One element than help give perspective for making this type of decision can be applied from basic management challenges. One important thing that I learned from working with various project managers is that in any engagement it is important to determine what you can manage and what you can (or cannot) control. When back-end components of the cloud reside outside of traditional internal data centers, we can manage the cloud — but not entirely control it. Part of this – identified in Lauren Horowitz’ post on this site – concerns the topics of transparency, service issues and cloud standards. When it comes down to it, if the back-end components of the cloud are outside the traditional data center, it cannot be fully controlled internally.

For offerings such as the Amazon EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, and Rackspace, these offerings are off site from internal data centers. With this parameter, decisions have to be made about what lies inside and outside traditional data centers. The alternative to the cloud back end being external, however, may not be as attractive and the time to market compared to a provided solution is inferior.

Building a cloud internally may be a daunting task for some organizations, especially when some of the more primary components may not already be in place. One mechanism that can truly enable an internal cloud is a virtualized server environment. In quantifying the virtual environment, it is not necessarily how many virtual machines or hosts are in use but the percentage of systems that are virtual machines. Along with that, another building block of a cloud is a storage grid for ultimate flexibility on data protection. Lastly, network capabilities are a pillar that defines the internal cloud. This can include the use of load-balancing and traffic-managing switches. With all of that, it becomes pretty clear that the costs and growing pains could be significant.

Make no mistake, there will be cloud computing success stories. But in the case of your own implementation — determining where the back-end cloud components reside will be a critical question that will need answering sooner than later.

How does Symantec push out alerts to users?

Sean Derrington:  When a customer creates an account through [the Veritas Installation Assessment Service at] VIAS.Symantec.com, they have the option to “opt in” for notifications. The alerts are sent via email and the specifics of the alert (e.g., maintenance pack, hot fix, new technical documentation) are included and unique to the customer’s server/storage environment. (For example, a Sun Solaris customer won’t receive IBM AIX updates.) Once the customer receives the notification, they can take the appropriate action at their discretion, timing, and incorporate it into their change-control processes.

How is this a “cloud” service other than in name?

S.D.: This is a cloud-based service, as it fundamentally alters how organizations can understand best practices, known supported configurations and identify hidden risks in their environment. The process would be as follows:

1.      An IT organization visits VIAS.Symantec.com.

2.      A user downloads an agentless data collector that gathers detailed server and storage configuration.

3.      The user securely uploads the information to VIAS.Symantec.com (note: no application information or customer information is securely transmitted, simply configuration details).

4.      A customized XML report on the server(s) that were analyzed is sent back to the customer, providing dynamic links to pertinent information regarding server and storage configurations.

5.      This process can be repeated each time an organization is planning to go through a Veritas Storage Foundation and/or Veritas Cluster Server installation or upgrade and real time valid configuration information will be used for comparison.

Without this service, how did users go about patch management and so forth?

A:   There are two ways that customers have historically been able to understand Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server patch management.

1.     Symantec sends an email notification based on customer’s license subscription (e.g., Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle Real Application Clusters). This isn’t platform-specific, because the detailed configuration information isn’t known; only the type of license is.

2.           Alternatively, customers can visit the Symantec support site, search for the software version and platform version in their environment and determine if there are valid patches that should be applied.

Can you offer real-world examples of how the service has improved things for users?

S.D.: Yes. Currently there are more than 500 customers using the Veritas Installation Assessment Service, and they have analyzed thousands of server and storage configurations.  And of the servers that have been assessed, about 40% of the servers were found to have configuration errors. The top two invalid configurations (constituting about 70% of the total errors) were (1) storage subsystems that weren’t configured properly and (2) insufficient disk space. The insufficient disk space error is for the Veritas Storage Foundation and/or Veritas Cluster Server software, not application/database data capacity.

How much does the service cost?

S.D.:  It’s $500 per physical server and is available now. 

And while EMC is focused on selling this to service providers initially, it does believe there’s an enterprise play down the line for media and entertainment, life sciences, and oil and gas companies interested in building private clouds. Somewhat confusingly, EMC also hinted at its plans eventually to become a service provider itself, which may cause some channel tension, but for now Atmos is a product only.

