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Crystal Ball for Cloud in 2010

Cloudy Crystal BallDo you see the cloud in your 2010 crystal ball?

It’s always fun to see what others predict will happen.

The more controversial you are, the better….who wants to just hear about “the growth of the market” anyway. So here we go….2010.

Appirio looks deep into their crystal ball here with the following:

  1. Cloud developer community grows faster than open-source.
  2. Cloud standards won’t (and shouldn’t) happen.
  3. Cloud providers tackle lock-in.
  4. Cloud integration will get an enterprise poster-child.
  5. Enterprise apps get Googled.
  6. Enterprise collaboration is a feature, not a business.
  7. Microsoft lets Azure cannibalize a global account.
  8. Cloud computing consolidation.
  9. Global Systems Integrators will do nothing more than cloud marketing.
  10. The real innovation will be in the business of cloud computing, not the technology.

Web 20 Journal uses the powers of the supernatural to predict the following here:

  1. Cloud Reduces the Effect of the Recession
  2. Broader Depth of Clouds
  3. VC’s, Money & Long Term Viability
  4. Partnerships Galore & Weeding Out of Providers
  5. Hybrid Solutions
  6. Web 3.0
  7. Standards and Interoperability
  8. Staggered Growth within the Cloud
  9. Technology Advances at the Cloud Molecular Level
  10. Larger Adoption

You can hear the chants from IDC’s conference rooms here:

  1. Growth will return to the IT industry in 2010. We predict 3.2% growth for the year, returning the industry to 2008 spending levels of about $1.5 trillion.
  2. 2010 will also see improved growth and stability in the worldwide telecommunications market, with worldwide spending predicted to increase 3%.
  3. Emerging markets will lead the IT recovery, with BRIC countries growing 8–13%.
  4. Cloud computing will expand and mature as we see a strategic battle for cloud platform leadership, new public cloud hot spots, private cloud offerings, cloud appliances, and offerings that bridge public and private clouds.
  5. It will be a watershed year in the ascension of mobile devices as strategic platforms for commercial and enterprise developers as over 1 billion access the Internet, iPhone apps triple, Android apps quintuple, and Apple’s “iPad” arrives.
  6. Public networks — more important than ever — will continue their aggressive evolution to fiber and 3G and 4G wireless. 4G will be overhyped, more wireless networks will become “invisible,” and the FCC will regulate over-the-top VoIP.
  7. Business applications will undergo a fundamental transformation — fusing business applications with social/collaboration software and analytics into a new generation of “socialytic” apps, challenging current market leaders.
  8. Rising energy costs and pressure from the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference will make sustainability a source of renewed opportunity for the IT industry in 2010.
  9. Other industries will come out of the recession with a transformation agenda and look to IT as an increasingly important lever for these initiatives. Smart meters and electronic medical records will hit important adoption levels.
  10. The IT industry’s transformations will drive a frenetic pace of M&A activity.

The visions of David Linthicum at InfoWorld here:

  1. Rise of cloud computing standards
  2. First major cloud computing provider outages
  3. Microsoft will be relevant in the cloud
  4. Rapid consolidation of existing providers
  5. Rapid rise of cloud computing startups

So tempting to add your own isn’t it?

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By Jim Kaskade – January 6, 2010

A Balanced Scorecard for the Cloud

Balanced Score Card PyramidYou’ve probably experienced a derivative of Balanced Scorecard (Balanced Scorecard Management or BSM) if you’ve ever strategized, or simply thought about the forest as well as the trees. Howard Rohm, Vice-President of the Balanced Scorecard Institute, definitely has.

BSM, as the Institute has described it, is a strategic management tool for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy.

In balanced scorecard language, vision, mission, and strategy at the corporate level are decomposed into different views, or perspectives, as seen through the eyes of business owners, customers and other stakeholders, managers and process owners, and employees.

Balanced Scorecard in the Clouds?

Lets start by saying that you have the following mission for a company, which simply defines the ‘Purpose, reason for being’, or ‘Who we are and what we do’:

Our Mission is to be a trusted provider of information systems using highly innovative software technology that contributes to the development of society.

Lets expand this with the vision for the company, which can be defined as an ‘Image of the future we seek to create’:

Our Vision is to make the Internet even more accessible by using proprietary and innovative software technologies leveraging open source, collaboration, and the web.

OK. Now comes the strategy. Lets introduce cloud…Cloud Computing is core Information Technology that is predicted to make a disruptive impact on the development of society by leveraging open source, collaborative applications, and, of course, the web. So, in short, “Cloud is the strategy”! I quote a colleague of mine in my last life in online digital media and SaaS, J.D. Lasica:

Over time, the cloud will transform our approach to such fundamental concepts as search, commerce, money and security on a global basis.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has called this “the cloud computing age.” Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, declared that the network would become the computer, and many people now refer to the emerging next-generation Internet as “the cloud.”

As we’ve seen, Cloud can be an awfully broad category (just look at my ecosystem blog entries). But no matter what piece of the Cloud puzzle you propose to offer, the question for any organization is,  ”how do you make sure the details of your cloud strategy match up with the tactics of the greater organization?” or “How do we make sure the cloud strategy is the approach used to accomplish the mission and implement an organization’s vision?”

This is where BSM comes in.

NumberOneCloudCloud BSM Step 1

Step one is an assessment of the organization’s foundations, its core beliefs, market opportunities, competition, financial position, short- and long-term goals, and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, an understanding of what satisfies its current and future customers (needs analysis) as it applies to cloud.

This can be performed with a simple off-site meeting where the management team develops, discusses, and documents the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

NumberTwoCloudCloud BSM Step 2

Step two is the development of overall business strategy. This can be both at a high-level as well as a very detailed level. For example, the high-level strategy may be:

To create cloud-based collaborative applications that capture X million end-users within Y years.

The business strategy could then dive deeper. For example:

Provide leading Internet Identity Security, delivering both on-premise software and on-demand services for Internet Single Sign-On (SSO), Identity-Enabled Web Services and Internet User Account Management for both the consumer and enterprise customers.

