Enterprise SaaS takes off – With $14.5 billion in SaaS sales (an increase of 17.9% from 2011), lots of providers are getting it right. The biggest news is the boom in enterprise SaaS application adoption. Originally touted as the great leveler, allowing small businesses to take advantage of sophisticated systems hereto only affordable by big companies, the enterprise is rapidly dumping their high maintenance in-house systems and deploying a variety of SaaS services instead. Salesforce of course has long been a big player in this space, but the Workday’s spectacular IPO in October indicates a bright future. Look for lots of interest in Microsoft cloud products such as Office 365 and Azure as companies realize that these are cheaper and more flexible alternatives to traditional desktop tools. The rapid adoption of mobile devices in the workplace and its demand for more business customized apps is only going to accelerate this trend.

OpenStack grows up – While it remains to be seen if OpenStack wins the cloud infrastructure wars against VMware, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, given the number of cloud service providers lining up behind HP and Rackspace to roll out Openstack commercial services, it is not difficult to predict that 2013 will be another banner year for OpenStack. Practically the every major tech company in the world with the notable exception of Amazon is throwing their support behind OpenStack. On the technology side, more tools and functionality than ever makes the future of the largest cloud Open Source project ever definitely rosy.

Cloud Hardware Architectures get real – Over the last year or so, several vendors including VCE, the uneasy coalition of EMC, Cisco and VMware, Dell, and NetApp, have announced prepackaged cloud hardware stacks. On the surface the idea is appealing to enterprise IT infrastructure teams unprepared for the cloud revolution. However, as companies quickly found out, there is a big difference between dropping in a rack of hardware and building a productive enterprise cloud infrastructure. Since a primary cloud objective is hardware and software abstraction, more vendors will be developing infrastructure architectures tolerant of commodity hardware and supportive of transparent upgrades.

VMware Cloud gets it right – All indications are that 2013 will be the year that VMware finally gets it right after years of passing virtualization off as cloud. Enterprises that have been patiently waiting for a full suite of cloud features and tools will be rewarded with a system that will be expensive (what else is new), but actually delivers the goods.

Cloud Tools mature – With more offerings than ever from startups and mature companies alike, the market for sophisticated tools will be heating up as companies realize that they need orchestration, brokering, PaaS and cloud management suites. There will be lots of activity, new offerings, acquisitions, and of course, the inevitable hype.

About the Author
Beth Cohen is a senior cloud architect for Cloud Technology Partners, Inc., focused on delivering solutions to help enterprises leverage the efficiencies of cloud architectures and technologies. Previously, Ms. Cohen was the director of engineering IT for BBN Corporation, where she was involved with the initial development of the Internet, working on some of the hottest networking and web technology protocols in their infancy.

As I mentioned my previous post on the recently concluded OpenStack Summit held in San Diego October 2012, OpenStack needs to be taken seriously by anyone who is interested in building a public or private cloud.  For the more technically inclined the latest Folsom release has several new modules and features of interest to the enterprise and cloud service provider alike:

Quantum – Software Defined Networking (SDN), the latest darling of the cloud world is moving forward quickly with some really valuable features including L2 to L3 tunneling and a network API.  Expect to see lots of new development here.  On a side note, there was a great panel on the future of SDN moderated by Ken Pepple from Cloud Technology Partners, with people from Midokura, Big Switch and HP Cloud Services talking about their vision of the future for SDN.

Cinder – Now that Cinder has been spun out as its own named project, new features include intelligent location of Virtual Machine image storage, real snapshots, live migration, and more capability for large scale simultaneous VM initiations.

Keystone – New features includes support for role-based identify management (RBAC), PKI functionality, tools to add integration capability with enterprise grade account management systems such as Active Directory and other LDAP based systems.  Rumors of Kerberos support coming were floating around.

Documentation and security are both finally being taken seriously, with a half day documentation track on Monday morning and a full day of security related sessions on Thursday.  There was recognition among the lead techs that the developers who are creating OpenStack are not the users.  This resulted in much discussion regarding new features to make it easier to do deployments, upgrades (finally!) and manage it by operations folks.  There even was some discussion of IaaS/PaaS integration and how the VM’s work with the platform, a long overdue recognition that the IaaS and PaaS layers of the cloud stack are intimately related.

On the subject of operations, the tools to manage OpenStack are still weak, but they are no longer non-existent.  Ceilometer and heat among others look promising, but the better operations management tools are still mostly part of separate distributions such as Cloudscaling, Nebula, StackOps and others rather than being part of the product core.  While I do see the reasoning behind this thinking, at the very least we really need to have some standardized installation tools.  There is little benefit for every instance and distribution to reinvent the wheel.

