Cloud Computing Viewpoint

Could Data Centers Become Black Sheep?

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

Could they? Could it be out of Vogue to operate your own data center? Current developments in Corporate Social Responsibility and a maturing data center marketplace are starting to drive these changes. For many, this could be a discussion about the pink elephant in the room.

Remote Testing: the Achilles Heel of Cloud Services

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

Cloud services provide a new and promising opportunity for Enterprises to address the growing complexity of Information Technology (IT). The availability of smartphones and the expectation of immediate and simple access to both private and company specific information on a global basis are driving demand for centralization of IT services and the related competence required to support these effectively. Cloud service providers have established the necessary competence and IT infrastructure to deliver on these demands, but there is one potential Achilles heel that can present a challenge; assuring cloud service quality and performance.

Cloud Computing: How It Affects Enterprise and Performance Monitoring

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:30:00 EST

In recent times, cloud computing has played a dominant role in the industry. Whether you feel positively or negatively about it, it is undeniable that cloud monitoring, like any other component in your network, needs to be monitored – perhaps more than any other. To more old-fashioned solutions for monitoring, the cloud creates a number of obstacles: you do not have ownership of its hardware, it is not run on your network and when problems or glitches occur you have no control over them.

The Magic of Mobile Cloud Debunked

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:30:00 EST

It’s like unicorns…and rainbows! #mobile

Mark my words, the term “mobile” is the noun (or is it a verb? Depends on the context, doesn’t it?) that will replace “cloud” as the most used and abused and misapplied term in technology in the coming year.

If I was to find a pitch in my inbox that did not someway invoke the term “mobile” I’d be surprised. The latest one to catch my eye was pitching a survey on the “mobile cloud”. The idea, apparently, around this pitch involving “mobile cloud” is the miraculous capability bestowed upon cloud deployed services to automagically perform synchronization and storage tasks.

The proliferation of mobile devices has created demand for services that allow users to access personal data and content from any device at any time. Mobile cloud services are emerging that synchronise data across multiple mobile devices with centralised storage in the cloud.

While the statement regarding demand is true, the follow-on assertion is at best inaccurate, at worst it is false. There are no services, in the cloud or anywhere else, that can synchronize data across multiple devices. Oh, services may be emerging that claim to do so, but they can’t and don’t. Without fail, services “in the cloud” are invoked from the client – each individual client, mind you – and without that initiating event a cloud service would no more be able to synchronize data than previous incarnations of mobile services when we called them hosted applications.

SERVICE-SIDE PUSH

This is because the underlying technology used to access these services is still, regardless of the interface presented, the web. It’s an API. It’s HTTP. It’s a client-server paradigm that hasn’t changed very much since it rose to ascendancy as the preferred application architectural model back in the last century. The reason SPDY has started to gain attention and mindshare is not necessarily because it’s faster (that’s a plus, mind you, but it’s not the whole enchilada) but because of its bidirectional communication capabilities. SPDY can push to clients in a way that HTTP has never really been able to do, though many have tried. They’ve come close with approximations and solutions that to the untrained user appear to be a “push” but in reality they are little more than “dragging out a pull response.” And yet SPDY is still constrained in the same way as traditional HTTP: the client must initiate the connection.

The capability to push from the service-side does not and will not imbue “cloud services” of any kind with the ability to initiate actions, because the “cloud” cannot push to a client unless a connection is already established. And who initiates connections? That’s right, clients.

The only entity that could make a claim that it could initiate anything on a mobile device would be a service provider. That’s because they are the only ones who can actually find and connect to a device on-demand – and then it’s only their devices on their mobile networks. And then they’d best only do that if it’s (1) part of their terms of service or (2) the user specifically checked a box allowing them (or their service) to do so.

But consider the impracticality of “service-side push” to clients to synchronize data. Client devices are, well, mobile. That means their connectivity is not assured. “Always on” is a misnomer. Yes, the device is always on in a way the PC has never been, but it’s also in stand-by mode, which often means the radio – its means of communication – is off. This little fact is a problem for performance-focused IT, and it’s even more troublesome to those who’d like to create a service-side “push”. So Bob uploads a photo to a “cloud storage” service and the service wants to synchronize it with Bob’s other (configured by Bob, of course) devices. So the service starts sending out messages to try to connect to Bob’s other devices.

Right. One is turned off and the other is in flight mode to prevent his three-year old from purchasing God only knows what apps through the Android market and the third? It’s in standby, the radio is off.

That’s not the way it works today and it certainly shouldn’t be the way it works in the future. It’s a waste of processing power, of bandwidth, of resources in general. The client will eventually be online and will open a session with the “cloud service” and ask it for updates.