The strategy is a hypothesis of what we think will work and be successful. Some can conceive of this based purely on “gut”, and others derive it from significant industry, customer, and competitive analysis. I believe this process has to be driven by: 1) customer need, and 2) competitive landscape.

NumberThreeCloudCloud BSM Step 3

Step three is a decomposition of business strategy into smaller components, called objectives. Objectives are the basic building blocks of strategy at all levels of the organization – the components or activities that make up complete business strategies.

I prefer to define SMART metrics that make up objectives (SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely). I believe objectives have to be tied to metrics that define the performance of each department of the business (marketing, sales, business development, engineering, operations, HR, finance, etc.), and then, in turn, down to the individual.

Howard Rohm likes to map the strategy and associated metrics to four BSM areas: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, and Learning/Growth. It’s not unreasonable to make sure that these four aspects of the business are represented within company, department, and individual objectives, but I prefer to map to functional areas of the business first. Call it KMBSM (Kaskade Modified BSM).

Other Outputs of BSM

You can then take the output of this process and use it to build an Operating Plan for the company (the objectives, metrics with targets, and a revenue/expense plan.) This result coupled with the details of all analysis that went into the formulation can be compiled to create the Company’s Business Plan. Some companies like to have a specific Marketing & Sales or Go-To-Market Plan as well (this will detail direct vs. indirect channels, partnerships, pricing, sales tactics, service/warranty, advertising/promotion). Complex engineering projects not only require a product requirements document (PRD), but an overall Engineering Development Plan (consisting mainly of a project plan broken down by tasks, durations, resources, etc.). All this for another post ;-)

Interested in platforms that support the Enterprise’s ability to manage this exercise? Try Mindtouch’s collaborative platform for the enterprise here.

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By Jim Kaskade – December 1, 2009

Part 4: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Appirio_logoThanks to the team at Appirio, we have yet another view of the cloud ecosystem, here. It’s an interesting categorization of companies into the following groups:

Cloud Matrix

  1. Cloud Applications (Multi-Tenant + Single-Instance)
  2. Cloud Platforms (Multi-Tenant + Single-Instance)
  3. Cloud Infrastructure (Multi-Tenant + Single-Instance)
  4. Hosted Applications (Single-Tenant or Multi-Instance)
  5. Hosted Platforms (Single-Tenant or Multi-Instance)
  6. Hosted Infrastructure (Single-Tenant or Multi-Instance)
  7. Private Cloud Applications (On-Premise + Virtualized)
  8. Private Cloud Platforms (On-Premise + Virtualized)
  9. Private Cloud Infrastructure (On-Premise + Virtualized)

Here is a quick highlight of the Appirio matrix. You’ll need to view in “full-screen” mode (”FS”).

.

I believe Troy Angrignon assisted in the creation of this, and contributes to the updates.

Other ecosystem perspectives:

Part 3: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Part 2: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Part 1: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Posted in Cloud Computing.

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By Jim Kaskade – November 16, 2009

Definition of Cloud Computing – Again

cloud-question-mark-cloud-computingIs there still confusion?

When you read articles like this one from Information Week by Charles Babcock…well, the quick answer is YES…there is still confusion:

“Despite the frequent use of the term, it still means different things to different people. That was evident at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo this week in Santa Clara, where I thought I would find consensus.”

So what do the experts in the field say? Here are a few Industry Analysts who collect their definitions from discussions with many cloud company CEOs, CIOs, and the like.

Gartner

Thomas Bittman's Definition of Cloud

Thomas Bittman's Definition of Cloud

Thomas Bittman, VP Distinguished Analyst defined Cloud Computing in a webinar here:

Cloud Computing: A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies.

Gartner provides their in-depth view of cloud here.

IDC

IDC analyst Frank Gens defines cloud on his blog here, as follows:

Cloud Services = Consumer and Business products, services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet

Cloud Computing = an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet (i.e., enabling cloud services)

Frank details his definition a bit more here….and I can’t help but love the detailed data IDC provides on Cloud Service Revenue forecasts here.

Forrester/Jupiter Research

James Staten, Principal Analyst at Forrester, shared the Forrester definition of cloud here as follows:

A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way.

You can find much more on their blog here. As some may recall, Forrester acquired Jupiter Research in late 2008.

The 451 Group

Dan Kusnetzky,  Rachel Chalmers and others on the team have provided a definition as part of of a report, Partly Cloudy – Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing, which can be found here. The definition is as follows:

‘Cloud computing’ describes a service model that combines a general organizing principle for IT delivery, infrastructure components, an architectural approach and an economic model – basically, a confluence of grid computing, virtualization, utility computing, hosting and software as a service (SaaS).

Or, put more simply, the cloud is IT, presented as a service to the user, delivered by virtualized resources that are independent of location.

You can see more about 451’s cloud perspective on their blog here.

AMR Research

Bruce Richardson and others at AMR have provided the following definition of cloud and compare it to SaaS here:

Cloud computing is the next-generation of software as a service, in which a complete software environment is licensed as a subscription from a software vendor and low-cost, secure, and dependable IT hardware infrastructure is ‘rented’ from a utility-computing provider on demand. The customer has complete control over its own secure and private IT environment at a very low cost and without the hassle of procuring and managing its own data center. It can quickly scale IT resources up or down as computing needs change. And [the customer] has complete freedom to customize the solution as it sees fit and complete control over upgrade cycles and all other aspects of its IT environment.

More about cloud from AMR here.

Burton Group

Burton Group defines cloud computing as:

The set of disciplines, technologies, and business models used to render IT capabilities as on-demand services.

You can read more from Jamie Lewis, Drue Reeves and others on their blog here.

THINKstrategies

Jeff Kaplan provides IT perspective on his blog here. Jeff defines cloud here, as follows:

A set of web-based tools and services which permit users to acquire computing resources and development capabilities to build or support applications, or perform specific IT functions on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Yankee Group

Agatha Poon and Camille Mendler at Yankee discuss cloud here. Agatha’s recent definition of cloud at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in Santa Clara was consistent with her blogged definition here:

”dynamically scalable, virtualized information services delivered on demand over the Intenet with multitenant capability, service-level agreements (SLAs) and usage-based pricing.”