Here’s a taste of what EMC claims it will do. Atmos is a globally distributed file system (code-named Maui) that runs on purpose-built EMC hardware (code-named Hulk).

The software automatically distributes data, placing it on nodes across a network according to user-defined policies. These policies dictate what level of replication, versioning, compression, deduplication and disk drive spin-down a particular piece of data should have as it resides in the cloud. Depending on how important the information is, there might one, five, or 10 copies of it around the world, for example.

The closest thing out there today that resembles Atmos is Cleversafe.org.

Atmos also provides Web service application programming interfaces, including Represntational State Transfer and Simple Object Access Protocol, as well as the Common Internet File System and Network File System support for integration with file services; a unified name space, browser-based admin tools and multitenant support for multiple applications to be served from the same infrastructure without co-mingling data. And Simple Network Management Protocol support provides a plugin to existing reporting tools on top of the existing reports and alerts Atmos offers, according to EMC.

The software ships on purpose-built hardware available in 120TB, 240TB or 360TB configurations. [Editor's note: The National Center for Atmospheric Research has an archive already several petabytes in size. It would need at least three of these boxes to contain just its existing data. In other words 360 TB is large, but not that large by today’s standards].

There’s also a fit with VMware as Atmos can run on a VMware image, although Mike Feinberg, the senior VP of the cloud infrastructure group at EMC, says users don’t need VMware to use Atmos.

EMC did not announce pricing details today either, except to say that it’ll be competitive will existing petabyte-scale JBOD-type offerings.

Rackspace’s plan centers on acquisition, partnership and expanding its existing Mosso Web hosting product into three broad offerings: Cloud Sites website hosting, Cloud Files storage service, and Cloud Servers virtual private servers.

On the acquisition side, RackSpace has acquired Jungle Disk, a cloud-based desktop storage and backup provider that has thus far relied on Amazon’s S3. It also acquired Slicehost, a provider of Xen-based virtual private servers (VPSs) that claims 11,000 customers and 15,000 virtual servers.

As far as new Mosso offerings, the new Cloud Files will come in at $0.15 per GB of replicated data, or if the data is distributed across a content delivery network (CDN), at $0.22 per GB. CDN capabilities come by way of a partnership with Limelight Inc.

Also as part of Cloud Files, RackSpace will partner with Sonian Networks to provide cloud-based email archiving starting at $3/mailbox.

Coming soon, Cloud Servers is Mosso’s new name for Slicehost’s VPS offering. Under Slicehost, the services starts at $20/month for a virtual Xen server with 256GB of RAM, 10GB of storage, and 100GB of bandwidth. “Slices” scale to 15.5GB of RAM, 620GB of storage and 2,000GB of bandwidth for $800/month.

When it comes to the Xen-based Slicehost — aka Cloud Servers — I should note that Mosso is a longtime VMware customer that has publicly pondered the viability of the relationship as it expands its services. It will be interesting to see whether this acquisition signals a break from VMware or whether it will continue to use VMware as the underpinning of its Cloud Sites offering. Rackspace, care to comment?

On another note, Slicehost is one of many hosting providers that use open source Xen as the basis of their cloud offerings. Presumably, it’s also the kind of company to which Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix Systems Inc., referred when Citrix announced XenServer Cloud Edition and Citrix Cloud Center (C3) at VMworld 2008.

At the time, Crosby said that luring these hosting providers into Citrix support contracts was a huge priority. “Trivially, we looked around and found a couple hundred hosted IT infrastructure providers using open source Xen,” he said. “XenServer Cloud Edition is intended to win greenfield accounts but also to bring the open source Xen guys back home.” XenServer Cloud Edition boasts features like the ability to run Windows guests and commercial support.

One final thought: If any of you find this whole cloud computing thing a bit, ahem, nebulous, Lew Moorman, Rackspace’s chief strategy officer, made an interesting distinction between different types of cloud offerings. “Cloud apps,” Moorman said, are what we used to think of as Software as a Service (SaaS); “cloud hosting,” meanwhile, refers to pooled external compute resources. And of course, there’s cloud storage. Rackspace, it seems, will offer all three.