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The New Normal in Enterprise Infrastructure
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BuzzBy Ellen Rubin
As we work with dozens of companies that are actively running pilots and doing early deployments in the cloud, it made me think about what the “new normal” will look like in enterprise IT infrastructure. A recent report from the Yankee Group shows that adoption of cloud is accelerating, with 24% of large enterprises already using IaaS, and another 37% expected to adopt IaaS within the next 24 months. It’s clearly a time of major shifts in the IT world, and while we wait for the hype to subside and the smoke to clear, some early outlines of the new paradigm are emerging. Here’s what it looks like to us at CloudSwitch:
- Hybrid is the dominant architecture: on-prem environments (be they traditional data centers or the emerging private clouds) will need to be federated with public clouds for capacity on-demand. This is particularly true for spikey apps and use cases that are driven by short-term peaks such as marketing campaigns, load/scale testing and new product launches. The tie-back to the data center from external pools of resources is a critical component, as is maintaining enterprise-class security and control over all environments. Multiple cloud providers, APIs and hypervisors will co-exist and must be factored into the federation strategy.
- Applications are “tiered” into categories of workloads: just as storage has been tiered based on how frequently it’s accessed and how important it is to mission-critical operations, application workloads will be categorized based on their infrastructure requirements. In the end, app developers and users don’t really want to care about where and how the application is hosted and managed; they just want IT to ensure a specific QoS and meet specific business requirements around geography, compliance, etc. The cloud offers a new opportunity to access a much broader range of resources that can be “fit” against the needs of the business. In some cases, the current IT infrastructure is over-provisioning and over-delivering production gear for lower-importance/usage apps; in other cases it’s woefully under-delivering.
- IT becomes a service-enabler, not just a passive provider of infrastructure resources: IT is now in a position to provide self-service capabilities across a large set of resources, internally and externally, to developers, field and support teams. This requires a new set of skills, as we’ve blogged about before, but the cloud gives IT the opportunity to meet business needs in a much more agile and scalable way, while still maintaining control over who gets to use which resources and how.
- The channel shifts from resellers to service providers: as noted by Andrew Hickey at ChannelWeb, the opportunities for resellers will need to shift as companies reduce their large hardware and software buys in favor of the cloud. The new focus will be on providing services and consulting with an opex model and monthly payments, and expertise in change management and predictive use models will become core competencies. We’ve already started to see this shift at CloudSwitch with a new crop of cloud-focused consulting/SI boutiques springing up in the market to help CIOs plan their cloud deployments.
For many enterprises, these shifts are still being discussed at a high level as CIOs formulate their cloud strategies. Other organizations are diving right in and selecting a set of applications to showcase the benefits of cloud to internal stakeholders. We’ve been fortunate at CloudSwitch to work with some of the earliest cloud adopters and with our cloud provider partners to help define some of the “new normal.”
New Features from CloudSwitch Make it Even Easier to Use the Cloud
By John Considine
We’ve been hard at work over the past two years building the underlying infrastructure for our CloudSwitch software, with the design goal of innovating rapidly on top of this architecture. The latest release of CloudSwitch Enterprise has proven that we’re able to introduce new capabilities quickly, and provides some insight into features that are on the way.
This release contains some great features and improvements that have been driven by our early customers. We’ve introduced a feature that has been the #1 request from customers and prospects—public IP access. To understand the background on this feature, we have to start with the CloudSwitch security model: we’ve designed our system for maximum security when deploying applications to the cloud. In the earlier versions of our software, this design meant that all access to the machines deployed into the cloud was routed through the data center. This allowed the customers to utilize their firewalls and rules to govern what happens in the cloud. For many enterprises, this remains the preferred mode for deploying the CloudSwitch solution. However, many of our customers want to deploy internet-facing applications and are looking to the cloud to help reduce bandwidth constraints within their data centers and improve performance by moving their computing closer to the customers. By routing all traffic back to the data center, we were neither improving the bandwidth constraints nor were we letting customers take advantage of the geographical distribution of their computing.