MWD Advisors

In Neil Ward-Dutton’s recent report, “Strategic Insight: Exploring the business value of Cloud Computing” found here, MWD provides the following definition of cloud computing:

Cloud Computing is a model of technology provision where capacity on remotely hosted, managed computing platforms, on which applications can be developed and/or deployed, is made publicly available and rented to multiple customers on a self-service basis. Cloud Computing resource capacity is provided through a “utility” model – it’s licensed and paid for based on consumption, rather than being purchased in perpetuity through a traditional technology licensing model. In addition, a Cloud Computing provider isn’t only responsible for delivering functionality; it’s also responsible for providing customers with agreed levels of service (performance, reliability, scalability, availability and security and so forth).

Enterprise Strategy Group

Mark Bowker and Steve Duplessie are the minds behinds ESG’s cloud perspective with blogs here, and here respectively. Mark gives his early definition here:

‘Cloud computing’ is nothing more than a service model where business workloads are deployed, transparently executed internally or somewhere on the Internet, and businesses only pay for what they consume. Rather than purchase servers, storage, and other pieces of IT equipment, businesses simply purchase a set of dials and indicators that finely-tune and adjust IT performance, availability, data protection, and security based on business requirements regardless of the actual physical location of the applications and data.

GigaOM

Although not your true analyst group (and more a news group), I still think of Stacey Higginbotham as an expert in the field. She provides a more involved definition here, as follows:

Although it is difficult to come up with a precise and comprehensive definition of cloud computing, at the heart of it is the idea that applications run somewhere on the “cloud” (whether an internal corporate network or the public Internet) – we don’t know or care where.

Taken to the next step,…cloud computing infrastructures….should ideally have these characteristics:

  • Self-healing: In case of failure, there will be a hot backup instance of the application ready to take over without disruption (known as failover). It also means that when I set a policy that says everything should always have a backup, when such a fail occurs and my backup becomes the primary, the system launches a new backup, maintaining my reliability policies.
  • SLA-driven: The system is dynamically managed by service-level agreements that define policies such as how quickly responses to requests need to be delivered. If the system is experiencing peaks in load, it will create additional instances of the application on more servers in order to comply with the committed service levels — even at the expense of a low-priority application.
  • Multi-tenancy: The system is built in a way that allows several customers to share infrastructure, without the customers being aware of it and without compromising the privacy and security of each customer’s data.
  • Service-oriented: The system allows composing applications out of discrete services that are loosely coupled (independent of each other). Changes to or failure of one service will not disrupt other services. It also means I can re-use services.
  • Virtualized: Applications are decoupled from the underlying hardware. Multiple applications can run on one computer (virtualization a la VMWare) or multiple computers can be used to run one application (grid computing).
  • Linearly Scalable: Perhaps the biggest challenge. The system will be predictable and efficient in growing the application. If one server can process 1,000 transactions per second, two servers should be able to process 2,000 transactions per second, and so forth.
  • Data, Data, Data: The key to many of these aspects is management of the data: its distribution, partitioning, security and synchronization. New technologies, such as Amazon’s SimpleDB, are part of the answer, not large-scale relational databases. And don’t let the name fool you. As my colleague Nati Shalom rightfully proclaims, SimpleDB is not really a database. Another approach that is gaining momentum is in-memory data grids.

More about cloud from GigaOM here.

Freeform Dynamics

Dale Vile presents Freeform’s first impressions here, defining cloud as follows:

Cloud computing…is about the evolution of dynamic virtualised infrastructure that allows us to think more in terms of resource pools than individual IT components. This in turn opens the door to delivering computing resource on a utility basis, which is equally applicable both internally (i.e. with regard to the way you use your data centre) and externally – which takes you into the realm of utility computing and software as a service.

You find more on Cloud and IT from Freeform here.

RedMonk

Michael Monk doesn’t really define cloud. He starts out acknowledging that a definition is needed, but then continues to elaborate here.

Before cloud computing was all the rage, if you recall, we were all nuts about Software-as-a-Service, one of the funner tech initializations – “SaaS”! Once Amazon introduced EC2, SalesForce Force.com, and others followed, we needed some more categorization to differentiate and understand these things. “We” being industry pundits & vendors. Thus, we arrive at the 3 *aaS’s of cloud computing.

SaaS depends on PaaS, depends on IaaS. The wider world probably cares more about actually doing something – SaaS – than having middleware to build something – PaaS – and care more about those two things than having a bunch of instances with that annoyingly calm blinking command like cursor – IaaS.

More from Michael about cloud can be found here.

Hurwitz & Associates

Judith Hurwitz offers up her defintion and blogs the industry here:

Cloud computing is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet. The cloud in cloud computing provides the means through which everything — from computing power to computing infrastructure, applications, business process to personal collaboration — can be delivered to you as a service wherever and whenever you need.

The cloud has several key characteristics: elasticity and scalability, self-service provisioning, standardized APIs, billing and metering of services, performance monitoring and measuring, and security. There are three models for Cloud: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a service.

Ovum

David Mitchell, John Maden and Laurent Lachal are quoted quite a bit on cloud. But unless you’re a paying customer, the Ovum/Datamonitor/Butler Group isn’t as forthright with online disclosures/opinions let alone definitions as some of the other analyst groups.

Nemertes Research

John Burke and Andreas Antonopoulos at Nemertes frequently comment on IT in their blogs here and here respectively.

ABI Research

The analysts over at ABI have decided to stick to their core, that being mobile. In their report, mobile cloud computing, Mark Beccue and others highlight that mobile cloud applications move the computing power and data storage away from mobile phones and into the cloud, bringing apps and mobile computing to not just smartphone users but a much broader range of mobile subscribers.

Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan research and report on Cloud Computing as seen here. However, the IT research team is generally very tight lipped with their research….unless you are a paying customer. They don’t seem to actively promote their perspective in cloud within their IT research services.