MOBILE CLOUD

Whether applications use web technologies because of the reality that clients are not “always on” or because it’s the model (client initiated and more importantly to them, controlled) most familiar and acceptable to consumers, reality is that mobile devices and clients leverage web technologies to store, share, and synchronize data across services. The “mobile cloud” and its alleged ability to “synchronize data across devices” is little more than cloud washing, as is the term “mobile cloud” itself which some have tried to claim is defined by the way in which a device accesses its services. From differentiation between network type (wired versus wireless) to the client-model (thin client browser versus thick client application), some continue to try to make the case that there exists some “mobile cloud” that is completely different than that of the “regular old cloud.”

There is not. The web is the web, the presentation layer of an application (thick or thin) does not define its server-side technological model, and service-side push (and control) remains yet another marketing phrase used to describe capabilities that is not technically accurate and which ultimately sets unrealistic expectations for consumers – and in the enterprise, IT.

The notion that you’d build a “mobile cloud” that is somehow separate from the “regular cloud” is preposterous precisely because it contradicts the purported purpose for building it: synchronization and “access from anywhere.” It’s that “anywhere” requirement that makes a mobile cloud as realistic as unicorns. If I upload a photo to <insert photo service here> I should be able to access – and thus synchronize – from any device, and that includes my laptop or desktop PC, the latter of which is certainly not “mobile”.

These assertions that a mobile cloud exist only serve to reinforce the heretofore unknown Clark’s Third (and a half) Law: Any sufficiently advanced web technology is indistinguishable from cloud in the eyes of the marketing department.

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i-Technology in 2012: Five Industry Predictions

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:00:00 EST

Cloud Computing Journal asks a variety of members of the ecosystem, from CIOs to independent consultants to marketeers, about where the i-Technology industry is headed next...here are their views on what's in store in 2012, starting with Nigel Dunn, Principal at Calx Europe – a European Business Acceleration Company specialising in working with vendors, service providers and channels in developing and implementing plans for growth in the Cloud market.

Cloud Expo Takeaways: Cloud Policy and Governance is the Missing Link

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:00:00 EST

With 9th Cloud Expo at Silicon Valley's Santa Clara Convention Center now finished, Cloud Computing Journal asked a variety of industry stakeholders what their Top Three takeaways were from the event, now that the many thousands of delegates are back at their desks and their companies, leveraging the knowledge and the insights that they gained through the extensive technical/strategic program and the huge number of booths on the Expo floor.

Cloud Expo Takeaways: The Emerging Critical Role of Cloud Security

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 04:00:00 EST

The Future of Cloud Computing: Industry Predictions for 2012

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:00:00 EST

With 9th Cloud Expo - Cloud Expo Silicon Valley - in full swing at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, what's being said about the future landscape of cloud computing? In this round-up we asked a variety of members of the cloud computing ecosystem, from CIOs to independent consultants to marketeers...here are their views on what's in store in 2012. Listed as one of the Top 100 Bloggers in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem, Peter joined Salesforce in 2007 after 18 years as a senior contributor to the enterprise IT journals eWEEK and PC Week. Based in the Los Angeles area, he works with IT professionals and ISVs to build a global community based on Force.com: the salesforce.com Platform Cloud.

Cloud Computing Opinion: More Froth, But More Clarity Too

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 08:30:00 EDT

The cloud stack market continues to go through waves and gyrations, but increasingly now the future is becoming more clear. As I have been writing about for a while, the number of competitors in the market for “cloud stacks” is totally unsustainable. There are really only four “camps” now in the cloud stack business that matter.

Taking the Pulse of Cloud Computing, Fall 2011

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 06:45:00 EDT

The markets may be melting, but Cloud Computing continues to attract headlines, VC dollars, M&A activity, and more. So let's take a quick look at what's being said, written, and done about the Cloud...now that we have reached Fall 2011.

Cloud, The Tau Index, & The World's IT Leaders

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 08:53:00 EDT

Several months ago I wrote about the Tau Index, a measure I created to find the countries who are the most aggressive in deploying IT. My idea was to aggregate certain measurements to level the playing field - it's easy enough to find the countries with the world's largest IT budgets, but tougher to find which are being the most aggressive with respect to the size of their population and economy. Bangladesh emerged at the top of the heap, followed by several countries in Asia, Northern Africa, and Eastern Europe. This was no surprise, for it is these regions that are the most dynamic economically today, while the world's major powers continue to tread water. See It at Cloud Expo West! But the Tau Index is a rough measure, and I've been working to refine it. I plan to announce all-new results at an Enterprise 2.0 event in Manila November 3, then at Cloud Expo West in Santa Clara CA the following week. Add Cloud Computing to the Mix The key facet of the new report will be to track how Cloud Computing is being deployed. My original report covered 80+ countries, and I was able to discern a Top 25 from that group. I don't expect to be able to include as many countries with the new data set; for now I am concentrating on the few countries that made my Top 25 and are also among the so-called "Next Eleven" (N-11) countries. The Philippines, where I've been on a long-term visit, is in that group, as are other Southeast Asian nations. How should I track Cloud Computing? My idea is to assign a value of between 1 and 4 to perhaps 20 specific aspects of the Cloud, multiply those values by the percentage of people who use them, then season an overall Cloud Computing Factor into the original recipe. For example, the use of gmail and similar Cloudmail would have a value of 1. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. would carry a value of 2, Salesforce and VMWare a value of 3, AWS a value of 4. The idea is that a high percentage of SaaS or IaaS in a country would carry more weight than simply having a lot of people on Yahoo Mail or Twitter. That's the rough outline. I have all the details in at least three places in my office. Please tweet me or email me with your input. In particular, I'm surveying people to determine the optimal weighting of all the Cloud Computing factors, and also to determine how heavily to weigh Cloud Computing overall. The world is looking into the mirror at a very scary economic picture today. Can we cut through all the partisan-based fingerpointing and realize that increasing productivity has always been the key to economic growth. To me, there is nothing more potentially productive to the global economy than Cloud Computing. http://www.twitter.com/strukhoff

