Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

In late September, an announcement was made that will make cloud deployment and systems integration easier.

A partnership was struck between an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider company WaveMaker Software, and cloud computing management firm RightScale. The deal brings together WaveMaker’s open-source visual development platform and RightScale’s Cloud Management Platform.

Why is that newsworthy? It’s partnerships like these that make it easier for businesses to deploy and manage applications on the cloud. WaveMaker allows users to skip the coding when customizing apps on a multi-tenant framework, and they can drag-and-drop their apps and data on clouds managed via the RightScale platform.

So, if you’re a company without the IT resources to dedicate to complex deployments and management, this is the kind of arrangement that will give you scalability and make cloud computing cost-effective.

Cloud computing offerings made possible by the WaveMaker and RightScale integration have become increasingly popular, and are expected to multiply. One estimate of the market: Telecom Trends International recently projected that the cloud computing market will generate $45.5 billion in revenue by 2015.

Read more about cloud deployment and systems integration.

I can only imagine the anger and frustration of customers of T-Mobile Sidekick. Earlier this month, many lost pictures, contact numbers, calendar dates and other data on the Microsoft cloud server Microsoft/Danger. This is yet another setback for consumer cloud users, following a recent Google Gmail outage and other fiascos.

In an Oct. 12th press release put out by T-Mobile and MS, the company thanked customers for their patience and noted that service had been restored to most and that hard-working teams were re-establishing full stability. T-Mobile and MS said they would continue to try and recover lost content and that “recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible.” At the same time, it acknowledged that some may never recover their data.

Cloud computing defenders say that losses like these can easily be avoided by backing up customers’ data – something that individual PC users are continually urged to do to save their own internally stored files and information.

I agree. Website monitoring can help, too, by alerting companies when they’re approaching usage thresholds and keeping track of access highs and lows.

I think, too, that, whether you’re talking about cloud computing for consumers or businesses, we need more industry-established standards, security and safety guarantees and such to bring more users – consumers and businesses — to the cloud. We won’t get them without more confidence out there in the very concept and workability of the cloud.

This week, at the Oracle OpenWorld show, LoadSpring Solutions, which makes enterprise software hosting solutions, will preview Version 5 of its proprietary SpringBoard Control Console – the security and administrative Internet portal. SpringBoard gives project managers and IT departments secure access and functionality for running specialized project management apps for organizational teams across the world.

Some of the new enhancements:

1) Customization – enabling users to move applets to different locations within the portal that best supports their work processes.

2) Project site applets – allowing project teams to share site weather and deadline information. Site pictures, video streaming, and RSS Feeds can be uploaded for visual display.

3) A federated services and single-sign-on (SSO) functionality option – the combination of which allows enterprises to integrate their user names and password information automatically from desktop to application sign-on. It’s secure, and can be done from anywhere in the world.

I think LoadSpring’s announcement represents a growing new way of thinking about hosting solutions. Just accessing apps is nothing extraordinary anymore. Now, it’s all about building solutions to help project managers and IT teams make better, timelier decisions, enabling easy collaboration and adding efficiency to the game.

Have you registered yet for Oracle OpenWorld?

I thought it was interesting to read about the ‘future think’ behind Citrix’s new XenDesktop 4 virtualization software. Citrix this week unveiled software that will give users access to hi-def desktops from anywhere, and including from PCS, Macs, thin clients, laptops, netbooks and even smartphones..

The company is gambling that Windows 7 will feed more demand for desktop virtualization software, and it recognizes that a traditional PC linked to an office or laptop belongs to, well, the Lincoln administration.

“Today, the world is flat and small,” said Raj Dhingra, XenDesktop general manager at Citrix, in a recent story about virtualization software.  “We need to work in entirely different ways than before. A traditional PC that is locked to an office or a laptop is too confining.”

Citrix’s all-devices strategy follows its moves bringing virtual apps to the iPhone earlier this year.

Apparently, the latest XenDesktop version comes with a range of server-and client-side virtualization options, including offline desktops hosted in local virtual machines; desktops hosted on blade PCs; hosted desktops based in virtualized servers; and hosted shared desktops.