Wikipedia

Per wikipedia here:

Cloud computing is Internet- (”cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (”computing”).[1] In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them.[2] It typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources as a service over the Internet.[3][4]

Had enough yet? I’m sure we could poll a few CEOs of cloud service/product providers as well as a few CIOs of cloud technology users…but I suspect their defintions are similar. Did I miss you? Please comment on your analyst group and cloud definition.

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By Jim Kaskade – November 8, 2009

E2.0 – An Executives’ Holy Grail?

1indy-idol-holy-grail

Holy Grail

The market changes constantly….new competition; old rivals offering new functionality or new marketing spins; customers’ needs changing. Couple this with internal management challenges; board, shareholder, and/or investor pressures. Being an executive is only getting harder with what I’ll refer to as information overload.

How do executives keep an efficient eye on both external and internal metrics that count and manage their enterprise data? Is this Enterprise 2.0 or E2.0?

I envision that the first thing I see when I start my day, is an internal view of the entire company…across every functional area, every line of business. Combine this with an external view of the market in which the company operates – an “executive dashboard” if you will. But it has to be more than just reporting – it must pull together all the  enterprise business analytics needed by execs. Make this web-based and available from the office, my laptop, my home computer, and even my mobile phone.Business_Analytics

As the CEO, I might have an area of the dashboard where I can shoot a live video (from my webcam) or upload a more polished video to show to executives, key individuals, or all employee’s….a morning video-cast for all to wake up to.

I can envision columns of information that are organized to provide me status of key groups within the organization and provide direct links to their team leads and internal communities in general. Major applications used by each group would also be provided in one centralized “mashup”.

11641-Cockpit

Executive Dashboard

Integration with the major enterprise applications including: teleconference (e.g. Cisco WebEx), email (e.g. MSFT Exchange), CRM (e.g. Salesforce), and ERP (e.g. SAP) packages is an absolute given.

At my last SaaS company, as the CEO, I (and my staff) maintained the following information / dashboards…it seemed almost as difficult as flying a helicopter just to get everything into one place, let alone updates, and the content right:

  1. Board of Directors (Investor) Company Dashboard
  2. Sales / Biz Dev Pipeline Dashboard (Direct & Channel)
  3. Financial Dashboard (Cashflow, Op Budget, P&L, BS)
  4. Operational Dashboard (platform/CDN/infrastructure spend)
  5. Platform Dashboard (SaaS customer usage statistics)
  6. Online Lead-Gen Dashboard (signups)
  7. Marketing Dashboard (campaigns, PR)

    information-overload2

    Information Overload?

  8. Monetization Dashboard (we managed an ad-network)
  9. Customer Support Dashboard (free to paid conversion focus, satisfaction, profiling)
  10. Content Dashboard (use of digital content, content campaigns)
  11. Engineering Dashboard (development project status)
  12. Content Moderation Dashboard (outsourced platform cost)
  13. Product Strategy / Roadmap Dashboard (prioritized development)

This doesn’t even begin to include all the supporting documentation that you and your staff iterate on. Of course, you can comb the old Intranet hierarchies, your personal computer directories, your email folders, and the like….but it can become unmanageable (not just for you, but your staff).

Have any of you ever felt you had the enterprise under complete control? Or are you a victim of information overload like the rest of us?

IDC_White_Paper_on_Information_Overload

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By Jim Kaskade – September 18, 2009

Consumers and Businesses Collaborate?

If you were to ask Jon Carder at MojoPages, “How do you get up-to-date information about local (or remote) businesses?”…he’d say, “Ahhh, is that a trick question? Why do you think I started www.MojoPages.com?”

MojoPages

Jon’s story all began when he was searching for a good moving company to help him relocate in San Diego. He had a terrible experience with the company who was evidentally backed by the BBB, boasted the best rates in town, etc., etc. If only there was a way to know how businesses are truly treating their customers. A way to know which businesses are the best? That’s when he began dreaming of an online community where people could share their knowledge and experiences to help one another find the best local businesses and stay away from the worst.

gripripI was reminded of Jon’s story when I read a recent post about Wikipedia for small businesses by Mark Goldenson. In 2007, yellow page directories were a $31 billion market, but they are being rapidly killed by the web, mobile access, 411 lines, and services vastly more convenient than thumbing through dead trees.

What about a Wikipedia for small businesses? Take an enterprise collaboration tool suite like MindTouch’s DekiWiki and create a public wiki that lets anyone create a website about a business and add a wealth of information:

  • Contact details
  • Hours of operation
  • Lists of products or services
  • Recommended items
  • Food nutritional values
  • Photos
  • Prices
  • Coupons and specials
  • Management and staff
  • Credit cards accepted
  • Wheelchair accessibility
  • Wireless availability
  • Franchise locations
  • Availability of power outlets
  • Customer traffic
  • Phone tree options
  • Years of operation
  • Public restrooms

Business owners could claim their site and add their own details (much like Zillow.com for homes), but unlike MerchantCircle, Smalltown, and other attempts at bringing small businesses online, this webspace would not require any action from the small business. Their website can be created and useful even without their knowledge.

Good idea Mark!

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By Jim Kaskade – August 30, 2009

What Does HA in the Cloud Mean?

2008_Outages

What is High Availability (HA)? My best definition is best depicted in terms of the following example:

99.9999% (”six nines”) system availability = only 31.5 seconds of unplanned down time per year, or 2.59 seconds per month, or 0.605 seconds per week.

In short, HA is a system-level feature (architecture, design, software suite) which ensures system up-time. This aspect of your system becomes more important as the service becomes more mission critical. The following table provides “availability classes” based on associated downtime amounts (courtesy of Zimory):

HA_Classifications

HA is designed to preserve your most valuable resource: time. Every second your system is down costs you and your customers money, and every second your system administrator spends solving downtime problems costs you more.

The Harvard Research Group (HRG) divides high availability into its Availability Environment Classification (AEC) in 6 classes:

  • Conventional (AEC-0): Function can be interrupted, data integrity is not essential.
  • Highly Reliable (AEC-1): Function can be interrupted, data integrity must be however ensured.
  • High Availability (AEC-2): Function may be minimum interrupted only within fixed times during the main operating hours.
  • Fault Resilient (AEC-3): Function must be maintained, within fixed times during the main operating hours, continuously.
  • Fault Tolerant (AEC-4): Function must be maintained continuously, 24*7 enterprise (24 hours, 7 days the week) must be ensured.
  • Disaster tolerant (AEC-5): Function must be available under all circumstances.

