Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

With IT – just like other corporate departments – under the gun from senior management to centralize and reap economies of scale, distributed systems seem the dream answer to cost-cutting directives from above. To be sum it all up, distributed systems offer an attractive solution – centralized control along with dispersed physical assets and overhead.

In a recent article I read, the author put it just right: “The relentlessly increasing cost and complexity of maintaining IT departments and infrastructure makes on-tap computing power very attractive to modern enterprises.”

But beyond this simple cost-efficiency based explanation of the benefits of cloud computing for businesses, here are five reasons to make the switch:

- Scalability: PaaS is the end goal of businesses moving to the cloud. It’s the idea that a platform – hosting SaaS apps, can itself be run as a service. Consumers already use the cloud in a SaaS environment. SaaS applications running on a PaaS are easy to deploy, just the opposite of the complex and difficult environment at most companies today – where companies exhaust resources and manpower deploying, maintaining, and upgrading software systems “using skills way outside their businesses’ core function of interest simply because the resulting application is indispensable,” says the story. How true! Over a grid, the power of existing systems can be scaled exponentially, maintained seamlessly, upgraded transparently, and redeployed at will.

- Speed: Grid-powered PaaS and their apps can help increase productivity and a business’s competitiveness with fast deployment of new systems or the speedy ramping up existing ones. In addition, users can tap SaaS apps the run on grid-based PaaSs from anywhere globally…fast and without any special training.

- Deployment: Developers can pare weeks off integration and configuration time with hosting environments for their cloud platforms. On-demand network computing power and storage capability means that companies don’t have to invest the bank and everything under the mattress in static hardware.

- Cost: As I said above, this is one of the biggest advantages for companies making the move to the cloud. Why? “Grids pull across projects to provide more predictability at less cost with fewer software licenses, ” says the story. On top of that, PaaS, combined with SaaS, allows businesses to pay only for the resources they actually use. And don’t’ forget about the savings from not investing in expensive hardware!

PaaS, distributed computing infrastructure and virtualization are working together to create powerful and fast networks. It’s the imaginative and powerful apps, managed services, such as network, server and transaction monitoring, and end-user apps that will complete the picture to bring about a true cloud revolution.

It’s becoming more and more apparent daily that Microsoft is betting heavily on the future of cloud computing.

The big cloud-based news that came out of Microsoft was back in the fall, when it launched Azure, the lynchpin of its cloud-computing strategy.

But now, The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is creating a new unit, called the Server and Cloud division by merging two existing sub-units within its broader server and tools business: “the Windows Azure group, which has driven the launch of its cloud-computing program, and the Windows Server and Solutions Group.”

According to the story, the new division will be headed by Amitabh Srivastava, who reports to Server and Solutions Group head Bob Muglia.

Microsoft made the announcement on its internal blog.

Tivoli Live Monitoring Services – that’s the name of IBM’s new cloud-based monitoring suite for data centers that it has built for IT administrators. IBM’s aim is to give IT folks a central point of control to monitor network activity and help prevent outages, which is not healthy for data centers – as we know.

IBM’s new product gives businesses a snapshot view of all their different operating systems, virtualized servers, middleware and software and software applications.

“With digital information as the lifeblood of more organizations, even the smallest companies or divisions consider the datacenter’s functionality mission-critical,” Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli, said in a statement from the company.

According to a press report that I read about the new product, the new monitoring service will help “quickly identify and address potential outages and bottlenecks that threaten application availability before impacting end-users.” Tivoli, available on IBM’s cloud, also alerts IT operations when the service detects a potential problem and it gives dashboard data to help administrators analyze and correct the issue.

Even though Big Blue is a late-comer in SaaS launchings, versus companies like Google (with its Apps and Docs), Tivoli represents the latest in a general ramping up of SaaS offerings by the company. Recently, IBM issued another cloud-based product (Blue Insight) that lets users analyze and distribute business intelligence and analytics applications.

Of course, there are already many great monitoring solutions out there that are providing businesses that move apps and databases to the cloud with an extra measure of comfort and reliability. Here at Monitis, we’re seeing incredible demand from website owners and businesses that need stable, 24/7 monitoring of everything from transactions to servers and networks, even printers – and from the cloud.

Who knows, perhaps Big Blue even took a look at us (and companies like us), and spying our growing success, decided that this was a game they needed to be part of?

There’s a great, although somewhat scientifically-centric story on the future of cloud computing that’s worth reading.

Essentially, the story asks: “Is cloud computing a useful computational platform for the computational problems you and your institution need to address?”  In other words, why is computing on the cloud better than maintaining internal servers, hardware and all the resources needed to support them?

Right off the bat, the story points out a great reason: “Through the use of pre-configured virtual machines, scientists avoid any of the technical issues associated with getting an application to run — they just use it.”

But a good point to consider is that, since cloud computing is on the Web, the first and most obvious question to ask is whether the Internet connection used by your cloud computing service provides enough bandwidth to handle your app demands. And does it add too much latency? This author says that the cloud was designed as a “latency-tolerant network,” and may not be suitable for certain users – such as scientific and HPC computing. Interestingly, he points out that “many HPC algorithms and applications… bottleneck and die” even after just a few microseconds.