One final note, one thing that was quite noticeable was that the Grizzly design sessions had a very different vibe from previous summits.  While some were packed with lots of discussions about new features, more often the Technical Project Lead and a few others ran the show with little input from the other participants in the room.  As the number contributors grow, the community is going to need to work hard to avoid having the immediacy of the Summit be diluted.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of meat already, but as can be seen by this tiny sampling of the current hot projects, there is still much work to be done.  The good news is the OpenStack community is ready willing and capable of delivering the goods in the coming months and years.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

You would think that cloud technology would have standardized long time ago.  While network standards that shape the Internet have been widely accepted throughout the industry, cloud standards have had a much slower adoption path.  Sadly the current state of cloud standards is, after 15 years, still far less mature than it ought to be.  As cloud infrastructure technology matures, increased interest by the enterprise and emerging vendors is driving a renewed effort to create viable standards that will benefit everyone.

For companies looking for integration and the capability to build hybrid clouds, various standards and proprietary and open APIs have been proposed to provide interoperability up and down the three layers of the cloud stack.  The first and so far only, cloud-oriented standard that has been ratified is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), which was approved in September 2010 after three years of processing by the DMTF.  OVF’s open packaging and distribution format offers some platform independence by allowing migration between some platforms, but it does not provide all the tools needed for full cloud interoperability.

I think we can all agree that everyone benefits from technology standards in the long-term – the operative word is long-term.  You would think that everyone would agree that cloud infrastructure technology standards should be given high priority, but creating compelling proprietary systems and discouraging standards gives early adopter companies competitive advantage in the short-term.  Think about Amazon and VMware’s vast technology and market leads in the cloud services and enterprise infrastructure systems respectively.  They have little motivation to support any standards that have the potential to undercut their monopoly market positions.

Users of cloud are asking when will cloud computing standards mature enough so that more companies will feel comfortable implementing cloud architectures and using cloud services without feeling locked in.  Ironically, while the commercial cloud offerings have been growing, built on the very standards that created the Internet itself, Amazon and others have been reluctant to publish their architectures.  Application Programming Interfaces (API), which hide the underlying architecture, are all well and good, but they do not guaranty true interoperability.  Downstream vendors quickly find that they need to build API interfaces for all the different services they need to support; adding significantly to the development and maintenance costs.  To address this and transparently transfer workloads among the different vendor based on predefined business rules, there needs to be much more comprehensive standards.

One obvious question to ask is if there is an opportunity for the commercial cloud systems to become standards.  After all, there have been precedents where formerly proprietary formats, such as VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) which was developed by VMware, have become de facto standards simply by being widely adopted by the industry.  One could even argue that platforms such as Amazon’s AWS are already standards.  However, as many companies have found to their chagrin, while it has a vast variety of services, easy to use tools, and a significant technological head start on the competition, it is more of a cloud world roach motel.  Lots of companies have found it easy to get applications running quickly, but changing providers or taking the applications back in-house as requirements change is fraught with unexpected perils.  Amazon’s backing of Eucalyptus does not address that problem directly, but it does offer a viable option for companies that want to build what Amazon euphemistically calls, on-premise services.

In conclusion, the good news is that the cloud industry is finally reaching consensus that the time to build cloud interoperability standards is long overdue.   The biggest need remains for interoperability standards to allow virtual machines to be migrated between clouds transparently and for more robust hybrid cloud solutions.  For the moment companies that want to use multiple platforms or a mix of public and private options are stuck with complex architectures and emerging orchestration tools such as enStratus and Rightscale to bridge the gap.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

To understand how to manage your high availability options, it is important to have a discussion about how high availability, risk and component failure work in a cloud environment.  High availability is very important for cloud environments; often the cloud provider is required to meet strict service level agreements for 99.99% or 99.999% (the so called 5-nines) availability.  In theory, that is the very reason that customers are interested in using cloud services.  It should be noted that most of the public cloud service providers have lots of methods to measuring availability that is in their favor, so even in the case of catastrophic systems failure, they are rarely accountable for the downtime.  This has been one of many sources of caution for enterprises that have wanted to leverage public cloud services.