Cloud HA

High availability in the cloud will exist at every level of the hardware and software stack including:

  1. Datacenter resources: power, air conditioning, etc.
  2. System hardware resources: storage, server, and networking.
  3. Operating system with bundled HA
  4. Database bundled HA
  5. Virtual machine HA
  6. Application HA (Web-server, ERP, etc.)

Datacenter HA

This typically means that you have redundancy built into your architecture by: 1) using multiple datacenters (leveraging redundancy across them), and 2) benefiting from redundancy for all resources within the datacenter (e.g. multiple air conditioners, etc.)…..this doesn’t include redundancy for the compute platform components.

The following definition for the classification of data centers is typically used:

  • Tier 4: Has multiple active supply paths for power and air-conditioning, has redundant components, it is fault-tolerant and provides an availability of at least 99,995%
  • Tier 3: Has multiple active supply paths for power and air-conditioning, with only one system active in standard use; has redundant components and is manageable at the same time and provides an availability of at least 99,982%
  • Tier 2: Has one path each for power and air-conditioning; has redundant components and provides an availability of at least 99,741%
  • Tier 1: Has one path each for power and air-conditioning; has redundant components and provides an availability of at least 99,671%

True story…to this day, I remember getting a page at 3am in the morning (I had my VP of Operations set up an automated text message sent to my phone for all Severity level 1 & 2 support calls). It so happened that at 2:45am the datacenter had an air conditioning outage. Of course, there was an automatic switchover to a redundant unit, which also failed.

I and my staff were notified of rising temperatures on our SaaS platform (at the time this platform was a 100 node cluster consisting of several sub-clusters). By the time the datacenter issue was addressed, our system had experienced such high temperatures that we began to detect failures in our database cluster (more pages). Although, database failover occurred automatically, multiple database servers failed intermittently (the worst kind of failure).

By the time we manually recovered from the database cluster failures, the customer had experienced approximately 228 minutes of what we classified as a “Severity 1″ defect with a SLA which was significantly lower, of course.

Needless to say, I personally made some very uncomfortable calls to the customer, and we then made some additional changes to our system HA design to insure that this 3-sigma event wouldn’t occur again. I’ll add, this was not the only time we had datacenter-level issues. My other story was when the datacenter staff was testing their redundant battery backup and accidentally powered down our entire system and scrambled the brains of our Orca disk array subsystems!!!

Hardware HA

High availability for your hardware resources (computing, storage, and networking) begins with redundancy. With storage, my experience involves using disks in a RAID 5 configuration. In addition to this, we deployed 100% redundancy (RAID 0) across a separate cabinet preferably in a separate datacenter (e.g. RAID 5 on a server and then those disks mirrored on another server with RAID 5). This insured us against two disks dying within one storage subsystem, against a storage subsystem going down, against a cabinet going down, and against a datacenter going down (see my previous story).

Then we built in redundancy into our processing nodes by deploying commodity clusters (a number of Linux servers which were a part of the same resource pool servicing a suite of specific applications). Each of our servers where inherently redundant using a HA cluster configuration. In addition to this, we had redundant IO/controller cards (storage and network), redundant power supplies within the server, and redundancy built into our cabling schemes (e.g. redundant cables to NIC cards). We also made sure that servers within a certain functional cluster were distributed across multiple cabinets.

Lastly, our architecture included redundancy for all our switches (networking gear) similar to our compute nodes.

OS HA (Linux)

They don’t get much press, but there are many better high availability options available for Linux. Here are a few:

  • High-Availability Linux Project: The grand-daddy of open source HA which provides the heartbeat failure detection daemon, the poetically named “shoot the other node in the head” fencing daemon and documentation needed to build your own an automatic-failover cluster.
  • Linux Virtual Server: Primarily intended to provide scalability through load balancing, but also incorporates high availabiliy via heartbeat, failoverd and shared storage.
  • Redhat Cluster Suite: Combines failover daemons with a reasonable graphical configuration panel with the GFS distributed file system. Integrates with commercial fencing hardware such as the HP/Compaq Integrated Lights Out API. Since Redhat is open source, all the components of this otherwise payware solution are also available in the excellent (and free) CentOS distribution.

Linux-HA is an open source project which offers software, Heartbeat, which is a daemon that provides cluster infrastructure (communication and membership) services to its clients. This allows clients to know about the presence (or disappearance!) of peer processes on other machines and to easily exchange messages with them. Heartbeat is also a leading implementor of the Open Cluster Framework (OCF) standard and when combined with a resource manager like Pacemaker, is competitive with commercial systems. The current stable series of Heartbeat can be obtained for many linux platforms (including CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, openSUSE and SLES).

The following Linux distributions are more likely to be deployed in larger datacenter environments. I also include a reference to HA features (commonly included as a cluster offering):

  • RedHat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat Cluster Suite
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: High Availability Extension
  • Oracle Enterprise Linux: Oracle Clusterware
  • Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition: Heartbeat/Pacemaker for clusters
  • Mandrake Enterprise Server 5 (MES5): Mandrake Linux Clustering

RedHat’s HA offering, Red Hat Cluster Suite, provides a complete ready-to-use failover solution. For most other applications, customers can create custom failover scripts using provided templates.

Database HA

Many databases build HA into the RDBMS kernel. Oracle has taken the approach of building a set of tightly integrated HA features such as data protection, table repair, and database failover. Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is the premier database clustering technology that allow two or more computers (“nodes”) in a cluster to concurrently access a single shared database. This database system spans multiple hardware systems, yet appears to the application as a single unified database. Oracle Database 11g includes Oracle Clusterware, a complete, integrated clusterware management solution available on all Oracle Database 11g platforms. Oracle Clusterware includes a High Availability API to make applications highly available. Oracle Clusterware can be used to monitor, relocate, and restart your applications.

