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Cloud Computing Still Confusing to Small Businesses

cloud-computing-confusingOnly 28 percent of small-business owners completely understand the concept of cloud computing, while 42 percent of respondents said they are not using cloud computing at all and 35 percent said they were using it only for data storage, according to the latest “Brother Small-Business Survey,” from Brother International, which examined the role of technology in small business.

Small-business owners also noted using the cloud for document management (21 percent) as well as business applications like CRM and accounting and human resources (17 percent).

The study, conducted by Wakefield Research and based on a poll of 500 owners of U.S. businesses with less than 100 employees, revealed a surprising 75 percent of these small-business owners felt that a crashed computer was more disruptive than a sick employee, and 75 percent said that a tech malfunction had negatively affected their business through a missed deadline or opportunity.

“This year’s small-business survey found that technology is just as important as a healthy workforce,” John Wandishin, vice president of marketing for Brother, said in a statement. “The results emphasize the importance of delivering reliable and easy-to-use products to promote a productive working environment.”

When asked about business investments, 51 percent of small-business owners said that they prioritize technology tool-related capital investments, such as new software, mobile apps and cloud computing services. Machinery-related (21 percent) and facility-related investments (20 percent) were other areas of priority.

The results indicated that while technology plays a vital role in terms of office productivity, 66 percent of small-business owners said they are frequently overwhelmed by the amount of technology available to help them run their businesses, and 86 percent additionally noted that in the past year, office productivity suffered due to technology not working properly. Nearly a third (31 percent) of respondents went so far as to say that they would give up a week’s worth of vacation to ensure tech malfunctions never happened in their business again.

The survey measured a slight uptick (48 percent, compared with 44 percent in 2012) in small-business owners feeling the need to stockpile cash to help guarantee that they could survive any economic downturn. However, 52 percent said they believe that investing in their businesses can give them an advantage over competitors.

While stress levels among small-business owners remained high in general (58 percent in 2013, versus 55 percent in 2012), survey results indicated “extreme stress” seemed to be down. The percentage of those claiming their stress levels are at their highest ever (13 percent) is down almost half from last year (24 percent). However, 41 percent of small-business owners felt that 2012 turned out worse than expected.

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Cloud Computing Versus SaaS

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As our world becomes more and more connected, the terms used to describe online services blur into abstraction. In this article, I’ll clarify the terms “cloud computing” versus “software as a service,” often referred to as SaaS. In some ways, it’s like describing two sides of the same coin. However, there are some clear distinctions, along with risks and rewards to keep in mind.

The Internet is increasingly being referred to as the cloud. One of the earliest mentions of cloud computing is in the paper The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design published by MIT Professors Sharon Eisner Gillett and Mitchell Kapor in 1996. Readers of a certain age will remember one of Kapor’s other ideas, a product called Lotus 1-2-3. Regardless, historically the central computers that run the nation’s telephone network were often diagrammed on flowcharts as a cloud. The intricacies of networked computers that comprise the Internet are so complex that the term has been co-opted for use in our modern society.

In the early days of computers, users rented time on a mainframe computer. A few decades later, we all became accustomed to having our own personal computers on our desk, upon which we installed shrink-wrapped software. We became responsible for upgrading our computers, software, and backing up our data. As often happens in life, though, things are going full circle where we’re returning to the days of renting time on someone else’s computer. Instead of a single mainframe computer though, today we may utilize a bank of computers residing in a data center in an undisclosed location. Instead of being relegated to working only at our desk, today we often use mobile devices to carry out tasks unimaginable just a few years ago.

In general, cloud computing can be thought of as any instance where you’re using a computer that resides outside of your physical location. Most users encounter cloud computing in the form of software as a service. You might pay a fee for the service, such as QuickBooks Online, Salesforce.com, or Microsoft’s Office 365, or you may pay in a nonmonetary fashion through an advertising-supported and/or information-gathering models, such as Gmail, Mint, or Facebook.

With all of these applications, you’re relying on software installed and maintained on remote computers. Most often SaaS is delivered via your web browser, so long as you have a connection to the Internet, you’re able to carry out tasks that may be business or personal in nature. With this background in mind, I can provide some distinctions between cloud computing and software as a service:

  • Cloud computing gives you access to an environment that you can customize or build out to suit your needs. With SaaS, you’re limited to the features and capabilities written into the software, but cloud computing offers the ability to increase server capacity or storage space on demand.
  • Cloud computing offers elasticity, meaning your resources and costs can increase or decrease with your demands. SaaS typically involves a set fee per user, per month, so costs and the functionality offered tend to be fixed.
  • In short, cloud computing is highly customizable, whereas SaaS offers more of one-size-fits-all approach.