What we needed to do was to let our customers control the internet access to their servers in the cloud—which sounds a lot like a firewall. In keeping with our philosophy of maintaining existing enterprise policies and procedures, we did not want to introduce a new and partial firewall solution into the customer’s environment. We wanted to allow the customers to deploy existing firewall solutions into the cloud so that they have the knowledge, trust, and control over their cloud resources.
The new public IP access feature allows the end user to assign a public IP address to one of the interfaces on a standard firewall appliance. The other interface can be 
placed on the network LAN for your servers in the cloud. This allows the customer to define rules, services, and polices for how public internet access is granted to resources in the cloud. This is immensely powerful – it brings services like VPN access, dhcp, dynamic DNS, proxies, full firewall rule sets, and logging to cloud deployments. You’re no longer limited to the set of functions that a cloud provider offers for control of firewall resources or load balancers.
A second new feature is the CloudSwitch Library. This is a resource area that contains virtual machines and infrastructure elements that can be deployed to the cloud. You may have seen the beginnings of this in the June commercial release 
of our product where we introduced the “Sample VMs” folder. In the latest release, we have expanded the capabilities of this feature to allow for different types of virtual machines and appliances to be deployed to the cloud. This release includes a “Network Appliances” folder for network-related infrastructure components –think firewalls, load balancers, and WAN optimizers. We have included a popular open source firewall and load balancer (Smoothwall + HA proxy) to allow our customers to have access to a full feature firewall solution for the cloud.
The final improvement in this release is the addition of better geographic control over where you want to run your applications in the cloud. Since we have customers coming not only from all over the US, but all over the world, we have made it easier to select the geography within our user interface. Users can enable and select these regions 
quickly and easily to deploy workloads into data centers from Ireland to Virginia to Singapore. What is really cool to see in our product is a single network spanning all of these data centers and allowing the virtual machines to operate seamlessly, as if they were all local.
CloudSwitch’s unique architecture and our powerful Cloud Isolation Technology™ make it possible to create and deliver these new features quickly. We’re constantly enhancing our software to make everything “just work” for enterprises in the cloud.
Clarity of Vision
By John McEleney
This weekend I participated my ninth Pan-Mass Challenge, a 192-mile benefit ride for the Jimmy Fund and The Dana Farber Cancer Institute (5,000 riders who will jointly raise $31M). With approximately 12-plus hours of saddle time, I had plenty of time to think. What struck me, beyond the amazing logistics and incredible spirit of the riders and volunteers, was that this all started with s simple vision of one man—Billy Starr.
His Idea
He had lost his mom to cancer and decided to do an annual bike ride across Massachusetts as a fund raiser for cancer research.
His Vision
Each year we will grow the amount that we give for cancer research. His communication strategy was equally clear: cancer affects everyone, therefore, everyone should want to be involved.
Since he started this journey, he has raised over a quarter of a billion (that’s a “B” as in billion) for cancer research. Today the PMC funds 50% of the research budget at Dana Farber. So what does this have to do with cloud computing and CloudSwitch? Nothing and everything. From a technical stand point, absolutely nothing. From a business standpoint, it has everything to do with cloud computing. Let me explain.
It is easy to be confused about how the future will evolve with cloud computing. Every day we hear and read the postulations from the optimists that everything will move to the cloud. We are equally confronted with the contrasting views of the fear mongers that nothing will move to the cloud. To get some perspective and a simple view of the cloud world, I think you need to step back and take a broader view of the transformation that is happening.
Every day, people are getting more and more comfortable with the idea that data is located somewhere else (other than on the physical device they can see). Email and facebook are two proof points. Organizations are also getting more comfortable with not having all of their data and/or applications physically in their data center. Just look at the growth of SaleForce and use of raw Amazon compute resources. We recently had a discussion with a senior IT person who pointed out that the finance team wanted to know why the IT people were buying so many books (they weren’t buying books, they were submitting their AWS charges on expense reports!).
We believe the future is clear: the public cloud WILL be part of the IT organization in the future. There may be many obstacles and objections during the adoption process, but the economics and business agility that public clouds provide are so compelling, that organizations will have to adopt them or risk losing competitive advantage. Our mission at CloudSwitch is to help organizations extend their data centers to the cloud.