Virtual Machine HA

Xen

An example of VM HA includes Citrix’s partnership with Marathon Technologies, whose EverRun product not only recovers and restarts the virtual machine and its software stack but the application data as well. EverRun monitors the exchanges between a running virtual machine and its hypervisor, detecting when work is interrupted and moving the VM to a healthy server.

In order to understand the enhanced levels of HA that everRun VM offers, it’s important to first understand what XenServer HA does and does not address.

  1. First, XenServer HA is a best effort solution; there is no guarantee of a restart on another host. This is because XenServer HA does not ensure that resources are allocated on other hosts, so it’s possible that a host failure might result in a situation where there is not enough resources to restart the VMs from that failed host. This would be similar to disabling availability constraints in VMware HA and allowing the HA cluster to power on more VMs than could be supported in the event of a host failure. In this regard, XenServer HA is a bit less powerful than VMware HA.
  2. Second, XenServer HA heartbeats will not only leverage network interfaces, but will also send heartbeats across storage adapters as well. This is a significant advantage over VMware HA, as it helps to eliminate the dependency upon the network connectivity to the Service Console/Dom0.

With that in mind, adding everRun VM to an existing XenServer HA implementation now adds some useful new functionality:

  1. everRun will setup a separate compute environment (another VM) on a separate host to reserve memory in the event of a failure. This enables everRun to provide guaranteed recovery in the event of a host failure.
  2. everRun VM provides component-level fault tolerance, meaning that if a host’s storage connectivity is lost, it can fail that connectivity over to a different host. This is accomplished through the use of private interconnects between members of the everRun VM resource pool. In my mind, this is pretty powerful stuff. Being able to fail disk I/O from the HBA in this server to the HBA in a different server over a set of interconnects is really powerful.

VMware

VMware HA simply provides failover protection against hardware and operating system failures within your virtualized IT environment. VMware Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability for applications in the event of server failures, by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that is in virtual lockstep with the primary instance. By allowing instantaneous failover between the two instances in the event of hardware failure, VMware Fault Tolerance eliminates even the smallest of data loss or disruption.

Application HA

Application software (including the base OS) is covered by a host of independent solutions including (but not limited to):

  • Tivoli System Automation (IBM)
  • Advanced Server (Red Hat)
  • Lifekeeper (Steeleye/SIOS)
  • Polyserve

A central concept with most high-availability solutions, is the system heartbeat. One server sends a signal to the other to determine system and application health. Heartbeat communication path options include serial port and LAN. It is a good idea to use multiple paths, such as serial and LAN or multiple LAN connections.

The failover models include active/active, active/standby and N+1. In active/active configuration, each server in the cluster is providing its own set of applications and services. If one fails, the other takes over. Users may experience some degradation of services, because the remaining system is serving both sets of applications and services, although it does allow for maximum resource utilization.

Active/standby provides the best continuity of service after a failure. However, it requires a redundant system and the associated cost. In N+1 configuration, one standby system provides failover protection for multiple active systems. This configuration provides reasonable utilization of resources while minimizing cost. If multiple failures should occur, users still may experience some increase in response time. Alternately, other active servers could be configured to take over.

IBM’s Tivoli is one of the most recognized encumbants in the “legacy” system management software space, and one we always competed with while I was at NCR Corporation.

All these HA software suites helps meet high levels of availability and prevent service disruptions for critical applications and middleware running on heterogeneous platforms and now virtualization technologies. Functionality varies, but generally has a list similar to the following:

  • Initiates, executes and coordinates the starting, stopping, restarting and failing over of individual application components or entire composite applications
  • Provides standard toolset that supports multiple failover scenarios involving both physical and virtual environments
  • Offers advanced clustering technologies, including support for sophisticated clustering configurations—such as n:1 or n:m configurations—to help reduce the number of required hardware servers
  • Delivers advanced, policy-based automation to ease operational management of complex IT infrastructures by eliminating the need for extensive programming skills to create and maintain scripts and procedures
  • Provides plug-and-play policy modules that integrate best practices for third-party software solutions, allowing out-of-the-box failure detection and recovery to help drive operational cost savings and continuous high availability
  • Speeds recovery through the ability to define resource dependencies to quickly associate conditions with resources, enabling operators to choose the proper corrective actions within the right context
  • Integrates with the broader portfolio of high availability and event automation offerings that enable systematic implementation and execution of high availability operations across applications, middleware and platforms

Applications vary considerably with typical classes including:

  • Database servers
  • ERP applications
  • Web servers
  • LVS director (load balancer) servers
  • Mail servers
  • Firewalls
  • File servers
  • DNS servers
  • DHCP servers
  • Proxy Caching servers
  • Custom applications

HA Comes at a CostCloud_HA_Cost

The quick answer….YES! As you add HA within each level of the system, you’re paying more in hardware, software, and even IT resources (although some will say this expense should actually decrease with the HA automation).

The Future of HA

Is there room for anything outside of VMware?

High-availability processing was pioneered by the long-defunct Tandem Computing, whose NonStop computers twinned and shadowed every hot-swappable component, with transfer of processing between “sides” under the supervision of the Guardian NonStop Kernel (NSK) operating system.

If you substitute “VMware ESX” for “Guardian NSK” in the above paragraph, you have an almost exact description of VMware’s plans for the future of a high-availability computing architecture. In this model, virtual computing resources, including CPU, storage and memory, are added and replaced on the fly, while workloads are shadowed by virtual machines (VMs) and entire data centre operations can be migrated without interruption to different physical processing locations.

Other Opportunities

There’s a much broader set of high availability functionality than VMware HA. What if you want to use multiple clouds? Say you want to have AWS and Zimory provide you services and you balance across them? Why not? In the digital media world, I used both Alkamai and Limelight, leveraging one against the other and using one as a failover in case response times didn’t meet my specs.

What if you want to failover between geographic locations? Sure Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations, but lets dig a little more into this. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment, however, is only 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region, and Amazon EC2 is currently only available in two regions: one in the US and one in Europe. Will this suffice for all enterprise requirements? Maybe not. Is there an opportunity to provide HA across public cloud providers, across different geographic regions? Maybe.

