Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

Wondering about the WAN landscape in 2010? Well, think virtualization, cloud computing and video traffic; they’ll all be part of WAN optimization this year, according to a news account that I came across recently.

Riverbed, which specializes in IT infrastructure (including WAN optimization) performance for enterprise networks, applications, and storage, predicts that this year more and more end users will demand to connect to corporate resources – no matter where they’re working. Among its forecast, it said: “As more cloud and virtualization projects come to fruition, users will be further away from their data. More vendors including Riverbed will step up to provide offerings for the cloud that address several key issues including service availability, data and vendor lock-in, security, data transfer bottlenecks and performance unpredictability.”

Sounds like much-needed help in a world where SaaS providers like Google get attacked in cyberspace because their cloud app (Gmail) customers are political dissidents. Safety, security of data – those are the kind of assurances that companies want about the cloud. Seems like I can’t say this enough!

More demand for WAN-optimized solutions will come, too, because the growing inventory of apps traversing the cloud will be content-rich, real-time and bandwidth-intensive, “as the use of collaboration and Web 2.0 applications become more widely utilized across distributed enterprises and virtual workgroups,” said Adam Davison, vice president of corporate sales and marketing at Expand Networks, in the story.

And Davison makes a good point that – in the face of increased demand for advanced WAN optimization solutions – IT folks are “already realizing that it is no longer just about providing acceleration, but about enabling enhanced levels of traffic visibility and control, and assuring the quality of the user experience across all these complex environments.”

So, seeking greater adherence to SLAs is part of the future, too, I’m glad to see. That’s a trend that I can confirm, too, providing monitoring services to companies whose end goal is to provide their customers with a seamless and positive solution.

Watch out Google Docs. I read about a service from Box.net (offered via a company called Increo Solutions that Box.net has acquired) that allows users to upload and view the content of a wide variety of files as well as share and embed files across the Internet.

There’s also an embedded viewer that lets you see all the files, just like you’d see in Google Docs (Personally, I like the above viewer better).

Why is embedding files anywhere on a website news-worthy or notable? As noted on readwriteweb.com, it’s one thing to upload and share documents online, but downloading them carries issues for companies and end-users.

For one, a company, out of concern for privacy, may not want their documents to be downloaded. Another: sometimes end-users just want the convenience of viewing something online, and that’s the extent of it – they don’t want to download it. They’re the ‘less-is-more’ kind. They don’t even like to carry around thumb drives.

But today’s workforce is different from that of even a few years ago. There are more home-based workers, and, much to Apple’s delight, iPhone sales (and other smart phones) are going through the roof. In short, people now have easier ways to access and collaborate on documents. That’s why these tools, from the likes of Box.net and Google are so important – and needed—these days.

Apparently, this ability to store, upload, collaborate and download (if one so chooses), is being called “cloud content management” by Box.net, yet another cloud buzzword.

If cloud content management (permit me to invent the acronym: CCM.) works smoothly, that gives enterprises and end-users a tremendous boost of confidence in the cloud, and I applaud that. But there are plenty of IT folks at both growing and large companies alike that still have reservations about the soundness and security of the cloud – whether it’s over the reliability of a platform or the safety of data.

So, even as these CCM tools multiply, so will services like cloud data center and cloud platform monitoring.

Imagine yourself as an IT superman, and on your best day, configuring 50 or so desktops at your company. That would be pretty impressive, I’d say.

Now, imagine process automation that can ramp up thousands of virtual machines in less than a month. In this age of virtualization, this is a reality now with products such as Surgient’s Cloud Express suite of tools that allows IT organizations to do just that.

I read about this new development by Austin, TX-based Surgient on CTOedge, and the goal is to provide companies with a turnkey set of systems management tools automating the provisioning of virtual servers across massive cloud computing deployments. That’s according to Brian Wilson, Surgient’s VP of services and support.

So, you may ask, why is this capacity so important in today’s computing environment? Well, like everybody else in the corporate world these days, IT has to cut costs, and that often means labor, unfortunately.  Meanwhile, the number of virtual servers that organizations need to deploy or implement keeps on climbing. And so companies need to employ the latest IT automation tools that do the job of the system manager.

