What does this have to do with the just concluded April 2013 OpenStack Summit? Everything! The Summit was a big turning point for the just under three year old Open Source Cloud Platform Project. Never before has the Summit felt more like a real business conference with a clear-eyed agenda to architect a stable and viable enterprise ready cloud platform, rather than just a bunch of wild developers on a mission to save the world. After several years of intense development and shakedown, OpenStack is finally more than ready to take on the unique challenges of enterprises that want to deploy private clouds.

There were plenty of great examples of respected organizations, public and private that have crossed the innovation chasm by deploying OpenStack clouds into their production environments. The keynote sessions all highlighted large enterprise case studies to emphasis the message that OpenStack is a strong and very viable option. Here are just a few to whet your appetite:

• • Bloomberg has deployed a large scale internal cloud, for a variety of applications including analytics and support of their backend systems.
• • BestBuy built an OpenStack cloud to support their extremely spiky holiday rush traffic. In just eight months, 25% of their systems ran on their new cloud in time for the 2012 Christmas buying season. They found the new platform, combined with a move to a PaaS push button development environment and a server side delivery architecture, allowed them to speed delivery of their catalog content pages down to under 2 seconds, while saving over $500K per platform upgrade. How is that for some serious discounting!
• • Comcast Cable and NBC/Universal built an OpenStack cloud to move content delivery out of proprietary limited function set-top boxes and into backend servers, giving them more flexibility and capabilities for the development of new interactive features such as live streaming and gaming.
• • The NSA, yes the spies in DC, are using OpenStack. Of course, what, how and why they are using it were not shared, but clearly they are not overly concerned with reports of security deficiencies.
• • Samsung is rolling out a production grade platform that will support millions of users across the globe. If the success of the new Android based smartphones and tablets are any indication, Apple should be looking over its shoulder very carefully.

In conclusion, if your company is contemplating a public or private cloud deployment, you should be putting OpenStack at the top of your shortlist. The rich ecosystem of big names, such as Dell, IBM, RedHat and Cisco is a clear signal that OpenStack has arrived!

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.

The magic of the cloud is that it can do anything.  It is both robust and flexible, the best of both worlds.  Ok, I admit that I have been spending far too much time reading cloud marketing materials lately.  Now back to reality.  Yes, the cloud is highly flexible and it can do almost anything, but if you want to get the most out of your private cloud investment, you need to pay attention to the underlying hardware as I discussed previously, and you need to define what you are planning on using it for by creating and testing use cases.

Use case planning seems counter-intuitive.  After all you can sign up for a web server with Amazon in about 5 minutes.  Amazon does not know what you are planning on doing with it.  Wrong.  Amazon’s product management department spends plenty of time figuring out exactly what would be attractive to their typical customer and honing the service to deliver it.  For the enterprise, the planning process is no different, but instead of planning for an external paying customer, for example, the use could be for internal application developers or a web portal.

To give you an idea of how this works, let us say, you are planning on using the cloud for the company’s E-commerce website.  This means that you will need to plan for applications that will support thousands of sessions per second, variable workloads and lots of complex and changing data.  By identifying the key metrics such as number of concurrent transactions per second, size of database, etc. you can then build a method for testing your assumptions.

To get the conversation started here is a short list of possible use cases for a private cloud.  Over the next few weeks I will be digging deeper into how to leverage the cloud model in the enterprise.

Archive storage — Many companies have moved to keeping their archives on line instead of on backup tape for many excellent reasons.  Using SAN or near-line storage is still expensive.  Cloud object or block storage is an attractive alternative because of its optimized approach to high availability.  It also scales nicely as archives grow over time.

Federated hypervisor/VM management – This is one of the main reasons that the enterprise is interested in the cloud in the first place – any server, any service, any time.  Adding self-service, charge back and transparent delivery of the right resources from a federated pool can be very cost effective.  Look for a cloud that provides cross platform hypervisor support and robust VM management tools.