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By Jim Kaskade – August 15, 2009

VMWare vSphere – The new Cloud OS?

VMware announced vSphere 4 on April 21, 2009 and released it today, May 21, 2009. vSphere represents a re-branded release of VMware Infrastructure 3, with an enhanced suite of tools including the ability to do cloud computing across the Internet.

VMWare History

VMWare History

VMWare History

VMWare has had a successful ride with virtualization approaching $2B in revenue and trading with a market cap close to $15B. The company has been almost unchallenged until Xen was purchased by Citrix in October 2007, and Microsoft launched Hyper-V in mid-2008.

VMWare Suite of Products

vSphere

Infrastructure

The core of the solution includes the “Infrastructure services”, starting with the ESX (paid)/ESXi (free) hypervisors. These hypervisors abstract processor, memory, storage, and networking resources into multiple virtual machines. Then you layer in other products such as VMWare DRS which continuously balances computing capacity in resource pools to deliver the performance, scalability and availability not possible with physical infrastructure.

VMware vStorage VMFS is a cluster file system that leverages shared storage to allow multiple instances of VMware ESX to read and write to the same storage, concurrently (shared storage).

VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning lets you subscribe more capacity to virtual machines than they actually have, eliminating the waste of resources and space caused by unused over-allocated storage.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V integrates with VMware vSphere through the vNetwork Distributed Switch (only available with the vSphere Enterprise Plus edition). Cisco Nexus 1000V delivers VN-Link, virtual machine-aware network services for VMware vSphere.

Availability

VMWare VMotion can move an entire running virtual machine instantaneously from one server to another. VMware VMotion uses VMware’s cluster file system to control access to a virtual machine’s storage.

Storage VMotion enables you to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous storage arrays with complete transaction integrity and no interruption in service for critical applications.

VMware HA simply provides failover protection against hardware and operating system failures within your virtualized IT environment.

VMware Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability for applications in the event of server failures,  by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that is in virtual lockstep with the primary instance. By allowing instantaneous failover between the two instances in the event of hardware failure, VMware Fault Tolerance eliminates even the smallest of data loss or disruption.

VMware Data Recovery protects against data loss in your virtual environment by enabling fast backups to disk and, more importantly, fast and complete recovery.

Security

VMware vShield Zones enables you to monitor, log and block inter-VM traffic within an ESX host or between hosts in a cluster, without having to divert traffic externally through static physical chokepoints.  You can bridge, firewall, or isolate virtual machine between multiple zones defined by your logical organizational and trust boundaries. Both allowed and blocked activities are logged and can be graphed or analyzed to a fine-grained level.

VMsafe provides an application program interface (API)-sharing program that enables select partners to develop security products for VMware environments.

Scalability

Hot add means that one can add more CPUs and memory into a virtual hardware environment. This is interesting, but the important facts of the VMWare platform is that it supports up to 32 physical machines, each with up to 64 logical processing cores, 256 virtual CPUs, and 1TB RAM.

vCenter

vCenter centrally manages VMware vSphere environments allowing IT administrators centralized control over the virtual environment. Administrators can provision VMs and hosts using standardized templates, and ensure compliance with vSphere host configurations and host and VM patch levels with automated remediation.

VMWare Target Enterprises

Small to Medium Businesses

vsphere_small_bizThis is basics…designed especially for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers. The catch here is that both editions are all-inclusive packages that enable you to virtualize and consolidate many application workloads onto three physical servers running vSphere and centrally manage them withVMware vCenter.

Large Enterprise

vsphere_large_enterprise

Each edition includes a hypervisor as well as features to improve availability, protect data, and simplify operations. For the hypervisor, customers can choose to deploy either VMware ESX or VMware ESXi. One instance of VMware vCenter Server, sold separately, is required.

VMWare Pricing

VMware vSphere is licensed based on the number of processors on the physical host. VMware customers may deploy vSphere on physical processors that contain up to six processing cores at no additional charge. vSphere Advanced and vSphere Enterprise Plus editions provide an expanded core entitlement and allow customers to deploy on processors that contain up to 12 processing cores.

vSphere Essentials: $995 per processor (up to 6 cores for use on a server with up to 256GB of memory.)

vSphere Essentials Plus: $2,995 per one processor (up to 6 cores for use on a server with up to 256GB of memory.)

vSphere Standard: $795 per one processor (up to 6 cores for use on a server with up to 256GB of memory.)

vSphere Advanced: $2,245 per one processor (up to 12 cores for use on a server with up to 256GB of memory.)

vSphere Enterprise: $2,875 per one processor (up to 6 cores for use on a server with up to 256GB of memory.)

vSphere Enterprise Plus: $3,495 per one processor (up to 12 cores for use on a server with no memory limit.)

Support and Subscription (SnS) is available for all the vSphere editions above. A minimum of one year of SnS is required for each license. VMware vCenter Server is a required and separate purchase in order to centrally manage and enable many vSphere features.

VMWare Offerings Summarized

VMWare Offerings Summarized

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By Jim Kaskade – May 21, 2009

Infrastructure or End-User Web Applications? Where In Cloud To Go?

I was re-reading Appirio’s Top 10 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2009 today and thinking to myself, “If I were to start a new venture capital backed  startup in the Cloud Computing space, would I focus on core infrastructure or on end-user web applications?” Here’s what got me thinking:

“The rise and fall of the private cloud – While private clouds will continue to generate a significant amount of hype, customers in most cases will realize they are little more than a better data center implementation. They will be valuable for customers who have significant transaction volumes and stringent regulatory or security requirements, but will have little ROI for the average IT organization. In the end, private clouds will create more value for service providers than for customers.”

When I think of private cloud, I think of hard-core cloud provisioning (e.g. Eucalyptus), or Cloud OS (e.g. VMWare) solutions – both what I’d refer to as “infrastructure”. Well, hindsight is great with VMWare. No one would argue that the business is booming with a market capitalization of over $15B….and Eucalyptus is a Benchmark and Battery Ventures backed startup – not shabby VCs. Eucalyptus was born out of a weather forecasting project in November, 2007 within UCSB (my Alma mater). Barrier to entry? High (good for VCs). So, infrastructure may not be looking so bad.

