Mereja

Author: Gary Orenstein

  • Doubling Down on Scale-out Storage

    NetApp this week agreed to acquire Bycast, whose storage virtualization is used for large-scale digital archives and storage clouds — yet another investment by a major systems provider in scale-out storage aimed at tackling the growth of unstructured data. But while big systems vendors realize they need a new approach to solve the workloads generated by the web, cloud and data-intensive applications, are they really ready to ride the commodity hardware cost curve embraced by large web and cloud providers?

    Scale-out storage differs from traditional scale-up architectures in that it horizontally adds new storage nodes (servers with internal disks) instead of vertically aggregating lots of individual disk drives behind one or two super-sized controller servers. Scale-out further implies a corresponding software layer that can make hundreds or thousands of nodes act like a single system. It has the potential to change the shape of the data center by displacing large, costly enterprise equipment with an easily sized pool of inexpensive servers.

    Google and other web giants have found great success with scale-out approaches. Indeed, for web and cloud computing workloads, increases in users, objects, and capacities drive a need for innovative scaling approaches at low costs, and scale-out storage, by leveraging commodity hardware, fits the bill. (Data storage is just one of the issues we’ll be taking an in-depth look at June 23-24 at the GigaOM Network’s Structure conference in San Francisco.)

    The race to capitalize on high-growth, scale-out data markets has led NetApp, HP and EMC to be spearhead acquisitions and new product development in this sector. In 2003 NetApp also acquired Spinnaker, which at the time was positioned primarily as a way to aggregate multiple file systems into a single larger file system, or what’s known as a single global namespace. The Spinnaker product resulted in a “tortuous integration effort” according to some, and obviously didn’t fit all of NetApp’s needs when it came to providing scale-out storage, hence the Bycast buy.

    HP, similarly, has been around this block a couple of times before. In 2007 the company acquired Polyserve, a clustered file system that had integrated with Oracle solutions, and then in 2009 bought IBRIX, a scale-out storage provider with solid penetration in the animation arena.

    EMC, meanwhile, has also had multiple product plays at work. Its first effort to tackle these new scale-out object-based workloads was Centera, which it positioned as a content-aware storage solution. More recently, EMC’s been working on Atmos, a cloud storage product aimed at turning service providers into purveyors of terabytes online.

    For NetApp, one of the appealing features about Bycast’s offering is that it doesn’t necessarily replace the underlying storage systems, but rather aggregates existing solutions, including those by NetApp. IBRIX, which was once adopted by customers on a range of hardware platforms including a long relationship with Dell before the HP acquisition, now seems to be tightly packed with HP hardware. And EMC’s offerings do not come in a software-only flavor.

    It seems like the appetite to reach the scale-out storage market is still carefully balanced with the existing product lines and systems that form the lifeblood of big vendor sales. But these moves also signal a recognition that scale-out is here to stay, and that NetApp, along with other major systems vendors, will not stop at one acquisition or product to capture the market.

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    Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show.

  • The Cloud Collaboration Wars Ramp Up

    Following a string of acquisitions, new product development and vendor chest pounding this year, the cloud collaboration wars are shaping up to be a key competitive battleground. Cloud computing providers are fortifying their positions, aiming to be one-stop shops for enterprises to shed internal infrastructure and move to online collaboration and communications. With this market focused heavily on software capabilities, and a healthy ecosystem of smaller players and startups filling in the gaps, watch this space carefully for more consolidation and acquisitions.

    Cloud collaboration has now expanded beyond the core of e-mail communications to include social networking, group content creation and management, presentation sharing, project management, integrated voice and video, calendaring, scheduling and more. Let’s take a look at the big players and other possible entrants.

    Microsoft

    Microsoft is the undisputed legacy king of enterprise communications with its Exchange mail platform, which continues to hold ground in some part because so many users have been weaned on the Outlook interface. Now Microsoft has put its marketing muscle behind its Business Productivity Online suite which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. Microsoft hosts these services, but sells them directly and through partners.

    Anxious to defend its turf, the company has launched a competitor-focused website WhyMicrosoft.org WhyMicrosoft, which explicitly details the benefits of the Microsoft offering over IBM, Google Apps, OpenOffice, and interestingly, Cisco. The installed base, breadth of platform, and user-addiction factors are likely to favor Microsoft for the short term, but its leading position is by no means guaranteed.

    IBM

    In January, IBM hit the PR accelerator when it announced that Panasonic had chosen LotusLive, planning to eventually convert 380,000 employees to web-based mail. Claiming it as the industry’s largest cloud-computing contract, the deal gives IBM and LotusLive a renewed lease to play in the cloud collaboration space, and according to reports, also includes other online collaboration offerings such as  calendars, web meetings, file sharing, and social networking. Few companies have the size and scope of IBM to help enterprises of this size manage these implementations worldwide, so expect to see IBM continue with global deals that wrap LotusLive into a giant package of outsourced IT services.