"Mr. Y" Ignores Cloud Computing

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:50:00 EDT

The Washington DC crowd has been roiled in recent weeks by an article written by "Mr. Y," a pair of Naval officers who think the US has become too paranoid about terrorism, too spendthrift with its military, and too cavalier about the future of educating its children. The reports cites "a kind of subculture of despair and hopelessness" in the national spirit. The article is meant to be a long-coming book-end to an article published in 1946 under the pseudonym "X," who in reality was George Kennan, the mastermind of the "containment" strategy that ultimately appeared to have played a major role in bringing down the Soviet Union. It was too much to hope for an appearance of the term "Cloud Computing" in this report. As it is, the word "technology" appears only twice. But that's too be expected; the level of knowledge and dialog among even very intelligent people about new ideas from the wacky folks in Silicon Valley and like-minded areas around the globe has been abysmal for a long time. I wouldn't expect even very intelligent folks from Washington to grok the full implications of the Cloud, even as one of them, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has done so (as I ceaselessly point out in my columns). It does seem as if these two fellows, one a US Navy Captain and one a Marine Corps Colonel, are on a track with which most Americans would agree. They appear to be advocating a return in the US to the can-do optimism that launched the country into world pre-eminence almost a century ago. So I'll read the report in detail and report what I think. I'm hoping it is as revelatory as the authors intended, and not as simplistic as I fear. In any case, maybe they can then take the next step and advocate the specific benefits of what innumerable US companies are now developing with the Cloud.

Cloud Computing's Datacenters: How Safe is Safe?

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:11:00 EDT

A question came up recently at a Cloud Computing conference in Manila: given the Philippines' history of natural disasters, how confident can investors really be about building mission-critical datacenters in the country? One member of a special panel noted that there were no datacenter or call-center outages in the Philippines during the Ondoy and Peping typhoon disasters in late 2009. Another noted, “if your datacenter goes down here, then you have a lot bigger problems than your datacenter going down.” This comment was, unfortunately, prescient given the ongoing disaster in northern Japan. The catastrophic failure of nuclear power plants in the Ring of Fire is indeed a bigger problem, while also focusing on the question of building datacenters on such dangerous ground. Global Danger Zones Without getting pedantic, we must nevertheless ask, “how safe is safe and how dangerous is dangerous?” Certainly California is also in the Ring of Fire, albeit not subject to the subduction quakes that create large, local tsunamis. Seattle, on the other hand, is in a subduction zone similar to those of Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. And peaceful New Zealand's recent catastrophic quake proved that you don't need an 8.0+ subduction shake to have a disaster. Recent flooding in New South Wales, Australia would most certainly have devastated any datacenters in its path. The long, hard winter in the American Northeast and Midwest have shown how even the hardiest of cities can become paralyzed by the elements. And anyone from the American Midwest and South can tell you about the potential of tornadoes to terrorize and obliterate. Where should we put all these datacenters, then? France? How Important a Factor? Despite the scary images and grim prognosis from Japan, so far the nuclear plant “events” are being gauged as a 4 on the 7-point logarithmic INES scale that tries to measure these things. The Chernobyl blast in 1986 is the only 7-point incident so far; Three Mile Island in 1979 was a 5 on this scale. And in the Philippines, a TV poll from March 14 found that 69% of respondents were still in favor of completing a long-abandoned nuclear-power project that was started during the Marcos administration. The Philippines has very expensive power, even as it uses only about 3% of the electricity per capita of North America, Western Europe, or Japan. The dear cost of electricity has been a dealbreaker for many large industrial proposals; without cheaper power, the country will continue to lose out to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The country also suffers from a constitutional limit of 40% foreign ownership for most projects. So basic financial fundamentals will probably trump plate tectonics and the weather when it comes to building the oodles of new datacenters that global Cloud Computing will demand over the next several decades. There are also the issues of latency and privacy. Latency comes into play in financial markets in particular, where performance delays are measured in microseconds. For many companies and industries, “real time” means accounting for the speed of light and measuring datacenter proximity in terms of feet, not miles, let alone thousands of miles. Privacy in particular and data integrity in general are big, politically driven issues that can require datacenters to be located in the country where the data originates. What about your organization? How important is location with respect to a.) potential natural disaster b.) latency c.) data integrity? Goto www.rogerstrukhoff.sys-con.com or www.twitter.com/strukhoff and shoot me an email or tweet.

