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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I entered my career in the early 1990’s, software companies were making huge strides with the development of the Microsoft windows operating system.  As we began to reach the second half of the 90’s, internet-based companies were beginning to explode everywhere.  It’s an era that for many remember it being call the dot.com and later the “dot.bomb era”.  It was appropriately named as start-up after start-up software companies launched new products to market with monies invested by investors who thought they had found the next goldmine. Finding investment in your new dot.com was as easy as showing a demo to some investors (so it seemed). 
 
Rumors of start-up companies who had limited success and were purchased by another company for record returns, later motivated this frenzy between investors and start-ups.  Just as we experienced in the last few years with the real-estate market, the market in the late 90’s adjusted and record number of technology companies folded.  Investors got weary and companies over-spending habits caught up to them.  Customers got burned by buying underdeveloped/vaporware applications that were over-promised and under-delivered.  The market plummeted. 

4 years ago when BlueLock started this mission of offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS), they went to market there were very few companies nationally who were leveraging virtualization and providing cloud hosting services that leveraged OpEx over CapEx.  For four years BlueLock has worked with VMware to help aid in the development of this model.  Four years later, with many successes and even a few failures over the past few years, BlueLock is a smooth running machine and is feeling the rewards of being an early evangelist of IaaS.  

As the idea of cloud computing continues to go mainstream, history may be on the verge of repeating itself.  As in the dot.com era, everything was about dot.com and moving to the web.  Today everything is about cloud computing and making sure you are a cloud provider.  You can’t skip a rock without hitting a technology/colo hosting company who now claims to have a “cloud offering”.  Buy some licenses of VMware, put in two SANS, place it all in a rack, and VOILA - a new cloud provider! 

It is true that technically many of these companies are cloud providers, as equal as it was true that many of those dot.bombs were technically software companies.  As software companies in the late 90’s learned, it takes more than having a basic product and a good sales guy to sustain business.  Now the new “cloud” companies are learning the same.  I have talked to a handful of these new “cloud hosting” companies who after investing close to a million dollars in cloud infrastructure now realize that they can’t sustain the capital constraints. 

I am not stating that every company besides BlueLock who claims to be a cloud provider is falsely representing themselves.  There are some very good companies out there, who are doing this the right way.  I am stating there just aren’t many who are doing it right and may not survive.  The crux of this post is - be careful where your company invests its monies.  While the providers you talk to might all sound the same, look beyond the words and look at the core of the business to get to the real truth.  Is this “cloud” just a rack in their collocation business?  You might be putting your trust in the next dot cloud computing bomb. 

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.

Some may argue cloud computing, specifically infrastructure-as-a-service, is moving towards a commodity (I think we're already seeing this) - but does that mean relationships don't matter? I say no. No matter how commoditized the Infrastructure-as-a-service or "cloud hosting" markets get, trust and relationships will continue to be a major factor in choosing and staying with a provider. 

Trust is king.  Clients want a brand they can trust and a provider who cares.  We've seen many prospects choose BlueLock because of the VMware brand, clients like Pathagility and Indigo BioSystems.  Indigo BioSystems, a technology provider for scientific research organizations, was at Amazon EC2, but just couldn't do what they needed - they needed VMware.  At BlueLock they got the security and management they needed on a VMware platform; two things they didn't find at Amazon.  Pathagility, a web-based platform for generating, managing and reporting on clinical data, needed security and compliance as well - on a platform built for mission-critical applications. They chose BlueLock because of the relationship (and VMware, of course).

The VMware brand is also the reason why vCloud Express has been such a hit.  People are out there looking for a self-service platform based on VMware, and now they have it.

Commodity or not, trust is and will continue to be king in the cloud.

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.

BlueLock and LOGiQ3, a BPO service provider to life insurance and reinsurance companies, have been working together for a couple years now.  When LOGiQ3 came to BlueLock, they were looking for a secure, compliant and scalable cloud hosting solution.  The company had an aggressive go-to-market strategy and they had limited time to build and implement their IT infrastructure, let alone ensure it was compliance and bullet-proof. They didn't want to spend the capital on the equipment, labor and expertise needed to get to where the were going, so they chose to outsource their IT infrastructure needs.  

Why did the cloud (specifically BlueLock) make sense for LOGiQ3?

• No upfront costs or lengthy contracts
• The BlueLock Cloud is based on VMware virtualization technology
• BlueLock is well-equipped to handle their enterprise-level production needs
• The security is solid
• The data center is SAS 70 Type II
• 99.99% uptime guarantee
• Geographically diverse data centers for redundancy and disaster recovery needs

To learn more about the solution BlueLock put in place for LOGiQ3 download the case study.

Over the past two years, BlueLock and Apparatus have built a strong and dynamic partnership with their complimentary virtualization and data center expertise.  By joining forces, the teams are able to work together to wrap services around BlueLock's cloud hosting solutions to better serve clients.