That being said, I have to admit that, in general, it’s better to be closer to the end-user (preferably someone in the executive office) when selling into an enterprise. This would mean that one might make a case for building sexy Web 2.0 dashboards (e.g. E2.0), providing CxOs more control and visibility. In my 20 years marketing and selling into large enterprise, the sexy tools always seemed to get the most attention first. In the cloud space this might equate to building cloud configuration, management, and reporting applications that are web-based (e.g. Rightscale).

Barrier to entry? Hard to say. Could a couple of engineers take open source projects like Bitnami and create a better, maybe more robust Rightscale competitor in the evenings and weekends? Maybe. It’s hard to know exactly how much time elapsed between initial conception to first product release at Rightscale….the website domain was first acquired in Febuary, 2007 and then the first product released via their blog in April, 2007. You can only guess that Thorsten von Eicken, Founder and CTO, conceived the project in January, 2006 based on his own career timelines….so 13 mths to launch….maybe less – Thorsten didn’t leave Citrix until April, 2006 and the other founders, Rafael H. Saavedra and Michael Crandell, didn’t formally join the efforts until May, 2007 and Jun, 2007 respectively (a year later). I think it’s safe to say that the level of complexity for this application wasn’t the magic, but more the vision of the founders.

sandwich

The Middle Isn't Good

Maybe you take it up a level…and instead of building or managing private, public, and virtual private clouds, you facilitate the deployment of SaaS cloud services like Google Apps, Salesforce, etc within the enterprise (e.g. Appirio)? Barrier to entry? Again, hard to say. Narinder Singh founded Appirio sometime in August of 2006, and launched a consulting practice in November, 2006. It’s taken only 3 years to develop it’s current cloud product and service business.

So at what level of the spectrum do you enter? Cloud OS or SaaS-enabling web applications? Ok, there’s much more to take into account in order to properly answer this question (e.g. customer needs, market opportnity, complete competitive landscape, time-to-market, amount of capital needed, etc.). That being said, lets all agree that you don’t want to be caught somewhere in the middle.

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By Jim Kaskade – May 19, 2009

Part 3: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Cloud Taxonomy

Cloud Taxonomy

Sourced originally from Peter Laird’s work published September, 2008 here (and later updated and presented at the Enterprise Cloud Summit in May, 2009 here).

Infrastructure

  • Public Clouds – the poster children of Cloud Computing. These vendors offer computers as a service. If you need 50 computers in 15 minutes, these guys will take care of that. Differentiators include the provisioning model (virtualized instances vs. actual machines) and the host OS versions that are supported.
  • Private Clouds – these solutions help enterprises build private clouds within the firewall. If privacy and control is a big concern, or you want to increase utilization in an existing data center, a private cloud may be what you want.
  • Compute and Data Grids – while these solutions are also useful outside of a cloud, they can play an important role for applications that are deployed within a cloud. The key difference with Cloud applications from traditional on-premise applications is in how they must scale. With an on-premise application, you can scale vertically when the load gets too high – by buying a bigger machine. In the cloud, applications must scale horizontally – by adding more machines in a cluster. Compute and Data Grid products can help achieve horizontal scalability.
  • Virtualization and Appliances – when deploying OS stacks to public and private clouds, you will find it helpful to have a library of virtualized OS images. The vendors in these buckets will help in this area. Also, depending on the cloud being used, any number of Virtualization technologies will be used.

Platform

  • Business User Platforms – these platforms are cloud based application development environments. The focus of these platforms are on non-programmers as the application developers. To make this happen, these platforms offer rich visual tools to enable the developers to define data models and application logic. The differentiators for these platforms are their features – which is important to investigate during software selection as there is no coding allowed, so developers cannot code around feature outages.
  • Developer Platforms – these platforms are cloud based application development environments that support custom coding. Developers can build highly customized applications with these platforms, without having to worry about scalability, OS configuration, load balancing, operations, etc as they would with a public cloud offering. The differentiators for these platforms include the supported programming languages (Java, python, custom, etc), and data storage capabilities (RDMBS, key-value stores, etc).

Services

  • Storage – these vendors offer hosted storage that are API accessible. Meaning, any application can get/set objects into these Cloud storage solutions. The solutions vary in the supported data access models – key-value stores, file stores, etc.
  • Integration – solutions that provide integration facilities between multiple Cloud applications, or Cloud applications with on-premise applications. Major features offered are: messaging queues, business process modeling (BPM), and application adapters (like NetSuite adapter, SAP adapter).
  • Metering and Billing – building your own billing and invoicing system is highly discouraged. This is a great operation to outsource to a specialist. These vendors offer expertise in how to structure billing plans, plus all of the back office capabilities behind invoicing and collection. By outsourcing to one of these PCI compliant vendors, you will reduce the level of compliance your Cloud application will need to attain.
  • Security – The Cloud infrastructure and platform vendors must provide security, and so a base level can be assumed. But for value-add features, like application authorization features, encryption, and Single Sign On capabilities across multiple applications – look to these vendors.
  • Fabric Management – this is a space that evolves quickly, so you will need to keep up to date on new developments with these vendors. Generally, these vendors help you manage and deploy your application in the Cloud. This varies from features that allow you to design a virtual data center in a cloud, to auto-scaling an application when load increases, to monitoring Cloud servers to restart them if they fail.

Applications

  • SaaS – these vendors represent the ultimate end-game to all of this – Cloud based applications. There are thousands of them, and are traditionally known as Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. SaaS applications are available over the internet, are quick to provision a new account, are offered in a pay-as-you-go model, and allow some level of customization. NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Taleo, Concur, Workday and many others have established the space as a viable way to deliver software.

Part 4: Cloud Computing – A complex Ecosystem?

Part 2: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Part 1: Cloud Computing – A Complex Ecosystem?

Posted in Cloud Computing.

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By Jim Kaskade – May 18, 2009

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