The US, World's No. 3 Economy? Cloud to the Rescue!

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:15:00 EST

IT buyers and vendors in the coming year will no doubt be focused on data integrity and security, on SLAs, and on whether their commitment to Cloud means virtualizing on-site datacenters and/or moving some things (eg, the webserver) to a third-party. They will no doubt discuss SaaS and whether PaaS and IaaS are starting to mean the same thing. They will analyze vendors, make typical build-buy decisions, and maybe even pursue a strategy or two. An Era of Instability Most managers will be rewarded for keeping their heads down and noses to the grindstone--whether those rewards entail promotions, bonuses, or simply keeping their jobs. Most IT managers (and even executives) are not paid to see the big picture, but they may wish to be aware that in 2011, they are working in the midst of one of the more instable periods in recent world history. The United States was designated as "the world's lone superpower" when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Creation of the dot-com boom and "new economy" in the 90s was built on the foundation of that assumption. The Internet "changed everything." Then 9/11 and the US reaction to it changed everything again. Today, the US economy seems mired, with high unemployment, a hollowed-out manufacturing base, and a public deficit as a percentage of GDP edging up to levels not seen since the late 1940s--with none of the optimism of that era. Now comes a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that paints a picture of a world economy in 2050 that will make this look like a golden era. China #1, India #2, US #3??? Specifically, the report alleges that China will have the world's largest economy, with a GDP of almost $60 billion (compared to about $9 billion today). Worse, the US will not even get the silver medal, but will be in third place behind India, according to this report. Each of these "big three" economies will be at least four times larger than the fourth-place finisher, Brazil, according to this report. Rounding out the top ten will be Japan, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, Germany, and the UK. Turkey, Nigeria, and Vietnam will all have larger economies in 2050 than either Italy or Canada, according to this report. And somehow, South Korea will have slipped from its current 13th place to 17th place. This report is, on the face of it, preposterous. Economic change doesn't simply occur by assuming certain growth rates and extrapolating them. There are huge geopolitical factors involved that trump any sort of arithmetic noodling. And just as "nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition" (in Monty Python's phrase), nobody can reasonably expect what will truly transpire within the next 40 years. Nobody in 1865 could have expected the Great War, the Great Depression, and World War II. Certainly nobody in 1970 could have expected 9/11, or the great oil shocks of the 70s--or, say, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we most certainly still live in a nuclear-armed world that could change forever in a flash. Is Any of This Possible? Potential catastrophe aside, just to take one small example from the PwC report: how will Mexico, which will run out of oil, its primary export, within 30 years, exceed the German economy within 40 years? Further, how will Indonesia--leapfrog France, the UK--and Germany--given its population and environmental pressures, lack of English proficiency, and still-current reputation for corruption? Sure, it's now a member of the G20 group of economies, but still has an economy smaller than the US state of Illinois. And India will have a larger economy than the United States? With a current estimate of 450 million illiterate (or barely literate) people in poverty, an infrastructure that decades behind that of a developed nation, several potential tinderbox local and regional political issues, and a current per-capita income below that of Papua New Guinea? Certainly, it's the hope of technologists everywhere to improve the lives of people and the societies of nations, by creating smarter businesses and more transparent governments. But are the projections in this PwC report possible or desirable? Who's in Charge? American economic and political hegenomy has been a reality for a century now, more or less. It followed centuries of Western European hegenomy, and is seen by Americans as a natural outgrowth of its European roots. And the world is a large ship that simply doesn't turn in the water quickly. For one thing, the world depends to an enormous degree on the $10 trillion annual budget of the US consumer. Everyone knows that this must change, that other countries of the world must sell to themselves and to each other more. But if the US were in fact to become the world's number three economy within a mere 40 years, then something will have gone seriously wrong. Even so, the PwC report, if nothing else, illustrates the intuitive notion that the US in particular and the Western world in general are ceding their economic might to Asia. This is not necessarily a bad thing if one views the world in non-zero-sum game terms, ie, if a gain by one country doesn't automatically translate into a loss by another. But there are huge diplomatic issues that must be taken into consideration in any discussion of economic growth. The world's largest economic powers will also be looked upon as the world's largest political powers; one hopes for the good. What Now? The US has had an uncanny bi-partisan gift for tarnishing its leadership halo over the past 40 years, yet no country has emerged to take its place. Will this happen within the next 40 years? No, it will not in the absence of some unforseen, calamitous conflict. Yet disturbing economic questions about the US economy remain. A toxic political atmosphere finally combusted into violence in Arizona; will this lead to a more rational mood or was this merely the Ft. Sumter of our age? Is the PwC report accurate in its implicit prediction that the US is now on a downward slide that is not going to reverse itself? I certainly hope not. IT cannot prevent hatred. But the rising tide of IT can continue to lift the big US ship as well as the boats of every nation. The potential of Cloud Computing to reduce costs, provide previously unimagined flexibility, and allow companies to focus on innovation rather than maintenance can still save the day, for the US and for the world.

My Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions for 2011: John Savageau

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 02:30:00 EST

Enterprise service bus as a service will begin to emerge within enterprise clouds to allow common messaging within applications among different organizational units. This will further support standardization within an enterprise, as well as reduce lead times for applications development.

My Top Five Cloud Predictions for 2011: Steve Jin

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:15:00 EST

Continuing our series, we hear now from Steve Jin, Top 50 blogger on Cloud Computing at DoubleCloud.org, Author of VMware VI & vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), and Founder of the open source VI Java API.

Our Top Five Cloud Predictions for 2011: Kevin Jackson & Larry Carvalho

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 09:45:00 EST

Cloud Computing Journal authors look at the short- and mid-term future of the Cloud. Today we start with KEVIN L. JACKSON Editor, Government Cloud Computing on Ulitzer, and LARRY CARVALHO, the 2011 Instructor of Cloud Expo's ever popular Cloud Computing Bootcamp.

Cloud-First Initiative Threatens Federal Systems Status Quo

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 00:05:00 EST

Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, is getting down to business on the “Cloud First” initiative that was announced by the OMB a few weeks back. He’s been showing a snappy slide deck around town in DC the past few days that will probably affect different people in very different ways. Taxpayers should love it because it is a plan for saving money and improving efficiency throughout the government. Commercial CIOs should learn from it, because it illustrates a practical and practicable approach to cloud computing. And the freebooters and freeloaders of the “federal systems” fraternity should be very, very afraid of it because it says their back-scratching days may be numbered.

The Top 5 Overlooked Reasons Why Business Belongs in the Cloud

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:45:00 EST

There are plenty of “Top 5 lists” with generic reasons for why businesses should migrate into SaaS and cloud computing. Scalability, cost, mobility – they’re good reasons, sure, but we’ve heard them before: what else does cloud computing offer? If you’re thinking about moving your business into the cloud but haven’t yet, here are five reasons that are often overlooked.

A Peaceful Leap to Cloud Computing

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 08:45:00 EST

History has many examples of invaders wielding steel swords, repeating rifles, or whatever the latest weapon may be, driving out people who are less well-equipped. Corporate IT departments are starting to go the same way, at the hands of people equipped with cloud computing. The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group has been focused on the business reasons why companies should use cloud computing.

After Security, Network Bandwidth is the Next Cloud Bottleneck

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 07:00:00 EST

Security concerns (real and imagined) have long dominated much of the cloud conversation and caused many companies to deliberate about getting started in the cloud. Slowly, the security issues are being addressed--through the adoption of corporate policies for cloud usage, maturing cloud provider offerings, and by technologies such as CloudSwitch which isolate and encrypt all cloud resources to meet the requirements of the CSO. But while the focus has been on cloud security, another potential bottleneck is on the horizon as companies start using the cloud in more substantial ways.

In our discussions with IT executives and their teams, we’ve been hearing about a new concern: the ability of corporate networks to handle cloud traffic. Network performance is a lurking issue that hasn’t yet received the attention it deserves. That’s understandable, since bandwidth is rarely a problem for companies exploring the cloud in a small way, where they may deploy a few experimental VMs in order to understand the process. But as they start expanding their cloud footprint and running production-oriented applications, data movement takes on a completely different scale. As enterprises start to move real workloads out to the cloud (or to straddle internal and external clouds), look for network performance to become top of mind.

IT professionals and developers often assume they have huge network capacity, and it’s probably ample for their current Internet usage or the small cloud projects they may have tried so far. But what will happen, for example, when you have dozens of developers all trying to use cloud resources? Or if you put high-transaction processes in the cloud that need to “talk back” to your data center? What if you are trying to move a lot of video or graphics between your business users and the cloud? Network usage is about to get much more demanding, and the traffic will need to flow without bottlenecks (or saturating the network) for an organization’s cloud strategy to work.

Thus potential cloud users will have to do some back-of-the-envelope analysis of the maximum bandwidth they might need and how much additional traffic the network can handle. While the data center (or internal network) is running at speeds of 1Gb and even 10Gb, the connection to the Internet is lagging behind. Today, a “good” Internet connection is considered to be in the 100Mbps range. Some companies have more, and many have less than this capability, so when extending services to the cloud, you have to consider what impact this lower speed could have, and how to deal with it.

