InformationWeek Stories by Charles Babcock

InformationWeek Stories by Charles Babcockhttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-05-24T09:20:00ZJoyent Matches Amazon Cloud Infrastructure PricesJoyent expands instance types to match Amazon's in size and price, adds "reserved" instances to better compete.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/joyent-matches-amazon-cloud-infrastructu/240155506?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-vs-microsoft-8-cloud-battle-lines/240155221"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/996/Intro_Microsoft_v_vmware_01_tn.jpg" alt="VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines" title="VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Joyent president CEO Henry Wasik keeps a recent news story on the wall of his office "to remind the staff of what we're up against." The headline reads, "<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-to-cloud-rivals-try-to-catch-us/240154827">Amazon to Cloud Rivals: Try To Catch Us</a>." Joyent is determined to catch Amazon. Wasik said the Joyent cloud was initially equipped with a basic set of 10 virtual server selections. On Thursday, the company introduced 13 instance types that closely align with Amazon's most popular virtual server types, from AWS Micro up to Standard Extra Large and Quadruple I/O Extra Large. "As people move off of Amazon [Web Services], we want them to be able to slide over to the equivalent instance" in Joyent, said Wasik. Joyent is actually increasing its virtual server selection with additional choices, 71 in all, to make its cloud service more attractive to customers. That means Joyent now has a match for AWS Store Eight Extra Large and AWS High-CPU Extra Large, along with many <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/">other options</a>. [ Want to learn more about Joyent? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/joyents-cloud-competes-with-google-amazo/240003345?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Joyent Cloud Competes With Google, Amazon</a>. ] It also adjusted its pricing so a given instance type is a near match to its AWS equivalent. In some cases, the price appears to be less than Amazon's, but Wasik said Joyent in some cases offers a slightly smaller resource, either in memory or storage, than Amazon and sought to maintain equivalent, not lower, pricing. Joyent has added "reserve" pricing to its server instance pricing structure to match Amazon's Reserved Instance pricing. As with AWS, reserve pricing will commit the customer to a designated amount of use of a server type for either a one-year or three-year period, in exchange for a lower price. Joyent's expansion of server types coincides with Dell's decision, announced Monday, to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-reveals-hybrid-cloud-details/240155301">abandon the infrastructure-as-a-service</a> (IaaS) market. Instead, it will resell Joyent's cloud services. "We're pleased with Dell's selection of us," Wasik said. Out of three named partners, Joyent is "the partner to be the public cloud provider," he said. Until Monday, Dell said it was operating two IaaS facilities of its own, planned to add more and expected to be a major converged hardware supplier to cloud service providers. The latter is still the case. Even as a Dell partner, Joyent can't quite match Amazon Web Services' global spread. It operates data center facilities in Emeryville, Calif., Ashburn, Va., Las Vegas and Amsterdam, serving what Wasik termed "thousands" of customers, including large enterprises. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/joyent-gets-new-ceo-preps-cloud-tools/240142476">Wasik joined Joyent</a> as CEO in November. His former company, Force10, was acquired by Dell in August 2011, and Wasik for a time served as head of Dell Force10 unit. With Joyent's designation as a prime Dell partner, it's clear he still maintains his connections inside Dell. Joyent is known in some ways as the residual brain-trust of Sun Microsystems' Solaris expertise, where the open source version of Solaris operates as SmartOS. It's also known for employing the authors of and sponsoring Node.js, the increasingly popular server version of JavaScript that shows up in mobile applications. But Joyent also hosts workloads running Linux and Java, and thus is in a position to substitute for Amazon's EC2, if customers choose to switch allegiance. "We're really oriented toward giving the customer a lot more choices," said Wasik. In other words, watch this space for how effectively Joyent IaaS competes with Amazon IaaS.2013-05-24T09:03:00ZGoogle Cuts Prices On New Datastore ServiceGoogle reduces per-gigabyte pricing for Cloud Datastore by 25%, reflecting falling cloud storage prices; read operations are cheaper, too.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/google-cuts-prices-on-new-datastore-serv/240155519?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/data-protection/8-great-cloud-storage-services/240151180"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/967/Cloud_Storage_Services_01_tn.jpg" alt="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" title="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Great Cloud Storage Services</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>Google has reduced the price on its Google Cloud Datastore, introduced a week ago at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco, from 24 cents per gigabyte per month to 18 cents a GB per month, or 25%. Google Cloud Datastore is unstructured data storage similar to Amazon Web Service's Simple Storage Service or S3. By quickly reducing its price, Google is encouraging greater use of Google Cloud Datastore for object storage purposes. Customers may choose to use it as a standalone service or use it in connection with their Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine operations. Google manages the data storage system; it's only available as a cloud service. Google announced the price reduction in a post to its <a href="http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/05/reducing-app-engine-datastore-pricing-by-up-to-25-percent.html">Cloud Platform blog</a> Thursday. Google Cloud Datastore is an offshoot of the <a href="https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/structuring_for_strong_consistency">Google App Engine's High Replication Datastore system</a>, established in 2011, which now processes 4.5 trillion transactions per month, engineering director Peter Magnusson wrote in the post. It is a highly scalable, reliable system of the type that has made Google cloud architecture famous. It has a 99.95% uptime record, Magnusson said. [ Wondering what other services Google introduced at its Google I/O developers' conference last week? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/internet/google/google-strengthens-cloud-platform/240155040"> Google Strengthens Cloud Platform</a>. ] Although similar to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/government/cloud-saas/amazon-cloud-gets-federal-stamp-of-appro/240155281">Amazon Web Services S3</a>, Google Cloud Datastore is something less than a direct competitor, even with the price reduction. The reduction probably has more to do with keeping existing Google App Engine and Compute Engine users attached to Google services than it does with competing directly in the larger field. Compared to Google's Datastore, Amazon's S3 standard storage is 9.5 cents per GB per month for up to one terabyte of object storage. It also comes in Reduced Redundancy (7.6 cents per GB) and Glacier (1 cent per GB) forms. Like the High Replication Engine system from which it sprang, Google Cloud Datastore is based on coordinated copies of replicated data, ensuring that a copy with data integrity survives, regardless of a hardware or system failure. High Replication Engine uses the well-established Paxos algorithm to achieve the survivability characteristic. The objects stored may be of different data types, as opposed to more structured data. Read operations under the new pricing structure went from 7 cents per 100,000 operations to 6 cents per 100,000 operations. Write pricing went from 10 cents per 100,000 operations to 9 cents per 100,000.2013-05-23T10:45:00ZCloudCheckr Monitors Amazon GovCloudAmazon cloud performance monitoring system goes a step further than competitors with specialized version that complies with federal security regulations.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cloudcheckr-monitors-amazon-govcloud/240155417?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-vs-microsoft-8-cloud-battle-lines/240155221"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/996/Intro_Microsoft_v_vmware_01_tn.jpg" alt="VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines" title="VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Last November a small startup called CloudCheckr launched the beta of its performance-monitoring system for Amazon Web Services. Now, it's bringing out a specialized version, CloudCheckr Gov, suitable for monitoring performance on AWS GovCloud, no mean trick because security requirements keep most independent monitors out. CloudCheckr is part of a small but thriving third-party market consisting of companies that shed more light on what's going on inside the AWS cloud. Cloudability, Cloudyn, Cloud Cruiser, Newvem, ExtraHop Networks and Uptime Software occupy this space and compete for AWS users. CloudCheckr is an online service that provides basic AWS monitoring for free, and advanced, CloudCheckr Pro for $179 a month. CloudCheckr Gov is also priced at $179 a month. It's more than a passive monitor. It checks for up to 150 best practices in cloud workload configurations and security alignments. It can advise what should be done when it spots an exposure or shortcoming. With evident foreign interest in hacking U.S. government agencies, expertise in security and the ability to monitor GovCloud help set CloudCheckr apart. [ Want to learn what Amazon Web Services offers in its own Trusted Advisor performance tool? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-tool-helps-shape-your-cloud-workl/240150228?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Amazon Tool Helps Shape Your Cloud Workload</a>. ] CloudCheckr, based in Rochester, N.Y., must provide built-in controls that assure GovCloud is being accessed by U.S. citizens. It can do so in part through its partnership with JHC Consulting, a veteran-owned business that specializes in, among other things, reselling AWS infrastructure to government agencies. "The expertise of the team at JHC Technology has been critical in accelerating the launch of CloudCheckr Gov," said Aaron Klein, COO of CloudCheckr, in an email message following the announcement. CloudCheckr uses that capability to dismiss some of its rivals. "Other chief vendors in our space, Newvem and Cloudyn, are not able to provide GovCloud support since each is based in Israel (and thus does not meet the U.S. Persons-only standard for GovCloud access). But the CloudCheckr development team was initially based in Argentina, and CloudCheckr still lists a "satellite office" in Argentina, which isn't so different from its rivals. Regardless of the issue of national boundaries, both AWS and AWS GovCloud meet the "moderate" standard set by Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) for computing infrastructure. CloudCheckr assesses workloads sent to GovCloud to alert their owners to any FISMA moderate control exceptions and benchmark compliance and performance in the areas of shared control with GovCloud. CloudCheckr Gov also ensures compliance with International Traffic In Arms regulations. GovCloud has its own API, which is formatted differently from the standard AWS CloudWatch monitoring service. CloudCheckr has integrated its monitoring and performance analysis into the GovCloud API. Likewise, GovCloud has different purchasing options and pricing tables from the standard AWS pricing, including the option to purchase physical hardware on which to run an instance. The CloudCheckr Gov service arrived as sequestration cuts decrease federal agency budgets and reduce capital expenditures. Company spokesmen say the GovCloud service can aid agencies in adopting cloud computing and meet the FedRamp directive for agencies to move more operations into the cloud. To encourage adoption, Amazon recently made a GovCloud Management Console available that mimics the functions of the regular Amazon management console, but access to the GovCloud console is restricted to authorized GovCloud users. CloudCheckr isn't oriented toward one industry segment. It launched CloudCheckr Gov because it wants to help "a broad range of companies and organizations" use the Amazon cloud, Klein said via email. CloudCheckr received $2 million from Genesee Capital and Garrison Capital in its Series A round of funding April 11.2013-05-22T09:41:00ZVMware's Hybrid Cloud: Not Amazon's ModelVMware's Hybrid Cloud Service has important differences compared to Amazon Web Services. Customers will have to weigh the partner model and pricing.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmwares-hybrid-cloud-not-amazons-model/240155357?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityVMware will establish four data centers from which it will offer its competition to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure-as-a-service, the company announced Tuesday. But there are big differences between what VMware is doing and what an AWS, Google or Rackspace does. Not one existing Amazon customer is likely to abandon EC2 to take up residence in a soon-to-be-launched VMware facility. But many existing VMware customers are likely to remain comfortably in the VMware fold because of those four centers, if they work out as planned. VMware wants partners to supply compatible public cloud facilities, but has been frustrated at the lack of sophistication and willingness to adopt full-scale VMware implementations. Bill Fathers, VMware's new senior VP and general manager of its Hybrid Cloud Services unit, acknowledged in an interview he was hired to build up the capabilities of the VMware ecosystem, and that includes training and equipping more hybrid cloud providers. He was recruited for the task in March from a seasoned cloud supplier, Savvis, now a unit of CenturyLink. While it looks like VMware wants to take hybrid cloud business away from partners, it literally can't provide an Amazon-scale alternative to the public cloud and must rely on partners to fill in many gaps. That makes establishing four VMware data centers something of a balancing act. [ Want to see how one VMware partner maintained an arm's length from its cloud software, even though its hosts many VMware-based customers? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/terremarks-vmware-cloud-software-story-i/240155253?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Terremark's VMware Cloud Software Story: It's Complicated</a>. ] VMware is also in a poor position to compete by building ultra-modern data centers, as Facebook did in Prineville, Ore., and Forest City, N.C., and then offering low-cost compute cycles out of such infrastructure. On the contrary, VMware won't build anything. It will lease space from wholesale data center builders. It will then wheel in racks of servers, most likely from its Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) subsidiary, based on partner Cisco's converged compute and networking infrastructure, and throw on the switch. One such data center will be located in Santa Clara, Calif., a leading site for wholesale space built by CoreSite, Digital Realty Trust and Vantage. Other VMware centers will take shape in Las Vegas, Dallas, and Sterling, Va. These facilities, to some extent, represent the opposite of those that Facebook, Google and Amazon have built. Those three companies compete from their own supersized facilities, stacked with servers built to their own designs. VMware will rely on smaller leased facilities using more standard parts. Renting third-party space, VMware will be able to establish such centers quickly. Left unsaid is that they can phase-out leases and wheel away equipment almost as fast as they wheeled them in, if, for example, demand slackens or customers express more interest in the public cloud elsewhere. But for now, VMware isn't going anywhere but straight into hybrid cloud computing. One possible outcome is that these facilities will serve as a model for VMware partners to emulate, and within three to five years the partners will do such a good job that VMware won't want to operate its own hybrid cloud service data centers in perpetuity. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, given the chance to comment further after the announcement, said he saw the hybrid data centers as both a role model and a place where VMware "could set the bar higher and higher" for implementing hybrid services, based on its evolving product set. For now, VMware believes it can implement a fuller set of services and make them easier to use than partners can. And it wishes to do so to forestall more customer movement to AWS. Fathers amplified that description further in an interview after the announcement: "By becoming a service provider ourselves, we will learn a lot of important lessons that we can bake into [vCloud Director]."Those lessons may still need to be learned. VMware has heard frustration in its own customer base that it isn't easy to move into a hybrid computing environment from the present vSphere and ESX Server-based part of the data center. At the same time, some knowledgeable voices among service providers have said VMware software is more enterprise-oriented than service-provider-oriented. Service providers have to meet a different set of needs and a larger scale of operations. One such voice, John Considine, CTO of the Terremark cloud unit of Verizon, said Verizon found it expedient to continue to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/terremarks-vmware-cloud-software-story-i/240155253">use its own cloud provisioning software</a>, even though it wishes to host as many ESX Server-based workloads as possible. In that fashion, Terremark didn't become what VMware terms a "vCloud Data Center Partner." In the U.S., those partners are Bluelock, headquartered in Indianapolis; the AT&T Synaptic Cloud; and CSC, which plans to integrate its customers with multiple cloud vendors as well as VMware. Overseas, the data center partners are Colt in Europe, Singtel in Singapore and SoftBank in Japan. In addition, there are hundreds of "vCloud powered" partners, a lower-level designation of their VMware environments. Given its strong position in the enterprise, VMware also sees an opportunity to evolve the nature of hybrid cloud itself. It will make what are sometimes described as legacy applications available as a service in its four hybrid data centers. One of its announcements Tuesday at its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters was that SAP applications, including the in-memory database engine Hana, will be available through its vCloud Hybrid Service. Fathers hopes many additional independent software vendors come to its hybrid cloud centers and use them to get their main applications to work in the cloud for multi-tenant use, while allowing customers to keep their data on premises by putting a piece of the same application on the customer's premises. "It would be a new pattern in software distribution if we can divide up applications that way," he said. The inability to allow enterprise data to remain on premises while using the cloud "has been a big barrier to the adoption of cloud computing," he said. VMware Hybrid Cloud will have limited availability through an early access program that starts in June. General availability in the U.S. is expected in the third quarter. Availability in Europe, the Middle East and Asia will follow in 2014. Pricing, while announced, also remains somewhat cloaked. As vCloud Hybrid Service becomes available in June, early access users will pay by the hour but will gradually graduate into monthly or annual rates, depending on the nature of the service used. The pricing listed for multi-tenant service, 4.5 cents an hour for one virtual CPU and one GB of memory, sort of approximates the medium-sized servers of Google and Amazon, if multiplied by three. So for a rough comparison, the VMware pricing comes out at $0.135 for VMware; $0.132 for Google and $0.12 for Amazon. But, of course, there's no shutting down a virtual machine and saving money during the nighttime hours if you're going to be charged by the month or the year. The base unit of pricing is also too small a virtual machine to be of much use in most enterprises. Details remain to be explained in how the pricing will actually work out. Fathers said listing a price for a basic VM unit was an effort to impose simplicity on a complicated subject. It is also likely to impose some confusion as well.2013-05-21T15:30:00ZVMware Reveals Hybrid Cloud DetailsVMware says its hybrid cloud service will offer a "seamless extension" of customers' virtualized on-premises data centers, undercuts Google on price.