But for many other types of users, enterprises from large corporations to small and mid-sized web-based businesses, cloud providers offer plenty of bandwidth – even considering the presence of virtual machines. VMs can add to latency issues because of the time-sharing nature of their underlying hardware. This is so even though users may never have a clue of a VM failure running in a cloud environment. Some cloud computing providers take snapshots of the VMS as they run jobs, and if the hardware fails for one VM, then all can be restarted from that snapshot.

But while the author of this article may have mixed feelings about the cloud for the scientific community, he underscores, however, that “one strong appeal of cloud computing” is the simplicity of contracting with an Internet provider to access a lot of free-floating computational resources. It’s an “astounding bang for the buck” platform that needs very little capital expenditure, he notes.

Further he gives a boost to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as one example of a cloud computing service that is available to the scientific community, as users can specify VMS that can run on unused hardware resources within their datacenters as those resources become available. This way, scientists only pay for those resources they actually use.

That’s a key benefit of the cloud for all users – not just scientists, I might add.

In the end, after an analysis of the cloud for scientific computing, he adds: “The future looks bright, although there are some big clouds out there! Happy “cloud” computing.”

I, as the owner of a cloud-computing service provider who takes great care to provide proper bandwidth, security, cost-savings and other benefits to my customers, couldn’t agree more.

Oh, no, say it isn’t so.

I read where users of the fast-selling Windows 7 are resorting to re-installing the software – which facilitates different aspects of cloud computing – because they’re seeing a totally black screen after logging on to the system.

It’s being called the “black screen of death,” and it’s not the kind of dark stain that Windows needs now, especially as it paves the road to cloud computing with Azure.

According to a news story I read on the “black screen of death,” Microsoft said it was checking out whether its latest security update, issued on November 10th, caused the problem.

I heard that the flaw also affects Vista, XP and other operating systems, and that millions of people may have been affected.

The “black screen of death” moniker is a play on the “blue screen of death,” which appears when Microsoft operating systems crash.

As of this posting, no fix has been issued by Microsoft.

A new report released on November 20^th by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) outlines the benefits and potential pitfalls of cloud computing. The 123-page report, “Cloud Computing: Benefits, Risks and Recommendations for Information Security,” offers recommendations to businesses on how to minimize the security risks of trusing their data to a cloud provider.

This report seems right on time, as more companies turn to the cloud to do business, drawn by lower maintenance and costs. Analysts IDC expects worldwide spending on cloud services to hit $17.4 billion, climbing to $44.2 billion by 2013.

The ENISA report spells out the risks of, well, risk, on cloud computing. While cloud-service providers offer 24/7 availability, data centers can go down. And customers relinquish security – which they previously handled on their own – to providers.

It also discusses the dangers of customers becoming dependent on a single provider, facing challenges if they want to move data and apps to a different provider. Further, companies could face risks from regulatory audits on the data they keep on the cloud, the report said. And, because we all know that tasks lists tend to be bigger than what we actually get done, some cloud providers may not fully or properly delete data when a customer requests it.

In its report, ENISA outlines measures that companies can take to safeguard their security when dealing with cloud-service providers.

It recommends that firms perform risk assessments, essentially comparing the potential risks of storing data in the cloud against keeping files in an internal data center. It’s a good idea to also compare different cloud providers to narrow the list and then obtain service-level assurances from selected providers. It says, too, that customers should clearly specify which services and tasks are to be handled by internal IT and which by its cloud provider.

I recommend, too, that companies making the leap to the cloud employ 24/7
website and server monitoring services that can warn customers if cyber crooks are attempting unauthorized access to data or trying to breach firewalls.

ENISA even provides a checklist and detailed questions that customers can use when shopping for a cloud provider.

This is a great read; I encourage you to take a look at the full report on cloud security.

One of the great things about cloud computing is its “pay for what you need” model. In these difficult economic times, that’s a huge appeal for cost-conscious companies.

And it seems that, more and more, cloud service providers are recognizing that appeal. For example, AT&T recently said it will unveil a product by year’s end called Synaptic Compute as a Service, which lets businesses buy more computing capacity when they need it.

According to a story about the offering on Cnet.com, AT&T designed it to enable IT people to store and maintain internal applications and data via AT&T’s cloud. “Capacity and availability can be ramped up when needed, especially if a company’s own data center resources become taxed,” AT&T said in the story.

“The service is designed is to help businesses save money by not having to maintain full network capacity year-round if demand only shoots up during certain times of the year,” according to the story.

One other development that caught my eye here: With Synaptic Compute, AT&T’s customers can seamlessly access software and content they need – whether stored internally or on AT&T’s network cloud.

That ability to help companies who have one foot in its internal servers and another out on the cloud is tremendously valuable. I think this is a huge differentiator for cloud services companies these days.

Take monitoring services. Some firms can only monitor and report on transactions, servers , networks, databases and other metrics over companies’ internal servers. Others, like our company, have the ability to be a watchdog for companies on both their internal servers and cloud-based infrastructure.