This is actually a two-part problem. You have to consider initial data movement: how long will it take to move a terabyte of data over the Internet and into the cloud? What impact will that have on current users and your business? You also have to look at ongoing updating of that data: how much traffic will be flowing back and forth, and what will that mean for your steady state? Will you have to buy more bandwidth for the cloud to be viable? Obviously, any major new capex requirements would be a challenge for cloud adoption.

Fortunately, technologies are emerging that can help optimize your current network and avoid an expensive upgrade. For example, CloudSwitch has a public IP address capability that provides direct access to cloud resources without having to go through the enterprise data center, avoiding what could otherwise be a huge bottleneck. Rather than relying on the Internet connection to the data center, cloud deployments can take advantage of the aggregate bandwidth of end users. This CloudSwitch feature also allows enterprise firewalls and load balancing capabilities to run in the cloud so traffic can flow smoothly and securely. In addition, companies like Citrix, F5, Riverbed, and Cisco are developing software versions of their WAN optimization technologies that can be deployed in the cloud. Their innovations in compression, de-duplication, and other techniques will enable much more efficient data movement so you can make better use of the network you already have.

If you’re the head of IT or Application Development looking ahead to 2011, you probably have some great cloud pilots under your belt, and you’re evaluating moving into the cloud in production mode. Just remember that bandwidth is something you’ll need to think about and prepare for.

CloudSwitch has been thinking about these issues, and together with our partners we’re working on solutions to ensure optimum bandwidth for the cloud. Emerging technologies will allow you to meet the bandwidth demands required by production applications, so you can scale out your cloud footprints without building out your corporate network, leveraging the investments you’ve already made.

The Sweet Science of Cloud Computing

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:43:00 EST

One sure sign that a new technology market is approaching critical mass is when people start fighting over it. I’m not talking about abstract arguments and dialectical debates about meanings and means. I’m talkin’ fisticuffs, mano a mano, the sweet science! And with cloud computing, it’s on now, Baby. OK, maybe it was more like one-sided trash talking at the weigh-in before a title bout, but this week we heard plenty of it, in two weight classes, no less. In the middle-weight division, we saw the young and scrappy contender NetSuite mixing it up with aging titlist SAP and at the same time Microsoft got in fellow heavyweight Google’s face, big time. Here’s how it went down.

A Year in the Clouds - How Cloud Computing Exceeded the Hype

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 06:24:00 EST

We have now reached that time of year when the great and the good partake in the festive tradition of crystal ball gazing, as they predict the IT industry’s future trends for the next twelve months. Over the next three weeks or so we will be deluged with various top tens, who will move, who will shake, who’ll hit tech heaven with the next iPad and who will reach tech hell with the next Sega Dreamcast.

Data Danger Lurking in Public Cloud Contracts

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 07:00:00 EST

There is an exhaustive new study out that should give enormous pause to organizations considering or already using public cloud services, especially for storing data and documents. The research was conducted by The Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary, University of London and it examines the “Ts&Cs” in the service agreements from a who’s who of cloud service providers, from Akamai to Zoho. The survey covers many different aspects of the agreements, including things like jurisdiction, fair use, arbitration, etc., and it finds many troubling details and patterns that lead the authors to conclude: “The main lesson to be drawn from the Cloud Legal Project’s survey is that customers should review the Terms and Conditions of a Cloud service carefully before signing up to it.”

No Cloud Standards, Private Clouds Will Fail, Say Predictions for 2011

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 05:00:00 EST

Here are a few predictions about the Cloud for 2011 from an article I read that I thought I’d share with you. Some of them are quite startling. Here goes: - Don’t Expect Cloud Standards in 2011 – Yeah, there will be drafts of standards, and possibly some ratifications by groups such as DMTF, NIST [...]

Moving Up the Food Chain in Cloud Solutions

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:45:00 EST

The cloud computing ecosystem is rapidly changing with acquisitions. This note is about how one company has expanded their realm to other focus areas responding to customer demand.

Cloud Computing Journal Analysis: Microsoft's Cloud Strategy

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:30:00 EST

A few days ago, Microsoft published The Economics of the Cloud, a whitepaper that has so far not gotten nearly as much attention or consideration as it deserves. Perhaps this indifference is due to a collective freshman flashback on the dreaded “Econ 101” or, to skepticism about Microsoft’s importance in the new world of cloud computing. Either way, it is unfortunate because the paper presents some startling new data about the cloud, and, not entirely intentionally, reveals the company’s cloud strategy at a level of nuance that we have not seen before.

Big IT Spenders Circle The Wagons To Hold Off Cloud Innovation

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 18:30:00 EDT

The newly-formed Open Data Center Alliance doesn't seem entirely wholesome. Wielding its collective $50B/year IT spending power as an offensive weapon, it aims to dictate the details of the data center of tomorrow to the tech industry, turning IT managers into technology designers and technology innovators into subservient commodity suppliers, and holding off the public cloud for as long as possible. Great news for SMBs in the public cloud.

Integration or Connectivity - "as a Service"?