Some examples of what may be considered pure cloud computing include:

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – This service allows you to store and retrieve an unlimited amount of data, at anytime of day, from any computer connected to the Internet.
  • Microsoft’s Windows Azure – This service provides virtual servers that can be used for application development and delivery.
  • Rackspace.com — Similar to Windows Azure, Rackspace.com provides servers for hire, but with a wider array of operating systems to choose from.

A primary benefit to cloud computing is that users outsource the care and maintenance of servers to firms that specialize in that capability. When demand warrants, new servers can be brought online in minutes, rather than the days required when a company maintains its own data center. Any sort of computer-based application can be hosted on cloud-based computers, from a website or shopping cart to custom programs for internal use. Thus, with cloud computing, the user is generally responsible for maintaining the applications on the server, while the hosting companies maintain the underlying physical equipment and operating system.

For SaaS, end users are removed from maintaining both the application and the server equipment. Benefits of SaaS versus desktop programs include:

  • Applications, such as QuickBooks Online, allow you to access accounting records from anywhere in the world, instead of from specific computers within your office.
  • New features appear in the software automatically, so there’s no need to purchase a software upgrade to be physically installed on each of your computers.
  • Your data is backed up automatically, so a local hard drive crash won’t affect your data.

Despite all of the benefits that cloud computing and SaaS provide, there are still risks to consider and manage:

  • Consider the recent situation with megaupload.com, where certain purported illegal actions by a subset of users caused everyone using the service to lose access to data. Think about a toddler having a certain bodily function in a public swimming pool – everyone has to suddenly get out of the water. Similarly, actions by one or more rogue users can cause unexpected and dramatic disruptions for everyone else sharing a cloud-based resource.
  • Both cloud computing and SaaS involve trust, in that you’re trusting an organization to hold up its end of the bargain. Intuit, maker of QuickBooks, last year experienced a spate of outages that caused business interruptions for users of their myriad online services.
  • A service you trust and rely on could suddenly change hands, such as Facebook’s recent acquisition of Instagram. You may then be forced to find a new service provider if you have philosophical differences with the new owner of a tool that you’ve relied on or if customer service levels start to slip to unacceptable levels.
  • If you stop paying for the service, access to your data can be immediately terminated. However, many providers offer a grace period. For instance, if you cancel your QuickBooks Online account, your data is maintained for a year, should you decide to resubscribe to the service.

Author: David H. Ringstrom, CPA
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Virtualization Top CIO Priority

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Virtualization and the server consolidation that it delivers will be the top priority for chief information officers in 2012, according to a survey by the research firm IDC. Savings from server consolidation will be invested in new IT initiatives such as cloud computing, mobility, data analytics, and use of social media for business purposes.

When CIOs were asked by IDC to name their top three IT priorities for this year, nearly 40 percent of them picked virtualization and server consolidation, more than any other area of IT. After virtualization, investment in cloud services came in second, followed by collaboration tools, business analytics, and the consolidation of application portfolios.

While IDC ranks CIO priorities, another research firm, Gartner, scaled back its IT spending increase forecast for 2012 to 3.7% growth, down from an earlier forecast of 4.6%.

Virtualization and server consolidation, along with cloud computing, are all part of a wider enterprise goal of reducing IT complexity, said David McNally, IT executive advisor at IDC, in a Webcast Tuesday. And savings from server consolidation will be reinvested in four main “pillars” of IT, he said: cloud; mobile, data analytics, and social business.

“The cost savings that have been realized from virtualization and cloud services have been significant and they are being consumed by next-generation technologies and the four pillars,” McNally said. Beginning in 2012, IDC sees IT moving from a focus on productivity and cost savings to a focus on delivering innovation in what it calls the “intelligent economy.” According to the survey, 67% of CIOs see themselves as no longer the chief information officer but the “chief innovation officer.”

“We think that CIOs are well prepared for this moment. They have experience leading in this transformation and they are ready to step up,” said Meredith Whalen, the U.S.-based senior vice president of Insights and Vertical Markets Research at IDC.