Due to our great success together, VMware asked BlueLock (a VMware Hosting Provider) and Apparatus, to take the stage during the keynote session at this year's VMware Partner Exchange to share our story in front of 2500 conference attendees. The VMware Partner Exchange is an annual partner conference dedicated to educating and enabling partners for success with VMware. 

Brian Wolff, VP of Sales at BlueLock and Casey Watson, Chief Evangelist at Apparatus went on stage and showed the virtualization community at the Las Vegas conference what Indiana's technology Community is all about - innovation, trust and execution.  That's right, Indianapolis is a virtualization hot-bed.

The week of the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) was one of great accomplishment.  The conference started out on Monday Feb. 8, the day BlueLock launched BlueLock CloudSuite, a comprehensive offering of cloud hosting solutions.  The news took off and the PEX excitement began.

Kim and I drew large crowds at the BlueLock booth as we challenged visitors to test their "Cloud IQ."  Many walked away with enough points to earn a Starbucks gift card while other weren't so lucky and had some studying to do!

While we manned the booth, BlueLock's executives kept busy with many of our current partners such as Consonus, F5, DoubleTake Software, and of course, VMware representatives.  BlueLock's engineering and development squad, which was filled with a few new faces to the BlueLock team, found great value in the training breakouts and the time they spent with other virtualization experts from around the globe.

Tuesday morning, BlueLock's VP of Sales, Brian Wolff and Casey Watson of Apparatus took the stage at the PEX keynote address to spread their knowledge and expertise around creating meaningful and successful partnerships between cloud hosting providers (BlueLock) and managed service providers (Apparatus).  BlueLock and Apparatus have worked together in a number of cloud hosting projects with great success.  That success stemmed from each company doing what they do best while creating a partnership of understanding and strong communication.  Brian and Casey's participation in the PEX keynote helped to build heavy traffic at the BlueLock booth, which made Kim and I very happy!

Tuesday evening, BlueLock CEO John Qualls, CTO Pat O'Day, and Chairman Mark Hill attended an exclusive dinner to receive BlueLock's honors as Americas VMware Service Providers Program Partner of the Year and Global runner-up.  The following morning, the entire BlueLock team gathered at the regional breakout for the Americas where the award was announced in front of the entire congregation.


BlueLock was thrilled to receive such an honor.  We couldn't have done it without our expert team and our faithful clients who have made us who we are.  Congratulations to the entire BlueLock family and our friends, our clients, for a great year of accomplishment in 2009.  Here's to a great 2010!

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.

So what is enterprise cloud computing?  How is it so different from (regular) cloud computing?

Jill Tummler Singer explains that enterprise cloud computing is "a behind-the-firewalls use of commercial, Internet-based cloud technologies specifically focused on one company’s or one business environment’s computing needs." 

It's a "a controlled, internal place that offers the rapid and flexible provisioning of compute power, storage, software, and security services to meet your mission’s demands.  It combines the processes of a best in class ITIL organization with the agility of managed, global infrastructure to make your IT faster, better, cheaper, and safer. Enterprise cloud computing gives your business agility, survivability, sustainability, and security."

Many enterprises with highly secure data and strict up-time and performance needs feel that cloud computing is out of the question.  Most of these companies questioning the abilities of cloud computing services are companies in the government, life sciences and financial services industries.  Enterprise cloud computing is the answer for them.  They need tailored, dedicated high performance environments to provide the benefits of cloud computing with the security and assurance of enterprise-class platforms.

BlueLock is a top VMware hosting provider - we use proven enterprise-class VMware virtualization technology to serve our clients no matter what industry or need level, but we are able to tailor and architect high performance, secure and compliant cloud computing environments specifically for our enterprise-level clients.  BlueLock has been extremely successful serving clients in the government, life sciences and financial services, helping them to realize the advantages of cloud computing.

To learn more about BlueLock's enterprise cloud computing services contact us here.

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.

(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.

I love my job. As a client specialist at BlueLock, I get to spend the majority of my time working with the innovative companies that are producing the products and services of the future and, at the same time, pushing the limits of cloud computing hosting.

In all of my conversations with BlueLock clients, one thing is clear:

There is massive demand for a cloud computing platform, specifically for testing and development, that is cost-effective and integrates well with production environments.

Many businesses have data and processing that doesn't require a fully-managed cloud hosting service at four nines (99.99%) uptime.

Some companies offer services that seem like they could be a good answer for this problem. IBM recently released Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, which seems like it might be a competitor of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform.

The problem with some of these test/dev clouds is that they can't support VMware hosted environments. This means that, with test/dev clouds like EC2 and IBM's new offering, a company that is running their production environment on VMware can't necessarily integrate their test and production environments seamlessly -- an important consideration when doing a cloud computing comparison.

Enter vCloud Express...

One of the cool tools that the BlueLock engineers are tinkering with is a VMware-based, pay-as-you-go option that will be ideal for companies that need an environment that is dedicated to test and development. We announced vCloud Express back at the start of September, and since then, have received an overwhelming number of signups for the beta-version. In fact, we acually completely filled up all of the beta test slots!