Development and test – One of the best use cases for an enterprise cloud is a shared development and test environment.  Self-service is essential, but the private version allows much more control on resource use by using a rules based delivery model to optimize IT investments.  Creating an enterprise PaaS environment is also desirable because it allows better integration across applications and more standardized application development.

Application spaghetti rationalization – An enterprise cloud delivers better application portfolio management and more efficient deployment by leveraging self-service features, rules for deployments based on types of use.

Web services, portals and e-commerce – Web services of all sorts are a natural for the enterprise cloud.  They are well suited to being able to take advantage of the inherent elasticity and automated workload based provisioning and deployment capabilities.

VDI Support – VDI is another natural for an enterprise cloud.  VDI is often used to better maintain control over workers’ compute environments, but the workloads are inherently highly variable, which is an excellent reason for implementing such systems on the cloud.  An obvious extension is mobile application support which is a growing part of the enterprise service portfolio.

Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity — Again the cheap storage and VM management makes a good case for using the cloud as a secondary site.  The public cloud is already heavily used for these purposes, but moving the function in-house could be cost effective for a very large enterprise.

About the Author

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

One of the many touted reasons for moving applications to the Cloud is to avoid vendor lock-in, so virtual environment independence is essential for any cloud migration.  However, today all the cloud stacks available, EC2, Cloud.com, Terremark, etc., assume that anyone moving into the cloud is creating new servers, building new systems and applications, not migrating their existing application and systems to the cloud.  Yet, many companies interested in cloud migration do not want to incur the costs associated with application level porting of their existing IT investment.  As many companies have discovered, migrating physical or virtual servers and applications directly to the Cloud is not as simple as it might seem on the surface.

The good news is that there are a number of good ways to address this issue.  Which one is the right one for your company is going to be dependent on your specific requirements.  However the basic choices are a full migration of the existing set of systems to a PaaS (Platform as a Service), moving some of the systems to the cloud to create a hybrid environment, or creating a virtual data center in the cloud.  In more complex environments, a mix of the different approaches might be the right answer.

Full migration – This is the approach you would choose if you need to preserve as much of the existing systems as you can.  While you will need to change the IP addressing schemes and not all platforms are supported, this can be a very cost effective method.  The downside is that each cloud environment is somewhat different, so migrations require tools need to have flexibility and are aware of the specific environment.  The number of migration tool products or applications available on the market is surprisingly small.  Once you ignore the specialized migration tools written by the virtualization platform vendors (VMware vCenter Converter and Citrix XenConvert for example), which are obviously not going to work in a cloud environment, and the repurposed backup tools (Acronis Backup and Recovery v10 Advanced Server Virtual Edition and Double-Take Move for example), the number of tools that have automation and multi-platform support is limited to two.  The RiverMeadow Networks Shaman^TM Appliance and PlateSpin Migrate are the only two products on the market today that are both automatable and support virtualization platforms other than Hyper-V and VMware.

Virtual data center in the Cloud – Another product on the market, Cloudswitch takes a different approach to complex existing data center environments.  CloudSwitch encapsulates the VM and preserves all of the existing network architecture/topology, including the IP addressing schemes.  The CloudSwitch solution can be very elegant for companies that are not ready to give up on their existing data center infrastructure but want the capability for transparent cloud bursting.  They also offer a great solution for companies that have reason to keep their networks completely private, yet still move their workloads into the Cloud.  Be aware that since the solution adds another layer of abstraction there is some extra overhead.  Of course, the issue of network capacity and the ability to move large data sets across the WAN remains.

Cloud bursting and hybrid environments – For companies that want to use the cloud for augmentation of their existing services the option of taking a portfolio approach to service locations might be the right solution.  The issue with this approach is the potential for incompatibility between the different environments and the limited management tools.  VMware recently announced Cloud Connector, a new tool to manage hybrid environments across venders, but it does require that all the environments be based on the ESX virtualization platform.

Ultimately which migration approach works best is going to be governed more by the existing environment, the business objectives and the limited number of tools to do it right.  As the Enterprise Public Cloud matures, the tools for migration will become more available and better matches to the needs of businesses.