Before going into the details of how to quantify the cost of risk mitigation for a cloud, a short discussion of the science of risk management will help with understanding how it all works.  The goal of business risk management is to detail what kinds of risks exist in your specific business and determine how to prevent them entirely or minimize their impact on the business as a whole. Business risk management is essentially quantifying the risk that a given system will fail multiplied by the cost.  Cost is further broken into two more categories.  Out of pocket costs, also referred to as sunk costs, and lost opportunity costs.  Sunk costs are costs that you will need to pay out to fix the problem, while lost opportunity costs are revenue lost due to the system unavailability.  For example, the risk that there will be regular earthquakes in Japan is high.  The Japanese have responded to this threat by having some of the strongest earthquake resistant building codes in the world.  However, as last year’s 9.0 tremor and following tsunami so dramatically demonstrated, it is impossible to prepare for such extreme and rare events.

High availability is best addressed by redundancy.  However, redundancy can be achieved at several levels of the IT infrastructure: hardware, software, network, or a combination.  Traditional IT organizations have reduced the risk of downtime by concentrating almost exclusively on hardware redundancy.  The scale of the cloud, where there are already thousands or hundreds of thousands of systems, hardware redundancy at the component level quickly becomes unsustainably expensive.   A telling scholarly article that looked at the reported hardware failures from several large data centers shows that by far the most likely failure at data center scales is as would be expected the components that have moving parts, such as hard drives and power supplies.

In practice, the enterprise needs to balance the cost of duplicating hardware throughout the cloud ecosystem, which is the traditional approach to solving the risk management problem, against the need for keeping operating expenses low. Another consideration is that duplicating everything at the hardware level does not automatically guaranty that you do not still have a single point of failure in the environment.  For example, you might have remembered to contract with multiple carriers to spread the risk of a network outage, but if they all come into the data center at a single location, the data center is still prone to a catastrophic “backhoe failure”, which is what happens when a backhoe has severed all the up-link cables in one fell swoop.  It is an expensive and time consuming repair that leaves many unhappy customers in its wake.  Yes, there are ways to mitigate this risk, but they are expensive and need to be balanced against the relative probability of such an event.

The best approach is to look at the probability of failure of each component in context of the entire ecosystem.  Since hard drives fail at such a high rate, the hardware approach is to mirror or RAID the drives across thousands of systems.  This translates to data redundancy and added costs that far exceed the optimum for availability and cost reduction.  At scale, building a storage system that handles the data redundancy at the software level is far more efficient.  Another examples, is planning for power supply (or more precisely fan) failures.  Again, since they are generally the next most common component to fail, instead of filling the cloud data center with thousands of extra power supplies and fans, it is better to build the cloud to be resistant to downtime if a server node fails.  In the end, addressing cloud high availability is not only about determining the MTTF of hard drives, cables or switch ports, it is also balancing it against the likelihood of a given failure at the data center macro level.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

People have been managing data centers for 30-40 years now, so that should mean that there are a good set of standard best practices for building highly available resilient components.   That is true for the old style data center, but the old best practices are expensive and do not scale well for cloud architectures.  Duplicating hardware to protect against failure works well when you have hundreds of components but the costs are linear so it does not scale.  Unlike traditional IT operations, over-design to protect against obsolescence is not desirable when scaling to thousands of nodes.  For example, spending an extra $6000/rack for 10GB switches might seem to be a sensible way to protect against hardware obsolescence if you have 10 racks, but that extra cost is much harder to justify when you are provisioning a 100 racks and it has turned into an extra $6 million!

The principal of ‘replacement management’ takes on great importance when managing the thousands of physical devices required for a cloud deployment.  The advantage of the cloud is that you do not need to build expensive high availability redundant systems because an assumption that components will fail is built into the architecture.  By leveraging the huge pools of cloud resources, the level of redundancy can be considerably reduced.  If a component fails, the system will continue to work until someone replaces it.  Since commodity low price devices typically have a high rate of failure, the whole architecture needs to be based on “availability” and “partial failure”.

In a cloud environment, it makes much more sense to just replace a component than worry about what caused the failure and trying to troubleshoot it.  The most common components to fail are disks, since they are mechanical moving parts.  A typical disk failure rate in a cloud data center is about 10-15%.  However, fans, power supplies and memory will also fail less frequently.  For example, the OpenStack Swift architecture assumes that disks, systems and entire zones can and will disappear (fail) at any time.  Yet, there are only three copies of every file, and no additional redundancy in the hardware.