If you want to make an impact, you have to be clear about what you are trying to accomplish. Billy was clear with the PMC and he aggressively pursued that goal. At CloudSwitch we are passionate about helping companies embrace the cloud. Our vision is clear—we think that the cloud will help businesses become more agile and we think we have a role to play in making this happen. Try CloudSwitch today.
Do VMs Still Matter in the Cloud?
By John Considine
There’s a long running debate about the true role of Virtual Machines (VMs) in cloud computing. In talking with CTOs at the large vendors as well as the “Clouderati” over the last two years, there seems to be the desire to eliminate the VM from cloud computing. A colleague of mine, Simeon Simeonov, wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago that made the case for eliminating the VM. While the argument is appealing, and there is growing support for the idea, I’d like to argue that there are compelling reasons to keep the Virtual Machine as the core of cloud computing.
Virtual Machines encompass “virtual hardware” and very real operating systems. VMs drive the economics and flexibility of the cloud by allowing complete servers to be created on-demand and in many cases share the same physical hardware. The virtual machines provide a complete environment for applications to run – just like they would on their own individual server, including both the hardware and operating system.
Sim and other cloud evangelists would like to see applications developed independent of the underlying operating systems and hardware. Implied in this argument is that developers shouldn’t be constrained anymore by an “outdated” VM construct, but should design from scratch for the cloud and its horizontal scalability. This reminds me of early conversations I had when we were just starting CloudSwitch that went something like: “If you just design your applications to be stateless, fault tolerant, and horizontally scalable, then you can run them in the cloud.” The message seemed to be that if you do all of the work to make your applications cloud-like, they will run great in the cloud. The motivation is cost savings, flexibility, and almost infinite scalability, and the cost is redesigning everything around the limitations and architectures offered by the cloud providers.
But why should we require everyone to adapt to the cloud instead of adapting the cloud to the users? Amazon’s EC2 was the very first “public cloud” and it was designed with some really strange attributes that were driven from a combination of technology choices and a web-centric view of the world. We ended up with notions of “ephemeral storage” and effectively random IP address assignment as well as being told that the servers can and will fail without notice or remediation. These properties would never work in an enterprise datacenter; I can’t imagine anyone proposing them, much less a company implementing them.
But somehow, and this is what disruption is really about, it was OK for Amazon to offer this because the users would adjust to the limitations. The process began with customers selecting web based applications to be put in the cloud. Then a number of startups formed to make this new computing environment easier to use; methods of communicating the changing addresses, ways to persist storage, methods of monitoring and restarting resources in the cloud, and much more.
As cloud computing continued to evolve, the clouds started offering “better” features. Amazon introduced persistent block storage (EBS) to provide “normal” storage, VPC to allow for better IP address management, and a host of other features that allow for more than just web applications to run in the cloud. In this same timeframe a number of cloud providers entered the market with features and functions that were more closely aligned with “traditional” computing architectures.
The obvious question is what is driving these “improvements”? Clearly the early clouds had captured developers and web applications without these capabilities – just look at the number of startups using the cloud (pretty much all of them). I’d assert that the enterprise customers are driving the more recent cloud feature sets – since the enterprise has both serious problems and serious money to spend. If this is true, then we can project forward on the likely path both the clouds and the enterprises will follow.
This brings us back to the role of the Virtual Machine. Enterprises have learned over the years that details matter in complex systems. Even though we want to move towards application development that doesn’t touch the hardware or operating systems objects, we must recognize that there is important work done at this level – hardware control, the creation and management of sockets, memory management, file system access, etc. No matter how abstract the applications become, there is some form of an operating system that works with these low level constructs. Further, changes at the operating system level can affect the whole system – think Windows automatic updates, Linux YUM updates, new packages or kernel patches have caused whole systems to fail; this is the reason that enterprises tightly control these updates. This means in turn that the enterprise needs to have control of their operating systems if they want to use their software and management policies, and the way that you control your operating system in the cloud is with VMs.
Enterprise requirements are driving the evolution and adoption of the cloud and this will make the use of VMs even more important than it has been to date. Cloud providers know that enterprise customers are critical to their own success and will make sure that they deliver a cloud model that feels familiar and controllable to enterprise IT and developers.