I don’t like to see anybody – and their skill set – replaced, but this is the kind of technology that companies need today to increase efficiencies on a grand scale and stay competitive. And I suppose the more competitive that companies remain, the better able they’ll be to expand and grow and then, perhaps, take on more IT specialists to focus on other areas. It’s a vicious cycle.

Meanwhile, companies, especially small businesses, continue to seek out services, such as automation to monitor websites, that allows them to do more with little or no IT support staff. And the cloud is the perfect infrastructure model because IT tasks like monitoring can be done 24/7 and from anywhere in the world – not just one location.

Local and national governments around the world continue to migrate data and productivity applications to the Cloud – as part of initiatives to save money and make processes more efficient.

We’ve certainly seen cloud computing initiatives in the U.S., for example, the city of L.A.’s migration this year from internal email to Google’s Gmail – a move expected to save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years. And cities around the U.S. are considering conversion to the cloud, too.

National governments, too, are developing private clouds. The U.S. announced its Apps.gov initiative last year (Google’s handling this one), and the Japanese have built an infrastructure dubbed the Kasumigaseki Cloud.

But now, from across the pond (the Atlantic ocean, that is) comes news that the U.K. government plans to save more than £3 billion pounds yearly by 2013/14 by sharing software and IT services in the cloud. The British want to build a government-wide cloud computing platform (to be called the G-Cloud) and an application store, among other IT strategies.

Right now, Whitehall (as the government sector is known) runs on hundreds of data centers and tens of separate networks. And that’s just not going to work going forward, according to Government CIO John Suffolk, in a story about the initiative. Here’s more on how the U.K. government would save: right now, public sector agencies buy many separate versions of the same type of software packages, serving common departments such as HR and finance, as well as much of the same IT infrastructure. But the centralized G-Cloud would allow the public bodies to reuse the same software applications.

The British G-Cloud would slash the number of data centers from hundreds to about 12, which would save British taxpayers about £300 million pounds per year and cut server power and cooling costs by 75%. Plus, the G-Cloud’s app store, where government agencies could re-use apps on a pay-as-you-go basis, is estimated to save another £500 million pounds per year.

Britain’s proposal is impressive, and I expect we’ll see even more cloud development by governments around the world. And as we do, we’ll see even more demand for ways to monitor cloud platforms.

It makes sense to protect your investment in a cloud provider – especially when public money is at stake.

Chief information honchos at companies are hot for cloud computing and virtualization in 2010, says a new report by Gartner.

In the study, Gartner asked CIOs to list their top technology priorities for 2010, and respondents ranked virtualization as their top area of focus. Next came cloud computing and web 2.0. That makes sense because Gartner researchers predicted that firms will invest more in hosted solutions this year and less in hardware – as budgets continue to shrink and be constrained.

And what are CIOs most concerned about? At the top of the list: business process improvement. The next biggest concern is reducing IT costs, according to the study.

I’m very happy to see that CIOs, the ones who hold the purse strings, are not just paying lip service to the cloud and virtualization. In fact, in a story I read elsewhere, Gartner has boldly predicted that one-fifth of all businesses will own absolutely no IT assets come 2012 – due to migration to cloud computing.

CIOs are getting more serious about incorporating cloud tools into their cost-saving strategies. Seems everyone wants a piece of the pie, as cloud computing and virtualization solutions continue to prove big money savers for companies, and more companies invest in the technologies.

As we start the New Year, I want to take a quick look back to review some of the incredible milestones we’ve witnessed and orchestrated here at Monitis. We’ve watched the cloud industry expand and grow – with new cloud providers launching their platforms and a variety of new service providers bringing their brands and tools to the cloud.

Last year was an incredibly successful year for Monitis, as more and more companies making the move to the cloud relied upon our monitoring services (such as external monitoring, back-end monitoring, web traffic monitoring, transaction monitoring and EC2/S3 cloud monitoring.

We grew our customer base by 400% and our revenue by 500% last year. As you might guess, I’m ecstatic about those numbers, not just because it means we’re doing better, but because it represents growth for the whole industry, too. And I think it proves growing recognition by companies that accessing services, information and apps via the cloud – but safely – is the future of IT.

One of our biggest thrills this past year happened in November, at The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference in Boston. We competed with a group of other technology companies in the event’s “Innovators Showcase,” and we gave a presentation called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere.” We won! and we were named “Most Innovative Start-Up of 2009.”