    Google

    Perhaps the most exciting cloud collaboration offering from a product perspective is Google Apps, which includes Mail, Docs, Groups, Sites, and Video. While certainly lagging in some of the functionality delivered by Microsoft, Google continues to add new features at a blistering pace. The company has its own enterprise customer roster and has been actively promoting Google Apps through its Gone Google campaign.

    While traditionalists claim that Google’s offerings lack the sophisticated capabilities of Exchange or Office, many see them as light years ahead on the collaboration side. Anyone who has jointly edited a Google Doc should be able to attest to that. And as the world seems to move away from the benefits of fancy font formatting to the speed and efficiency of easy sharing, Google might be in the best position to capitalize on the cloud collaboration race. But perhaps the dark horse is Google’s mobile strategy. Android and the NexusOne phone already appear to be more innovative than Windows Mobile competition, and the integration with Google Apps could dramatically accelerate business adoption.

    VMware / Zimbra

    VMware boldly entered the cloud collaboration race when it acquired Zimbra in January. Largely hidden within Yahoo! from its initial acquisition, Zimbra will now get the support needed to emerge on the grander stage. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite has one of the most interesting deployment models in the industry. By providing compatitibility with a variety of mail clients such as Outlook and Apple Mail, Zimbra leaps over the competition by eliminating the troublesome issue of asking users to give up their familiar mail program interfaces.

    It should be noted, too, that the top three executives listed on the VMware leadership page have a combined 47 years of experience at Microsoft. These folks know how Microsoft profited from communications and collaboration products, and are likely to be in a good position to chip away at that market position.

    Others

    Without a formidable e-mail offering, many of the other collaboration players are relegated to fill in elsewhere. Oracle plans to develop Oracle Cloud Office following the OpenOffice aquisition through Sun to integrate desktop, web and mobile interaction. And Cisco will approach the market through its unified communications offerings and WebEx products.

    Let’s also remember that collaboration habits are changing. As we move away from e-mail to other communications mechanisms like instant messaging, Facebook, and Twitter, perhaps the dominance of the e-mail core will evaporate. Salesforce.com is taking this approach with the introduction of Chatter, leapfrogging the e-mail playing field entirely to social communications.

    Meanwhile, the open source and freeware worlds are waking up to the promise of online collaboration, and there are many free, standalone cloud collaboration products. We covered many useful ones here.

    There is still a long road to hoe for many users to give up their affinity for Microsoft Outlook and Office. But it appears that now, more than ever, cloud collaboration could turn the tides toward a new slate of solutions.

  • Why Azure Could Help Drive Cloud Revenue in 2010

    Azure, the cloud computing platform that Microsoft rolled out this week, could drive significant cloud revenues in 2010, as the company is more uniquely positioned to serve the needs of enterprise customers than any other large-scale cloud provider to date.

    Microsoft has been selling software to enterprises since its inception; it’s in Redmond’s DNA to offer solutions to many of the deepest installed bases in the world. And its well-established focus on the developer community means it knows how to make application development surrounding software platforms work well. Add to that the fact that the company has deep pockets, which means it could afford to give Azure offerings away until it gains momentum.

    To get a better sense of Azure adoption and use, I spoke with Grant Leathers, director of enterprise infrastructure, and Andy Lapin, director of enterprise architecture, at Kelley Blue Book, which operates the popular car site www.kbb.com. As both longstanding Microsoft customers and Azure alpha customers, they have been following Azure developments since the beginning and have a clear, compelling and — I believe — soon-to-be common use case.

    The www.kbb.com web site serves some 14 million monthly users and requires two data centers. Its preferred method of operation involves running a primary “hot” site, then backing it up with a secondary “warm” site which can be used in disaster recovery scenarios. However, since there is relatively good uptime at the primary site, the secondary site implies dozens of systems that are sitting idle most of the time. So the opportunity to move this entire secondary infrastructure into a cloud service that could spin up or down as needed could eliminate the need for a second physical facility.

    For Kelley Blue Book, the value proposition surrounding cloud computing has always been clear. “When you compute out the cost of a cloud option compared to hosting the backup site yourself, the savings are obvious,” said Lapin. “Just think about the servers, maintenance, power and space costs. All of that goes away and only a fraction of that spending is needed to spin up a similar cloud-based infrastructure.” It currently has a working www.kbb.com replica in the cloud, and has especially benefited from integration with Visual Studio, which allowed for the reuse of existing skill sets as well as easy porting of local applications.

