Nginx (pronounced engine-x) Inc. has been moving forward with improvements that managed services providers (MSPs) and VARs delivering Web services will welcome. The open source Web server is already the power behind popular high-traffic sites such as Facebook and Hulu, among 40,000 other domains. While it still has a relatively small share of the Web server market, it is growing in popularity while Apache and Microsoft are losing market share.

When Nginx founder Igor Sysoev found his project becoming popular, maybe too popular, and started receiving feature requests from commercial users, he realized that it may be time to take his little project and go commercial. Sysoev created Nginx in 2004 with the aim of solving a problem he had with the current technology offerings. Now the startup has secured $3 million in Series A round funding and plans to offer its first commercial product in Q3 2012.

According to Andrew Alexeev, head of business development and marketing and Nginx, the focus of the commercial products is based on customer feedback and will include high availability, clustering, integration and performance management improvements and tools. In addition, the company is looking at the cloud for business opportunities.

“We are also targeting cloud infrastructure density and efficiency,” said Alexeev. “Nginx can conserve hardware performance and improve security.”

The first commercial product will be a connection processing and optimization software platform that enables advanced performance, traffic management, extended configuration and security features for hosting, and cloud and enterprise server infrastructure. The company will also offer an easy way for partners to migrate existing Web installations such as those on Apache to Nginx.

Dell partners should take note of this news as one of Nginx’s investors is a firm affiliated with MSD Capital, which is Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell’s private investment firm. Alexeev shared that Nginx hopes to use this relationship to collaborate on the delivery of hardware services and management for customers.

The company will open its new San Francisco headquarters in Q4 2011.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Leah Rosin at lrosin@techtarget.com, or follow us on Twitter.

]]> http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/channel-marker/open-source-nginx-to-offer-commercial-product-in-q3-2012/feed/ 0 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/channel-marker/3-cloud-strategy-lessons-from-solution-provider-logicalis/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/channel-marker/3-cloud-strategy-lessons-from-solution-provider-logicalis/#comments Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:48:10 +0000 Heather Clancy http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/channel-marker/?p=4546 What self-respecting IT services provider ISN’T trying to position itself as an expert in cloud computing? After all, pretty much everyone has their own definition of what it means. What’s that old saying? There is margin in mystery?

But some, clearly “get it” more than others. I will list Logicalis in that category, since I pretty much agree with a list of “common mistakes” that Logicalis feels businesses make when they try to figure out how this year’s technology buzzword-du-jour will realistically fit into their information technology strategy. I’ll reinterpret those ideas here. But first, let me say that I subscribe to the definition of cloud as technology delivered as a service. I care less about where that service is housed: public or private. The most common categories under that blanket are infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). I won’t list examples of each because someone will whine at me and that’s not the point of this post anyway. Taking all that into consideration, back to those lessons, although not in the same order as Logicalis lists them.

1. The cloud isn’t just a short-term fix. Realistically, the reason that SaaS and IaaS have earned so much attention and subsequent business is that they can help cut costs. As in RIGHT NOW. But if every department of an SMB starts opting for its own version of a particular SaaS service, things get complicated from a management standpoint. This is where IT service providers can add value: by helping businesses make appropriate choices and also by helping them integrate cloud services with legacy infrastructure. That means taking a long-term view.
2. The cloud isn’t just about technology. One of the things that IT people tend to forget when thinking about the cloud is the fact that real potential lies in helping businesses rethink the way they run their operations. By taking contracts electronic, for example, a shipping company could cut weeks out of its billing cycle. So, the cloud isn’t just about just trimming the IT budget, it is about trimming operational costs. The benefits will speak to many outside the IT organization.
3. Migrate in-house applications to the cloud wisely. This final item is tied very closely, of course, to the first two themes. Too often, decisions about technology infrastructure investments — what to cut, what to buy — are made purely on the basis of cost and performance. Before a company moves an in-house technology investment or application into the cloud it should consider not just the speeds and feeds elements, it should think about the entire end-user experience — whether that end-user is a customer, employee or business partner.