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Cloud computing consists of several components like storage, compute resources, applications and infrastructure. The success of most cloud computing initiatives is dependent on a well connected system that can contribute to making high availability a realistic goal at a reasonable cost.

Public Cloud Computing: Enabling the Elastic Enterprise

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:10:00 EDT

The private cloud enables elastic computing but the public cloud enables the elastic enterprise, a new business model where IT is resource that is shared with partners and customers. It can create new business processes that have greater richness, flexibility, and efficiency than those used in the locked tower of the vertically integrated corporations of the past hundred years. As with any new paradigm, nobody should plunge into it this new world without caution or knowledge. But, plunge they should. Private computing is soon to go the way of on site power generators and telephone PBXs.

Novell Survey Stuffs Private Cloud Ballot Box And Some Truth Spills Out

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:00:00 EDT

Novell paid Harris Interact to survey enterprise IT decision makers about cloud computing so as to make a case for its new private cloud management products. Not surprisingly, the public cloud comes out smelling a bit musty and the survey design a bit off for it. Nevertheless, even when you push aside the fishier Qs and As, there is still a lot of good stuff there which leads to some interesting conclusions about cloud computing in general.

Which Countries Are the World's Most Aggressive IT Deployers?

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 00:34:00 EDT

The Tau Index has two key elements: 1. it adjusts a nation's IT expenditures for the local cost of living--IT costs the same in absolute terms everywhere, so makes a bigger impact in poorer countries. 2. it rewards countries that have smaller income disparities--IT's advantages should be able to be better distributed in a society with more uniform income distribution. The idea of the Tau Index is to provide a real-world snapshot of how things look on the ground in a country. How dynamic is the country really? How well arre IT's advantages being shared with everyone? How hard is a country fighting to enjoy IT's rising global tide?

Brocade Wants to Kill Your Cloud Buzz

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 17:00:00 EDT

In his keynote address at the NetEvents Press Summit in Istanbul, Brocade CMO John McHugh pulled a major "Debbie Downer," decrying the immediacy of cloud computing and calling it "overhyped". He further predicted that true utility computing is "probably 10 or more years away" and counseled IT in the meantime to work with a single vendor to build a private cloud "inside a metal cage." He also used the opportunity to defend networking pure-plays like Brocade and take what seemed possibly to be a thinly veiled swipe at HP for its acquisition of 3Com, saying that integrated server-network solutions "have failed to provide customers with the flexibility and economies they need." And, finally, he wrapped up his downbeat dialectic by apparently speaking for the entire industry and saying “We just don't [at this time] have technical, legal and security [capabilities] to engage fully with cloud.” Mr. McHugh's comments seem to reflect the severe collective thinking of Brocade; it might do them good to all read the latest research from CompTIA which reveals, among other things, that, in the next year, 72% of end-user organizations will expand the number and types of cloud services they use. Brocade shorts, are you listening?

Opinion: "Cloud in a Box" Gets Boxed In

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 07:15:00 EDT

Just a week after our blog post on the telcos, we find another big company joining the cloud computing tsunami – Oracle’s announcement of its “cloud in a box” offering as well as new offerings of Oracle software running on Amazon’s EC2.

For a company whose leader shunned the term “cloud” last year, this is a lot of cloud announcements in one week. Oracle’s new Exalogic Elastic Cloud is perhaps the first “cloud in a box” solution that is actually delivered in a box (of hardware). Unlike the offerings we have seen from Eucalyptus, Nimbula, Azure, and VMware, the Exalogic product contains the control software as well as the hardware components to make a virtualized resource pool. The other vendors have focused on delivering a software solution that can be combined with the users’ choice of servers, storage, and networking gear to build a cloud.

Oracle, powered by Sun’s server and system technology, has decided to deliver a complete cloud solution that contains up to 360 CPU cores, 2.8TB of RAM, and 40TB of storage in a single rack of equipment. This big box is reportedly priced at just over $1M. Oracle’s motivation for this box is to deliver on the promise of building an entire stack of both hardware and software that has been engineered to work together to deliver better performance, reliability, and scale. Overall, the Exalogic system has impressive performance characteristics and may be a great solution for data center consolidation, but…

Placing the term “Elastic” in the name of this offering is stretching the accepted definition of the term as it relates to cloud computing. The Exalogic server is a contained set of resources that is purchased, operated, and maintained as part of the enterprise infrastructure. You can scale your applications up and down within this solution, but in the end, you are limited to the number of cores, amount or RAM, and size of the storage you purchased. While you can add more racks to the solution, you are stuck paying for the whole thing independent from what you really use – not exactly elastic or pay for only what you use. My only other problem with Exalogic is the range of supported operating systems – we like the Linux and Solaris support, but a quote from Rick Schultz of Oracle – “There is no demand for Windows at the moment” – makes me wonder who they are talking to. More than half the enterprise workloads CloudSwitch has deployed to the cloud are Windows-based; how can there be no demand for Windows in Exalogic?