    “The other way that we plan to use Azure is when we launch new products,” said Leathers. “We currently spend a lot of time calculating projected user growth to server requirements and much of that forecasting can now go away. We can launch in the cloud with 5-10 servers and if we need 10 more, they’re just a few clicks away. All of our learning can occur in the cloud with the ability to add capacity on demand.”

    Not everything is perfect, however. While Kelley Blue Book has seen great scalability coming from the compute size of Azure, the SQL Azure scaling options are limited to smaller database sizes, essentially restricting some powerful, data-heavy applications from cloud deployments. And the performance and management tools for Azure seem to lag the core offerings.

    But overall, Kelley Blue Book’s experience with Azure has met their expectations, allowing them to leverage business and technology relationships with Microsoft while jumping in to cloud computing with a relatively simple, straightforward use case.

    Microsoft is unquestionably late to the cloud computing party compared to Amazon, Rackspace and Google. But the combination of an enterprise software sales culture, a massive installed software base, and developer-friendly approaches will likely mean even more companies adopt Azure in 2010, turning it into a significant driver of cloud revenue.

    Image courtesy of Flickr user Carlos Gutiérrez G.

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  • Forecast for 2010: The Rise of Hybrid Clouds

    For companies protective of their IT operations and data, wholesale public cloud computing adoption can be a difficult pill to swallow. But cloud momentum is too strong a trend to ignore. Enter the hybrid cloud — a panacea of sorts, enabling companies to maintain a mix of on-premise and off-premise cloud computing resources, both public and private, managed through a common framework to simplify operations. This concept has steadily gathered steam over the last year and a half, and now appears poised to capture the minds, and wallets, of corporations in 2010.

    First, let’s take a look at the reasons leading corporations to consider hybrid clouds, then the means for them to get there. Data security and control are most frequently mentioned as the drivers for corporations to own and manage a portion of their infrastructure. Most corporations have longstanding cultural biases toward keeping core IT assets in-house that are unlikely to change anytime soon.

    That said, companies also want to take advantage of public cloud resources. One reason hybrid clouds are proliferating is to enable “cloudbursting,” or the ability to seamlessly and automatically grow workloads into public cloud resources for a period of time, and then decommission them once the heavy loads subside. For industries such as finance and health care, compliance regulations limit the number of public cloud offerings they can use, forcing some of their infrastructure to remain in-house.

    Simple negotiating leverage will lead companies not to put all of their eggs in one public cloud basket, and maintaining private infrastructure provides one way to control, although not necessarily minimize, infrastructure costs. Also, the demands of a typical enterprise do not have the wide load swings of web applications, and in the cases where resource demand can be forecasted, owning infrastructure as a financed capital expense can be more advantageous than high monthly operating expenses.

    The hybrid cloud market is being addressed by large technology vendors as well as open-source software projects in what might be classified as the ultimate battle between lock-in and unlock. On the large vendor side, VMware has been busy enabling both enterprises and service providers with a range of virtualization tools to deliver migration of virtual machines between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures. The company’s vCloud Express initiative allows service providers to offer infrastructure as a service offerings for enterprises while maintaining compatibility with internal VMware deployments.

    HP recently announced three offerings aimed at companies using both physical on-premise and cloud servers, including HP Operations Orchestration for provisioning, HP Cloud Assure for cost control, and HP Communications as a Service for service providers to offer small businesses on-demand solutions.

    Microsoft has focused its Azure cloud platform on enterprises that can use the same Windows and .NET development frameworks on services internally and on the cloud. See our posts “Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line” and “Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010?” Even Amazon has started to reach towards hybrid deployment models with its Virtual Private Cloud service positioned as “a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.”

    Approaching the market from another direction is a set of companies and open-source software projects that provide on-premise and public cloud integration. Eucalyptus is perhaps the best known in this category and provides open-source software infrastructure for on-premise cloud computing. Eucalyptus includes the ability to work within VMware environments and provision resources to Amazon Web Services.

    Open Nebula, an open-source project out of the Distributed Systems Architecture Group at the Complutense University of Madrid, creates a new virtualization layer that “supports the dynamic execution of multi-tier services on a distributed infrastructure consisting of both data center resources and remote cloud resources.” And Nimbus, focused primarily on the scientific community, also provides a virtualization framework to help manage cloud deployments for infrastructure as a service.

    The good news for enterprises considering hybrid cloud computing deployments is the range of options on the table. From the fully integrated end-to-end solutions like VMware or Azure, to the open-source solutions that provide more choice, the time is right to jump in and benefit from the cost savings, flexibility, and technology advances delivered by hybrid clouds.

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