From the Enterprise perspective, now has never been a better time to invest in cloud services. Enterprises are broadly adopting all types of cloud services at multiple levels in the organization. Initial predictions were for the enterprise to favor private and community clouds over public services, but the hottest trends in Cloud adoption has been Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based business applications which are projected to grow from $13.4 billion in 2011 to $32.2 billion in 2016, a 19.1% five-year CAGR! The rapid adoption of SaaS applications of all flavors by the enterprise has been a surprise to many, but the vastly reduced costs due to the pay as you go pricing models, and high degree of service delivery flexibility has overcome any perceptions of needing to trade price for reduced feature sets. Unsurprisingly, the most often added cloud-based application services are Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM), with Web Conferencing, teaming platforms and social software suites nipping at their heels.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) continues to appeal to companies that want to replace in-house and traditional data center models for the cloud hardware abstraction approach. Gartner is predicting Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), cloud management & security devices, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are growing from $7.6B in 2011 to $35.5B in 2016, a CAGR of 36%. A word of warning for companies that think just because the Amazon cloud is easy to use, it is easy to build and manage. Building a private cloud still requires a degree of expertise that few enterprises have in-house. In the next year or so expect more companies to see the value of using the services of cloud consultants to avoid painful and expensive mistakes when building private clouds; or alternatively using emerging enterprise focused public cloud services such as Bluelock or Terremark.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) which still does not quite know what it wants to be when it grows up, is lagging with only about $1B in revenue in 2012, but as the market matures, expect to see rapid uptake as companies recognize the value of standardized tools that can ease the pain of Cloud application deployments. Some of the newer PaaS tools like the ServiceMesh Agility Platform combine the features of a SDLC workflow engine, production support and orchestration across different cloud platforms.

New Cloud Technology Directions

Ultimately, innovation is the marriage of technology and organization change. The dilemma is how to pull innovation into IT core functionality without disrupting the flow of new ideas, when the modern enterprise understanding of IT is focused on operational excellence and cost control. The CIO should be leading the cultural change to the new flat organization by leveraging cloud and mobile application in new and interesting ways. The trick is to create tools for people to quickly test and validate their ideas so they can implement new ideas that work within the enterprise framework. Cloud tools can be used to deliver on that promise, but is the enterprise up to that challenge?

This is not the first time wrenching technology innovation has changed how companies do business, and it certainly will not be the last. Companies able to use disruptive technologies, such as cloud computing, effectively will leave companies who do not have that ability in the dust. By recognizing the seeds of change and embracing them, the smart company can leverage cloud services by using the efficiencies of pooled IT resources at the same time allowing greater flexibility to meet the challenges of the global economy. This combination of combining commodity utilities with innovation allows companies to compete effectively using the efficiency and flexibility strategies simultaneously.

Challenges, Always Challenges…

Consumers intuitively get cloud and have been more than willing to embrace it warts and all as it has matured. They are highly price sensitive and will easily sacrifice features in exchange for low cost. On the other side of the market spectrum, the more conservative enterprise market is still struggling with the basic model. Some companies worry that the emerging cloud companies are too small to do business with, while others are concerned with how to incorporate new technologies into existing technology portfolio investments. To address their concerns, at the same time as Cloud technology continues to mature and standards develop , innovation around service delivery and breakthroughs in storage technologies are making it ever more enterprise ready. The pace of cloud vendor consolidation has already picked up as the traditional enterprise vendors such as HP and IBM has rushed to add enterprise ready cloud services to their portfolios. This should alleviate the fears of even the most technology adverse companies.

A final word for any remaining cloud technology skeptics, as with any innovative force, the cloud is just a tool to drive change, not an embodiment of change itself. Enterprise cloud consulting leaders, have firsthand experience with how companies willing to ride the Cloud revolution will not only survive in today’s hyper-competitive world, but thrive. I cannot wait to see where the next wave takes us!

About the Author
Beth Cohen, 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.