About the Author

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

As we discussed in part 1, cloud services can be classified into five broad categories:

• Consumer Grade
• Small Business Grade
• Mid-sized Business Grade
• Enterprise Grade
• Private Cloud

For the consumer and the small business, cloud services are widely available, cheap and fairly robust if you are willing to put up with the limited services and self help support.  But for the enterprise, hoping that Amazon will not accidentally compromise your data, is just not going to be enough to satisfy your auditors or risk analysts.  Part 2 will discuss products that are more suited to the more sophisticated requirements of mid-sized and larger enterprise customers.  Part 3 will cover the cloud architectures and services that appeal to the needs of the large enterprise.

Mid-sized Business Grade – This is the classification that is the hardest to characterize.  Many of the newest entries into the cloud space fall into this category as vendors ramp up products that will appeal to companies that cannot afford the risk of implementing the consumer grade services available to small business customers, but who are unwilling or unable to pay for enterprise grade products or private cloud implementations.  In general the mid-sized enterprise is not going to be satisfied with the minimal customization available to the small business market.  The value that cloud services bring to mid-sized companies is access to applications with features and capabilities long available to enterprise customers at a fraction of the cost.  This market is full of niche products that cater to narrow specialties, such as facilities maintenance and asset management solutions (MaintenanceConnection and WebWork), and more sophisticated products with broader appeal, such ERP (NetSuite).  These is also a growing set of products being marketed as cloud portfolio management tools, such as Cloudswitch, a migration and virtual cloud data center management tool.  Many of these offerings have the capability for greater customization and better support services, which make them attractive to the mid-sized market, but the vendors tend to be relatively small so there is a risk of vendor lock-in and less robust back-end architectures than might appear on the glossy website.  Expect to see the most growth in these types of products as mid-sized enterprise customers become more comfortable with moving their IT applications to the cloud.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.

OK, we get it.  Cloud computing is big – really big.  In the interest of clearing away the massive amounts of vendor hype, here is a simple formula for sorting out the vast array of available — over 3000 at last count — and emerging cloud services.  In general, cloud services can be classified into five broad categories:

• Consumer Grade
• Small Business Grade
• Mid-sized Business Grade
• Enterprise Grade
• Private Cloud

Part 1 will cover consumer and small business grade products.  Part 2 will discuss products that are more suited to the more sophisticated requirements of the mid-sized and larger enterprise customer.

Consumer Grade – This represents by far the largest segment of the currently available services in terms of usage.  Close to 100% of all consumers are using some kind of cloud services, if you count email.  These products can easily be characterized by their extremely low price, little or no support, and limited customization.  They are designed for automated delivery of relatively simple vertical services with broad appeal to the mass market; the fast food of the IT world if you will.  Some examples of consumer grades products are webmail (Gmail, Hotmail), on-line backup (Mozy, Carbonite), photo sharing ( Flickr, iStock), and some web-based office productivity products (Google Docs, Office Live).

Small Business Grade – This category is growing by leaps and bounds.  However, the quality of the services, support and price vary wildly.  Again these services are pitched as low price alternatives, but they are focused on the business market rather than the consumer.   Many of the thousands of offerings are SaaS enabled applications that were formerly sold as in-house standalone server based systems that are being converted to cloud offerings to capitalize on the attractive subscription pricing model.  While some available services have broad appeal to any small business, like virtual file servers (Nasuni), database systems (Oracle), web hosting (Rackspace), accounting services (Intuit), payroll (ADP), HR management (Capterra), and sales force automation (Salesforce.som, Sales Metric), many of the products are extremely focused on their particular narrow vertical niche, anything from organizational membership management software (Wild Apricot, NetForum), facilities management applications (Maintenance Connection), to medical billing collections services (Athena Health, AllScripts).  If there is a small business application, then more than likely someone has made it available on the cloud.  While the price is attractive for a small business, the per seat model doesn’t scale well.  The biggest issue with many of these services is the lack of any customization and the mostly self help support.

About the Author

Beth Cohen, Luth Computer Specialists, Inc.