The move to reduce complexity through such practices as virtualization is one of 10 predictions IDC is making for 2012, based on survey results. Some of the others: continued efforts to align IT and business goals; hiring IT staff that bring business skills as well as technical skills to the job; expanded use of social media beyond just by marketing into all areas of the enterprise; and further development of mobile device management in an era when employees seek to use their own personal smartphones and tablets on the corporate network.

Enterprises will also make more of an investment in “big data” analytics in 2012, IDC predicts, to analyze the petabytes of data their businesses generate in order to make business decisions.

“The final bricks in the foundation for the intelligent enterprise will be laid in 2012 in a number of key industries,” IDC states, mentioning health care, utilities, and retail as industries making the most of analytics technology. Analytics jumped to number four on the list of CIO IT priorities for 2012, from ninth place in the previous survey.

IDC notes that the amount of data generated by enterprises is expected to grow by 48% this year and that 90% of it will be unstructured data.

Author: Robert Mullins
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What Is Hadoop?

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So tell me, what’s a Hadoop when it’s at home? Some kind of dance?
Not so much. Think of it as a file system for distributed computing and storage. Because that’s what it is.

What’s a file system for distributed computing and storage when it’s at home?
Let me take you back to big data.

What’s big data?
You know all that stuff you’ve got that fits in nice relational databases?

Yes.
Well, it’s that and a whole lot more. It’s that and the other stuff – the unstructured bumph, like bits and pieces posted on blogs or on social media, the data gathered from sensors, or from CCTV cameras, or log files. In short, it’s everything you collect, but don’t know what to do with.

And, as the name big data would imply, there’s a lot of it. Thanks to all these new systems and services that need monitoring and the decreasing cost of storage, businesses are retaining lots more data than they have in the past.

Hadoop is a system designed to help organisations get to grips with all that data and turn it into information they can understand and use.

So what does it actually do?
Well, previously if you needed to tackle a relational database, you might have turned to a centralised platform with a load of shared storage and CPU.

Nowadays, to process a lot of unstructured data, you need a lot of compute resource. One way to get that is to use a distributed system – for example, a load of commodity servers, each with its own local storage and CPU.

That’s where Hadoop comes in, letting all that distributed commodity stuff come together to work on the same problem.

Another key Hadoop component, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), ensures that each piece of data will be stored on more than one server – handy if one part of your storage goes down, as the cluster can continue to work and no data will be lost.

Another of its core components, the framework MapReduce, allows applications to split up the processing work that needs doing into lots of different bits and parcel those bits out to all the nodes in the cluster. It then collects up all their answers and combines them back into a single answer.

Right, so what’s this all being used for at the moment?
The list of Hadoop users reads like a who’s who of tech’s big names: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yahoo all make use of Hadoop. These companies have huge volumes of data on their users that they regularly need to analyse. Think of those ‘People you may know’ or ‘People who liked X also bought Y’ features on Facebook and Amazon, for example – companies need to scour through vast logs of their users’ details and behaviour for relevant results, which is where Hadoop comes in.

Who owns Hadoop then?
Hadoop is an open-source product, so no one owns it as such. There are several different distributions, as you would expect, but the most popular – and the one that vendors such as IBM and Oracle are rolling up into their big data offerings – is Apache Hadoop.

However, the nature of the open-source beast is that various distributions of a product can appear. Yahoo, for example, made its own version of Hadoop – unimaginatively named the Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop – but canned it earlier this year in favour of putting its weight behind Apache Hadoop, and has been a…

…major backer of the open-source project since.

Earlier this year, Yahoo spun out its Hadoop efforts to make Hortonworks, a company that works on Hadoop development as well as providing services for companies wanting to install Hadoop.

Do companies need help installing Hadoop then?
Well, one of the criticisms levelled at Hadoop is indeed that it isn’t too easy to manage and use – it’s more of a job for the technically minded than the average end user.

“Installing, configuring and administering a production-scale Hadoop cluster requires considerable system administration expertise. Interacting with Hadoop requires a detailed knowledge of programming languages,” a recent report by analyst house Gartner said.

It’s worth noting that a number of companies are working on solving the installation problem, including Dell which recently announced a product called Crowbar that automates the installation of Hadoop onto commodity servers and has been generating a bit of buzz about the project.