2009 was also a year of continuous enhancements and innovations to our services. I’ll list them below, and as you read through these developments and click on the links to learn more detail, you’ll be able to chart just how far we’ve come in delivering state-of-the-art, cloud-based network and systems monitoring .

I’m very proud, and I’m grateful beyond words to you, our customers. I sincerely hope you’ll help us usher in a new year of enhancements and services that, I am certain, will help you grow and expand your own businesses. We’ve got some exciting things planned!

Our 2009 Milestones:

- Launch of ‘Top 10′ service – providing network and systems engineers with a holistic view of processes and applications that are consuming the most resources, enabling them to quickly diagnose or prevent problems and properly match IT infrastructure capacity to business needs.

- Launch of asset management as a service, which automatically creates inventory of software, logs usage patterns and proactively suggests optimization to help companies reduce IT cost.

- Announcement of remote monitoring of system events.

- Launch of performance testing as a service, enabling companies to instantly run site performance tests, as well as keep historical records and manage performance scripts.

- Launch of public reporting and widgets, features that enabled our customers to make their websites’ uptime statistics publicly available – for the benefit of their own customers.

- Launch of our cloud monitoring service

- The addition of a monitoring location in China – expanding our global coverage

- The addition of a new external monitoring location within Amazon EC2 cloud network, allowing customers of the cloud provider to check their users’ web experience locally.

- Tweet alerts for network failures on Twitter

- Management Information Base (MIB) browsing for MonitorSNMP. A MIB is a type of database used to manage the devices in a communications network and comprises a collection of objects in a virtual database used to manage a network’s routers and switches.

- Introduction of remote monitoring to work on the Sun’s Solaris platform

- A free links checker service to detect broken and dead-end website links and alert users

- An interface for command-line tools to help make IT folks more productive and efficient

- A web ecosystem visualization service called WebMap, which helps IT engineers and managers understand their networks better in terms of status, health and manageability.

- Monitis S3 Monitoring, an on-demand cloud storage and usage service, enabling customers to independently monitor Amazon S3, notifying them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

- Database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

- User-friendly enhancements, such as the ability to manage all external monitors from a single, central location, enabling customers to edit network settings, monitor timeouts, change monitoring locations, schedule maintenance, and schedule and set up notification rules for all monitors from a single place.

- A new scheduling feature for our on-demand load testing

- Special holiday pricing for e-commerce monitoring – to help prevent site downtime

- MonitorSNMP, an enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring service available via the cloud

- A time-saving universal cloud monitoring framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all cloud-hosting providers including Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

- The ability for customers to create custom, end-to-end locations for server monitoring locations

- A free service to instantly check website response times from different locations

- Enterprise-class options for system failure and performance outage notification management

The new year has brought out some cool predictions on the direction of cloud computing, and there’s plenty more where that came from. A new cloud-related trend (this one on the consumer side) that I read about on the horizon is the growth of services that stream movies, TV shows, music, video games, newspapers, magazines and books on demand from the cloud to a Web-connected portable or home computing device.

That would mean the end of physical content downloaded off the Internet.

If you think this is mere cloud conjecture and more hype, consider Comcast’s recent beta launch of Fancast Xfinity – a cost-free bonus for its cable/Internet customers that streams shows from partners like HBO and Cinemax, TBS and TNT to up to three of a customer’s computers, regardless of the physical location of the computers.

And remember Apple’s recent purchase of streaming music company LaLa Media? The strategy behind Apple’s move there is to create an alternative to its file-download process – which is time consuming and confines sales to its own customer base. The LaLa acquisition will enable Apple to sell virtual copies of songs or an album via instant stream, on-demand to your chosen device – be a mobile phone, MAC or PC. Another project in the making: a streaming subscription video service over the Web to devices such as the Apple TV set-top box, challenging the cable and satellite TV industries. CBS and Disney have reportedly expressed interest, according to a recent article I read.

Among other trends in development of cloud-based consumer devices:

A new generation of tablet-like smartbook computers that are bigger than a smart phone but thinner and lighter than a netbook portable PC. Look out for them this year, say Apple insiders, notes the story. Because these tablet smartbooks won’t feature a hard drive, they’ll be energy efficient and rely on Wi-Fi or mobile phone connectivity to retrieve and store content from the cloud. The smartbooks could also be used for Internet phone and video calling.