But what I found equally interesting to read was that the desktop virtualization market has lots of room for growth. Did you know that fewer than 10% of data centers worldwide have virtualized desktops? That’s what analysts at ITIC say.

But nearly one-third of customers plan to virtualize in 2010, according to an ITIC poll of 400 corporations mentioned in the story.

Is your company virtualized – or on its way? Or have you chosen a different route?

IBM: only three little initials, but a huge enterprise presence. That’s why it’s recent unveiling of a cloud-based email service application is such big news.

It’s called IBM Lotus Live iNotes, and it’s the company’s “first real foray into a mass-market cloud-based service,” according to a recent story that caught my eye. The solution includes e-mail, calendaring, and contact management, and it is designed to work with existing on-premise, e-mail. Or, it can operate stand-alone. Per user pricing will start at just $3 per month.

The company’s thinking behind creating IBM Lotus Live iNotes, according to the story I read, is that it reduces the cost of running applications for companies. Also, it will reduce the burden on IT people to make it possible for people both within and beyond their organizations to share data, such as documents and files.

OK, say you don’t like Lotus Notes, or even IBM, particularly. And so what if Yahoo and Google already have such animals launched and in operation. The fact that IBM has created this app-hosted cloud is big news for cloud computing. Heck, at least I think so.

You’ve heard of software-as- a- service (SaaS), platform-as- a- service (Paas) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), but what’s the fourth type of cloud computing. I hear that several vendors are positioning services as such to gain marketing traction. But just what is it?

Apparently, they are advisory or development consulting services. But Dan Kuznetsky of ZDNet doesn’t consider these true cloud computing formats because to be a true cloud, a few things need to be present. As a primer, I thought I’d share:

A – APIs must be available so that companies or organizations can develop their own management environments;

B – You need a Web-based management environment to enable organizations to operate and administer all functions of a subscriber’s cloud environment;

C – Subscribers should have access to very granular accounting and costing information that allow them a detailed  level of control and the creation of chargeback mechanisms.

D – The cloud environment must be scalable and elastic – allowing subscribers to control their use of cloud resources.

E – There should be a set of self-service tools available that can be very quickly used.

F – The cloud should exist virtually, and the hardware supplier should be independent.

Dan thinks a fourth type of legitimate cloud computing could exist, for example, a service that would front-end multiple kinds of offerings and allow automatic deployment across numerous cloud computing supplier environments. “This approach would support workload management, workload service level management, workload failover and the like.”

Interesting! What do you think could be a fourth type of cloud computing?

If you’re a Chevy Chase fan, you know that, in the movie, National Lampoon’s Vacation, his wife’s cousin Eddie plays a bothersome, uncouth mooch – on the trashy side, too.

Well, I stumbled upon a blog post that talked about virtual machines as a problem for developers, not the answer, and that the real path to salvation will come when we murder OS and adopt fast, efficient platform-centric cloud computing. Here’s a classic quote from the post:

“VMs have certainly allowed us to (literally) think outside the box about how we characterize “workloads” and have enabled us to begin talking about how we make them somewhat mobile, portable, interoperable, easy to describe, inventory and in some cases more secure. Cool. There’s still a pile of crap inside ‘em. What do I mean? There’s a bloated, parasitic resource-gobbling cancer inside every VM.  For the most part, it’s the real reason we even have mass market virtualization today. It’s called the operating system.

“If we didn’t have resource-inefficient operating systems, handicapped applications that were incestuously hooked to them, and tons of legacy networking stuff to deal with that unholy affinity, imagine the fun we could have.  Imagine how agile and flexible we could become.”

The author is saying that virtualization is just a band aid because the real answer is to get rid of greed, moochy, resource-hungry operating systems and embrace the PaaS world, for instance the platform-oriented cloud.

He goes onto say that Cloud v1.0 “with all it’s froth and hype” will pale in comparison to Cloud 2.0 — “the revenge of SOA, web services, BPM, enterprise architecture and the developer. “ He warns, though: “… the protocols and models for how applications interact with the network are sure going to change and accelerate due to Cloud — at least they should.”