I'm excited for the public launch of BlueLock's vCloud Express, because we'll be able to offer clients the perfect solution for their test/dev needs. Until then, I'll keep you posted as we continue to progress. 

In order to continue the conversation about getting started in the cloud, let’s move on to step number two: comparing cloud computing vendors (to determine which best fits your needs based on the infrastructure and expertise inventory you took).

Getting Ready to Compare Cloud Computing Providers:
After looking into the amount of IT infrastructure you currently house and run as well as the people and expertise you need to manage it you should have a pretty good idea of what it takes to keep your company up and running.  From there you need to decide what kind of cloud computing solution you’re looking to use.  Is it something simple like an additional software-as-a-service account?  Or are you hoping to use PaaS to access some infrastructure?  Or better yet, does your company want to outsource its entire infrastructure to the cloud?

There are many options when it comes to “moving to the cloud.”  For this post we’ll focus on the migration to an infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud.  One easy first step is test and development.  This is a low-risk way to test out cloud providers and their capabilities while also making a decision around the type of infrastructure you prefer.  Do you want enterprise-level VMware hosting or is Amazon EC2 for you?  Do you want to be able to migrate between clouds and providers and if so, what might that look like and what additional platforms would that require?

While engaging in a test/dev environment, developers should focus on testing their application’s functions, performance and scalability.  Keep in mind that most applications can be tested in a public cloud, but that some for technical or cultural reasons should be kept in-house, unless you are able to secure the type of SLA that would allow you to migrate those “special” applications.

Now let’s say that you’re ready to make that infrastructure move to the cloud (sometimes this may mean you skip the whole test/dev show).  There are four main items to consider when comparing cloud computing vendors.


The SLA is the most important item you need to compare vendors against.  If you have sensitive data or applications that require high uptime capabilities, you would be wasting your time to look at any vendor with and SLA below 99.99%. But if you just need a test and development environment it wouldn’t make sense to pay the premium for such high availability (higher availability = higher price).  Find out your uptime needs and then locate the vendors who offer the SLA you need.

Technical offerings are the next determining factor.  Depending on which kind of infrastructure you prefer (if you have a preference) you would need to figure out which providers use which technologies.  For instance, do you need enterprise-level VMware hosting technology or does your organization want to use something more along the lines of Microsoft Hyper-V?  If you have a preference work around that, and if not, let’s move straight to #3 – Control.

How much control do you want of the infrastructure?  Do you have your own people to manage your infrastructure or are you on a hiring freeze and need your cloud provider to manage the infrastructure.  There are a number of options in the cloud – some vendors provide managed cloud hosting services (like BlueLock) and others just provide the infrastructure while you manage it.  Whatever your preference, there is a vendor for you.

Lastly, and most obviously – once you’ve compiled a list of vendors who provide the SLA, technical specs, and right amount of control, you’re left to look at pricing.  By now, you may only have a couple cloud vendors left, but you should be in a great place to compare and make the right choice.

While at VMworld 2009, we took some time to talk with some of our cloud computing partners such as Intel, F5 and Shavlik.  As a VMware hosting provider, it was great to attend such an amazing conference focused on VMware virtualization technology and the advancements VMware and their partners are making in the virtualization and cloud computing realm.  Watch this video to hear some words from our partners at the event.

Rick Vanover ran a very interesting post on TechRepublic regarding the key differences between Amazon EC2 and VMware’s vCloud Express, which BlueLock, a VMware hosting provider, is participating in.  vCloud Express was publicly launched at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.  BlueLock and four other cloud computing providers where chosen as launch partners to provide the new cloud computing platform.

Amazon EC2 is based on Citrix XenServer technology and VMware’s cloud offering is targeted directly at Amazon.  vCloud Express is obviously based on VMware virtualization technology as well as their vCloud API.

Snapshot of the differences between pricing and offerings:

I’m a little confused why he closes his post by saying that AWS is currently the winner.  Based on what he’s stated above about the offerings, I would say it seems as though VMware’s vCloud Express is the winner.  Ah, because its beta and there are still a few limitations here and there.  Watch out Amazon, vCloud Express could give you a run for your money when it graduates from beta status.

To learn more about vCloud Express, click here.

To read Vanover’s full post, click here.

North Carolina based Consonus announced a cloud computing solution designed for businesses that have rigorous uptime requirements but don’t have the capital or time to build additional capacity themselves.  The Consonus Virtual Infrastructure Service (VIS) is hosted and managed in a fully-redundant and secure SAS 70 Type II data center and features an integrated disaster recovery solution.  Data center and managed service provider Consonus has partnered with Infrastructure-as-a-service provider BlueLock to offer the new VIS program.


BlueLock has been providing infrastructure as a service as a VMware hosting partner since 2006.  We're very excited to work with Consonus and help them add on to their service portfolio.

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.