This approach to failure at scale can be very cost effective, but it takes different mindset from traditional operations.  Every cloud operations engineer for cloud should learn what is in the service, where the critical parts are located, and how to replace a failed component, then incorporate the knowledge into standard operations processes.  Automated tools need to be written to help identify the location of failed disks and other components so they can quickly be isolated from the environment and replaced.  To maintain a high level of robustness without sacrificing cost efficiency, the system needs to be designed to replicate data on the application/software level, not disk or network level.

In conclusion, the biggest paradigm shift is that development and operations groups need to work together to optimize the systems and drive down costs.  Tests and metrics need to be created to determine the optimum systems configurations.  By understanding how changes in the components affect the systems as a whole, it will allow you to flexibly configure the systems to meet the application requirements as they change.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Transforming Businesses with Cloud Solutions

A recent presentation I saw about Microsoft’s Azure cloud service claims that Azure is a PaaS (Platform as a Service), while offerings from Rackspace and Amazon are IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).  Coming from the network administration world I was left scratching my head.  You would think that by now cloud computing definitions would be settled.  After all, cloud technology as a concept has been around for at least five years.  As noted in my previous blog on cloud business and operations , NIST has published a viable definition even with its somewhat operational bias.  To me and the majority of the IT community, the definition of PaaS is that it provides the operating system but any tools or applications installed on that platform are beyond the scope of a PaaS service.

Drilling down further into the mystery, there seems to be a gap in the three layer model that requires an additional component.  Cloud computing follows the traditional IT model of infrastructure support and application development as separate functions.  IaaS and PaaS are both services that are designed, built and supported by people who are IT infrastructure engineers.  They have little knowledge or interest in the applications that sit on top of the systems they build.  SaaS products, on the other hand, are developed as applications designed to be used primarily by end users.  Modern SaaS products typically leverage IaaS and PaaS services for their infrastructure.

Microsoft Azure and other similar services, such as, AppEngine by Google and Force.com by Salesforce.com clearly are providing services that do not fit into that classic three layer cloud computing model.  They deliver tools for building new applications and supporting existing software, but unlike SaaS (Software as a Service) these services are designed specifically to be used by developers to create new applications.  Azure does have some built-in runtime support tools, but unlike VMware’s vFabric the tools are designed from the developer’s, not operational perspective.

So I would argue that Microsoft’s definition of Azure as a PaaS is misleading.  Clearly Microsoft is co-opting the term PaaS by its own unique definition for marketing purposes, but I think that just muddies the waters unnecessarily.  Microsoft Azure as a comprehensive development platform in the cloud built from familiar components has few real competitors and offers a valuable service for Microsoft centric shops that have no other viable way to easily migrate to their applications to the cloud.  A more accurate view is that Azure is an application development environment as a service.  Maybe the best term for Azure and other such tool kits should be Software Development as a Service or SDaaS.  By labeling these offerings separately it clears up the confusion between the IT operations and development functions.  The four layer cloud model, IaaS, PaaS, SDaaS, and SaaS more closely maps to the required staff skills and matches the IT functional model that exists in most organizations today.

As their web portal says, “Windows Azure and SQL Azure enable you to build, host and scale applications in Microsoft datacenters.  They require no up-front expenses, no long term commitment, and enable you to pay only for the resources you use.”  Sure reads like a cloud Software Development as a service offering to me.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.  Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

It is official.  Cloud computing is finally mainstream enough to earn its own NIST definition.  On the surface it is simple enough; by NIST standards the definition is pretty short – only 2 pages.  It has five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.  The three service models are well-known: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and the four deployment models are public, private, community and hybrid.

None of this should be news to anyone who has been following the cloud for a few years.  What I find interesting is how IT operations-centric this perspective seems.  From the vendor messages at VMWorld last summer, the MIT CIO Symposium in May, and the most recent Boston CloudCamp,  you would think that Cloud Computing is primarily a new way of building IT infrastructure to run IT operations more efficiently.  Certainly, if you listen to the big consulting company of your choice, all you need to do to achieve your IT operations cost reduction goals, is sign a multi-million dollar deal and they will sell you a shiny new private cloud data center.  I will grant that it does achieve that goal (with a few asterisks of course), but if it was just a way to manage IT operations better, faster and cheaper, Cloud computing would not be all that exciting.

In my mind, Cloud computing and its companion technologies, mobile access and social networking tools are really a new paradigm of delivering IT tools and services to the enterprise.  Cloud shifts the focus away from essentially boring operations and systems by turning them into utilities.  Once the operations layer is abstracted away, users can focus on services, the essence of what we use computers for, to build better tools.  Yes, we have all heard that before.  Some of the older folks might even say Cloud is the new timeshare, but it is far more than that if we can push past the old way of thinking about the enterprise.