Other business problems that need solving before Hadoop can see more widespread uptake, according to Gartner, is the need for better integration with existing business intelligence tools and the development of a user interface for non-technical end users, perhaps focusing on data visualisation.

That shouldn’t put companies off deploying it, mind. Organisations wanting to jump on the Hadoop bandwagon could lose the first-move advantage if they’re put off by technical considerations, Gartner said.

So where did Hadoop come from?
An interesting question. The inspiration for Hadoop was a couple of papers published by Google.

Think about it – when it comes to big data, there are few companies gathering quite as much as Google. After all, it’s trying to index the entire web and more besides.

In the heady mid-2000s, Google came up with the idea for its own distributed computing system, publishing two papers to that effect – Google File System and MapReduce (both PDFs).

This inspired technologist Doug Cutting – who’d been involved in two open-source search projects, the software library Lucene and web crawler Nutch – to create Hadoop as a way of enabling these projects to take advantage of distributed computing.

Hadoop itself is named after a toy elephant owned by Cutting’s son

Author: Jack Clark
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The Secret To Cloud Success

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Those IT organizations that move to cloud computing are moving to SOA (service-oriented architecture), whether they understand it or not. Hear me out: Private and public clouds often rely on APIs for their functionality, which are typically Web services that can be combined and recombined into solutions. The result: SOA, at its essence.

The problem is that many of those who define and implement cloud computing don’t have a good grasp of SOA. Although they are building a SOA by default, they have no handle on the proper steps and the interworkings of all the pieces. They end up with a Franken-SOA, where some aspects of the cloud solution are better thought out than others.

What’s a Franken-SOA? It’s a bunch of cloud services that become parts of core applications or processes, mostly on-premise. These services provide core functionality, including storage and compute features, that are used in a composite application or perhaps a composite process. However, they’re used without a good architectural structure and become both difficult to change and difficult to manage.

In Franken-SOAs, there is no governance, no identity management, no service management, and no service discovery. It’s like driving an Indy car without a steering wheel. It’s very powerful, but you will hit the wall — quickly.

The tragedy of the situation is that cloud-driven Franken-SOAs can be avoided with some planning and architectural forethought. But most of those who define the use of clouds these days are more about speed to deployment than thinking through the architecture. Indeed, many consider cloud computing to be a replacement for SOA. They don’t grasp the value of SOA — or any architecture and planning discipline, for that matter.

I suspect that Franken-SOAs will continue to walk the earth. Hopefully, the angry villagers with torches and pitchforks will drive them out at some point.

Author: David Linthicum
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Sorting Out The Different Layers Of Virtualization

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Have you found yourself wondering what’s wrong with all of the marketing mavens out there in virtualization land? It seems that everything is virtualization and nothing is virtualization.

Over the years, I’ve developed a tool or a model that has helped my clients better understand all of the layers of virtualization technology so that they could sort out what would be useful and what doesn’t fit in their world (or their network for that matter).

As you might expect, this model has been the foundation for much of the commentary offered here. Several readers have asked for a more graphical view of this model and a quick description of what each layer of the model does to help organizations leap from the mundane world of hardware and software into the illusionary world of virtualization. Since we just live to serve, here’s the tool displayed as a graphic.

There are many layers of technology that virtualize some portion of a computing environment depending upon whether the organization is seeking performance, reliability/availability, scalability, consolidation, agility, a unified management domain or some other goal. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

Access Virtualization — hardware and software technology that allows nearly any device to access any application without either having to know too much about the other. The application sees a device it’s used to working with. The device sees an application it knows how to display. In some cases, special purpose hardware is used on each side of the network connection to increase performance, allow many users to share a single client system or allow a single individual to see multiple displays.

Application Virtualization — software technology allowing applications to run on many different operating systems and hardware platforms. This usually means that the application has been written to use an application framework. It also means that applications running on the same system that do not use this framework do not get the benefits of application virtualization. More advanced forms of this technology offer the ability to restart an application in case of a failure, start another instance of an application if the application is not meeting service level objectives, or provide workload balancing among multiple instances of an application to archive high levels of scalability. Some really sophisticated approaches to application virtualization can do this magical feat without requiring that the application be re-architected or rewritten using some special application framework.

Processing Virtualization — hardware and software technology that hides physical hardware configuration from system services, operating systems or applications. This type of Virtualization technology can make one system appear to be many or many systems appear to be a single computing resource to achieve goals ranging from raw performance, high levels of scalability, reliability/availability, agility or consolidation of multiple environments onto a single system.