Looks like infrastructure folks will need to stay on top of things as we say goodbye to OS, virtual machines and hello to the cloud, or cloud2.0!

The world is sure spinning fast these days. Breathe!

The cloud is becoming more of a reality by the minute, as prestigious companies line up to become part of the future. The latest is Professional services specialist Deloitte. I read that their Australian division is investing some $10 million to transition to a single data center (down from two), and at the same time, starting its journey toward developing a cloud platform for internal use and for customers, too.

Deloitte is already heavily virtualized, at 40% of servers, and after the transition to a single center, that number should reach 60%. In the story, a company spokesman said: “Our longer term target is for just about everything to be virtualized.”

Also, more interestingly, Deloitte plans on building an internal on-demand cloud to support both internal and client needs.  Deloitte’s construction will also involve creating a high-speed (10 GBit) dark fiber connection between Sydney and Melbourne, where the bulk of Deloitte’s staff are based.

Driving much of Deloitte’s infrastructure construction is the growing need to store and manage data for clients.  Growth in demand for electronic discovery and data analytics services has led to a 400% growth in storage capacity at the firm – “with a couple of hundred terabytes of data being held online,” the spokesman said.

Dramatizing this situation, the article said Deloitte has one client with 20,000 back-up tapes – “and they need a provider able to reconstitute, de-duplicate and access this information.”

It’s always exciting to me to read about companies finally recognizing that they need to switch from old-fashioned multiple server set ups and embrace virtualization and cloud computing.  I think it’s great that Deloitte is making its moves, and smart of them, too, to recognize the giant wave that’s building for third-party data management among corporations.

I read an interesting article that quoted a government official on how much U.S. taxpayers will save by the government’s migration to the cloud. In it, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, was quoted as saying:

"We’ve been building data center after data center, acquiring application after application, and frankly, what’s that done is it’s driven the cost and investments in technology across the board. ”We cannot continue in this trajectory." He said that the government spends $19 billion out of a $76 billion federal information technology budget on infrastructure, and much of that is duplicative.

Cloud computing, putting commonly used software into a shared set of servers and letting agencies buy and use only what they need, will bring down costs drastically. The U.S. has already created Apps.gov  – which frees the government from building and maintaining software and infrastructure and enables it to buy technology from third parties.

One example of cloud computing success in the government sector is USA.gov, a listing of government information and jobs. It cost about $2.5 million yearly to maintain, but, In May, the U.S. moved it to the cloud, and taxpayers now foot a maintenance bill for $800,000 per year.

It’s very encouraging to see numbers like this, and I hope that different government agencies continue to move their databases and apps on the cloud. The U.S. is not only making its operations more efficient, but they’re saving us money, too.

There’s no doubt in my mind that cloud computing is reshaping the IT world and that more and more companies are convinced of its efficiencies and cost-savings. For example, with the cloud, there’s no need to manage complex systems underlying apps and databases, and you only pay for what you use.

Nevertheless, it’s worth remaining cautious before jumping on the cloud bandwagon, as there are no established standards yet. Here are a few points to consider:

- Security – Make sure your provider is registered as a data processor under the Data Protection Act (EU equivalent or US Safe Harbour) because you want to be able to trust whether that company is safely handling your customer files and other sensitive data.  Check into their policies and procedures on transferring, protecting and recovering data, as well as how they keep it confidential.

- Service – Get a service-level agreement. This will concretely define your expectations on minimum levels of service provided as well as compensation should your provider fail to keep their end of the bargain – for example, failed access to your data or apps.

- Speed – Consider whether your internet bandwidth can handle the increase in volume once you switch to cloud services. If not, you may want to consider alternate or multiple services.

-  Cost – Ask how much it’ll cost you to get off the cloud (if you must), for example, if you want to switch to another provider.  And will you be able to get your data back? These are important factors to consider.

Once we see more standards established in cloud computing, these issues will become less important. But it’s a good idea to be prepared and cautious when considering a move to the cloud.

The U.K.’s Telegraph has more to say on cloud computing risk. Check it out.