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-reveals-hybrid-cloud-details/240155301?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityVMware will establish four data centers in the U.S. in which it will host a cloud environment that's highly compatible to the one that its customers use in the VMware-virtualized portion of their on-premises data centers. The new facilities will be "a seamless extension" of customer facilities where they will be able to shift workloads at will with a few virtualization management console commands. VMware is building commands into its vCloud Director product and the modules in its vCloud Suite to automatically provision a designated virtual machine with networking that connects between the customer's premises and a remote Hybrid Cloud Service data center. VMware is not about to build a global chain of cloud data centers on the scale of a Facebook or Google. It's more likely to lease space in existing third-party facilities, equip them with its own hardware and software, and operate them as public cloud facilities. CEO Pat Gelsinger said VMware, in making such a move, is not backing away from continued use of channel partners and existing data center partners, which include Bluelock, CSC and AT&T in the U.S. That list formerly included Dell as well, but Dell announced Monday it would no longer try to provide public cloud services. [ If VMware is such "a great partner," why isn't Terremark using its cloud provisioning software? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/terremarks-vmware-cloud-software-story-i/240155253?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Terremark's VMware Cloud Software Story: It's Complicated</a>. ] In an interview after the announcement Tuesday of Hybrid Cloud Service, Gelsinger said that VMware was creating model VMware public clouds in the four data centers -- locations unspecified -- that its many regional service providers could emulate. By building new capabilities into its vCloud Automation Center product and its vSphere Management Console, the "network stretch and deploy" feature will become something customers can invoke from within a familiar management setting and use to move workloads out to a VMware Hybrid Cloud facility. VMware is also integrating Hybrid Cloud Service with other VMware products, including vCenter Operations, used for capacity and virtual system management, and VMware View, its desktop virtualization product. One of the few surprises in the announcement, which had been anticipated for weeks, was that it will charge $0.13 an hour for a "fully redundant" 1 GB virtual machine with one processor in a "dedicated cloud" or an isolated server. That brings a secure and private virtual server in the VMware Hybrid Cloud Service to market priced slightly under one major competitor, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/google-compute-engine-too-little-too-lat/240155164">Google Compute Engine</a>, which is offering a midrange VM at $0.132 per hour. Amazon remains at a lower benchmark, $0.12 an hour for a medium server. Indeed, both Amazon and Google offer one virtual processor but 3.75 GB of memory, not 1 GB as VMware does, for their standard or medium-sized virtual machine. The multi-tenant version of Hybrid Cloud Service comes in lower than the single-tenant offering. VMware is offering 1 GB servers with one virtual core at $0.045 an hour. Prices for larger servers, which most customers would need, were not listed in the announcement. VMware Hybrid Cloud will have limited availability through an early access program that starts in June. General availability in the U.S. is expected in the third quarter. "We have become mission critical, we have become the new hardware, we have become the new environment customers rely on for the internal infrastructure," said CEO Pat Gelsinger at the start of the presentation. Hybrid Cloud Service will extend that reliance out into the public cloud, he said.2013-05-21T10:28:00ZTerremark's VMware Cloud Software Story: It's ComplicatedTerremark CTO John Considine says VMware "is a great partner of ours." But Terremark built its own cloud provisioning software to run its operation.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/terremarks-vmware-cloud-software-story-i/240155253?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/more-pioneers-of-cloud-computing/240151032"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/964/Cloud-Computing-Pioneers_promo.jpg" alt="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers</div> (click image for slideshow) </div>  Verizon Terremark, Verizon Communications' cloud unit, was an early VMware cloud supporter. It is eager to support VMware customers who wish to use its Enterprise Cloud services, and it will provide them with all the VMware components they need to duplicate the environment they have on premises. On the other hand, Terremark, a former independent supplier of cloud services to the government and enterprise before VMware got into the cloud business, doesn't rely on VMware products to run its own operations. With 50 data centers around the world, and one of the world's biggest communications hubs in its NAP of the Americas data center in downtown Miami, Terremark has gone its own way when it comes to maintaining a high-volume, multi-tenant cloud service operation. Terremark for the last three years has endorsed VMware in the cloud and frequently appeared at VMworld as one of the public cloud alternatives. Customers, even within Terremark services, have opted to use something other than VMware. That fact, combined with Monday's <a href="http://cloudpundit.com/2013/05/20/dell-withdraws-from-the-public-cloud-iaas-market">withdrawal of Dell</a> as a named provider of VMware public cloud services, shows some of the obstacles that VMware is running up against as it tries to convince customers to turn to it for public cloud services. Dell was to be one of four VMware providers in the U.S., along with Bluelock, CSC and AT&T. Worried about defections to Amazon Web Services, VMware has slated a press conference at 10 a.m. Pacific Tuesday to say what VMware's public cloud alternative will be. [ Want to learn more about VMware's public cloud plans -- and its exasperation with AWS defectors? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-hybrid-cloud-time-for-amazon-answ/240155169?itc=edit_in_body_cross">VMware Hybrid Cloud Plans: Time For Amazon Answer</a>. ] Terremark CTO John Considine explained VMware "is a great partner of ours" and he wants it stay that way. But if Terremark, an early supporter of VMware customers in the cloud, had used VMware vCloud Director and other products, it would have had to extend them with its own custom code to get them to operate in the manner and scale they would need in a Terremark cloud operation. "Terremark was the first company to support the vCloud API," he said in an interview. But it realized if it chose to extend the API for its own use, "you're not standard. It's then a challenge to maintain the extensions" with each update of the API, he said in a recent interview. In addition, Terremark found the number of licenses it would need to operate a Terremark cloud under VMware server software "a little expensive." It developed its own cloud management software that suited the needs of a supplier focused on providing highly secure and managed environments to the government and an established list of enterprise customers. It offers customers whatever environment they wish, and some opt for an all-VMware setting inside Terremark. But "it's not a majority. A few customers are asking for that capability," but most are sticking with a standard Terremark cloud setting. Terremark routinely runs workloads from customers using VMware ESX Server without vCloud Director. "Verizon decided it wanted to invest heavily in cloud software. We built our own orchestration layer to supply customers with cloud services. We were able to do so because we carried over expertise in managed services" from Terremark's earlier business as a supplier of hosted managed services, Considine explained. Verizon Terremark was positioned Oct. 29 in the leaders' quadrant of Gartner's reports on both infrastructure-as-a-service and North American providers of hosted managed services. The two are closely related, and the joint designation reflects the industry out of which the Terremark Enterprise Cloud has emerged. Hosted services providers run applications themselves, with each application serving a particular customer. In IaaS, the customer would be responsible for running the application itself, while the cloud service provider runs the underlying infrastructure. Cloud services are also more automated, digital services, as opposed to the manual interventions possible and sometimes required under hosted managed services. Terremark is the former independent supplier of cloud services to the government and enterprise. In February 2011, it became the cloud computing unit of Verizon and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/infrastructure/management/verizon-cedes-data-center-management-to/232300165">took over management</a> of Verizon data centers intended to deliver cloud services.2013-05-21T09:38:00ZRackspace Woos Developers, Fights Sagging RevenueRackspace adds support for SDKs and APIs to its OpenStack Cloud, hoping to encourage developers to use its service.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/rackspace-woos-developers-fights-sagging/240155222?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityCloud application development is different from established, enterprise software development. And that's one reason why Rackspace is taking its strategy of supported cloud computing and extending it to developers. Rackspace is making available software development kits (SDKs) for Java (frequently used for enterprise applications) and PHP, Python and Ruby (frequently used in Web applications), and making them available in the Rackspace Cloud. It's also making Microsoft .Net languages, such as C#, available as well. They are used both in the enterprise and on the Web. PHP, Python and Ruby are all interpreted languages. Applications developed with them go through an interpreter each time they're run. That means a change to the code is picked up immediately with the next run of the application, making interpretative languages good for addressing frequently changing business conditions. Java and .Net are both more mature and more strictly defined in how they work with data and what they can do, giving them greater predictability and stability. Both sets of attributes are needed in cloud-based applications and both types of languages may be used in building different parts of a cloud application. "We are also working on node.js, which we hope to release soon," wrote Lew Moorman, Rackspace president, in a May 13 blog. Node.js is JavaScript for servers, used to supply services to the JavaScript commonly running in the Microsoft Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers. The move makes Rackspace into more of a platform-as-a-service for developers instead of strictly infrastructure-as-a-service for compute workloads. [ Want to learn more about how Rackspace expects to create a global presence in cloud computing? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/rackspace-launches-global-openstack-expa/240152897?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Rackspace Launches Global OpenStack Expansion</a>. ] Rackspace is looking to expand the use of its Rackspace OpenStack-based cloud, and developers are a good source of business. Once they develop an application in a given cloud environment, chances are high they will run it there as well, using the environment with which they are already familiar. Over several years, Amazon Web Services supported the use of many languages. It serves as the host environment for a wide range of developer-based services, including the Heroku platform-as-a-service, owned by Salesforce.com, and the OpenStack developer cloud, OpenShift, owned by Red Hat. Rackspace was early to market and a founder of the OpenStack open-source project. But analysts, such as Jillian Mirandi at Technology Business Research, have pointed out that Rackspace over the last year has migrated existing customers off its old infrastructure onto its OpenStack cloud, a process that has occurred steadily, but at the expense of acquiring new customers. In Rackspace's first-quarter earnings call May 8, CEO Lanham Napier said 2.6% growth over the previous quarter represented a slowdown in its cloud-revenue expectations. "The primary source of slower growth in the first quarter came from slower-than-expected sales to our enterprise customers," he said, according to a <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/1417061-rackspace-hosting-management-discusses-q1-2013-results-earnings-call-transcript">transcript of his remarks</a>. Rackspace also reversed course Feb. 22 when, after saying it wouldn't compete with AWS on price, it lowered prices on storage and bandwidth use to match those of Amazon's. The combination drove its stock price down 20%. At the same time, more developers are looking for compatible cloud environments in which to develop applications, and Rackspace is seeking to capture its share. They tend to have different characteristics from the typical previous generation of enterprise applications, as explained by Eucalyptus Systems' Marten Mickos <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/for-developers-the-cloud-means-having-to-rethink-everything-they-know-about-making-software/2013/05/20/ced3c95c-c0d3-11e2-9aa6-fc21ae807a8a_story.html">in The Washington Post</a> . Among other things, cloud applications need to assume the hardware might fail underneath them and have failover instructions to another instance of the application ready to be executed at a millisecond's notice. Demand for the application might expand and contract unpredictably, and therefore it has to be designed with load-balancing characteristics that can be applied automatically. Additional servers might need to be spun up to maintain the appropriate response times to customers, another cloud application characteristic. Such changes occur in a scale-out fashion, where more virtual servers are added to a cluster to handle the load, as opposed to taking over more of a single large server or small cluster of them. Developers who choose to use the Rackspace Cloud will get support from Rackspace's own expertise in use of the SDKs and application programming interfaces. Rackspace is known for its willingness to support cloud customers both by email and directly on the phone, whereas Amazon Web Services offers only email support. Amazon competitors point out you can't find a phone number to call for support on the AWS site. Rackspace support will help a developer figure out where his application code is interacting with a Rackspace cloud API or run-time environment for the language used by his application. It will help identify coding errors and advise on best practices for invoking the SDK or API. Given its experience in building cloud infrastructure, Rackspace support personnel can advise when a given application in the Rackspace Cloud needs to scale out; when to automatically generate more servers based on the application logic; when you need a custom monitoring script to check the status of a MySQL database replication; and so forth. "Rackspace Developer Support marks the first time we will officially support your application code. When you're programming your application to interact with the Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack, we want to make sure it is as easy as possible," Moorman wrote.2013-05-21T09:06:00ZGoogle Compute Engine: Too Little, Too Late?Google must convince enterprise IT managers that its infrastructure-as-a-service offering is a good fit.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/google-compute-engine-too-little-too-lat/240155164?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/google-io-10-key-developments/240155051"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/995/Google_IO_01_tn.jpg" alt="Google I/O: 10 Key Developments" title="Google I/O: 10 Key Developments" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Google I/O: 10 Key Developments</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div> If the enterprise has been waiting for Google Compute Engine, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/internet/google/google-strengthens-cloud-platform/240155040">it's now available</a>. But is Google's cloud platform really ready for the enterprise? That's the question that occurs to me every time I read another headline about how, this time, Google is departing from its focus on the brilliance of its own information-gathering mechanisms and addressing the needs of the enterprise. Is it? Really? I have found Google to have a deaf ear to business needs in the past. There were those quotas on I/Os and API calls that Google imposed on early App Engine users to teach them not to overtax a service that Google had just launched. That didn't inspire a sense of unmitigated commitment in enterprise users. Perhaps quotas are ancient history now, but the culture and point of view that spawned them might still be hanging around. What about those thousands of businesses that dared to think there might be a Google alternative to Microsoft Office? Google tried to convince as many listeners as it could that Google Docs, later Google Apps, was here to stay, "a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes." Free Google Apps ended without warning in December, and now many enterprises understand Google's commitment to products is tentative and dependent on their revenue streams, not so different from everyone else. What's Compute Engine's revenue stream going to be two years from now? Were you a startup in 2010 that came to rely on Google Cloud Store? Well, Google decided to charge for the CPU use involved and, guess what, performance swirled down the sink drain. Google apologized and stopped charging, but not before some customers found performance so unreliable that they went elsewhere. And startups are the kinds of enterprises with the greatest tolerance for Google's vagaries. [ Want more on what Google's done to strengthen Compute Engine? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/internet/google/google-strengthens-cloud-platform/240155040?