that multiple workloads (running within virtual machines) can be configured to run on very high-end server hardware and storage architectures – perhaps mutli-socket, multi-core server hardware with 32GB or 64GB of RAM and high-performance SAN(s).  Those physical hosts can then be combined into clusters and that computing capacity can be even further aggregated.   It’s important to understand how that computing capacity is assigned to your application(s).

Is infrastructure being “over provisioned”?  Since it’s possible to abstract the underlying hardware from the workload running within a VM it’s also very easy to do things like allocate more memory or compute power to the VM than is actually available on the underlying physical hardware. 

Can computing power be scaled (up and down) if needed?  As the business grows, the demand on application performance may grow with it?  It should be easy to assign and re-assign things like CPU and RAM resources.

How high can the underlying hardware platform scale?  Different IaaS and cloud computing models are based on different technologies – VPS (Virtual Private Servers), dedicated physical hardware and virtualization platforms like VMware all work differently, for example.  How much CPU and RAM in total (usually different based on the underlying model being used) can be assigned to the application(s) has an impact on the decisions you make about scaling.

Within the BlueLock IaaS Cloud, compute clusters are carefully divided into building blocks called “cores” and these cores are assigned to customers – never assigning more “cores” to a computer cluster than are actually available.  This goes hand-in-hand with dedicated versus shared computing models – just throwing everyone in the computer pool without regard to expected performance isn’t a good idea.  It’s important to ensure that the capacity to application(s) is both dedicated and somewhat dynamic.  At BlueLock, once one or more of these “cores” is assigned to a client they are combined together into a resource pool.  This pool of CPU and RAM can then be divided among one or more virtual machines, assigning priority to different workloads if necessary and providing the ability (if needed) change how much of the resource pool each VM is allowed to consume.  Behind the scenes, cool features of VMware’s virtualization platform like VMware DRS move VMs around from one physical host in the cluster to another without taking VMs offline.  This ensures that a particular physical host is never over provisioned and that, if needed, the amount of CPU and RAM assigned to a particular VM is always available to it.

This model of cores and dedicated resource pools, along with the abstraction of physical hardware from the resources assigned to a virtual machine, allows clients to provision (and pay for) only what they need.  As their needs change, additional cores can be added to grow resource pools and add to their application’s overall computing capacity.

In the next post, I'll look at the second item to focus on - application architecture.

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

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

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

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

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.