To really take advantage of the Cloud, take a look at what is happening in the consumer cloud space.  While some corporations are still dipping their toes in the water, some really exciting mass market tools and services are emerging.  Gmail, Skype and Flikr have become the new de facto standards for social communications, while Facebook and Linkedin are giant real-time experiments in the power of social networking writ very large.  Love it or hate it, Groupon and its ilk are bringing sophisticated mass customization marketing techniques and tools to small businesses.  Groupon would not even been able to exist if it were not for the Cloud.  It leverages the Cloud infrastructure to build out its systems, taps into its markets using the techniques of the social media pioneers, and delivers its services through mobile devices.  Clearly it is working in the consumer space.

These new architectures can translate back into the more cautious enterprise by using a combination of risk analysis and Agile methodologies.  You can can use them to rapidly create test cases within the enterprise setting to quickly determine if a feature is useful or desirable.  Some very successful companies have taken this new approach to heart.  Not surprisingly, Google uses it to build new tools, but long before the Internet, Capital One successfully used these methods to bring credit services to the masses, reaping huge profits along the way.  The good news is that the techniques are sophisticated, but they are not out of reach of any enterprise willing to shake off the status quo, build a culture that encourages lateral thinking, and truly rewards bold achievement.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

“Everything is mobile, everything is in the cloud.”

At the recent MIT CIO Symposium the theme was Beyond the Crossroads, the intersection of cloud computing, social media and mobile applications.  On the surface, the connection with these three themes would seem obvious to a technology savvy audience.  As proven over the past 150 years, first mover advantage can offer lasting benefits for a company that is smart about taking educated risks.  You would think that the enterprise would be embracing cloud and mobile technologies that have proven to be so successful in the consumer market.

However after spending a day listening to industry leader CIO’s primarily in the technology sector, what struck me was how much these supposedly leading lights in technology were stuck in the old school not invented here mentality.  The most exciting technology I saw all day was at the Innovation Showcase held long after most of the 900 attendees had left for the day.  Too bad, because these companies, such as Hadapt , a company that is creating the next generation of distributed database tools, and Apperian, a company building tools for managing enterprise mobile applications in the cloud, are demonstrating that there is plenty of room for innovation for the enterprise beyond the crossroads.

Meanwhile back at the main program, the discussion in the keynote panel on Opportunities and Strategies in the Digital Business World revolved around how the CIO needs to be thinking about how they can become the CEO of the company.  In the companies I have seen, you do not get to be in the top spot by being bold and innovative, rather a demonstrated ability to cut costs and produce short-term gains for investors wins every time.

According to Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-founder, Hubspot,  ”Cloud and mobile is not the future, it is a couple of years ago.  IT needs to be deflationary, destructive and disruptive.”  The CIO should be leading the cultural change to the new modern flat organization by leveraging the cloud and mobile application in new and interesting ways.  Instead the reality is that real innovation happens at the edges in the marketing dept, etc., or more often, completely outside of the typical enterprise where conformity and process thinking is encouraged over creativity and originality.  The Cloud moves IT from a capital intensive function to an operational expense activity.  The venture folks understand that paradigm; no right minded startup today is building an internal IT infrastructure.  At the same time, the typical corporate CIO is more challenged by the business manager with a credit card and a grunge against the poor service they have been getting from the IT function.

The dilemma is how can you pull innovation into the IT core functionality without disrupting the flow of new ideas, when the modern understanding of IT at the enterprise is focused on operational excellence and cost control?  Innovation is the marriage of the technology and organization change.  You do not see innovation in IT about 98% of the time because there has been zero input to how the IT tools are actually going to be used.  The trick is creating ways for people to quickly test and validate their ideas so they can implement new ideas that work within the enterprise framework.  The new tools can be used to deliver on that promise, but is the enterprise up to that challenge?  What do you think?

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

AWS, Amazon’s hosted web services offering suffered a major outage with some data lose at one of its data centers on April 21, 2011.  It was not the first such outage and I rather doubt it will be the last, but it was the one that was exposed what I call the dirty secret about cloud computing: the illusion of low cost high availability, systems backup and protection, and how quickly so many cloud services have become interdependent.

Ultimately, data protection and high availability boils down to having multiple copies of your data and IT systems in multiple locations with good reliable bandwidth connecting them.  Traditionally, high availability (that is 5 nines and up) has been expensive due to the cost of the bandwidth and hardware needed to deliver the level of service required.