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Google Strengthens Cloud Platform</a>.] With the announcement of Compute Engine availability, are IT managers going to start dancing to the beat of the Python drum, the primary language of Google's own systems, or did Google mean to extend its appeal by starting to talk about PHP? The subject of PHP came up at the same time as Compute Engine general availability, although a PHP runtime will be available initially only on App Engine, Google's development platform, not Compute Engine. Still, if Google sees lots of applications developed on App Engine in PHP, its most requested language, surely it will allow them to be run on Compute Engine soon. Talking about PHP is one way for Google to escape seeming like such an inward-focused company, one that heretofore has been out of touch with the proliferating, dynamic languages used by large companies on the Web. "We're bringing one of the most popular Web programming languages to App Engine so that you can run open source apps like WordPress," wrote Urs Holzle, senior VP, about PHP on the Google Cloud Platform blog May 15. So Google is just getting around to discovering that users might like to run WordPress. It doesn't give me a feeling that they have great insight into the needs of small or large enterprises. Amazon, meanwhile, routinely hosts a wide variety development languages and technologies, in part because it's a hospitable environment for Heroku and other third parties that specialize in offering them. With Google, there's still an air that the technologies it chooses and uses itself will be the ones that are made available. So a PHP runtime on App Engine is a step in the right direction; it gets the number of supported languages up to an underwhelming three. (Java is the other one.) Google announced general availability for Compute Engine at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/google-to-apple-catch-us-if-you-can/240155140">Google I/O 2013</a>, 11 months after launching it with significant fanfare. It was first available only in limited preview -- to a few experimenters from whom Google wanted feedback -- then a month ago to Gold support customers paying $400 a month. Enterprises that wanted to test Compute Engine or conduct an experiment with it were kept out for almost a year. I shouldn't complain. That's a speedy march to general availability for Google. App Engine for Business, with <a href="http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-app-engine-for.html">features</a> that showed Google understood what business needed -- a central administration console, security -- was announced as being available in "technology preview" in May 2010. If you're a business, should you adopt an offering that's not yet a supported product? Nevertheless, App Engine stayed in technical preview until March 2012, when it was discontinued with a hand-wave explanation. "Almost all the features you wanted in App Engine for Business will now be available to all App Engine developers in an upcoming release," said the developer blog. So you want the business version of our product? Just wait, its features eventually will be embedded in the consumer product, if you understand how we work around here. Google's lateness in getting Compute Engine to market is also worth noting -- most companies try to deliver the product they just announced in the next quarter -- but we all know at this point we shouldn't judge Google by the same standards we apply to other companies. In Google's view, it's just-in-time marketing because so many companies haven't adopted the cloud yet. Yes, but they've tested and run their first applications in the cloud, and chances are high they didn't test on Google. But the tipoff that Google might still not be ready for the enterprise market, to me, came with its announcement of Compute Engine pricing. Google will charge $0.132 an hour for an n1-standard virtual server. That's a server with a virtual core that's roughly equivalent to Amazon's M-1 medium server. Both come with 3.75 GB of memory, one virtual core CPU and similar disk storage: 410 GB for Amazon and 420 GB for Google. But Amazon is charging only $0.12 an hour. Compute Engine falls short of Amazon Web Services' aggressive pricing, while Microsoft Azure comes very close to matching AWS. Google is one of the few other companies with such a broad revenue stream that it could match AWS if it's in the cloud market to win enterprise customers. But at that price, it's barely making a race of it. Enterprise customers are moving to the cloud for agility and flexibility in their computing resources, but also for price, regardless of what surveys try to tell you. The difference of a penny an hour across thousands of servers for each day of the year adds up in a way that enterprise CIOs understand very well. Google has got one of the best cloud architectures in existence on which to base a general-purpose, infrastructure-as-a-service for the enterprise. But building a modern compute architecture and serving the enterprise remain two different things. Until Google makes some move to prove otherwise, I am doubtful Compute Engine is an enterprise contender.2013-05-20T09:40:00ZVMware Hybrid Cloud Plans: Time For Amazon AnswerVMware doesn't like the degree to which customers and partners have been implementing cloud using its products. Will it compete with Amazon?http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-hybrid-cloud-plans-time-for-amazo/240155169?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityVMware is slated to disclose its plans for hybrid cloud computing to its customers Tuesday. This announcement is needed, not because customers demand it, but because VMware needs to do something to arrest Amazon's continued reach inside corporate IT. As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger explained to partners Feb. 27 in Las Vegas: "We all lose if [enterprise customers] end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud ... Own the corporate workload now and forever." Maybe the event will even get underway with COO Carl Eschenbach repeating the exhortation he made to partners Feb. 27. Don't get beaten by a competitor "that sells books." He misspoke, of course. What he meant to say was don't get beaten by "a mere bookseller." [ Want to see more of what VMware executives had to say in February about the public cloud? See <a href="http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/240149626/vmware-top-execs-lash-out-at-amazon-public-cloud.htm?itc=edit_in_body_cross">VMware Top Executives Lash Out At Amazon Public Cloud</a>, from InformationWeek's sister publication CRN. ] It's already known that VMware will say the hybrid cloud will include its own version of infrastructure-as-a-service, a public cloud that customers may turn to if they want to migrate into a large-scale version of what they've already got on premises. As a plus, their existing management tools will see workloads in either place, giving them an extension to their data centers. That interpretation comes from Forrester Research analyst James Staten, who on March 13 posted a blog reporting <a href="http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-03-13-vmware_takes_the_cover_off_its_public_cloud">what he heard from VMware executives</a> as they told investors what they intended to do next: "Yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Services, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others." But I still can't square these statements with what I see going on in the VMware ecosystem. Staten posited that VMware was discontented with its partners and customers for not more wholeheartedly adopting the VMware vCloud Suite path instead of trying out Amazon. "Sometimes you can only coax a reluctant partner and I&O [infrastructure and operations, or enterprise IT] customer community for so long before you feel you have to take matters into your own hands. That is exactly what VMware has decided to do to become relevant in the cloud platforms space," he wrote March 13. In other words, VMware is unhappy with the degree to which customers and partners have been implementing cloud computing using its products, and it's decided to take matters into its own hands. It will establish its own public cloud, one that competes with Amazon Web Services. I believe all of this, except for the last part. I think VMware will enter infrastructure-as-a-service and will exhibit a fuller cloud implementation than its partners have been able to display. That means automated cloud operations, end user self- provisioning, chargeback, scalability on demand and flexible configurations, based on customer need. But I don't think VMware expects to take any customers from Amazon and I'm waiting to see how close a VMware-sponsored public cloud will come to Amazon EC2 server pricing -- the really tough nut for VMware to crack. On the contrary, I think VMware IaaS will be a demonstration of how vCloud Suite can be used to build out multi-tenant cloud services. It could be a variation of the cloud that it already operates for developers, Cloud Foundry. If it moves a version of Cloud Foundry from platform-as-a-service into IaaS, it will only be following in Microsoft's footsteps, which did the same with Azure PaaS earlier this year. Cloud Foundry has the benefit of being open source code, and VMware partners desperately need something lower priced than vSphere 5 and vCloud Director with which to compete. VMware may even have a little spare cloud hardware in its VCE subsidiary's warehouse that it would like to put into productive use. In that way, the VMware "public cloud" could go on the books as a business expense instead of an unwanted inventory write-down. I don't have any insight into VMware's actual accounting methods; I just know there are several ways for VMware to launch a full-bore public cloud. A test of how serious it is about public cloud computing would be to ask: Where is the equivalent of AWS US East, AWS US West, AWS Singapore, AWS Japan, AWS Brazil, AWS Sydney and AWS Dublin? Will VMware be opening cloud data centers around the globe? Don't hold your breath on that one. Or is a model VMware public cloud meant to drive the further development of public cloud partners around the globe? Indeed, if VMware announces a chain of cloud data centers, I'll be asking Bill Fathers, senior VP and general manager of VMware hybrid cloud services, when I talk to him May 21 why VMware hired him in the first place. His Linkedin profile shows he has experience in "Establishing worldwide alliances, partner programs, joint ventures." That's not going to be very useful if it's VMware's goal to scoop up customers' interest in public cloud services for itself. If that is its plan, that means a chain of VMware cloud data centers would be seeking to displace partners such as CSC, Dell, Bluelock, AT&T, Colt, Softbank and SingTel, and hundreds of regional suppliers. Most of these partners have continued building out their VMware services, even as word of VMware's plans leaked out in March. Maybe they didn't get the public cloud memo. No, I'm betting VMware will establish a model public cloud to prove what can be done with a new round of VMware products and attract some customers to it. This will act as both model and goad to partners who have implemented partial public clouds but still haven't quite gotten there. And it's not all on the partners. VMware until now hasn't produced the supplier software needed to operate a fully functioning, fully equipped, multitenant public cloud. That's another thing I'll be looking for Tuesday -- what's available in the VMware code? Is there more there than there used to be? This is a make-or-break space for the future of VMware, and I can't wait to see what unfolds.2013-05-17T10:00:00ZTale Of 2 ServiceNow Users: Problem SolversServiceNow users share experiences with the SaaS IT service management: one for compliance, IT automation; the other in business services.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/tale-of-2-servicenow-users-problem-solve/240155053?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityServiceNow supplies IT service management in the form of software-as-a-service (SaaS). It ranks number three in a market that is led by BMC's Remedy product, with HP's Service Manager number two. At ServiceNow's Knowledge 13 user group meeting in Las Vegas this week, its customers in keynotes, sessions and private interviews talked about how they use the product suite. This, then, is a tale of two customers. One is Lennox, a heating, ventilating and air conditioning supplier which implemented ServiceNow for deep, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library">ITIL</a>) compliant IT service management, replacing BMC's Remedy. Service Stream, a combined utility and networking supplier based in Melbourne, Australia, also implemented ServiceNow for IT management, but CIO Craig Wishart said it's useful for far more than that in Service Stream's businesses. At ServiceNow's user group conference Wednesday, he gave a talk on "End-to-End Business Automation on the ServiceNow Platform." Wishart is an Australian who might be mistaken as boyish until he starts to speak about his organizational goals. Then he becomes a mature, straight-ahead, disruptive force. He has upended an 80-person IT staff, replacing 75% of it with leaner, communications and business-oriented personnel; the types of IT staffers who will flourish in a more automated and service-oriented IT organization. "I needed people who could talk to business leaders, and I had to go out and recruit them," he recalled. In the past 14 months, he's supervised the shifting of about 40% of Service Stream's compute power onto Amazon Web Services EC2, which now operates a data center in Sydney. He's replaced on-premises Microsoft Exchange with Office 365 in the Azure cloud and he's adopted the ServiceNow SaaS suite. [ Considering a move to Microsoft Office 365? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/google-apps-to-microsoft-office-365-10-l/240154989?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Google Apps To Microsoft Office 365: 10 Lessons</a>. ] "I looked at ServiceNow and concluded it wasn't just an IT services management tool. It was a business platform that I could leverage for IT services management capabilities," he said. That might not work at every company, but Service Stream is a heavily services-oriented company, installing fiber optic cable and connecting it to customers' homes, and doing 40 million meter reads a year in its electricity and water distribution businesses. Service Stream manages and supports a field force of 4,000 installers and technicians. Getting the right person to the right job with the right tools and supplies is a gargantuan task with many potential glitches, Wishart said. ServiceNow's Service Desk, Asset Management and other services can be adapted to get the right resources to the right task for the business as a whole, not just IT, he said. Wishart is using Microsoft's online application Dynamic Nav (the former Navision) for supply-chain management, ordering, tracking and controls. He plans to use it to get the right parts to the right field force technicians, he said. Service Stream will soon equip its field personnel with Apple iPads so they can frequently update information and also access online company resources that will help them troubleshoot isolated problems about customer configurations. Wishart said the SaaS will also give his firm a way to expand into new businesses. For example, Service Stream installs $71 million a year in solar panels for customers. After a year's use, the company knows their effectiveness declines 15% due to accumulated grit and dust. An automated Service Desk can trigger an email message to each customer to point out the expected decline and suggest a service call to clean the panels and restore their efficiency. "Today that happens usually when a customer calls the company. Many don't call, or worse, they call a competitor" to do the cleaning, said Wishart. He wants to automate the opportunity to capture that follow-up business. He's so committed to automating business services that he's convinced line-of-business heads and other executives to support him in a bid for an increased IT budget to help automate their services. Wishart said he's already won the first phase of that battle, and he's looking forward to ServiceNow SaaS and his IT staff taking more and more responsibility for generating Service Stream's $560 million in annual revenue. Service Stream is currently using the SaaS for design, construction and support of cellphone towers, installing fiber optic cable for new homes and neighborhoods, and scheduling meter readings for its retail water and energy businesses.A more typical ServiceNow customer is Carolyn Hollingsworth, senior manager of IT service delivery, and her team at Lennox, a heating, ventilating and air-conditioning company based in Richardson, Texas. Lennox was a user of on-premises BMC Remedy for IT service management, but it needed to customize Remedy to suit its organization. Each successive Remedy upgrade became more painful for Lennox, as the customizations had to be incorporated into the newest BMC version. J.D. Tucker, former Remedy administrator at Lennox, now a ServiceNow manager, said IT staffers could tell Remedy support was coming out of India, with the help-desk technician proceeding through a basic script. Frequently, they wished to advise the help desk tech to start on line 19 of the script, for example. In addition, seeking technical support on their customizations during upgrades frequently lead to a scolding that they had done the customization in the first place, said Tucker. The prospect of another upgrade prompted Lennox to look at ServiceNow, which it adopted in 2009. ServiceNow IT automation processes are controlled by a change management database and meet ITIL v3 standards, another important consideration at Lennox, which wished to become ITIL-compliant. It implemented ServiceNow's Incident service, which captures the details of a user interaction and issues a trouble ticket to a group of problem solvers rather than an individual technician. The incident is either resolved or escalated into the Problem Management service, where it is identified and researched as a repeated, ongoing problem that must be resolved on a more fundamental basis. Lennox implemented the Change Management service as well, which captures all system configurations and establishes an approval process before system configurations can be changed. If a patch results in a system outage, Change Management can roll back the change to a version of the system that works. Tucker said ServiceNow doesn't allow modifications of its core application, but customers may write JavaScript additions to work with the services. SaaS is based on annual subscription fees, and Tucker estimated that Lennox IT service management costs have declined by two-thirds with the changeover. Some of that savings, of course, stems from preventing problems due to customizations that wouldn't be compatible with future ServiceNow upgrades. "When we have a problem with ServiceNow, we talk to someone high up in the engineering chain," not a distant, middle-of-the-night support person, he said. "If we have to, we can go all the way up to the guy who developed the code."2013-05-15T09:55:00ZServiceNow Revamp Stars Cloud ProvisioningCloud Provisioning acts as a virtual machine orchestrator for VMware and Amazon Web Services cloud environments.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/servicenow-revamp-stars-cloud-provisioni/240154918?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/more-pioneers-of-cloud-computing/240151032"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/964/Cloud-Computing-Pioneers_promo.jpg" alt="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers</div> (click image for slideshow) </div>  ServiceNow has updated its online IT services management suite, including a new Cloud Provisioning feature. It announced the upgrades this week in Las Vegas during its annual Knowledge user conference, where it collected strong customer feedback on its product line. ServiceNow is a set of IT automation services hosted in 18 data centers around the world. Cloud Provisioning is a virtual machine orchestrator for both VMware and Amazon Web Services cloud environments. It can track what virtual machine (VM) has been sent where, even though they may be operating in a hybrid cloud environment, from a single pane of glass. It allows end users to self-provision the servers they need, then detects if the end user has abandoned the use of that asset. Cloud Provisioning works with the firm's core Service Automation Applications Suite so that VMs are generated from the firm's service catalog and are subject to the firm's Change Management module when users order changes to their VMs. It works with VMware ESX Server and Amazon Machine Images as of Wednesday, and will add Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor at some point in the future, said Rob Phillips, director of solutions strategy, in a demonstration of Cloud Provisioning after president and CEO Frank Slootman's opening keynote Tuesday. [ Want to learn more about how IT needs to change to cope with changing times? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/infrastructure/management/its-self-image-needs-work-cisco-study-sh/240154578?itc=edit_in_body_cross">IT's Self Image Needs Work, Cisco Study Shows</a>. ] In addition, the firm's executives announced that IT managers will be able to access ServiceNow applications from their Apple iPads and connect to any unit of the suite, while on the go. The service has a touch-sensitive, "card" view user interface that iPad users will quickly recognize, said Phillips. It can even attach a picture taken with the iPad camera to any record and send it to other IT managers. The iPad service is free to existing customers. ServiceNow officials also announced App Creator, which provides a development platform based on forms, workflow and standard ServiceNow interfaces for customer-generated workflows and automations to IT processes. Many ServiceNow customers were already cobbling together custom applications from different components of the product set. App Creator pulls those parts together, including the ability to define new data objects, and puts them in a point-and-click development environment designed for non-programmers. The firm produced App Creator after it discovered how far customers were going on their own in attempting to generate additions and custom applications. "This is a horse that has escaped from the barn. We've been running after it," said Slootman in his opening keynote. App Creator will tend to produce applications that fall within the lines of a request and response service, using defined data objects. Non-programmers or "citizen developers," a name coined two years ago by Gartner, can use the system, provided they have familiarity with the basic format of ServiceNow applications and use forms and workflow to duplicate it. App Creator is different from Salesforce.com's Force.com development platform in that it offers no proprietary development language. For those who need a language for bits of business logic, App Creator will work with standard JavaScript. The Knowledge '13 conference is being attended by 3,900 customers, roughly double the number that attended last year, as ServiceNow begins to gain traction with IT shops. Slootman called a number of those customers on stage during his keynote and asked them to tell the crowd what they'd done with ServiceNow services.Peter Agumaneiz, VP of tool and automation at financial services insurance firm AIG, said ServiceNow works as a replacement for 30 service desks formerly resident inside AIG, where it has become "the one system of record." It serves as the incident and problem reporting system throughout AIG and has been chosen by AIG developers as their preferred development platform, he said. Ves Kjenstad, executive director of service provider governance at Bristol-Myers Squibb, said her firm used to have 52 different ways to measure "time to resolution," once a trouble ticket was issued in response to a problem. Now it has a clearer method for eight measures, and a way of seeing on the ServiceNow dashboard how much time is left before an unresolved trouble ticket leads to a breach of its service level agreement, she said. Allison Collop, global IT director for Coca-Cola, said her firm supports app use around the globe with ServiceNow and "has been able to standardize" on its services for IT processes and procedures. Coca-Cola "runs the business of IT on ServiceNow," she said, including how it manages contracts with website building firms around the world. Paul Cassell, CIO of NYSE Euronext, said his stock exchange has based compliance reporting to the SEC on ServiceNow reporting capabilities. The former, more manual process often resulted in 50 clicks and "a cloud of dust," or failure to generate the correct report, he said. Now the reporting process has shaved 20 hours of compute time needed to produce the business-critical compliance reports, he said. Reggie Acloque, information management leader at GE Energy, said his business unit spent more time debating what tool to use than it did implementing the new system when it chose ServiceNow as the basis for its augmented engineering support for field technicians. The comment drew an appreciative laugh from the audience. "We use ServiceNow to automate business processes" that provide the support to technicians repairing turbines and generators in the field. The unit is a major component of GE, generating $28 billion in revenue. The new support system has taken $2 million off support costs so far, Acloque said. These customers have implemented ServiceNow multi-tenant services to reduce costs and take the friction out of interactions with IT users, Slootman said in his keynote. "We're not trying to re-invent the help desk. We're trying to eliminate it," he said.2013-05-14T12:22:00ZAmazon To Cloud Rivals: Try To Catch UsAmazon Web Services VP Adam Selipsky sits down to talk about Amazon.com's DNA and its low-margin approach to cloud services vs. competitors.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-web-services-to-competitors-catch/240154827?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/more-pioneers-of-cloud-computing/240151032"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/964/Cloud-Computing-Pioneers_promo.jpg" alt="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers</div> (click image for slideshow) </div>Adam Selipsky, VP of marketing and product management at Amazon Web Services, is tired of seeing headlines that announce another competitor has emerged to challenge Amazon. Selipsky won't name specific competitors, but in a recent interview with InformationWeek, he didn't hesitate to lay down the gauntlet to them. "Many old guard companies" are now talking about cloud products and cloud services. These are the same companies that are "threatened by the model we've brought to market" of low-cost compute cycles distributed from cloud data centers and charged for by the hour, he said. The old guard might be Oracle and IBM. It might also be Microsoft, which recently announced its Azure revenues had passed the $1 billion mark and said as it offered infrastructure as a service in March that it would match Amazon prices. Competitors have begun to put pressure on the uniqueness of Amazon's offerings. Selipsky visited InformationWeek in part to reassert Amazon's claims to market leadership. [ Want to learn more about how AWS fits into the parent company, Amazon.com? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-unlikely-to-spin-off-aws-cloud-un/240148747?itc=edit_in_body_cross"> Amazon Unlikely To Spin Off AWS Cloud Unit.</a> ] Amazon "is keeping up a rapid pace of innovation" by introducing a more complete set of services than competitors, he said. Last year it added Glacier low-cost storage and RedShift data warehousing, as well as new instance types. As a result, it is more frequently serving as an extension of enterprise IT as well as a frequent infrastructure for startups. It's hosting the customer analytics of News International, the London-based branch of News Corp. One third of the servers needed by News International are now provided by Amazon's EC2. It's also frequently used as a platform by Bristol Myers Squib and other pharmaceutical companies as they use complex patient data to design new drug trials. Bristol Myers reported that such a design can be executed in 1.2 hours on an AWS server cluster, compared to the two days it previously took in-house. That's saved work time for the scientists, pointed out Selipsky. But most of all, according to Selipsky, the comparisons between AWS and its competitors fails to see the high-volume, low-margin retailer's roots behind Amazon Web Services. Such an approach is not characteristic of the technology industry. On the contrary, he says he reads earnings reports from companies that say they are looking for a higher margin strategy, one that yields 70% or 80% margins more to their liking. "Frankly, I think many customers have been ripped off for decades," he said. "It's important to have a cloud provider that has a history of lowering prices when they lower costs," Selipsky said. "We intend to run a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-brings-price-cutter-mentality-to/232601304">high-volume, low-margin business</a>," as Amazon has done in retail, and Amazon has lowered prices 31 times since launching its service, he said. Prices, of course, are lowered in new or lesser used services more frequently than they are lowered in Amazon's core compute services. Nevertheless, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/rackspace-launches-global-openstack-expa/240152897">Rackspace</a>, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/google-combines-storage-for-gmail-drive/240154799">Google</a> and Microsoft have been at pains to keep pace with Amazon's moves and all three lowered storage prices when Amazon did last fall. What about Microsoft's declared intent to match Amazon pricing? "It's easy for a company to drop prices," responded Selipsky. "The hard thing is being able to afford to drop your prices.""It will be extremely hard for most companies to drive to the cost structure Amazon has and will continue to improve upon. … We will absolutely continue to drive down our business costs and customer prices," he said. Still, getting to the heart of AWS' balance sheet is impossible. Amazon delivers low-cost compute cycles because of the way it builds and operates cloud data centers, but Selipsky was not at liberty to divulge any details of how it designs the servers with which it populates them or how it keeps operations staffs small. How, for example, does Amazon solve the problem of chilling the equipment? Does it use the big air-conditioning units known as chillers or some lower-cost method? "We don't talk about that. We have a lot of our IP tied up in our designs," he said. That, of course, is in contrast to Facebook, which has published its server designs as part of the Open Compute Project and opened its data centers to inspection tours. Is Amazon watching its power usage effectiveness -- the amount of power actually used in computing out of the total delivered to the data center -- as Facebook is? Of course, said Selipsky. "We analyze everything. We're highly data driven." But PUE – power usage effectiveness - is another stat he was not at liberty to disclose. As a result, part of the belief in Amazon's "high volume, low margin" ethos has to be taken on faith. Parent company Amazon.com doesn't directly report revenues for AWS. In the first quarter of 2013, it reported $798 million in revenue in the "other" category, widely believed to mainly represent AWS but the accounting is not precise on whether the parent company's retail cash flow in part supports AWS operations. Nor was Selipsky prepared to provide such an accounting. Rather, without mentioning names, he wanted to draw a line in the sand and dare would-be competitors to cross it. Amazon continues to build out data centers, adding per day the servers it once took to support the $5.3 billion retail business in 2003. Some of this addition could take the form of upgrading old servers to more powerful models but Selipsky said Amazon is also filling more data center space with equipment. "We continue to expand geographically. We're not done yet," he said. It's already got centers in Northern Virginia as U.S. East, and centers in Oregon and Silicon Valley as U.S. West and GovCloud. Overseas, it's in Dublin, Sydney and Singapore, as well as in two locations in Japan and one in Brazil. Macquarie Capital says Amazon Web Services had likely revenues of $2.5 billion in 2012 and could be valued as a $19 billion company by 2015. As competitors reach their first billion or struggle to maintain stock value as growth slows, AWS is pressing its case. High volume, low margin is part of every aspect of Amazon's business. "It's the way we designed our headquarters and offices," said Selipsky. Challenged to illustrate, he says he and other executives work from desks that were originally made from doors as a low-cost office-equipment option. "Those desks are a visual reminder of the early culture of the company," he said. "It's difficult, retrofitting your company from a DNA perspective," he says to competitors. "If you're looking to make 70%-80% margins," you don't think about costs in such a manner. The scale AWS has achieved and its pace of innovation will continue to be based on that culture. Catch us, Selipsky seemed to say, if you can.2013-05-13T09:30:00Z3M Uses Azure For Image Analysis Service3M Manager Bill Smyth wanted to launch a new business at 3M. So he used Microsoft's Azure cloud services.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/3m-uses-azure-for-image-analysis-service/240154696?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/8-windows-8-apps-under-25/240154177"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/989/Intro_01_tn.jpg" alt="8 Windows 8 Apps Under $25" title="8 Windows 8 Apps Under $25" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Windows 8 Apps Under $25</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  When Bill Smyth wanted to launch a new business at 3M two-and-a-half years ago, he faced the daunting prospect of plunging into the $29.9 billion company's capital budgeting process. Or, he could circumvent that process and go straight to Microsoft's Azure cloud. As a 14-year veteran at 3M with product responsibilities, he had been through the capital budget process several times. "I've got the scars on my back to prove it," he said in an interview. Applying for capital funds puts an executive "into the competitive environment of capital money allocation," with repetitive meetings and discussions over how to divide up 3M's $1 billion capital budget. He only needed a few servers, but to get them, "I would be competing with executives building $100 million coating factories," he recalled. The budget process is the same whether someone needs three servers or a whole factory. And even if he received an allocation in one round of discussions, he could lose it in the next when a higher priority project was shown to be over budget and coming up short. "I had a million things I knew I had to do" to launch 3M's Visual Attention Service (VAS), an image analysis service that advises clients which parts of their images or video will gain the greatest share of audience attention. Smyth only needed a handful of servers; going to the cloud gave him those servers quickly, along with one less thing to do. "The concept of avoiding the countless budget meetings versus firing up more instances. It was a no brainer for me," he said. [ Want to learn more about Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud services? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/microsoft-azure-public-cloud-matches-ama/240152968?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Microsoft Azure Public Cloud Matches Amazon Prices.</a> ] In another sense, Smyth also was circumventing IT as well as the capital budget. Rather than relying on on-premises servers, he was going outside the data center, and that posed data management challenges. But he had an internal ally, the 3M Software, Electronics and Mechanical Systems Lab, one of the central labs that serve the whole company. It was SEMS that had the neuroscience expertise to establish how the human brain perceives light and images. "SEMS played a key role in much of our software-related decision making," recalled Smyth. "They proposed using Azure." Smyth was in a hurry to get his systems up and running because 3M realized two-and-a-half years ago that one of its underutilized, core competencies -- the neuroscience of image perception -- could be converted into a digital service. Two programmers from the lab became part of Smyth's five-person development team and were responsible for expressing the findings of the research in algorithms. And those algorithms became the foundation of his unit's VAS, which launched with Smyth as global business manager. One early recognizer of the value of the service was Adobe, which offered the service through its <a href="http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/marketplace/index.cfm?event=marketplace.offering&marketplaceid=2&offeringid=20261">Photoshop marketplace</a> in 2010. The service was termed effective, if pricey, in <a href="http://www.crn.com/blogs-op-ed/the-daily-app/229402256/the-daily-app-3m-visual-attention-service.htm">a review</a> by InformationWeek's sister publication CRN in April 2011. Smyth felt sure many parties, from advertising agencies and marketing units to independent video makers, would want to use a service that could tell them what parts of their images were going to attract the most interest. Two-and-a-half years later, he's been proven right. VAS has logged 8,000 users, including 10 of the leading advertisers in the U.S. It turned out that fast food restaurants wanted to analyze the imagery on their digital menu boards to ensure they attracted customer attention to the right places. Television advertisers used it to figure out what parts of their commercials were attention getters. The same applies to makers of banner ads and display ads. "Predicting the volume of traffic in the early days was difficult," he recalled. He knew he needed a compute infrastructure that scaled upward easily, in case growth took off. But he didn't want to over-invest as word was first getting out on the availability of the service. Smyth realized Azure fit his flexible scalability requirement also. The initial three virtual servers grew into a 12-server set of extra-large instances. That is, each virtual server has 14 GBs of RAM and eight virtual cores. But these decisions weren't made entirely in the absence of IT, Smyth said. On the contrary, he kept the staff informed and solicited its support. In part, that's the culture at 3M. "People here like to work with and understand new technologies. IT knew what we were doing. They were interested in us as an early adopter and wanted to help," he said. That help would be needed when it came to keeping VAS data secure. As companies started using the service, "they were developing things like new marketing materials and new packaging, [content] they view as sensitive company secrets." <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/windows/operating-systems/8-things-microsoft-should-fix-in-windows/240154570"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/991/Windows-Blue-Blue-1st-screen_tn.jpg" alt="Windows Blue" title="LinkedIn: 10 Important Changes" class="img175" /></a> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Things Microsoft Should Fix In Windows Blue</div></div>  Before using VAS, customers would conduct a security review of the service. Fortunately, 3M has its own security review process and made sure VAS complied with it. As name brands came to VAS, "we had our corporate IT data security people work with their data security people to help us get approved," he said. Before the service launched, Microsoft's Azure was subjected to a 3M IT security review and it passed as well. There was another major reason 3M chose the Azure cloud. Smyth had a limited development staff: Two developers in the SEMS Lab produced the neuroscience-based algorithms and three developers in his business unit produced the user interface and business logic. To do so, they used technologies already approved for new apps at 3M: Microsoft's Visual Studio development tools, C# language and Team Foundation Server collaborative development platform. 3M is basically a Microsoft .Net shop, Smyth noted. The easiest way to get the team to work together was to develop it on Azure. Once produced, other parts of the company involved in visual products -- 3M produces reflective paints, reflective signage and coatings for LCD screens to make them more usable, among other things -- could work with the neuroscience-based algorithms on Azure as well. So Visual Attention Service was developed, tested and staged on Azure, as well as running its production systems there. 3M also uses Microsoft's SQL Server database system internally; Azure offers a compatible cloud system, Azure SQL, that the VAS system uses, said Smyth. "Pretty much everything that the global, Visual Attention Service business uses is available in the cloud," he said. "If you're a Microsoft shop, it's just a straightforward process to go to the [Azure] cloud." The needs of the 3M application are in the process of changing. Single image analysis is a compute-intensive process; the first clients came to VAS to analyze one image at a time. For the last six months, 3M has been quietly offering VAS for video as well, and use of that process helped push 3M's server total to 12. One second of video often consists of 30 images, several of them requiring the compute-intensive analysis process. He's knows if VAS needs to move beyond 12 servers, Microsoft will be happy to accommodate him. At the same time, Smyth sometimes weighs the fact that there are alternatives available. The VAS service jumped onto Azure while it was still a beta service. "The documentation was decent, but there wasn't much of a user community. In some cases, we were pretty much on our own to figure out how do some things." Since April 16, Azure has been generally available <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/microsoft-azure-public-cloud-matches-ama/240152968">as infrastructure-as-a-service</a> as well as a development platform, and more users appear on it each day. However, rival Amazon Web Services has a large user community that formed during the past seven years that the Amazon service has been available. The lack of a vigorous Azure user community to consult with "probably hurt," he conceded. "Could we have moved faster on Amazon? I really can't say." It was vital to use the same tools and technologies in the cloud as 3M did internally, he said. The service suffered an outage on Feb. 29, 2012, the day that Azure security certificates failed to recognize that the quadrennial Leap Day had arrived. The lack of a Feb. 29 date for the certificates prompted a false reading by cluster governors of a hardware failure. The cascading readings caused a spreading failure throughout Azure that stretched across an eight to 10 hour period. Other than that, there have been "a couple of short-term glitches [on Azure] that were not an issue with customers," he said. And so far, renting Azure instances still doesn't require a capital budget or attendance at a long set of meetings. "It's a local decision that I can make independently," he noted. That's a good thing, because he believes video analysis, now generally available, will generate greater VAS usage and drive his business forward. The impact of video on the Internet is becoming a factor in website and application success. And as more video makers need to use image analysis, Smyth has no intention of cutting his ties to the highly scalable Azure.2013-05-13T08:00:00ZWhy IT Is Struggling To Build Private CloudsThink private clouds offer all the flexibility and none of the risk? IT is missing out if it doesn’t prepare for public cloud use.