While consumer use of the cloud is a bit off-topic for this blog, there are parallels in the business world – such as more companies putting their apps on the cloud versus keeping them on expensive and high-maintenance servers.

Whether you’re a consumer or a business, changes are coming. For consumers, the days of buying songs to store on your computer may be a coming to an end. And for businesses, the days of keeping files or apps on an internal server are ebbing.

One of the ‘hype’ messages about the Cloud is that it is green – meaning environmentally friendlier than companies running vast resource-wasting machines that need constant energy for maintenance. Well, is this merely hype, or is there any truth to the claim.

Cnet news raises the question, too, and quotes a great blog post on the subject that brings up some realistic points about the Cloud’s level of greenness. First, the problem is that is difficult to measure cloud greenness with the information that’s out there because none of the major cloud companies are providing utilization data.

I especially like this quote: “We now have the ability to run our applications on thousands of servers, but previously this wasn’t even possible. To say it another way, we can potentially use several years worth of energy in literary a few hours, where previously this wasn’t even an option.”

So, wait. Doesn’t that make Cloud computing more of an energy gobbler than companies’ current IT methods? The author says: “…hypothetically we’re using more resources, not less.”

But conversely, if companies possessed those thousand servers and ran them (underutilized), the power usage per utilized server would be significantly higher. The author adds: “But then again, buying those servers would have been out reach for most, so it’s not a fair comparison. There we are–back, at where we started. You may use 80 percent less energy per unit, but have 1,000 percent more capacity, which at the end of the day means you’re using more, not less energy.”

You might look at this issue with the U.S. Interstate Highway system in mind. Eisenhower kicked off the project in the 50s, and the development of super-highways cutting across underdeveloped lands opened those places to development – and more consumption of resources.

Another cloud blogger quoted in the cnet piece added: “…Cloud computing is all about providing standard components as services (it’s pure volume operations). The problem of course is that we will end up consuming more of these standard components because it’s so easy to do so (i.e. in old speak, there is less yak shaving) and it becomes easier to build new and more exciting services on these (standing on the shoulders of giants). ”

Certainly, there are plenty of stories out there about how governments and companies are saving and being more efficient by running apps and data centers on the cloud. But that’s not the same as green computing, is it?

But I hold out my judgment on the greenness of cloud computing until we as an industry come up with an efficient, standardized way of measuring it.

Virtual desktops – the combination of virtual access, application virtualization and virtual machine software – aren’t new, but why aren’t they in more widespread use? a recent article that I read asks.

After all, desktop virtualization offers IT folks help managing desktop systems – from dealing with both operating system and application updates to unexpected failures to security for mobile systems.

On this blog, I even wrote about the birth of a new cloud-based “D” or desktop by Sun Microsystems.

But blockages to adoption by enterprises may include the following:

- Psychological: Don’t mess with it if it “ain’t” broke, and leave well enough alone.

- In today’s world, running apps and OSs directly on physical, internal servers works – although it certainly isn’t efficient, and it’s costly. So, even though it’s not the perfect solution, lots of IT managers are afraid to change it to something they feel adds risk. Besides, most desktop virtualization approaches require changes to operation of desktop systems, applications and the like. It’s extra – and many might say unnecessary – work!

- Service issues: Even though the performance issues of virtual desktops are decreasing as time goes by, support issues are a reality – although increasingly minor on a person-to-person level. But large organizations can count up support instances and consider service a larger factor.

- Aversion to being “lassoed and dragged.” I love that quote, and bravo to the author of the piece for his creative way of describing how users of desktops issued by their company are averse to the move to virtualization because they’ve customized their systems with Twitter and the like, and they don’t want to lose that. Unfortunately, rather than deal with a whole lot of one-off conversions, IT often lassoes and drags desktop users in a standardize fashion. “People don’t like to be lassoed and dragged,” he says.

What I really connected with in this article is the last point: that the development of the cloud and the trend toward “cloud-based personal productivity applications” such as email and document and calendar management might change minds about moving to virtual environments.

I’d like to add the economic factor here, too. Yes, it’s tough to change human nature, but at some point, many companies, large and small, will be convinced of the savings and efficiencies of going virtual – in part due to the cloud – and that will add fuel to the fire of change. And once companies begin to feel comfortable with the reliability of virtualization and the cloud and cloud services (such as transaction monitoring), there will be more migration.

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.