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CloudSwitch Enterprise - Ready for Business
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BuzzBy the CloudSwitch Team
Today we launched the commercial version of our CloudSwitch Enterprise software at Structure 2010 in San Francisco. We’re ready for business and making our innovative software generally available. It’s an exciting moment for us, but it also reflects the evolution of the cloud industry.
Two years ago when we were just designing and envisioning our products, we realized that enterprises would want to use the cloud – it seemed inevitable to us that the cloud would dramatically change the way companies build and scale their applications. However, many early discussions tended to go as follows: “Are you thinking of using cloud computing?” “Um, what’s cloud computing?”
What a difference two years make. Not only do we not need to explain what cloud computing is anymore, but we’ve found that most of the companies who participated in our beta program were already planning, thinking, testing and evaluating their cloud strategies and architectures. As seen at the Structure show, an ecosystem of cloud providers has emerged, with offerings for public and private clouds, as well as a growing list of consulting and services firms to support cloud initiatives – and of course, a large and vibrant set of cloud management/enablement providers, including CloudSwitch.
In the past several months, we’ve tested our software with some of the leading enterprises at the forefront of the cloud world – brand-name companies as well as mid-tier organizations, all with exciting use cases that have taught us a great deal about customer requirements. Working with these innovators and seeing our software deployed and working at these customer sites has been a thrill, and we truly appreciate all the input and support. We’ve learned that customers want the agility and cost-effectiveness of the cloud, but need the critical CloudSwitch capabilities of full security and seamless portability between the data center and the cloud – across hypervisors and multiple cloud offerings.
So today we’re proud to announce that v1.0 of CloudSwitch Enterprise is ready for download. Try our 15-day free trial now and start running your applications in the cloud environment that’s right for you. Use your existing management tools and data center policies. CloudSwitch makes it easy with our enterprise-class features:
- Support for Amazon EC2 and Terremark’s VMware-based clouds (enabled through the vCloud API)
- Full encryption of data and communications through AES-256
- Role-based access controls for setting user/group permissions and controls
- Support for Windows and Linux-based applications
- Industry-first CloudFit™ for best fit of virtual instances into cloud resources
- Layer-2 bridge between data center and cloud environments
- API for programmatic control and integration into virtualized environments
To learn more about CloudSwitch Enterprise, please visit our updated product information. And if you’re still thinking about your cloud strategy, get started by downloading our always-free Explorer software for 1 user and up to 5 servers running in the Amazon EC2 cloud. Make the cloud part of your IT infrastructure today and see how simple and secure the cloud can be with CloudSwitch.
It Takes Bench Strength to Win
By John McEleney
Last night the Celtics beat the LA Lakers in a tremendously hard fought, exciting basketball game. Both teams played well and in the end, the Celtics won. They won because in the fourth quarter their bench strength (the depth of their talent roster) demonstrated why they would be part of the starting five of any other NBA team. To win in sports and in business you need excellence and you need depth.
At CloudSwitch we have some incredibly talented technical talent that working on the frontier of Cloud technology. This talent is not limited to the “starting five” - we have the technical depth throughout the entire team. My experience in leading teams over the past two decades is that serious technical talent wants to work with the best people. They want to be challenged and they want to challenge others. It is this passion and desire that will drive us to deliver products that will help enterprises realize the benefits of cloud computing.
In the fourth quarter in last night’s game, Kevin Garnett, Rajon Rando and Paul Pierce were on the bench rooting for their team. In a sport that typically glorifies the individual star, they demonstrated their selfless support. They knew that the Celtics were fielding a world class team and they were getting the needed rest to close out the game. This confidence in their teammates and their desire to win is what makes them truly a world class team. World class teams deliver world class results, in the cloud as well as on the court.
Get off the Bus - Explore the Cloud TODAY!
By George Moberly
A year ago I attended a session at Cloud Expo in New York. The presenting company told the audience that “cloud exploration services” were now available. Enterprises could purchase these packaged services to discuss, probably at length, how to identify candidate applications for cloud usage.
I’ve been there and done that – as a former professional services manager for such a “Big 4” data center automation company, I’ve participated in many such “school bus” campaigns. Often the end result is that everything is said, and little gets done.
According to this philosophy, you can’t just go out and try the cloud for yourself – instead, professional services are needed, and plenty of them. After the expenditure of months of time and large sums of money, you might be lucky enough to get a report of some applications that would be suitable to move – to their specific cloud.
While this approach well serves the interest of the vendor, there is a better way.
The premise of the cloud is that there is almost no penalty for trying something and failing. Move some applications and try them out. You didn’t get the SLA or characteristics you were looking for? You’re only out a buck or two.
Of course the premise I’m making is that you don’t have to change anything in your services, applications, networking, or infrastructure to give this a try. I make the further premise that the cloud enablement software doesn’t require a services engagement to acquire, install, set up and configure, and manage operationally over time. This week, we made CloudSwitch available. Give it a try. You can acquire, install, configure, move and run your applications today. No services required. You point us to your virtual machines, our software will automatically show you if they fit in the cloud, and after we’ve transferred them to the cloud, they will look and feel just like they do now, running in your on premise virtualized infrastructure. No engineering. No changes. No agents. No “additions” to your servers. No funny installers.
All this said, there are physics involved. I recommend a simple process that will result in immediate positive results in selecting candidate applications to move and run in the cloud, as well as in the confidence that comes from a “real test” involving complex multi-tier applications which are tied to both premise-naming services and other network services that cannot be moved out of your data center.
For a first application, I suggest finding something that has servers with relatively small disks. Moving disks over the internet can take time. Some ideas include an internal project server running a program management application, Wiki, or SharePoint. Or perhaps a development environment for a JBOSS application, or anything else based on an open source stack. Move and run this, and run the same load testing or characterization/acceptance tests you use today, and see how they perform.