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About a hundred or so GreenPages customers–IT professionals from organizations ranging from area hospitals to Liberty Mutual Insurance and Stratus Computer — came to hear GreenPages’ cloud pitch, specifically the VAR’s planned “data bus” that would help them move data from on-premises data centers to hybrid and/or public clouds. But that was the official news. Here’s the real scuttlebutt.

1: iPhones remain king. Even as Android devices grab market share.  GreenPages CTO John Ross made headlines with his mention of a 300 million unit preorder of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5.

2: Converged data center takes channel toll. If data centers do move to converged compute/storage/networking hardware, it’s clear that IT personnel will be impacted big time. There won’t be as much need for a server guy, a storage guy and a networking guy if companies buy all that capability together. “There will be bodies,” said the CIO of one attending company who most definitely did not want to be quoted by name.

3: VAR wars will ensue. The converged hardware shakeout will also impact VARs and integrators in affected accounts. An IT exec with a healthcare company said his boss is under pressure to choose between one VAR who supplies EMC and Cisco gear and another who does VMware and HP work. “He wants fewer suppliers,” he said.

4: IT guys LOVE their iPads. At one break-out session,  at least 10 out of 25 attendees had iPads at the ready. Canvassed by the speaker, only one person had a non-Apple tablet (I think a Samsung Galaxy.) In another session, when an HP VP asked who among nearly 100 people had checked out the HP TouchPad only one or two hands went up.

5: HP has a lot of work to do.

Another attendee said he was apalled at the quality of HP laptops his company has bought of late. These “business class” machines are not up to snuff, he noted. He was similarly unimpressed with a pitch for HP CloudMatrix. The $400,000 to $450,000 fixed-cost for HP to set up a “mini Amazon Elastic cloud” implementation is too rich for most of these companies.

6:  The major hindrence to cloud adoption comes from within.

IT staffs do not like change. Once the infrastructure is working, they like to freeze the picture, several GreenPages execs and IT attendees agreed. That makes it difficult to get people to sign off on cloud plans.  Conversely, it’s not at all hard to convince line-of-business people within the organization of the merits of a private or public cloud deployment.

7: Vendors will support virtualization. Even if they say they won’t.

Oracle support policy states it won’t necessarily support Oracle software on non-Oracle virtualization, but not one attendee said they’d not gotten support from Oracle when they asked for it.

“Typically, they will support you. I hear this [complaint about vendor non-support] mostly from internal people who have to support the application,” said Ross.

8: Tech reporters can eat a LOT of lobster.

No names mentioned. You know who you are.

Let us know what you think about this post; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com,

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The company’s new NetAlliance Partner Program seeks to take in hardware and software integrators, application and infrastructure service providers, and commerce and digital media platform providers. The idea is for cloud service providers — whether that service is public or private — to add value to their offerings by integrating them with Akamai services. “We can become another layer, network as a service,” said Brad Rinklin, vice president of global marketing and alliances for Akamai, Cambridge, Mass.

The Akamai Intelligent Internet Platform focuses on improving performance, scalability and security, among other factors. The platform includes more than 100,000 servers in 72 countries.

Rinklin said the new program is intended to help the company extend its presence in regions where it is under-penetrated today, such as Latin America where the company recently has teamed up with Exceda in Brazil. “We are not looking for a scorch-the-earth strategy. We will be mindful and strategic about the partners we sign up,” he said.

Akamai believes its service can help cloud service providers differentiate their own offerings, especially when it comes to service level agreements. The benefits of the program include market development funds and training/certification.

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Example: When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the Exalogic “cloud in a box” at Oracle Open World last year he maintained that it’s the perfect solution for companies like Facebook because a pair of Exadatas could run the whole Facebook work load. That may well be true but there’s a small problem: At last count there are a very limited number of Facebooks in the world (one at last count) and none of them appear to be using this sort of hardware.

Exalogic, detractors say, is far from cloud in a box because it requires companies to buy a lot more hardware than they may need. Admittedly, they can then grow into their hardware, but in a real cloud, they could start out buying/renting just the capacity they need and then scale up and down, paying only what they actually use–not a shelf full of expensive CPUs and infiniband networking.