Storage Virtualization — hardware and software technology that hides where storage systems are and what type of device is actually storing applications and data. This technology also makes it possible for many systems to share the same storage devices without knowing that others are also accessing them. This technology also makes it possible to take a snapshot of a live system so that it can be backed up without hindering online or transactional applications.

Network Virtualization — hardware and software technology that presents a view of the network that differs from the physical view. So, a personal computer may be allowed to only “see” systems it is allowed to access. Another common use is making multiple network links appear to be a single link.

Management of virtualized environments — software technology that makes it possible for multiple systems to be provisioned and managed as if they were a single computing resource.

Each of these technologies has been available in data centers in one form or another for nearly 30 years. What’s exciting and new is that this technology is increasingly available for industry standard, high volume systems and operating system software.

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CXO Expectations Still Clouded on Virtualization

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Enterprise-level business and IT executives and decision-makers may now have a greater understanding of the benefits of private and hybrid cloud computing environments, but a new study has found that there is still a large gap between expectations and the reality of what cloud computing and virtualization offer.

Symantec’s “2011 Virtualization and Journey to the Cloud Survey” surveyed 3,700 executives and decision-makers from 35 countries about their perspectives on the adoption and deployment of private and hybrid clouds, as well as virtualized technologies. Symantec found there are different approaches being taken with cloud computing, but perhaps the most troubling finding of the survey is the gap between the expectations of what cloud delivers and what, in reality, it actually provides.

“There’s a lot of understanding. There’s also a lot of misunderstanding on what private and hybrid clouds can do in an environment,” said Sean Derrington, director of cloud product management at Symantec.

Perhaps not unexpected, IT executives and business executives were out of sync in what they were looking for from cloud computing, and the gap between expectation and realization was also different.

“We’re also seeing a lot of companies increasing the deployment of business-critical applications in these private and hybrid clouds, much more so than before,” Derrington said. “I think it’s one of the early signs of maturity, but it’s also to keep in mind that as companies look to deploy cloud applications, they have to [attain] quality of service.” They need to get the same quality of service in private and hybrid clouds that they’re getting in traditional IT environments, he added.

Quality of service is proving to be a challenge, and it’s become a top priority among enterprises. When asked about virtualization and cloud technologies, 76 percent of respondents who have implemented server virtualization said performance was a somewhat or extremely large factor in making people concerned about placing business-critical applications on virtualized servers. Of those who have implemented private or hybrid clouds, 72 percent said performance was a significant or extreme challenge, so there are still a lot of wrinkles to iron out before enterprises are completely happy with private and hybrid clouds.

The Symantec survey asked IT and business executives about their adoption of storage virtualization, desktop/endpoint virtualization, server virtualization, private storage-as-a-service, and private/hybrid cloud computing. Unsurprisingly, the smallest gap between expectation and realization was with the most mature technology – that being server virtualization, with a 4 percent gap between goals and reality. All of the other technologies were well into the double-digits between expectation and reality, with storage virtualization at 33 percent, desktop/endpoint virtualization at 26 percent, private storage-as-a-service at 37%, and private/hybrid cloud computing at 32 percent.

What’s the lesson to be learned? Simple. There is still a lot of confusion around what virtualization and cloud computing can actually provide to organizations in terms of benefits. The expectations of benefits pre-deployment are much different than what is actually being realized post-deployment. Derrington noted that some of the problem is that if businesses don’t deploy virtualization and cloud computing technologies correctly, then the benefits people are expecting won’t be fully realized. He said he believes there is a lot of over-selling on what the technologies can do.

Part of the problem that still exists is in evolving the way IT organizations function, Derrington said. To get the full benefits of virtualization and cloud computing, it’s necessary to remove the silos of administration found in traditional IT infrastructures. If that’s not done, then the full benefits can’t be gained.

“There’s a lot of process that has to happen to take advantage of some of these new technologies,” Derrington said.

Additionally, some people are confused about what private cloud computing is. As Derrington noted, it’s more than simply deploying a VMware-based environment.

“Private clouds really are about looking at virtualizing the resources of storage and server, looking at resource utilization, and having a dynamic environment that can be elastic as you scale and contract resources on an as-needed basis,” Derrington said.