On the surface moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud looks and sounds very attractive.  In theory, the cloud offers a great solution.  By purchasing cloud services, anyone can leverage the investments of Amazon, Google, Rackspace and the other major cloud vendors in state of the art data centers with full redundancy, and big network pipes for a tiny fraction of the cost of doing it in-house.  By moving IT infrastructure to the cloud you can take advantage of the redundancy and resiliency of using multiple vendors and multiple data centers and get enterprise class data protection at rock bottom prices.  Reading between the lines of the standard service level agreements for the low cost cloud services paints a very different picture.  Amazon guaranties 98% up-time, hardly earth shatteringly difficult to achieve.  Once you add in all those pesky asterisks and inter-dependencies, it is unlikely that anyone is going to be able to collect on this incident or any downtime at all.

Setting aside the issue of Amazon services level agreements, all of this assumes that you have control over most if not all of the systems and services in your IT stack.  What this outage highlighted for many companies is that even if they had built in the best fail-over and high availability into their systems, they were still dependent on vendors and services that might not have been quite so diligent.  As more companies take advantage of the increasingly specialized cloud services built on top of the cloud utility vendors’ infrastructure, insuring up-time is going to be increasing more difficult to determine through the maze of inter-dependent services.

The bottom line for a business that wants to gain the advantage of high availability at low cost is that you need to make sure you have not only architected your own service to have a full fail-over solution, but you will also need to spend time doing diligence on all of your vendors’ policies and architectures as well.  No matter how good the SLA is, if one of your upstream service providers does not have a good policy in place, your site will still be affected by their lack of planning.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!

Virtualization is no longer news.  Over the past 5 years, over 90% of all enterprises have converted their data centers from racks of physical servers to virtual architectures, with an average project cost savings of over $800K.  These numbers are compelling, but over the past two years the virtualization market has shifted yet again.

While VMware still has close to a monopoly on the enterprise market, as the market shifts more toward the use of the cloud, that lock-hold is weakening.  The majority of cloud offerings, like Amazon, Cloud.com and Terremark (recently purchased by Verizon) to name just a few examples, are not based on VMware, but rather either the Open Source Xen architecture or a proprietary platform.  The purchase of XenSource by Citrix a few years ago was a very smart move indeed. With the backing of Citrix, which has long been a major player in the enterprise market, the Xen platform is rapidly becoming more attractive to companies that have traditionally shied away from the Open Source software model.

VMware itself is jumping on the cloud bandwagon and has been rolling out new offerings that appeal to enterprises that want the flexibility and efficiency of the public cloud offerings in their private clouds.  The IT department is going to be hard pressed to win an argument with a business unit about why they cannot deliver a new server in less than six weeks, when the users can already get that service from Amazon in 20 minutes.  The vCloud offering includes such cloud friendly features such as simplified chargeback mechanisms, IT as a Service (IaaS) architectures, and self-service portals.  As the server market is rapidly saturated, VMware is actively developing desktop virtualization products, thin application technologies, and enterprise class identity management platforms to handle thousands of virtual enterprise desktops and applications.  The application, code named Horizon, is basically an ID Management proxy server that interprets a company’s AD infrastructure and presents it out to SaaS applications.  The drivers for this technology are security and control, not cost savings.  Ironically, companies have rediscovered the dumb terminal without realizing it.

The biggest news on the technology side is the development of para-virtualization and new development platforms that are optimized for virtualized and cloud environments.  Para-virtualization first developed in Xen and now in available in VMware, is a way to optimize the virtual environment by sharing resources.  By having the virtual machines share memory, CPU and disk I/O, the virtual environment can be run more efficiently than the traditional stove-piped guest OS architecture.  However, the cost is fewer supported platforms because the para-virtualized kernels must be supported by the underlying hypervisor and more risk that the security between the guest servers can be breached.  The cloud environment is heavily dependent on para-virtualization.

The other recent development is the renewed interest in new tools that leverage the virtual and cloud environments.  VMware’s purchase of SpringSource in August 2009 is an indication that the development of cloud enabled applications is going to be a huge market in the next few years.  VMware has continued to demonstrate their enthusiasm for this market with its March 2011 acquisition of WaveMaker, a company that has built tools that make it easier to use the Spring tools platform.

In the future, I would see a return to stripped down operating systems that are optimized for delivering applications like web services and databases.  Think of it as sort of a full circle reassessment of the definition of an application and an operating system.  Who needs a VM Windows server with web services on it, when what you really want is a web server?

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc. Moving companies’ IT services into the cloud the right way, the first time!