In Boston last week, master marketeer Marc Benioff decried much of the noise from hardware vendors seeking to unload pricey server-storage-networking bundles as nothing more than the rantings of a “false cloud” that is “not economical, not environmental and not democratic.”

Of course, Benioff, an Oracle alum, has a dog in this fight. His Salesforce.com has led the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) charge for years now and is watching as legacy competitors like Microsoft and SAP scrap to catch up. He’s also made a lot of hay out of how Salesforce.com runs on a boatload of inexpensive commodity Dell servers. He emphatically denied rumors that Salesforce.com, like NetSuite, bought Oracle Exalogic/Exadata hardware.

Not to pick one side of a marketing war (although I am), but Benioff  actually has a point when he says that if your cloud requires a big hardware purchase then it’s not, in fact,  cloud.

He also took aim at other “legacy” IT powers claiming that Microsoft CTO Craig Mundie once told him that the existence of Salesforce.com probably  meant that 400,000 to 600,000 servers were not sold over the past few years.  Salesforce, he claimed, runs all the CRM and SFA workloads for some 100,000 active customers on 2,000 servers.

Whether or not those exact numbers are true is almost beside the point. The existence of truly efficient cloud computing means that companies like Cisco and Oracle and HP will have a very hard sell for their pricey, some-would-say proprietary big boxes going forward.

The lack of a market for big-bang converged hardware may be bad for these vendors that have a lot at stake in grabbing more of the data center workload for themselves. It’s less bad for VARs who already know how to build less-pricey multi-vendor hardware and software solutions for those shops. And it’s probably good news for those elite VARs and integrators who can help customer businesses figure out where and when true cloud computing fits into their IT plans.  Who can do cost-benefit analysis and show customers when it makes sense to offload compute loads or storage to a cloud provider and when it’s a smarter move to keep stuff in house. For those VARs, as the mantra has long held, there’s margin in complexity.

In the meantime, watch for Cisco, HP, Oracle to keep on claiming the cloud mantle while pushing these very pricey and uncloudlike hardware solutions to data center customers.  

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

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The study goes on to suggest that this community believes only 42 percent of their existing infrastructure and applications have the potential to live in the cloud. Among the survey respondents who WERE using a cloud application or service, most expect to spend only 34 percent of their IT budget on cloud computing by 2016. That means about two-thirds of their budgets WILL NOT be spent on the cloud; it also reinforces the growing belief that businesses will rely on a hybrid set of delivery models for their IT infrastructure.

In a press release describing the report, CDW’s senior director of managed services, David Cottingham, said:

“Many organizations are carefully — and selectively — moving into cloud computing, as well they should, because it represents a significant shift in how computing resources are provided and managed. With thoughtful planning, organizations can realize benefits that align directly with their organizational goals.”

I think the operative word in his comment is “selective.” While it would be dangerous to ignore the emergence of cloud computing technologies and services, now that the concept has been field-tested a bit, it is becoming more and more clear that cloud will be just one of the ways that technology will be delivered. At least within most companies. But that hybrid model suggests, perhaps, that the typical IT solution provider should probably spend more time tracking the cloud’s progress than they may have done traditionally.

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If you can get past the title, what this particular analysis REALLY will tell you is how much you should be thinking about shaping your cloud solutions and services around public infrastructure options (ala Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) versus working with the private cloud infrastructure options being developed by these and other major service providers. Or, if you are really ambitious, based on private cloud infrastructure that you build out yourself.

Here are some of the numbers that you need to pay attention to:

• Among companies that have adopted software as a service (SaaS), 36 percent are using it in some sort of of privately hosted form. What’s more, 25 percent plan future SaaS deployments that managed via a private hosting environment. How does this compare with those using public services: right now, about 40 percent of the businesses using SaaS are using the public form.
• When it comes to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the argument for thinking private is equally compelling. Here, too, 36 percent of the companies that have adopted IaaS have adopted some private version, rather than a public service.

I should mention that this data is pulled out of the Forrester Forrsights Software Survey from the fourth quarter of 2010. The survey base is 2,124 North American and European software decision makers.