It’s likely the gaps between expectation and reality will begin to shrink in the coming years. Symantec plans to survey companies on this topic again next year, so it should be interesting to see what has changed at that time.

Derrington noted there is much interest in cloud among enterprises, and most enterprises surveyed are, at the very least, discussing cloud adoption. There is still some confusion about what private and hybrid clouds are, but that’s more on the business side rather than the IT side.

“I think in enterprise there is more of an understanding of what cloud is and its capabilities, but there is still a little bit of a disconnect,” he said.

There is also an increasing focus among enterprises when it comes to virtualization and cloud technologies. Some are even going beyond deploying business-critical applications in virtualized or cloud environments and starting to discuss moving mission-critical applications over to virtual servers and the cloud.

“I personally wasn’t expecting 41 percent of respondents looking to virtualize ERP applications,” Derrington said.

As he noted, putting financials, human resources or any other mission-critical applications in virtual environments is betting the business on that environment. CIOs are more open to the idea of moving mission-critical applications to the cloud or virtual environments, whereas CEOs and CFOs are much more risk-averse. Business leaders, as opposed to IT leaders, tend to want to be a little behind the technology curve instead of leading it, Derrington said.

Many enterprises are relying on third-party service providers for their cloud and virtualization needs.

“They’re relying more heavily on outside providers,” Derrington said. At least 50 percent of respondents rely quite a bit or completely on outside service providers, whether those providers are vendors, resellers or managed service providers.

Based on the survey results, Symantec had a few recommendations for businesses.

“One of the things that we’re recommending is you really have to focus on the line between the IT organization and the executives,” Derrington said. Appropriate expectations about the technologies must be set to avoid the gap in expectations and reality.

Also, old-school IT thinking has to be abandoned. Operating in a silo won’t allow enterprises to get the benefits of virtualized and cloud environments. As companies modernize their infrastructure, they need to modernize their IT departments.

One last recommendation from Symantec is to track results.

“This is one of the things that proves success to upper management and executives in the company,” Derrington said.

Overall, things are looking good for the virtualization and private/hybrid cloud arenas.

“This is one of the areas where a lot of companies are aggressively looking. They think they can improve the way that they run their businesses, and one of the things that we saw is we need to raise some caution in making sure they’re doing it appropriately and not trying to overachieve and failing to meet those expectations, which then leads to other problems, too. But overall, very positive,” Derrington said about the survey results.

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Notable Trends in Virtualization

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Notable trends in virtualization:

1. Hybrid clouds mature. The nature of hybrid clouds – meaning parts of your infrastructure are running in both public and private data centers – is getting more mature and sophisticated. New providers are springing up frequently, which make evaluating them all that much harder.

Some are traditional hosting providers, other offer more virtualization expertise and some have built their own management tools around their services. One example: Terremark’s VMware-based computing as a service was acquired by Verizon for $1.4 billion, making them a major cloud provider. This move may prompt other carriers to have their own cloud marquee business.

And Amazon has been steadily beefing up its Web Services and dropping prices. “It is clear that people are now figuring out that they can do High-Performance Computing in the cloud,” as they posted recently on their blog.

And as hybrid clouds mature, there is more information on lessons learned, like this post from Netflix’s blog on how they made the transition from their own data centers to AWS, including cutting down on latency and learning how to scale up their operations.

2. Virtual firewalls still lag behind the physical ones. The protective technologies that are plentiful and commonplace in the physical world become few and far between when it comes to the cloud. And while few attacks have been observed in the wild that specifically target VMs, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t protect them.

However, traditional firewalls aren’t designed to inspect and filter the vast amount of traffic originating from a hypervisor running ten virtualized servers. VMs are so easily portable that tracking down a particular instance isn’t always something that a traditional intrusion detection device can do.

And because VMs can start, stop, and move from hypervisor to hypervisor at the click of a button, protective features have to be able to handle and recognize these movements and activities with ease. Finally, few hypervisors have the access controls that even the most basic file server has.

3. Cloud storage shakeout. Several major cloud storage players are either getting out of the business or will be by the end of this year, including Iron Mountain’s Virtual File Store (after two years), Valutscape (2009-2010) and EMC’s Atmos Online (2009-2010). Some of their competitors have stepped up to help migrate the existing clients. Clearly, this is a market in transition. Expect more of the same for the remainder of this year.