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/why-it-is-struggling-to-build-private-cl/240154507?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityIT is under pressure to build private clouds, which means creating a data center architecture that can deliver the same kind flexible, scalable computing as public clouds from Amazon Web Services and other providers. And private clouds do so without the security and control worries that come with sending data outside a company's own walls. However, with private clouds IT professionals face a dilemma between two competing goals: They want to build private clouds that are open to other clouds but also can run existing in-house systems and applications. Private clouds must be as open and standard as possible so, if necessary, you can shift workloads out to public clouds at times of peak demand (known as cloudbursting). Many IT pros look to OpenStack and other open source code that's based as much as possible on Web standards and nonproprietary languages, such as Python.   <div class="inlineReportPromo right"> <div class="reportHeader"><a href="http://informationweek.com/reports/2013cloud/?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_2013021?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130211" target="_blank">Get Our Buyer's Guides For Cloud Infrastructure</a> </div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1366/366CSreportbox.jpg" width="175" height="111" alt="IaaS Buyer's Guide" title="IaaS Buyer's Guide" class="reportCover" /> <div class="reportInfo">Our buyer's guides examine <a href="http://informationweek.com/reports/iaas?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_2013021?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130211" target="_blank">infrastructure-as-a-service</a> and <a href="http://informationweek.com/reports/paas?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_2013021?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130211" target="_blank">platform-as-a-service</a>, and they're free with registration. What you'll find: <ul> <li>Comparisons of vendors' IaaS and PaaS offerings</li> <li>Analysis of IaaS and PaaS strategies and use cases</li> </ul> </div> </div>  But IT also wants its private cloud architecture to work with what it already owns. If what you have is a data center that's heavily virtualized using VMware or a bunch of Windows Server hosts running Hyper-V virtual machines, those platforms offer strong, in-house management features but make openness and standardization difficult. VMware and Hyper-V represent just under two-thirds of the enterprise virtualization market, according to IDC. Both will gladly supply the means to build a private cloud data center, but neither matches up perfectly with the de facto public cloud standard -- Amazon Web Services, another proprietary system. Among the key advantages of private clouds is that they let you self-provision virtual servers. They also provide elastic scaling of those servers, let you shift workloads to any machine depending on demand, launch servers without human intervention and supply end users with an accounting of the resources they've used either for chargeback purposes or often just for showback. Private clouds have stirred up a lot of interest because they represent a step forward in data center design, relying heavily on pools of virtualized resources. Theoretically at least, they can be run as much by software programming as by humans, hence the VMware-coined term the "software-defined data center." Companies can build smaller data centers using cloud architecture because, by shifting workloads among general-purpose servers, storage and networks, utilization goes way up. FedEx estimates that moving to a private cloud architecture let it build just a 20,000-square-foot, 10-megawatt data center instead of the 100,000-square-foot, 30-megawatt building it had planned before embracing a strategy its IT leaders describe as "all in" on a private cloud design. Many companies building private clouds want to be able to tap public clouds during peak demand -- relieving them from having to buy infrastructure to support two or three times their usual steady state. While they want the option of using these blended private-public clouds, few IT leaders are running critical apps in a hybrid private-public cloud. FedEx CIO Rob Carter says there's no doubt that his company will tap a public cloud in the near future. FedEx will need more data center capacity, and a public cloud may be able to provide that on demand and with less capital investment. FedEx also will need computing capacity around the world to ensure fast response times, and public clouds might be a better choice than building private ones. Whatever the reason, the point is that FedEx built its Colorado data center architecture using the same principles as a public cloud. Every server is capable of running any application that's in the data center, for example, because every application that FedEx moved to this "pristine" data center was rewritten to use the same software stack. "When we do take that next step with Tier 1 applications in the public cloud, we've already been behaving that way in- house," says Kevin Humphries, FedEx's senior VP in charge of the data center infrastructure. VMware's Hybrid Hopes Once companies have created pools of virtualized resources in a private cloud, IT needs a way to let end users self-provision virtual servers and see what the resources they've commissioned are costing the company. Users need a service catalog of their server options for a given computing task. And IT needs a monitoring system that will do the routine work of keeping things running, spotting trouble as it develops, and commissioning and decommissioning VMs. VMware does most of this in its on-premises vSphere environment, but so far it hasn't convinced many customers to use the VMware-based public clouds it provides through partners as a path to hybrid cloud operations. VMware partners with Colt, SingTel and SoftBank overseas and AT&T, Bluelock, CSC and Dell in the United States. Hundreds of smaller regional partners claim VMware compatibility as well. A certain nervousness is evident in the VMware camp, as it watches Amazon become the first name in public cloud infrastructure by cutting prices that others such as Microsoft then match. "We all lose if [corporate applications] end up in these commodity public clouds," VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said at a Feb. 27 partner meeting in Las Vegas. "We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever." VMware's COO, Carl Eschenbach, urged partners not to lose out to a "company that sells books." But Terremark, a Verizon-owned data center colocation and cloud services provider and long-term VMware partner, illustrates VMware's problem. Terremark wants to host as many VMware-based workloads as possible, and its executives frequently appear on stage at VMworld user group meetings. But it's developing its own cloud management software rather than base its operations on VMware vCloud Suite, which it has found unsuitable for its large-scale operations, says John Considine, Terremark's CTO. Many observers, including James Staten at Forrester Research, predict VMware will enter the public cloud market and offer VMware-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service.The OpenStack Option Open source code projects are generating a lot of energy and innovation in the private cloud software arena these days. In particular, OpenStack, a project that started with Rackspace and NASA in July 2010, offers a way for companies to build a private cloud that promises to be compatible with a variety of public clouds. Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace already have public OpenStack clouds in operation, and IBM promises to bring its SmartCloud and its cloud consulting services into line. FedEx has used some proprietary systems to get its private cloud started, but soon "we will be OpenStack compliant," says Humphries. OpenStack provides for virtual machine provisioning and management, much as Microsoft and VMware do, but its primary hypervisor is open source KVM. OpenStack backer IBM has taken to publicizing what it sees as the efficiencies of KVM over VMware's ESX Server hypervisor, something that only KVM's owner, Red Hat, had done before. Thus, this fast-growing, open source private cloud initiative strikes at the heart of VMware's product empire. OpenStack supplies an end user portal for self-provisioning, and virtual machines use tracking to provide chargeback statements. It allows for load balancing and the automated spinning up of more servers to meet demand, if policies dictate an increased service level. OpenStack has its critics, including those who say it's really a set of projects and not a single, enterprise-friendly product. Companies that download OpenStack's six major service modules must do a lot to get them working together. Several companies, including Canonical, Cloudscaling, Mirantis, Nebula, Nimbula, Piston, Red Hat and SUSE, provide services around OpenStack. <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1366/366CSchart1.jpg" width="590" height="490" alt="chart: What Are Your Top Cloud Service Concerns?" title="chart: What Are Your Top Cloud Service Concerns?" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /> </center> OpenStack can't match Microsoft in Hyper-V virtual machine management; it can't beat VMware at generating and live migrating ESX Server VMs. But OpenStack promises to handle KVM as well as ESX Server and Hyper-V workloads, providing multiple cloud options. Perhaps most interesting -- to open source newcomers and established vendors -- is OpenStack's network virtualization and software-defined networking project, called Quantum. VMware, Juniper and Cisco have joined the Quantum project in part because contributing to it lets them influence and understand where the technology is headed. Networking is the last function in the data center to be virtualized, and all private cloud system producers are intensely focused on it.No Time For Open Source Purists OpenStack is advancing quickly. It's on its seventh release in less than three years, but it's not a universal standard. HP OpenStack differs from Rackspace OpenStack in some implementation details; Rackspace is different from Ubuntu OpenStack, which is different from Red Hat OpenStack. The goal of the initial OpenStack project was to let a thousand private and public clouds bloom, instead of having just a few giant public cloud providers such as Amazon and Google. The hope was that all these providers would be based on one core set of cloud software and would be interoperable. The OpenStack Foundation remains committed to that goal, but OpenStack has so many open-ended options that early implementers have had to make compromises that limit interoperability. HP and Rackspace, both early OpenStack cloud builders, have been criticized for implementing the software in ways that are unique to their operations. Nebula, the startup former NASA CIO Chris Kemp founded, offers OpenStack as a configured hardware appliance to be plugged into a server rack; Piston offers it configured in a different way on a memory stick that loads into a top-of-rack switch. Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu offer it as part of a Linux distribution, using different OpenStack releases and different tweaks to those releases. In "hustling to release a full suite of open cloud products built on OpenStack," director of cloud compute engineering Troy Toman says in a blog post, Rackspace "...created some implementation specifics that were out of sync with common practices in other OpenStack implementations." Beyond OpenStack It isn't only OpenStack that's in flux but the whole realm of open source code for private cloud computing. Eucalyptus Systems, for instance, does many of the same things as OpenStack but in an Amazon-specific context. Its open source APIs are compatible with Amazon Web Services' APIs, so if you're already an Amazon customer, you can develop a compatible private cloud on premises and your workloads will run in both. Critics complain that an open source project shouldn't be tied to a proprietary vendor's approach. Given Amazon's popularity, "we think it would be lunacy not make those two things compatible," counters Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos. Somewhere in between OpenStack and Eucalyptus is a commercial implementation of OpenStack from Cloudscaling, called the Open Cloud System. Cloudscaling is betting that both OpenStack and Amazon are long-term survivors in cloud computing and it supports both of their APIs. "Amazon is a de facto standard," says Randy Bias, CTO of Cloudscaling. Even the most stringent open source advocates must support it, he says. Three Private Cloud Approaches OpenStack is just now coming together as a set of cloud computing modules, so few large companies are implementing it. And those companies that are implementing it are careful in how they talk about it. PayPal, for example, has devoted a few servers to an OpenStack implementation and is running two "isolated" applications on them. That is, it's running two applications that can operate independently of each other and with few dependencies on PayPal's software infrastructure outside their own application logic. (The PayPal project gained notoriety because it was reported as a sign that parent company eBay -- with its many thousands of servers -- would adopt OpenStack and replace VMware software throughout the company. That isn't correct, a PayPal spokesman says, although it made no guarantees to any vendor.) <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1366/366CSchart2.jpg" width="590" height="492" alt="chart: What Challenges Did You Encounter When Launching a Private Cloud?" title="chart: What Challenges Did You Encounter When Launching a Private Cloud??" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /> </center> A common criticism of OpenStack is that the code is only loosely integrated; one of the six services works fine but a second and third don't work robustly with it. PayPal offers some counter-testimony. Its private cloud "went from idea to reality in six weeks," says Saran Mandair, in an email exchange. Once in operation, an engineer ran into a problem launching a workload and, facing a 45-minute deadline, sought support from developers on the OpenStack chat board. Within 10 minutes, he had seven or eight helpful responses and solved the problem and still made his deadline, Mandair says. Eucalyptus is criticized for riding on Amazon Web Services' coattails, but one implementer, AppDynamics, an application performance monitoring software maker, has found a mission-critical use for it. AppDynamics' marquee customer, Netflix, uses AppDynamics to watch its customer-facing systems running in the Amazon cloud. AppDynamics tests whether its systems are working in an Amazon environment by using virtual machines to mimic activity of thousands of server CPUs, banks of RAM, storage devices and transactions. But doing those tests on Amazon's cloud often hits limits AppDynamics set on Amazon capacity. Its solution was to build an AWS-compatible cloud in-house using Eucalyptus software running on 21 blades. With minor tweaks, AppDynamics was able to use the same scripting infrastructure it had used on Amazon because the Eucalyptus APIs behaved in identical ways. Trek Bicycle is typical of many enterprise IT teams: It's exploring different cloud paths, testing two private cloud options while increasing its use of the public cloud. The private cloud approaches it's looking at include a VMware virtualized data center at its headquarters and the increasing use of Windows Server with Hyper-V for its Microsoft application, database and development environment. Trek is "dabbling in private cloud" with the installation of VMware vCloud director software, says Adam Salvo, DevOps manager for Trek's Ascend retail point-of-sale and dealer management application. Trek is using vCloud to let some employees self-provision VMs. At the same time, however, teams working on the POS software and business intelligence are making use of Microsoft's Azure cloud service. Trek's Microsoft development has moved onto Azure, where C# tools and a SQL Server-compatible database service are readily available. Five developers work on the &dcThree;POS system in Trek's headquarters and two work remotely, but all access the same development tools and project software on Azure. They also use Azure's online computing capacity to perform software testing and quality assurance to avoid overburdening headquarters systems. Trek also uses Azure to stage pre-production systems to make sure they'll run as planned. Trek hasn't mapped out its cloud strategy yet, but Salvo says it might make sense to run business analysis reports it does for independent bike shop owners on Azure and let the shop owners access them there, while keeping core business data on premises in SQL Server. What about its VMware virtualized data center? Salvo says it could use tools that convert a VMware virtual machine into a Hyper-V VM, to ensure that VMware workloads can find an external host if needed in Azure. There are few clear choices in today's private cloud debate. But the trick isn't making that one perfect choice, because there isn't one option --VMware, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenStack -- that IT can embrace for all its private cloud needs. The trick is to avoid creating a private cloud that won't smoothly mesh with a public cloud should you ever want it to. A private cloud architecture has considerable flexibility and cost savings advantages, but the hybrid private-public data center infrastructure will be reality soon for many more companies. --With Chris Murphy2013-05-11T09:06:00ZGoogle's Cloud Drops Custom Linux For DebianGoogle cloud workloads have had to use Google's customized version of Linux. Now, Google is moving to a more standard form: Debian Linux.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/googles-cloud-drops-custom-linux-for-deb/240154669?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/googles-10-best-gags-pranks-and-easter-e/240151036"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/965/Google_Gags_01_tn.jpg" alt="Google's 10 Best Gags, Pranks And Easter Eggs" title="Google's 10 Best Gags, Pranks And Easter Eggs" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Google's 10 Best Gags, Pranks And Easter Eggs</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Google has been using its own custom version of Linux, Google Compute Engine Linux, as it loads its customers' applications into its infrastructure as a service. It announced Thursday that it's dropping that approach in favor of using the Debian Linux distribution. Debian Linux is the output of the Debian open source code project. All Linuxes use a kernel produced by the Linux kernel development process, led by Linus Torvalds. But Linux distributors surround the kernel with features that may match other Linux distributions or may differentiate that particular distribution. For example, Ubuntu was an early cloud supporter when it included Eucalyptus modules; then it switched to OpenStack as its primary cloud offering. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is frequently the standard Linux for corporate production systems. Debian is as close as any version comes to being an independent developer's favorite and a code base for other Linux products. It's also frequently found running Internet servers, as a free and stable operating system. Canonical's popular Ubuntu starts out with Debian as its base. In moving to Debian, Google is demonstrating that it wants Google Compute Engine to become less Google-technology specific and more of a standard platform. Compute Engine's predecessor, App Engine, a developer's platform as a service, restricted itself to Google's favorite language, Python, at its launch. Compute Engine workloads based on Debian means the favored operating system will be supported by a community larger than Google's development team itself. The Debian Project boasts of "thousands" of contributors and strives to be the version of Linux that runs on the most types of computers. [ Want to learn more about how the Linux kernel gets developed? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/linuxs-colonel-of-the-kernel-andrew-mort/202600515?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Linux's Colonel Of The Kernel Andrew Morton: 'Fix More Bugs'</a>. ] Debian sees itself as distinct from Red Hat because it is a project of independent volunteers, who are not tied to any corporate interest. It is available in 70 languages, and supports a wide range of computer types. Several Google developers are regular contributors to Debian and may have played a role internally in arguing for the switch. One of them, Jimmy Kaplowitz, a site reliability engineer at Google, said in a blog May 9 that Google was using the moment of Debian's 7.0 or "wheezy" release to make the switch. The 7.0 version is regarded as possessing hardened security and improved 32/64-bit compatibility. The 7.0 version also includes <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110726b">a revamped file system</a> and a "multiarch" feature that allows the libraries of different hardware architectures to install more easily. Because Debian runs on many hardware types, the Debian development team has dubbed it "the universal operating system," according to the project's <a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2011/20110726b">website</a>. Google will host its own "package mirror," a server containing the latest Debian Linux code modules or "packages," for "fastest performance and to reduce bandwidth costs" as workloads are built for Compute Engine. "Going forward, Debian will be the default image type for Compute Engine," Kaplowitz announced in the May 9 blog. He signed it as a Google engineer and "Debian developer." Compute Engine will support the use of either Debian 7.0 or the stable 6.0 version, known as "squeeze." Debian 7.0 was released earlier this week after two years of development. The Debian Linux project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock. In the past, Torvalds has been a supporter of the project and raised funds for it. To get to its universal operating systems status, Debian has had to include packages to support many different types of hardware -- 29,000 packages, or more than any other Linux distribution. Debian also includes Security Enhanced Linux packages, allowing it to operate in a more secure manner, but the user must opt to enable them. In addition to Debian, Google also supports CentOS Linux for Compute Engine workloads. CentOS is a duplicate of Red Hat Enterprise Linux made available by a distributor independent of Red Hat.2013-05-10T09:40:00ZAmazon Expands Private Cloud-Like OptionsAmazon Web Services offers more customers Direct Connect private-line access to AWS data centers.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-expands-private-cloud-like-option/240154552?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-tools-to-prevent-cloud-vendor-lock-in/240148635"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/948/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in" title="10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Amazon Web Services has expanded Direct Connect, its high-speed, private-line access to AWS data centers, to make it available from Seattle to its US-West and GovCloud regions, both located in Oregon. The service's expansion illustrates how public clouds are likely to become direct extensions of enterprise data centers. Direct Connect is one of the below-the-radar factors that has made AWS more attractive to enterprise users. It lowers workload response times from the cloud to end users down into the millisecond range, making the cloud seem more like a server on the LAN. Direct Connect provides a 10-Gbps fiber optic link from an Equinix data center in a metropolitan area to an AWS center in the same region. The Direct Connect link offers more predictable and private network access than ties through Internet service providers do. By using the link, a company can avoid depending on VPN connections, which are typically limited to 4-Gbps data transfer rates, according to the <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/">AWS Direct Connect website</a>. The Direct Connect links come in both 10-Gbps and lower-cost, lower-speed 1-Gbps options. [ Want to learn more about how Amazon implements its Direct Connect service? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/equinix-offers-private-cloud-with-a-twis/232700456?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Equinix Offers Private Cloud With A Twist</a>. ] AWS remains keenly interested in providing cloud services with more private data center attributes -- virtual private clouds. That interest has led it to form an extensive partnership with Equinix, which operates 22 telecommunications and data center facilities near major trading centers and urban areas. Equinix opened a new, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/equinix-opens-60-million-seattle-data-ce/240150666">$60 million center</a> in Seattle in March, and AWS's expanded Direct Connect service is tied into Equinix facilities there. Direct Connect first became available at Amazon's big US-East complex in Ashburn, Va., in April 2011. The customer ties into Direct Connect through an Equinix facility. AWS also offers Direct Connect via Equinix to its facilities in Santa Clara, Calif., Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. The high-speed connections take a few days to be configured and become operative, as opposed to the weeks typically needed to get more private-line capacity from network service providers, an Equinix spokesman said. With the Seattle facility's support for AWS GovCloud, it becomes more likely that government agencies can make use of Amazon servers to handle information formerly considered too sensitive or private to be sent to a public cloud setting. An existing Equinix customer can access GovCloud via Direct Connect from any existing Equinix location.2013-05-09T09:15:00ZBoundary Tracks App Performance, Even In AWSMonitoring service uses an analytics engine to detect changes in application performance, tracks apps on premises and in the cloud.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/boundary-tracks-app-performance-even-in/240154518?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityBoundary has updated its operations intelligence system to collect data from a variety of data center monitoring systems. The data is streamed through Boundary's analytics engine to give operations managers a near real-time view of what's going on with their applications. It may take a Cold War-era word to sum up what the latest version of Boundary does: collectivization. As of Tuesday, data is streamed to it from configuration and provisioning systems Chef and Puppet or the Splunk machine data identifier and analyzer. It comes in as well from the market-leading application performance monitoring (APM) systems New Relic and AppDynamics. Open source systems management Nagios contributes more, as does the Plexxi software-defined networking (SDN) switch. Additional sources will be added as both Boundary and its customers add adapters to the library currently available. Boundary doesn't offer the deep-dive down into an application's code to find the part that's not working, the way an AppDynamics implementation does. Instead, it assembles a higher-level overview of how all applications in a data center are functioning. The analysis is performed through the Boundary analytics engine at the heart of its online service; there is no on-premises installation of the engine. A small "meter" or network traffic collector is installed on each virtual machine being monitored. It streams packet header information on incoming and outgoing VM traffic to the engine. The goal is to analyze all elements of what Boundary CEO Gary Read called "application chatter," the queries an application makes to the database server or the messages it sends to the Web server. [ Want to learn how New Relic made a name for itself monitoring apps? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/obamas-developer-brain-trust-inside-the/240146233?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Obama's Developer Brain Trust: Inside the Big Battle</a>. ] If that sounds like a lot of data plugged into the analytics engine, in many cases, it is. Boundary is available free to a user generating one GB of data a day or less. Data centers that generate up to five GBs a day pay a $495 a month subscription fee. That's roughly equivalent to five to eight servers running 25 to 40 virtual machines, said Read. Larger users, generating up to 25 GBs, pay $1,495 a month. In an interview, Read said deploying the C-code-based meters is simple through commonly used deployment systems, such as Puppet Labs' Puppet. It's also non-intrusive to the operation of the application. The goal in generating all the data streams to the analytics engine is to spot when something out of the ordinary is happening with the application and alert a systems administrator. When different parts of an application are distributed on different servers in the data center, or even located as a service outside the data center, Boundary can still detect and map it as an essential component of the app. A customer's online Boundary dashboard is updated each second from the data streams and graphically shows overall operational status and individual trouble spots. Read said Boundary has over 1,000 users of the free version of its service and 95 paying customers, including the Joyent cloud service, StumbleUpon, GitHub and Gilt Groupe. One user, Michael Hood, lead engineer at online family tracking and communication service Life360, said being able to see how his firm's applications are performing on Amazon Web Services' cloud is crucial to the business. Among his 35 million users, many are families with children "who depend on the information we provide to manage their day-to-day lives. Life360's apps, for example, are repeatedly querying the iPhones and Android phones carried by family members, then posting their locations on a Google Maps overlay. If the application goes down, Life360 is likely to hear from parents who are depending on those postings. "When Amazon went down Christmas Eve, we immediately saw comments on social media by the people having trouble using the application," Hood recalled. Short of an outage, problems sometimes develop inside one Amazon availability zone, he noted. "We can route the traffic differently (to another zone) to avoid any performance issues," said Hood. Life360 is using information from Boundary once every two months or so to take such defensive actions and guarantee prompt responses to end users, he added. As one example of the data flows involved, Life360 collects a billion pieces of information a day to load it into its applications. Boundary is collecting information on each transaction in Life360's activity and all of its other customers' applications. That amounts to collecting 7.5 TBs of application performance data a day. The Boundary analytics engine "acts like a prism and splits it up" into information about each separate application, Read said. The service is not a direct competitor to predecessor application monitoring systems, such as New Relic or App Dynamics. Spokesmen for each participated in Boundary's announcement of enhanced services Tuesday. Boundary can use its data to provide color-coded alerts to managers. It can also remove alerts and problem highlights once they've been resolved, automatically or otherwise. In one case, managers were alerted to an application generating an abnormal number of network retransmits and found defective hardware in the network. The host of an online gaming system saw subnormal performance of a game server cluster and found one server had been given the wrong bandwidth on its network interface card. Boundary would be able to detect an abnormal amount of inbound traffic from a country that the application had previously had little contact with, and alert managers to a possible denial of service attack, said Read. Virtualization is rapidly evolving into a core element of next-generation data centers. This expanded role places new strains on the network. The <a href="http://www.networkcomputing.com/tech-center/nextgennetwork/download?id=189801427&cat=whitepaper?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe">Networking In A Virtualized World</a> report explores the technical issues exposed by virtualized infrastructure and looks at standards, technologies and best practices that can make your network ready to support virtualization. (Free registration required.)2013-05-08T09:29:00ZVMware Users Gain Bluelock Recovery OptionAs VMware prepares for the public cloud market, compatible suppliers like Bluelock add services to compete.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-users-gain-bluelock-recovery-opti/240154402?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityBluelock, an early member of VMware's public cloud ecosystem, launched recovery-as-a-service Tuesday for users of VMware virtual machines, whether on premises or in a cloud service. Recovery-as-a-service is expected to one day evolve into a lower cost replacement for disaster recovery systems, where duplicate hardware and software sit in reserve at a company's secondary or alternative data center. Bluelock is one of the first general-purpose services available online to VMware customers, based on familiar VMware vSphere 5 and vCloud suite products. It will be competing with SunGard and other disaster recovery services that provide similar services across the board to multiple hypervisor users. Bluelock is part of VMware's public cloud partner ecosystem, a group that is likely to find itself under increasing pressure as VMware prepares to enter the list of infrastructure-as-a-service providers. VMware is slated to announce May 21 how it expects to encourage and sustain its existing ecosystem, on one hand, and compete more effectively with Amazon Web Services on the other. Other primary cloud partners include Colt, Singtel, Softbank, Dell, CSC and AT&T. In addition, hundreds of other regional providers offer vCloud suite compatibility in their public IaaS offerings. Bluelock appears unfazed by the prospect of VMware offering an alternative, public cloud service. Bluelock will supply a VMware customer with a service that creates clones of vital systems running in the enterprise data center and establishes them in a Bluelock data center. It will also provide recovery service in a second Bluelock data center. Bluelock has data centers in Las Vegas and Salt Lake City as well as Indianapolis, where the company is headquartered. In each case, Bluelock creates a virtual data center unit, a designated set of virtual servers with well-defined software stacks, in an alternative location to the one in which they're running. In the event of a malware invasion, data center power loss or a natural disaster, the recovery systems are activated and preset means of feeding in up-to-date data are triggered. [ See our related story, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/will-vmware-stay-public-cloud-course-blu/24015033?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Will VMware Stay The Public Cloud Course? Bluelock Bets Yes</a>. ] Bluelock calls the recovery-as-a-service offering its "4-Series Virtual Datacenters," a name that appears to reflect the fact that it runs Tier 4 designated data centers, facilities that meet a 99.995% level of reliability, resiliency and compliance as determined by the Uptime Institute. The institute is an independent unit of the 451 Group, the company that owns 451 Research and the Yankee Group. Pat O'Day, CTO of Bluelock, said recovery-as-a-service is easier to test than physical disaster recovery systems. In many cases, the complexity of a physical duplicate of existing mission-critical systems made IT staffs reluctant to stage a full-scale test, where production systems were shut down in hopes that disaster recovery systems would work as planned and pick up the tasks. Bluelock bases its replication of existing systems and establishment of data feeds on the <a href="http://www.zerto.com/bcdr-for-enterprises/overview/">Zerto Virtual Replication</a> software system. It clones virtual machines and data traffic in running systems and feeds a copy to the recovery site. The system relies on a constant, up-to-date data stream rather than snapshots. Zerto spokesmen say it does so without impacting existing application performance. Using virtualization as the basis for a recovery system reduces its cost and provides "an appropriate balance between IT disaster recovery capabilities, affordability and risk mitigation," said O'Day in the service announcement. The service is priced to represent an estimated 40% of the cost of running a second, physical, production system, he said in an interview. The recovery service keeps a journal of all transactions of a running system. In the To-Cloud version, the customer goes to his or her vSphere control panel tab for disaster recovery and uses it to activate the backup system. The replacement system is given a data feed that represents up-to-date data for the application. If there has been a data corruption incident, the recovery system can go back in the transaction log to a point that preceded the corruption and reactivate only good data, O’Day explained. The service includes all the commands needed to run a test of the system, which the customer may activate when he chooses. If he schedules the test with Bluelock or conducts it on a weekend, there are no fees for twice-a-year testing, O’Day said. Testing disaster recovery systems is a sensitive point; few IT shops wish to risk bringing their systems down unintentionally in the process of DR testing. It's not uncommon for many small businesses or nonprofit organizations to have only the most rudimentary recovery system, such as a snapshot tape taken once a week or once a day. An early adopter of the service, Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa., didn't previously have a disaster recovery system. "We're excited to have a partner who we know will be there to help get us back on our feet in the event of a (disaster) declaration," said James Shuttleworth, director of network systems and infrastructure at the college, in the announcement. The service for existing Bluelock cloud customers is dubbed the Bluelock Virtual Datacenter 4500. The service for on-premises VMware users looking for a cloud-based recovery site is called the Bluelock Virtual Datacenter 4000. Bluelock was clustered with GoGrid and Joyent in the "challengers" section of Gartner's magic quadrant on infrastructure-as-a-service suppliers. E2 is the only event of its kind, bringing together business and technology leaders across IT, marketing, and other lines of business looking for new ways to evolve their enterprise applications strategy and transform their organizations to achieve business value. Join us June 17-19 for three days of 40+ conference sessions and workshops across eight tracks and discover the latest insights in enterprise social software, big data and analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS and APIs, UI/UX and more. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register for E2 Conference Boston today</a> and save $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference, or get a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass! 2013-05-07T09:16:00ZBMC To Go Private: Echoes of DellBain Capital and three others will buy management tool vendor BMC, in a move that parallels Dell's effort to go private.