For a second application, I suggest taking the web and application tiers of the three-tier application and moving them, leaving the data tier on-premise. Leave your management agents on those servers, and leave them joined to the same domain if they are Windows servers, or using the same naming services. Don’t be concerned if the servers have NFS or CIFS mounts to on-premise NAS storage.
For a more in-depth test, go ahead and move development environments for applications such as PeopleSoft, Siebel, or SAP into the cloud and develop your applications there. Extra desktops for developers make a good initial application to move, as do development support servers such as continuous build, defect tracking, and source code repositories.
Our focus on providing a zero-friction, packaged appliance-based product makes this possible. Our automatic CloudFit process will tell you up front if your application will fit and run successfully in the cloud prior to incurring any cloud spend, and how much it will cost per hour to run.
Sign up for our Beta and move and run your first application in the cloud TODAY! School bus not included.
Why an 'Apps' Guy Moved to the Cloud
I have spent most of my career involved in the development of software applications. For the past seven years, I had the honor of leading SolidWorks, the # 1 mainstream 3D CAD company in the world. When I left in 2007 we had over 750,000 users and tens of thousands of companies using our software. They were designing products that you and I use in our everyday lives.
Through a lot of hard work of hundreds of employees and some luck we helped create a lot of value for these customers as well as our investors and business partners. In addition to good luck (which we admittedly had a lot of), we capitalized on a fundamental platform shift: Unix to Windows. This platform shift, combined with a business model shift (direct sales to indirect sales) created a significant amount of value. I sense the same opportunity with the cloud.
After taking some time off, I spent time with some local venture capital firms looking at a lot of new technologies, new products and business ideas. All of the start-ups (not just some, but all) were using the cloud for their infrastructure. Like canaries in a coal mine, this to me validated what I was observing: the cloud really is a new platform. Also, the cloud requires a business model shift in enterprise software sales since cloud services by their nature are low-cost and on-demand – unlike the traditional sales model of large, costly enterprise purchases.
I spent several months more looking at companies in and around the cloud space and became intrigued by the perspective shared by Ellen Rubin and John Considine, founders of CloudSwitch. They had a clear view of how they felt companies would want to take advantage of the cloud. This was evident in their approach: rather than try to take the clouds to the data center (which everyone appears to be doing), they wanted to start from the data center and help them extend out to the cloud.
Combine this simple, yet profound insight with a platform shift and a business model shift and you understand why an apps guy would be so excited to join the CloudSwitch team.
Pre-Register for Our Upcoming Beta Program
Today we held our first webinar about our upcoming beta program. Beginning in March, we’ll be making two products available to beta customers: our free CloudSwitch Explorer and a free trial version of our commercial CloudSwitch Enterprise. Stay tuned for the beta releases in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, you can pre-register now to join the expanded beta.
New CloudSwitch Blog for Enterprise Cloud Computing
Welcome to our enterprise cloud computing blog where we'll share our perspectives on cloud computing trends and best practices for the enterprise. We're a team with extensive experience in IT software and systems (learn more about us), and we're passionate about the opportunity that cloud computing offers for fundamentally improving enterprise IT. However, we believe that before the cloud can reach its potential, some innovation needs to take place within the enterprise data center to make cloud computing simple, secure and tightly integrated with existing IT infrastructure. Our mission is to do just that. We tend to see the world from the data center out, unlike much of the innovation around cloud computing to date, which has focused on the cloud as a separate and silo'd environment.
Enterprise Cloud Computing Hurdles
We share the view held by many that the cloud will transform enterprise computing. Market analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2012, 80% of Fortune 1000 enterprises will be paying for some cloud computing service. We also believe that there are significant hurdles to this transformation, including data security, application re-architecture, poor integration with the data center and lock-in to cloud providers.
Security Risks
Protecting data within the cloud is the biggest concern for most enterprises when considering cloud deployments. When security is partly out of enterprise control, it becomes difficult to know with confidence if sensitive information has been accessed or compromised.
Applications Re-architecture
Today, moving an enterprise application to a cloud requires re-writing software to adapt the application to a specific cloud provider's infrastructure. A whole landscape of specifications for devices, services, networks, storage and other components has to be mapped to the virtual environment. This can take weeks or months of development work, time that many companies cannot afford.
Data Center Integration
Once the application is running in the cloud, managing it requires adhering to the cloud provider's tools and policies, even if they conflict with those of the enterprise. The application also needs to communicate back to existing business processes, identity services, databases and management tools - all the underlying components on which the enterprise depends.
Cloud Provider Lock-in
Cloud lock-in is always a concern when a cloud environment is out of enterprise control. What happens if the cloud provider changes its terms or its underlying infrastructure? What happens if another cloud provider comes along with a more attractive offer?
Subscribe to this blog so that you can know when we address these hurdles in more detail. Please share your thoughts on these and other hurdles and how you're thinking about solving them.
Our Vision for Enterprise Cloud Computing
At CloudSwitch, we believe enterprise cloud computing must achieve certain core tenets in order to deliver on its potential:
- Cloud resources should be secured end-to-end as an extension of the enterprise's security perimeter
- Applications should be able to run in the cloud without modification
- Users should be able to manage applications running in the cloud just as if they were running in the data center, using existing management tools and processes
- The enterprise should be free from cloud lock-in, able to move applications at will whenever it is appropriate, to another cloud or back to the data center.
Our goal for this blog is as a resource to help enterprises better understand and overcome the challenges that stand in the way of simple and secure enterprise cloud computing. We look forward to sharing what we learn from our customers and partners with you.