After four extraordinary days of immersion into all things OpenStack at the just concluded OpenStack Summit in San Diego, I can heartily say without reservations that OpenStack is not only very real, it is truly a game changer for the IT industry.  With that being said, yes, there is certainly plenty of hype about this Open Source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering – one wag even quipped that OpenStack was at the peak of the Gardner hype cycle, so it must be real.  Here are just a few highlights for the terminally busy:

• The technology has come a long way since the project’s August 2010 inception.  With 13 major corporate foundation contributors, it seems like the only major technology companies not involved are Amazon and Apple.
• There was much discussion about the newly created OpenStack Foundation as an organization and its long-term viability.  However, compared to where the Apache Foundation was at the same time in its lifecycle, the OpenStack Foundation is far ahead of the curve.
• OpenStack is definitely gaining market traction.  There were plenty of academic, enterprise and service provider IT folks kicking the tires.  To encourage more market adoption, the website is featuring user stories.  A new one from WebEx was inspired by a visit to the Boston conference where the engineers saw the Mercardo Libra success story.
• While there was still a preponderance of developers in attendence (it was a design summit after all), there were more operations and business types than ever.  The vendor area was busier than ever.
• The biggest technical buzz was around Quantum and virtualized Software Defined Networking (SDN) — standing room only at the technical update and all the design sessions, but Cinder, and Keystone were not far behind in incorporating new features and functionality.
• Every time I turned around there seemed to be a new distribution available from both the usual suspects, such as Piston and Nebula, and the big players such as Cisco, SuSe and ???.  Niki Acosta’ Vapor Trail blog has a nice summary of the many vendor announcements.  More on the case of the proliferating distributions coming…
• And finally, the parties this time were for the most part more subdued.  HP’s soirée at the New Children’s Art Museum was cool, but the endless Techno Musak at all of them just gave me a pulsating (pun intended) headache.

As can be seen from this tiny sampling of the Summit activities, an enormous amount of energy and momentum has built up in just over two years.  For a project that will likely eventually be as important as Apache and Linux, every organization and person who has contributed to it should be justifiably proud of their accomplishments so far.

About the Author

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

The traditional storage market has settled into several distinct streams.  On the high end is the EMC approach which is to build very complex storage systems with multiple redundant hardware plus many configuration options and features.  This very expensive approach works for enterprises that really need fast reliable storage and have the budget to justify the investment.  At the low end of the spectrum, there are lots of options for small storage pools — half a petabyte or so – which are generally sold through channels.  The prices for these systems have remained relatively stable at the $1 million for a petabyte range.

For companies that want massive amounts (15 petabytes or more) of cheap storage or a horizontally scalable cloud type architecture, the options have been limited to a few vendors or for the technologically adventurous, a roll your own system.  All this is happening despite the fact that there are now three hard disk manufacturers left, a de facto monopoly, and most users treat hard drives as interchangeable commodities with excessively high failure rates that require massive amounts of duplication.  Any vendor that can demonstrate a system that reduces the need for three data copies to maintain integrity by improving the failure rate from the current 10-15% a year, would deliver a big win for everyone.

As the cloud storage business grows the traditional vertically scalable storage is less and less viable.  There are several companies that are already working on building horizontally scalable storage, Scality and CloudBytes are two that come to mind.  There are also several Open Source projects like Openstack Swift that are taking on the large data store architecture problem as well.  Not all the cloud storage vendors are using a pooled block of storage approach.  ScaleIO turns all the disks in the servers into a pool of storage.  This radically different approach is dependent on the right use case and could have network bottleneck issues. The newer horizontally scaled cloudy architectures, such as Mezeo and Openstack Swift have finally opened up the possibility of building attractively priced massive data pools.

The biggest innovation of late is the incorporation of SSD technology.  Amazon is already offering an all SSD cloud storage service and a number of new storage vendors, such as SolidFire are building SSD only storage systems from the ground up.  SolidFire isn’t the first vendor with an SSD offering, Nimbus Data began selling all-SSD systems more than a year ago. EMC jumped in with a Symmetrix with all SSDs this summer, and others are expected to follow shortly. Texas Memory Systems, Avere, Violin Memory and Alacritech, have all-SSD systems designed to speed SAN and NAS performance for internal storage solutions.  Most storage vendors now give customers the option of installing some SSD alongside hard drives in their systems. In the long run, this is just an interim step as SSD prices will continue to fall over the next few years.  The future is a move to all SSD units coming to a data center near you.