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Optimizing the Cloud: Six Levers

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Cloud computing is an on-demand, integrated, configured, ready-to-use combination of compute, storage, network, platform and application software available as a standardized set of service offerings on a pay-as-you-use pricing model.

Cloud computing is altering the IT service delivery by providing rapid service delivery – provisioning resources takes few minutes instead several weeks, on demand scaling – businesses can scale up or scale down resources based on needs instead of provisioning for peak demand, consolidation of resources by virtualization is leading to better asset utilization and reducing resourcing needs, self service provisioning is leading to reduced time for service acquisition, standardization of service offerings is leading to reduction in the cost of maintenance, flexible pay-as-you-use charging supported by metering and billing is resulting in reduced costs as businesses pay for what they consume.

With clear benefits of cloud computing, many legacy applications are being migrated to the cloud. This paper explores the cloud migration activity and presents six levers for resource optimization during the cloud migration process.

Cloud Migration
Cloud migration encompasses moving one or more enterprise applications and their IT environments from a “traditional hosting” type of environment into a cloud either private or public or hybrid.

Cloud migration activity is carried out in these phases:

1. Evaluation: Evaluation is carried out for current infrastructure and application architecture, environment in terms of compute, storage, monitoring and management, SLAs, operational processes, financial considerations, risk, security, compliance and licensing needs are identified to build a business case for moving to the cloud.
2. Migration strategy: Based on the evaluation, a migration strategy is drawn – a hotplug strategy is used where the applications and their data and interface dependencies are isolated and these applications can be operationalized all at once. A fusion strategy is used where the applications can be partially migrated, but for a portion of it there are dependencies based on existing licenses, specialized server requirements like mainframes or extensive interconnections with other applications.
3. Prototyping: Migration activity is preceded by a prototyping activity to validate and ensure small portion of the applications are tested on the cloud environment with test data setup.
4. Provisioning: Pre-migration optimizations identified are implemented. Cloud servers are provisioned for all the identified environments, necessary platform softwares and applications are deployed, configurations are tuned to match the new environment sizing, databases and files are replicated. All internal and external integration points are properly configured. Web services, batch jobs, operation and management software are setup in the new environments.
5. Testing: Post migration tests are conducted to ensure migration has been successful. Performance and load testing, failure and recovery testing and scale out testing are conducted against the expected traffic load and resource utilization levels.

Optimization
Before the actual migration activity, several resource optimization activities are carried out.

There are six levers which can be used for resource optimization:

* Optimize by consolidating under-utilized resources.
* Optimize based on time of day usage.
* Optimize based on seasonal demand variations.
* Optimize based on life cycle usage variations.
* Optimize by standardizing platforms.
* Optimize by application rationalization.

Following sections detail these optimization techniques:

1. Optimize by consolidating under-utilized resources
In an enterprise with multiple brands, where each brand maintains their own independent IT environments, resources are allocated to applications based on the needs of that brand. As the capacity planning is undertaken independently for each brand, resources are left with spare capacity that goes unutilized. When considered as a whole, the spare capacity across all brands turns out to be of significant value. This provides an opportunity to consolidate applications across brands and reduce the resources based on their utilization.

Resource optimization based on demand:
In a traditional data center computational capacity is over-provisioned considering peak loads and thus under-utilized. Traffic flow analysis is conducted to determine the resource demand variations for the applications that use the most bandwidth, time of day usage, average time users are connected to the service, peak season and off season usage, CPU, memory and storage resource utilization.

There are three types of demand variations that can be considered for optimization: Demand based on time of day, on season and lifecycle of usage.

2. Optimize by time of day demand variations
Certain applications demonstrate periodic spurt in traffic aligned with time-of-day variations based on factors which are unique to the organization or industry. Some examples are morning spike in load on attendance application due to employee attendance swipe, end of day sales reconciliation, catalog item description updates during the night in an ecommerce site, search indexing every 8 hours on an intranet search application.

Traffic profiling of all applications is performed during the technical evaluations phase, provides the needed information to choose applications for optimization. Applications are chosen such that peak traffic loads are non-overlapping with each other. Resource usage on such applications can be optimized by allocating a reduced common pool of shared resources.