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/bmc-to-go-private-echoes-of-dell/240154278?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/unix-linux/10-cool-products-at-interop/240154110"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/988/collage-image_01v2_tn.jpg" alt="Interop 2013 Las Vegas Collage: 10 Cool Products at Interop" title="Interop 2013 Las Vegas Collage: 10 Cool Products at Interop" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Cool Products at Interop</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) </div>  One of the big four system management vendors is being acquired and will be taken private in the third quarter this year: BMC Software of Houston fetched a price of $6.9 billion from four venture capital firms in a deal announced Monday. The buyers are Bain Capital, Golden Gate Capital, GIC Special Investments and Insight Venture Partners. The price represented $46.25 a share, or a premium of 2% over the $45.42 price at which BMC closed Friday. At the latter value, BMC has a market cap of $6.49 billion. In some ways, the move parallels Michael Dell's effort to take his company out of the publicly traded arena and into private operations. Dell is also moving into systems management, with an emphasis on selling virtualized systems and managing the virtual data center and private cloud/public cloud operations. BMC has competed with CA Technologies, HP and IBM to provide third-party systems management for major hardware and software vendors. But the nature of systems management began to change drastically as virtualization took over the data center. Now Microsoft through its System Center Virtualization Manager and VMware through its vCenter Operations are moving more decisively into the systems management space. [Want to learn more about the BMC and VMware rivalry? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/virtualization/vmwares-system-management-push-ca-bmc-hp/240004525?itc=edit_in_body_cross">VMware's System Management Push: CA, BMC, HP Push Back</a>.] BMC held a market-leading position with its change management database, Atrium, and related products, giving its customers a point of control and configuration consistency for data center operations. Nevertheless, BMC was considered vulnerable enough that a number of suitors first emerged a year ago, lead by <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/software/infrastructure/bmc-has-multiple-acquisition-suitors/240001067"> Elliott Management</a>, with Dell, IBM, Oracle, EMC and Cisco reportedly in the bidding as well. Elliott Management ended up with 6.9% of BMC last year, placed two members on the board of directors and pushed for the sale of the company. Chairman of the BMC board, president and CEO Bob Beauchamp said in an interview that the offer led by Bain Capital and Golden Gate was welcome as a favorable outcome to shareholders and a way to put an end to a period of uncertainty. "I'm glad to get the rumors and speculation behind us," he said in an interview. BMC will continue operating as before, with no big changes planned for its 6,500 employees or management, he said. But the acquisition will provide BMC with the capital to pursue larger profits in its most successful product lines. In particular, BMC thinks it has a hit with its MyIT for managing mobile devices. In the last quarter, it signed large MyIT deals with Exxon Mobile and Credit Suisse for "tens of thousands of end users," as MyIT became generally available. MyIT first launched at the end of October. "You can expect to see us continue to invest heavily in self-service IT" on the MyIT pattern, Beauchamp said. Elliott Management urged BMC to become more of a cloud systems management company. Beauchamp said BMC has already moved into that field. "Nine out of the 10 leading software-as-a-service companies, including Salesforce.com and Workday, use our product that manages the SaaS end user experience," he said. With the private investor buyout, "we'll have more resources available to accelerate our top-line growth," he said. BMC was founded in 1980 as a mainframe and general data center systems management vendor. It went public in 1988. Revenues in fiscal 2012 were $2.2 billion, with net earnings of $562 million. It has what is regarded as a small amount of debt at $151 million. E2 is the only event of its kind, bringing together business and technology leaders across IT, marketing, and other lines of business looking for new ways to evolve their enterprise applications strategy and transform their organizations to achieve business value. Join us June 17-19 for three days of 40+ conference sessions and workshops across eight tracks and discover the latest insights in enterprise social software, big data and analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS and APIs, UI/UX and more. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register for E2 Conference Boston today</a> and save $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference, or get a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass! 2013-05-06T17:36:00ZDell Buys Enstratius, Extends Cloud ReachDell buys Enstratius to gain ability to deploy workloads to 23 major and secondary cloud service suppliers.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/dell-acquires-enstratius-to-extend-cloud/240154275?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/data-protection/8-great-cloud-storage-services/240151180"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/967/Cloud_Storage_Services_01_tn.jpg" alt="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" title="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Great Cloud Storage Services</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Dell is rounding out its cloud infrastructure management capabilities with the purchase of Enstratius, formerly known as Enstratus until the Minneapolis firm discovered others had the right to the name. No purchase price was disclosed. The Enstratius Cloud Management Platform interfaces to 23 specific cloud infrastructure offerings, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, Rackspace, Eucalyptus, HP Cloud, AT&T Synaptic Cloud, IBM SmartCloud, VMware vCloud Suite and OpenStack. The most recent addition was CloudCentral's Cloud Platform hosted in Australian data centers; it was added to the list May 3. The Enstratius platform provides cloud suppliers with an employee self-service catalogue and design and management tools to help users create workloads and deploy them into a cloud environment. The platform is noted for the major cloud suppliers that it supports. Unlike competitors, it reaches deep into the ranks of secondary suppliers as well, such as GoGrid, Bluelock, Joyent, CloudScaling, CloudSigma and the Apache Software Foundation's CloudStack. That means Dell can start to realize more of its ambition to be the link to and management agent between many cloud users and their service supplier. Dell can also start to integrate more of its recently acquired cloud technologies with those service suppliers, as well as be a large, data center-oriented supplier of servers and network switches. [ Learn more about the company InformationWeek named as one of the top tools for avoiding cloud vendor lock-in. Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-tools-to-prevent-cloud-vendor-lock-in/240148635?itc=edit_in_body_cross"> 10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in</a>. ] For example, Dell acquired Quest Software in September and recently re-launched its virtual machine monitoring system, vFoglight Pro, as Foglight for Virtualization, capable of including feedback on desktop virtualization from VMware's View product. Dell acquired Gale Technologies in November and re-launched its core product as Active System Manager, an automated provisioning and configuration platform for cloud workloads. Other acquisitions gave Dell a growing presence in cloud management, including Boomi for application integration and Quest Software's Quest One user identity and access management. Dell is seeking to be the integrator and manager across the private, enterprise cloud environment, then extend its reach to public cloud infrastructure as well. Enterprise interest in using private and public clouds together have made "more critical the need for controls, security, governance and automation," said Tom Kendra, VP and general manager, systems management, for Dell Software, a unit of the company established last year, in the announcement of the acquisition. David Bagley, CEO of Enstratius, said Dell's acquisition of his firm would "create new opportunities for organizations to accelerate application and IT service delivery across on-premises data centers and private clouds, combined with off-premises public cloud solutions."2013-05-06T10:18:00ZFacebook's Frank Frankovsky: Open Compute UpdateFacebook's hardware design chief previews his Interop keynote by explaining why he decided to open source the company's data center designs.http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/facebooks-frank-frankovsky-open-compute/240154184?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/a-visit-to-facebooks-desert-data-center/240149810"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/957/21_tn.jpg" alt=" Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour" title=" Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle"> Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Maybe it's the full beard beneath the bald dome. Regardless of whether it's energy consumption or hardware design, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-cloud-computing-pioneers/240142397?pgno=11">Frank Frankovsky</a> gives the impression that he's got his subject in a bear hug. He's going to tell you about the whole thing; no detail will escape his attention. And he does so with a combination of gravity and geniality that makes the process highly palatable. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that this Ursa Major at Facebook is the founder of the Open Compute Project and has ended up as chairman of the Open Compute Foundation's board of directors. He's the de facto leader of the world's first open-source hardware project. His official title at Facebook is VP of hardware design and supply chain operations, which means he's responsible for ensuring that Facebook has all the hardware it needs when it needs it. That's no small order, and over the last several years it has forced a rethinking of what data center builders were doing. Anyone who has been to Facebook's data center complex in Prineville, Ore., can see the first phase of Frankovsky's work. Server motherboards sit on open sleds that slide in and out of the server rack for easier maintenance; components are arranged in channels that allow continuous air flow down the rack. Temperatures are a little higher than expected in the data center because Facebook servers are designed to run at 85 degrees and Facebook doesn't use giant air conditioner chillers to cool the air. The result of revamped server and data center design is a facility that is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive than predecessor data centers, said Frankovsky in a recent interview at Facebook offices in Menlo Park, Calif. [ Learn more about Facebook's energy-efficient data center design. See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/facebooks-data-center-where-likes-live/240149671?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Facebook's Data Center: Where Likes Live</a>. ] "Once we got them into production, we thought, why not make this open source," he said. Facebook as a company had been a frequent adopter of open-source software. But there were no open-source hardware projects. On the contrary, Google and Amazon.com, as they built their leading-edge data centers, kept their designs a trade secret. Frankovsky had spent years in hardware design, production and product management, first for Compaq, then 14 years with Dell. He had come to admire the collaborative nature and pace of innovation of the Linux kernel development process and other open-source projects. "At Facebook, we were very active in open source. It was in our DNA. But in data center design, there was no comparable pace of innovation," he noted. Data center builders tended to take what the manufacturers gave them, which usually included what Frankovsky called "vanity hardware," where the manufacturer builds up the front of the sheet metal case with a molding and bulky brand symbol. Those embellishments restrict the airflow into the server and reduce the effectiveness of its cooling fans, Frankovsky said. As they worked on data center servers at Facebook, "there was a passion among our peers to take over the technical design -- take control from the suppliers" and strip away all the useless decoration and interfering components. Hardware evolution should be more like software. "We wanted to spur the industry to move faster. We thought, 'Wow, there would be an aggregated impact on the environment if everyone did it this way.'" The design team got its wish in April 2011 when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and two partners announced the Open Compute Initiative, the first open-source hardware project. Heading up an open-hardware project "was a natural evolution for me personally. I've always been a customer advocate," said Frankovsky. Facebook's Prineville complex has two finished data center buildings that reflect the first and second phases of Open Compute's server-hardware designs. Any Open Compute member is welcome to implement the designs in its own facility, but Facebook remains a production test bed for the evolving ideas behind Open Compute. As proofs of concept, the complex has recorded the best power usage effectiveness measures so far, 1.07 and 1.08 over successive quarters of 2011. That means roughly 93% of the electricity brought to the complex is used by computing devices. A more typical ratio would be 50%. The project has taken several new turns recently. "It's surprising how fast people are thinking differently" about hardware design, he said. Open Compute servers now populate the project's standard Open Racks, and a variation, the Hyve Solutions-originated storage server, combines disk drives with an extra serial-attached SCSI (SAS) connection. The connector usually ties storage devices together. In this combination, the SAS connector can tie the storage to a simple server, converting the Open Rack into "a poor man's NetApp file server," said Frankovsky. "It's a simple way to combine storage with a server in a single rack," one that more sophisticated designers of storage hadn't conceived of, he said. Another recent innovation is the "group hug board," a server motherboard that allows Intel Atom and an ARM vendor's chips to reside side by side and work together. The project set a specification for the size and shape of the pin connectors for chips used by the board. Competitors produced chips that met the specification, and the Open Compute Project produced the first motherboard with no vendor lock-in. Theoretically, one vendor's chips can be replaced with another vendor's. Facebook and the other members of the Open Compute Project have a unique position as large buyers of data center equipment, said Frankovsky. "We can bring competing vendors together. Only the (large Web-based) data center operators can do this," he said. Frankovsky arrived at Facebook with a rare combination of experiences. He had been a product manager for Dell's PowerEdge servers and had also been among the founding executives of Dell's Data Center Solutions unit. Data Center Solutions studied the server needs of the largest Web data center builders, then figured out how to produce thousands of them at the lowest possible cost. Data Center Solutions designs went into some search engine and Microsoft Azure data centers. For Frankovsky, who is slated to deliver a keynote address Wednesday at the <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/conference/keynote-speakers.php">Interop Conference</a> in Las Vegas, the Open Compute Project has become "a virtuous cycle of development," where ideas don't respect vendor boundaries. "It's awesome to see how far it's come" in its first two years, he said.2013-05-02T09:52:00ZEucalyptus Adds Netflix Tools, Amazon OptionsEucalyptus builds Netflix tools into the upcoming 3.3 release of its software for building an Amazon-compatible private cloud.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/eucalyptus-adds-netflix-tools-amazon-opt/240154025?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/more-pioneers-of-cloud-computing/240151032"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/964/Cloud-Computing-Pioneers_promo.jpg" alt="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers</div> (click image for slideshow) </div>  Eucalyptus Systems has incorporated Netflix tools into the upcoming 3.3 release of its software for building an Amazon-compatible private cloud. Eucalyptus' ability to tweak the Netflix tools and include them in its 3.3 release enhances its claim that it offers the best way to build an Amazon-like cloud on premises. Netflix is one of Amazon Web Service's largest customers and relies on Amazon infrastructure instead of building its own data centers. It has been a pioneer in building tools for use in Amazon's EC2 cloud, such as Chaos Monkey, which forces unexpected workload shutdowns at random to test an environment's resiliency. "Eucalyptus was the first private cloud platform to support Netflix open source tools, including Chaos Monkey, Asgard and Edda, through its API fidelity with AWS," said Adrian Cockcroft, chief cloud architect at <a href="https://signup.netflix.com/">Netflix</a>, in Eucalyptus' 3.3 announcement. Asgard is a Web interface for deploying workloads as Amazon Machine Image virtual machines; Edda is a tool that queries a user's resources in the cloud, listing the results and showing what's changed. "Thanks to this integration, those tools can now be used in both private and public cloud environments." Cockcroft said. [ Want to see how Eucalyptus' relationship with AWS changed from cold shoulder to warm embrace a year ago? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-makes-clever-private-cloud-play/232700120?itc=edit_in_body_cross"> Amazon Makes Clever Cloud Play.</a> ] The fact that <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/security/netflix-wants-you-to-adopt-chaos-monkey/240004829">Chaos Monkey</a>, Asgard and Ebba perform their functions in the Eucalyptus cloud setting buttresses Eucalyptus' claim that it is the supplier with the closest match to Amazon. Eucalyptus started as a project of the computer science department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, led by professor Rich Wolski. The Eucalyptus developers produced open source versions of Amazon's cloud service APIs. Amazon in March 2012 named Eucalyptus a partner in providing cloud services. With interest in private cloud reaching an all-time high in the enterprise, a private cloud operation based on Eucalyptus is one way to architect a future hybrid cloud operation, where a private data center works in conjunction with a public cloud. Eucalyptus isn't in the spotlight as much as Open Stack, another open source code effort that has attracted many corporate backers and a wide array of contributors. Because Eucalyptus' goal was to remain compatible with the market leader, many open source developers concluded it would be confined to initiatives defined by Amazon. But Eucalyptus' early commitment to Amazon APIs leaves it in the position of being the primary way to establish a private cloud that works with Amazon's. Eucalyptus has had a limited set of matching services to date. They included server provisioning similar to Amazon's EC2; long-term storage with an API like Amazon's S3's; an equivalent to Amazon's Elastic Block Store; and identity and access management compatible with the features of the AWS service. Release 3.3 attempts to broaden that compatibility. It includes: an Auto Scaling service similar to Amazon's for adding virtual machines when traffic demands increase; Elastic Load Balancing similar to Amazon's for distributing incoming calls for service across multiple workload instances; a monitoring service compatible with Amazon CloudWatch, which allows cloud administrators to program the collection of metrics on running systems, set alarms and identify trends that may be endangering the continued operation of a set of workloads. In addition release 3.3 allows cloud administrators to do resource tagging, the assigning of metadata to firewalls, load balancers and Web servers as well as individual workloads to better identify them. Eucalyptus has also expanded its number of support virtual server instance types to more closely resemble those used by Amazon. Release 3.3 is due out in the second quarter. Eucalyptus customers include MemSQL, AppDynamics, Nokia Siemens Networks, Mosaik Solution, Pilot Games and Rafter, a supplier of educational software. Eucalyptus customers often use Puppet Labs to configure workloads they are about to deploy. Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies said in the announcement that Eucalyptus' module for Puppet Enterprise lets private cloud builders "use the same familiar tool to automate the configuration, provisioning and management of both private and public clouds." One use case that's been gaining traction for Eucalyptus is a building a private cloud that serves as a test bed for an application that will eventually be deployed on AWS EC2 and related services, said Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos in an interview.2013-05-01T09:46:00ZAmazon Cloud Revenue Mystery PersistsWill AWS cloud revenues soon stop appearing under Amazon's "other" column? And are they large enough to finance AWS's future on their own?http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-cloud-revenue-mystery-persists/240153962?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/data-protection/8-great-cloud-storage-services/240151180"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/967/Cloud_Storage_Services_01_tn.jpg" alt="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" title="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Great Cloud Storage Services</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  Amazon Web Services officials touted their growing array of services and expanding customer base at an Amazon Summit 2013 in San Francisco Tuesday. Senior VP Andy Jassy sounded a familiar refrain: AWS has a high-volume, low-price mentality that leads to repeated service pricing reductions. And Amazon unveiled a new <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/certification/">AWS Global Certification</a> program, similar to VMware, Microsoft and Novell certified training programs before it. AWS training for technical staff concludes with an independently verified exam. In AWS's case, there will be three certifications: a Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator and Developer. Test center sponsor Kryterion will act as the verifier; it has testing centers in 100 countries. But neither Jassy nor other Amazon officials addressed parent company Amazon.com's core financial position and whether it will be able to indefinitely sustain its breakneck pace of innovation and price cutting. It has long been a mystery to what extent AWS is an independent business unit of Amazon.com and whether it relies on cash flow from the parent company. The revenues it generates appear in the "other" column of Amazon.com's fiscal reporting. Amazon Web Services generated $2.1 billion in revenues in 2012, according to an estimate by Ben Schacter, the Macquarie Capital analyst who is thought to have one of the strongest information pipelines into AWS. Those revenues will grow to $3.8 billion in 2013 and $6.2 billion in 2014, he has said in his reports on Amazon. [ Want to learn more about Amazon's rivals' plans? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/microsoft-azure-public-cloud-matches-ama/240152968?itc=edit_in_body_cross"> Microsoft Azure Public Cloud Matches Amazon Prices</a>. ] Those are impressive numbers, but earlier this week, Curt Anderson, CFO for Microsoft's Server and Tools business, said Microsoft had crossed the $1 billion mark in its own cloud revenues. Windows Azure debuted three years after Amazon's EC2 and is still playing catch up. Microsoft "probably has more net new growth opportunity in front of them than anyone," Forrester Research analyst James Staten <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/microsoft-azure-sales-top-1-billion-challenging-amazon.html"> told Bloomberg</a>. What exactly does Anderson's figure claim? Anderson told Bloomberg that some of those revenues came from the sales of Windows Server 2012 and System Center to third parties who use them to offer their own services on Azure. Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cloud-warning-for-amazon/240153849"> a RightScale survey</a> found that many enterprise cloud users have started with Amazon but continue to run tests and experiments using the primary competing suppliers, including Azure, Google Compute Engine and Rackspace. Jassy illustrated AWS's commitment to innovating in cloud services by citing 70 new instance types, features and services initiated by AWS since the start of 2013; one of them is AWS Trusted Advisor, which tells a customer if a cloud instance is sitting idle or typically runs at a steady state that makes it a candidate for use as a lower cost reserved instance. There were 160 such features and services added in 2012; 80 in 2011and 60 in 2010. "That pace continues to increase. Our roadmap is prioritized by what you tell us matters," he told the Moscone Convention Center crowd. Amazon continues to build out its cloud data centers as well. Jassy said that each day AWS was adding capacity equal to what it took to power all of Amazon.com's $5 billion retail operation in 2003. In other highlights, Jassy said AWS spent six years acquiring the first trillion software objects stored on its S3 long term storage. In the past year, it added its second trillion. Amazon offers its own scale-out version of Hadoop, Amazon Elastic Map Reduce, has initiated 5.5 million server clusters to run the service and handles 1.1 million requests a second for results from the service. In each case, Jassy told attendees, Amazon Web Services is providing building block services for developers without restricting or guiding them in how they must be used. "We very consciously decided we were not going to be paternal ," he noted, a fact that has both stimulated and frustrated those trying to use EC2 and related services for the first time. Among other things, many developers did not realize when first using EC2 that Amazon took no responsibility if a piece of hardware died while a system was running on it. It was up to the developer to architect his workload so that it could fail over to another piece of hardware in the cloud, in the unlikely event of a device failure. What Jassy remained silent about was his parent company's financial condition. It reported first quarter results on April 25, and all is seemingly well. CFO Tom Szkutak said revenues grew 22% to $16.07 billion. At the same time operating expenses are growing at a rate that takes a larger bite out of revenues. Cost of sales was $11.8 billion, or 73.4% of revenue, or down from 76.1% for the same quarter the year before. But the cost of order fulfillment was 10.8% of revenue, compared to 9.5% the year before. Marketing was 3.8% of revenue, compared to 3.6% previously. Tech and content was 7.9% of revenue, compared to 6.5%. Amazon.com's investment in fulfillment centers is supposed to introduce more efficient operations and faster deliveries , something sought by Amazon.com's Prime customers, who pay $79 a year to order what they want without paying for shipping. The number of Prime customers has grown, as has the cost of serving them. Amazon is investing heavily in capital improvements, including the $1.4 billion purchase of its Seattle headquarters, which it formerly leased, plus additional space for new Amazon offices. It has three new fulfillment centers in the works, and is making "additional investments in support of continued business growth, including Amazon Web Services" infrastructure, Szkutak said in the first quarter earnings report. Critics have charged that Amazon, which reported a loss of $39 million for the year in 2012, is getting further from, not closer to, a return to profitability as it continues its capital expenditures and AWS build-out. Amazon customers spent the same amount with the online retailer in 2012, according to <a href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/1385631-amazon-keeps-spending-more-as-its-customers-spend-less?source=email_rt_article_readmore"> Timothy Phillips</a>, as they did in 2011, while Amazon's expansion program appears to depend on customers spending more each year. On the other hand, Amazon.com now has 209 million active customers. "The cloud has changed what is fundamentally possible," Jassy said repeatedly at the AWS Summit. But has Amazon.com's retail business taken on such proportions that it can continue to finance both retail and AWS expansion? Or will AWS revenues at some point soon stop appearing under the "other" column and start being reported and financing AWS's future on their own? E2 is the only event of its kind, bringing together business and technology leaders across IT, marketing, and other lines of business looking for new ways to evolve their enterprise applications strategy and transform their organizations to achieve business value. Join us June 17-19 for three days of 40+ conference sessions and workshops across eight tracks and discover the latest insights in enterprise social software, big data and analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS and APIs, UI/UX and more. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register for E2 Conference Boston today</a> and save $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference, or get a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass! 2013-04-30T09:33:00ZCloud Survey Has Warning For AmazonRightScale's survey finds Amazon the public cloud leader -- but IT also is looking to Rackspace, Google and Microsoft.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cloud-survey-has-warning-for-amazon/240153849?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_security <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/storage/data-protection/8-great-cloud-storage-services/240151180"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/967/Cloud_Storage_Services_01_tn.jpg" alt="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" title="8 Great Cloud Storage Services" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">8 Great Cloud Storage Services</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div> As enterprises gain cloud computing experience, they also earn a bigger return on their cloud investment. "Mature" cloud users are also more likely to move beyond a single cloud service provider to multiple providers and engage in hybrid, public/private cloud computing, according to a RightScale survey of cloud use. In perhaps a warning to Amazon Web Services, the survey showed Amazon as the overwhelming public cloud leader -- no surprise there. But when it comes to conducting additional experimentation and testing in the cloud, three other major vendors were mentioned just as often as Amazon: Rackspace, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure, "indicating a much more competitive marketplace" in the near future, Right Scale predicted. The survey also produced one of the few measures showing which of the competing open-source initiatives is most frequently tapped as the backbone of a private cloud implementation: OpenStack leads with about 10% of implementations; CloudStack, which became an Apache Foundation project a year ago, was not far behind at 7%; and Eucalyptus occupied the third-place spot with adoption by 3.5% of the respondents. At this early date of private cloud build-out, implementations are equally likely to be based on a firm's virtualization vendor, such as Microsoft or VMware. But they are expected to increasingly be based on sets of commercially supported software, whether proprietary or open source, with the open-source projects gaining large communities of contributors and reviewers. [ Want to learn more about how RightScale sits as a broker between various cloud services? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/clouds-big-caveat-runaway-costs/240001508?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Cloud's Big Caveat: Runaway Costs</a>. ] The survey, entitled, "This Cloud Imperative: How Cloud Maturity Unlocks Cloud Value," is the 2013 version of what has become an annual update on "the state of the cloud" financed by RightScale. The survey was conducted in the first quarter and involved 625 respondents in IT, development and business roles. Responses came from a variety of companies, including financial services, media and publishing, education, digital agencies and software companies. To set up its report, RightScale described different levels of cloud users as seen in the survey: 8% have no plans to use cloud computing; 17% are cloud "watchers" who are learning about cloud computing; 26% are cloud "beginners," with a proof of concept operating in the cloud; 23% are cloud "explorers," with a first project or a handful of applications in the cloud; and 26% are "cloud focused," with multiple workloads in the cloud. Much of the report focused on responses from enterprise users with 1,000 employees or more. Of this group, 32% were engaged in proof of concept; 14% in their first project; 37% had launched several applications; and 17% were engaged in heavy cloud use. Many enterprises have "leaned toward a 'public cloud first' approach," since private clouds still require planning and time to set up, the RightScale report said. As a result, 61% of enterprises are running applications in the public cloud; 38% in a private cloud. Enterprise respondents, however, clearly had multi-cloud operations on their minds: 77% said they plan to use more than one cloud service. Of that group, 15% represented respondents who planned to use multiple public clouds; 15% plan to use multiple private clouds; and 47% plan to use hybrid cloud arrangements, or a combination of public and private cloud services working together. Why 15% would seek to use multiple private clouds? Perhaps because they see multiple projects on premises to build a private cloud; more likely, an enterprise is expecting to use the virtual private cloud service offered by a public cloud vendor, as well as its own private cloud project. Enterprises already experienced in public cloud computing showed most frequently in the Cloud Focused category. They were already running a wide variety of workloads in the cloud, including batch processing, formerly internal mobile and Web applications, as well as the more frequently encountered test and development, marketing campaigns, big data analytics, social networking apps and batch processing. More than 25% of Beginners, 50% of Explorers and 80% of the Cloud Focused groups reported the same major benefits of adopting cloud computing: faster business user access to infrastructure, greater scalability and faster time to market for new apps. "The more that organizations learn about how to work in the cloud, the more they understand how to address cloud-associated challenges" in governance, compliance, integration and security, the report stated. For example, 38% of Beginners found security to be a significant challenge in the cloud; just 18% of the Cloud Focused group. In addition, experienced users are more likely to set goals of hybrid cloud computing with complementary operations in the public and private cloud, or use of multiple public or private cloud implementations. As cloud usage in all forms increases, organizations report that "they realize significant more value from their cloud adoption. … As cloud maturity increases, fewer organizations report significant challenges in such areas as security, governance and compliance." In addition, more mature users suffer less from cloud outages, when they occur, than less experienced ones. The latter outcome may be a result of users gaining experience with Amazon's availability zones and spreading copies of applications and data across them, a safeguard usually sufficient to allow quick recovery if one availability zone is impaired. If may also be a consequence of implementing a multi-cloud strategy, where backup and recovery systems are kept in a geographically distant zone so that a sizeable natural disaster, such as Hurricane Sandy, doesn't knock out business critical systems. One of the most distinct signs of more sophisticated IT in the survey, however, was the correlation of DevOps adopters and members of the Cloud Focused group. Seventy-five percent of Cloud Focused users are also DevOps implementers, compared to 56% for Cloud Explorers, 53% for Cloud Beginners and 41% for Cloud Watchers. "Cloud and DevOps both focus on enabling IT agility" and IT managers focused on one are likely to be knowledgeable on the other, the report said. The use of open source configuration management tools, such as Chef and Puppet, make it possible to build software stacks, then quickly deploy production-like environments for test purposes, if the resources are available to do so. "By leveraging both together, companies can multiple the impact and deliver products to market more quickly," the report concluded.2013-04-18T09:51:00ZVMware Adds Interoperability With Ubuntu OpenStack CloudThe next Ubuntu release, coming soon, will include VMware plug-ins for the Quantum networking platform in OpenStack.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-adds-interoperability-with-ubuntu/240153156?cid=SBX_iwk_related_video_Attacks/breaches_securityVMware has contributed plug-ins to the OpenStack Project that guarantees the project's networking platform will recognize and work with virtual machines running under VMware's vSphere management environment and VMware's Nicira Network Virtualization Platform. VMware acquired startup Nicira last July for $1.26 billion and has made its NVP the basis of future virtualized networking in what it terms "the software-defined data center." The Network Virtualization Platform from Nicira, a leader in OpenFlow network protocol concepts, is also the basis for the Quantum networking platform in OpenStack. Nicira was a heavy contributor to OpenStack before the acquisition, and it remains one now. At the OpenStack Summit on Tuesday, VMware gave these contributions a particular cast. Through close collaboration between Canonical and VMware, they will work inside the Ubuntu distribution of OpenStack, according to VMware's VP of vSphere product management Joshua Goodman. Suse Linux and Red Hat also have distributions of OpenStack. Red Hat's KVM hypervisor is the one native to the OpenStack cloud open source code. Suse Linux is often cited as the version that works most closely with Windows Server and its hypervisor, Hyper-V. Both are keen competitors of VMware's ESX Server. [ Want to learn more about how VMware plans to work with the open source cloud project OpenStack? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-does-complicated-dance-with-open/240067325?itc=edit_in_body_cross"> VMware Does Complicated Dance With Open Source Code</a>. ] The move also reflects VMware's growing realization that it is likely to need to live with many OpenStack implementations in the future, despite its early hopes that its own cloud software stack, the vCloud Director suite, would be the basis of private and public clouds everywhere. The collaboration with Canonical gives it an OpenStack partner that is less an immediate competitor than either Red Hat or Suse. VMware contributed the plug-ins for the Grizzly release of OpenStack, which came out April 4. Canonical has not yet included Grizzly in its version of OpenStack, but it plans to do so by the end of the month. On Wednesday, Martin Casado, founder of Nicira and now chief architect of networking at VMware, posted a blog on the VMware website reading, "The transformation to the software-defined data center will take many forms, and VMware understands that many customers will want to piece together different technologies based on their requirements… " He said VMware is committed to having its virtualization environment work with OpenStack, despite perceived competition between them, and VMware has "almost doubled the number of developers working on OpenStack" compared to Nicira's previous level of contribution. Through its Nicira-acquired developers VMware was among the top ten contributors of code to the Grizzly release, he added. Attend Interop Las Vegas May 6-10 and learn the emerging trends in information risk management and security. Use Priority Code MPIWK by March 22 to save an additional $200 off the early bird discount on All Access and Conference Passes. Join us in Las Vegas for access to 125+ workshops and conference classes, 300+ exhibiting companies, and the latest technology. <a href="http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register today</a>!