The extent to which your organization can address the private versus public debate is an important consideration, therefore, as you build out your own cloud solutions. Of course, this conversation is probably all the more relevant given the very public Amazon outage of the past week.

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CEO Steve Ballmer informed employees of this rather big piece of news in a posting today.

“Bob Muglia and I have been talking about the overall business and what is needed to accelerate our growth. In this context, I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB. This is simply recognition that all businesses go through cycles and need new and different talent to manage through those cycles. Bob has been a phenomenal partner throughout this process, and he and his leadership team have the right strategy in place.

In conjunction with this leadership change, Bob has decided to leave Microsoft this summer. He will continue to actively run STB as I conduct an internal and external search for the new leader. Bob will onboard the new leader and will also complete additional projects for me.”

This news may unnerve die-hard Windows server loyalists as well as Wall Street, which has been critical of Ballmer’s stewardship of Microsoft. The departures of Robbie Bach, J. Allard, Ray Ozzie–all top tier executives–over the past year also raised eyebrows.

Muglia was often the public face of new server OS offerings, keynoting at TechEd and other Microsoft events.

It will be interesting if Muglia surfaces at another high-tech company. Bill Veghte, anohter highly-regarded Microsoft exec who left last year, is now at Hewlett-Packard, which is showing increased interest in software.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com, or follow us on twitter.

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At last week’s New England VMware User Group meeting in Atkinson, New Hampshire, there was no shortage of cloud talk.

Guy Bowers, senior systems engineer for VMware, started off the morning with his keynote on using Lab Manager to configure and set up virtual environments that can be disposed of once used, and he also touted vCloud Director as the tool for “providing the interface, automation and management required by enterprise and solution providers to build public and private clouds.” Attendees were still buzzing that vCloud Director will most likely be Lab Manager’s replacement, which is a conversation that really began at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco.

A VMware marketing and sales representative, who chose to remain anonymous, said cloud security continues to be the main concern voiced by potential customers. Data privacy and protection anxieties have weighed down cloud adoption since its introduction, despite the onslaught of new security tools and services from industry leaders, including IBM and EMC.

The second part of the keynote focused on virtualizing Microsoft Exchange with vSphere. Here are the top best practices to follow when testing Exchange in a vSphere cloud, according to VMware:

1. Don’t over-commit memory.

2. Set the memory to the configured size of the virtual machine (VM).

3. Make sure to right-size the configured memory of a VM

4. Enable VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler to ensure workloads are balanced

The keynote also highlighted hot topics from VMworld, including a summary of the top five labs at the conference:

1. VMware View 4.5 installation and configuration

2. VSphere performance and tuning

3. VMware ESX 4.1 new features

4. VCloud Director installation and configuration

5. Basic vSphere installation and configuration

First off, a recap of the five things I believe are driving technology investments today, especially among enterprise accounts:

1. Emergence of cloud computing
2. Evolution of business intelligence
3. Adoption of social network and collaboration tools
4. Explosion of enterprise mobility
5. Birth of green IT and corporate sustainability software

I asked the Net@Work audience, which consisted of about 100 enterprise solution providers (my unverified count from the podium so very unscientific, but there were about 90 responses for each poll question), for their feedback on each of these themes throughout the presentation. They were asked to name their “biggest opportunity” related to each. Here are those results, based on the percentage of the audience that picked this response.

1. Cloud: “Using virtualization to prepare existing infrastructure for private cloud uses,” although “deploying new server and storage hardware” for the same reason was also signficant.
2. Business intelligence: “Offer end-to-end solution design and consulting” (by a lot).
3. Social network and collaboration: “Offer end-to-end solution design and consulting,” followed by “integrating social network applications” with existing enterprise applications.
4. Enterprise mobility: “Shoring up backend server, storage and network infrastructure” to handle an influx of mobile users.
5. Corporate sustainability or green IT: “Optimize server and storage hardware with energy efficiency in mind.”

Even though it seems these solution providers will stick mostly with their traditional or core expertise when it comes to supporting these initiatives, the business intelligence and social network responses were particularly significant to me because they suggest the need for new skills development. Which begs the question: What is your expertise in either or both?

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