It is good to see innovation coming back in the storage industry after years of slack.  Expect to see more hardware innovation as SSD technology becomes the standard for fast reliable cloud storage and new systems take advantage of more reliable hard disk hardware and continued rise in data densities.  My crystal ball says that we might see a repeat of the massive changes that occurred in the 1990’s as smaller disks rapidly swept away all the incumbent vendors who were focused on their established large customers.  Watch your back EMC…

About the Author

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

The wonderful thing about cloud architectures is that they are designed to be cost effective at massive scales.  The major cloud providers are profitable not only because they can aggregate customers and use the available equipment more efficiently, but they can leverage their considerable market muscle to purchase truckloads of components at steep discounts.  As Google discovered and published in Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population , the brand and cost of a hard drive had little to do with its reliability.  Another paper delivered at the same 2007 Usenix Conference, Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?, came to similar conclusions.  The key to building reliability in the cloud is not quality components; it is building a hardware architecture that assumes that the components will fail and plan for that failure.  Since the individual components are essentially interchangeable, it stands to reason that a good cloud architecture should be completely hardware agnostic.

The fallacy of that kind of thinking is that failure rates are the only criteria for choosing a given component.  As you know hardware is a moving target, new and better hardware is always coming around the next corner.  Any good storage engineer knows that enterprise customers do not pay the EMC or NetApp premium just because they feel more comfortable buying from a known brand.  They are typically paying for the better tools, faster performance or bigger capacity that they need for their high performance applications.

It turns out that this applies to cloud hardware architectures as well.  Hardware does in fact matter if a cloud is going to run at peak efficiency.  Which hardware components are chosen can make a significant difference under stress conditions.  When the objective is to optimize the environment, the ideal cloud environment should be running at close to peak capacity – essentially under some stress — most to the time.  For example, in a storage array, the two constraints are always going to be system network bandwidth and disk I/O, i.e. how fast the disks can push the data around.  By specifying a faster disk controller and tweaking the configuration to boost the throughput by eliminating disk write caching for example, the entire system will run that much more efficiently.  Yes, in this case you will be reducing disk reliability, but since you already have a mechanism that provides disk failure resiliency in other ways, that risk can be tolerated in exchange for the faster throughput.

In conclusion, at the proof of concept and small system level, cloud hardware agnosticism works just fine, but for massive cloud installations that want to run at peak efficiency, paying attention to specifying the right hardware components to eliminate the throughput bottlenecks, has the potential to boost overall performance significantly.  The trick is determining if the hardware cost differential is worth the increased performance.  Of course at truly Amazonian scales, that cost differential essentially disappears.  However at more modest enterprise scales, in my opinion, in most cases the TCO business case for the better hardware will prevail.

About the Author

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

Recently I had an eye-opening experience.  I asked my sophomore business IT class how many of them owned various computing devices.  Unsurprisingly, 100% of them would not be caught dead without their Smart-Phone.  The majority had either Droids or iPhones, with a few Blackberries in the mix — sorry HP, the Palm is dead unless you hustle to catch up soon.  About 40% of them had an iPad or other tablet device in addition to their laptops.  Interesting that they thought nothing of owning three, what in my mind are, devices with similar functions.

I then asked the students if they were concerned with syncing all their information between all the different devices.  They looked at me rather puzzled.  They were not concerned because to them, the Smart-phone, tablets and laptops were just methods to connect to their data.  As far as they were concerned the authoritative copy of the data was located safely in the cloud, as it should be.  The devices to them were merely dumb terminals – although I am quite sure they would not even understand just what that meant.  What is important for the enterprise IT organization is that these twenty year-olds have made an important shift in thinking about how and where data is stored; a paradigm that we all need to accept and embrace to realize the real power of the cloud for the enterprise.

For all those people who think their data is safely stored on servers that are buried deep inside their protected LAN, their heads buried in the sand.  If you have data and you work with suppliers, customers, or employees, your data is out there on the cloud whether you like it or not.  Yes, you should be concerned with protecting that data properly, but the answer is not to install yet more firewalls and layers of obscurity.  The answer is to design the right architectures and the correct security to assure that the data is always available to the right people at the right time and at the right location.  My students, all future business leaders, have gotten the message, why haven’t the rest of us?  Maybe it is because too many IT people realize the inevitability of change, and how moving to the cloud spells doom for the old monolithic IT shops.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.