The other interesting difference in the Exalogic solution as compared to the big (public) cloud offerings is the design center for the hardware. Clouds like Amazon and Google were developed around “stripped down” servers to act as generic compute components. The redundant components normally used to improve the reliability of a server are removed from the compute nodes to reduce the component cost, and software and other application-level techniques are used to make up for the fail-able components. Each of the servers in the Exalogic solution has redundant power supplies, 2 solid state disk drives, and redundant Infiniband controllers. This more expensive hardware allows the system to survive component failures with minimal disruption to the running applications – a traditional enterprise infrastructure design, with high reliability to support a lot of VM’s packed on a single piece of hardware.

The difference between the two approaches highlights the upcoming battle between architectures in the cloud – stripped down commodity servers versus highly available high-end servers as the basis for cloud computing. The early leader in this space is the commodity server approach because of the types of applications initially targeted to clouds – stateless horizontally scalable web applications. But as we start putting more core enterprise applications into the cloud, the HA architectures become more interesting, and thus we expect this architecture to gain ground. We see these architectures gaining ground already with clouds like Terremark, BlueLock, and Savvis.

The other announcement this week from Oracle is expanded support for running Oracle software in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Oracle has provided templates (AMI’s) in Amazon for its database software since 2008, and this week they have expanded the number of applications they will support in Amazon to include Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle's Siebel CRM, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, and Oracle Linux. In addition to expanding the software supported on AWS, Oracle has taken the step of “certifying” the software for operation in Amazon. This means that customers can now get support from both Oracle and AWS for those applications. Although Oracle’s lead cloud story seems to be about the Exalogic box, I believe that this announcement does more to advance cloud computing for enterprises. Support for these key Oracle products in Amazon’s cloud adds credibility to public cloud computing, as it allows enterprises to really use the cloud for their core applications. This is one of the areas that a cloud provider cannot fix, it is up to the software vendors to expand their horizons to embrace the cloud and Oracle is blazing the trail.

I think the only downside to the Oracle-Amazon announcement is the lack of integration with Oracle’s control software. The FAQ’s from Amazon and Oracle emphatically state that the management controls for Oracle deployments to the cloud is exclusively the Amazon console and tool set. This is a shame since we believe that seamless integration between the data center and the cloud is key to a successful enterprise cloud deployment; creating a disjointed environment just adds work with no value for the enterprise and ultimately leads to cloud lock-in. Our enterprise customers have told us consistently that they want a “single pane of glass” from which they can manage pools of resources both internal and external.

Finally, while I like the architecture of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and believe that it could form the basis of a new class of cloud computing offerings, it too may be missing a critical point. If an enterprise decides to deploy their private cloud on this technology, there is no connection or relationship between the applications deployed to the private cloud and those running in the public cloud. This, once again, highlights the importance of cloud federation – you will never break the cycle of buying more hardware and infrastructure if you don’t embrace technology that allows you to access the public clouds.

Downsizing, Rightsizing, Cloudsizing?

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:45:00 EDT

Many hypes in IT are just the same old idea, launched again, but with better technology and under a new name. We could say for the datacenter: “The Data Centre is dead, long live the Virtual Data Centre”. The danger of this approach is that we treat it just like a new type of infrastructure, missing out on all the potential benefits.

Cloud Enterprise Architecture

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:10:00 EDT

Consultancy firm Deloitte has asked ‘does Cloud makes Enterprise Architecture irrelevant?’ This prompted a compelling discussion on the topic in a Linkedin group where I suggested that actually Cloud is Enterprise Architecture. Yes “the Cloud” is a place, which people point to in a vague hand waving motion implying it’s really far away and quite [...]

A Cloud Computing Epiphany

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:45:00 EDT

One of the greatest moments a cloud evangelist indulges in occurs at that point a listener experiences an intuitive leap of understanding following your explanation of cloud computing. No greater joy and intrinsic sense of accomplishment.

Can the Real Cloud Market Size Please Stand Up?

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:30:00 EDT

It seems like every week another sizing of the cloud market is published, and – maybe as to be expected - none of them seem to agree. Let’s have a look at who is saying what, and whether we are comparing apples to apples, or apples and oranges.

Cloud Computing Pragmatics

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 19:10:00 EDT

It’s real easy for pundits to step up and present a vision for Cloud Computing as a configurable resource that’s capable of meeting all needs, but I really believe that is a misnomer. In fact, more than ever I believe that we need to specialize Clouds to support a specific purpose. For example, I advocate that users need separate Cloud Computing infrastructures to support their full-motion video needs and their back office applications and that these should not live on the same Cloud infrastructure; especially if utilizing multicast video capabilities.

Might the Cloud Prove Thomas J. Watson Right After All?

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 05:00:00 EDT

In 1943 former IBM president Thomas J. Watson allegedly said: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". Will cloud computing prove Watson to be right after all?