3. Optimize by seasonal demand variations
Certain applications based on the industry and geography in which they are deployed, are exposed to seasonal variations in traffic. Traffic flow into eCommerce applications in North America are a classic example of this, during the holiday season (Nov, Dec, Jan) alone e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, Walmart.com receive 3X burst in traffic than their regular season traffic. This sudden burst in traffic would need the retailers to provision resources statically to cater to the peak loads and maintain them throughout the year. However, much of this capacity is under-utilized during the non-peak season. Retailers need to bear the costs of hardware, software licenses, network, power and people costs for maintenance. To reduce this overhead of costs, optimizing the resources based on such seasonal demand variability is considered.

4. Optimize by life cycle usage variations
Organizations have independent environments for various software lifecycle stages, which include development, pre-production testing, staging, multiple production sites and recovery environments. The software development lifecycle and environments for each of these brands are independent today and are scheduled and sized according to their needs. By aligning the schedules of software lifecycle stages of several brands and pooling the computing resources costs can be reduced.

Optimization is achieved by following these steps: Align the software development life cycle stages of multiple brands that have significant resources allocated for development and pre-production testing. Pool the computing resources for the brands into a virtual machine cluster with separate VM images as needed by development and pre-production testing. Create a resource allocation plan aligned with the software development lifecycle. Commission and decommission the computing resources as per the plan to reduce the resources.

5. Optimize by standardizing platforms
Certain IT environments have high diversity of operating systems, software applications, tools, and hardware from various vendors and versions. A highly fragmented environment with different vendors and versions for applications limits the interoperability, limits the reuse of applications and components across the organization leading to high levels of redundant functionality, increases the lead time in provisioning and change management of hardware and software due to limitations in effectively managing diverse platforms.

6. Optimize by application rationalization
Application rationalization helps to reduce overlapping and poorly utilized applications across brands in a enterprise. A current state chart of applications, their resource utilization efficiency, business criticality and cost is drawn for applications deployed in the IT environment of each brand.

Conclusion
Cloud computing provides a cost-effective, dynamically adaptive, scalable, self service provisionable platform for IT services delivery. These factors are driving migration of legacy applications into cloud computing platform.

Cloud migration presents an opportunity to significantly reduce costs incurred on applications. The six levers of optimization presented here help enterprises to fully leverage the potential of the cloud and benefit from the migration activity.

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Cloud Computing: Is It a Threat to Indian Outsourcers?

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Cloud computing, defined as a subscription-based or pay-per-use service that in real time, and over the Internet, extends existing capabilities of Information Technology, remains at an early stage of conceptual development. Services do range from full scale applications such as accounting and storage to niche services such as spam filtering.

Proponents of cloud computing contend that it erodes the requirements for major capital expenditures on IT infrastructure to customer applications. However, will cloud computing replace outsourcing and does Cloud computing “represents a fundamental shift in how financial companies pay for and access IT services?”

Cloud computing differs from traditional outsourcing in a number of respects. The contractual commitments, sometimes defined as subscriptions, tend to be for short periods of time, as little as a session to a month. The contracts rarely have up-front tariff charges.

The services are available are on demand but, while cloud computing services may be capable of some scaling they are most certainly not capable of unlimited instant scaling and addition of near unlimited resource. Semantically, cloud computing may be defined as “instant outsourcing.”

Indian outsourcers may consider extending their outsourcing services to the cloud computing domain, where their existing IT infra-structure services have spare resources capacity. They do have the resources to fill that gap in instant outsourcing through almost unlimited scaling and addition of near unlimited resources.

Where Indian outsourcers consider formally entering the area of cloud computing services, they should position cloud computing services as separate and distinct from their existing outsourcing services, containing no overlapping services with core outsourcing, even to existing clients. Pricing models differ.

While delivery of cloud computing services may be personalized, its services and service strategy is not collaborative. Outsourcers may consider using cloud computing as a means of selling non-core applications and services, which can impede the financial incremental benefits of major outsourcing contracts.

Many institutions, particularly in the financial services sector, are unlikely to entrust major aspects of data use and application to cloud computing services, unless and until their trust in those services has grown.

So, issues such as data security, systems integration, unexpected and tactical demand for capacity will be critical service hurdles that all cloud computing providers will have to clear to engage major clients in cloud computing in core areas of their technology structure and services provision.

Major external technology service provision is likely to remain a traditional strategically based outsourcing service. The need to respond tactically and spontaneously to immediate and short term business demands will erode the non-core elements of technology outsourcing.

If cloud computing can position itself an element of strategic information technology planning, then it will start to make more substantial inroads into traditional outsourcing.

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