Announcements
Redefining the New Enterprise Cloud
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BuzzBy John McEleney
Today we’re extremely excited to announce that we are being acquired by Verizon and joining Terremark, its IT services subsidiary. This is major news for us, and we believe for the cloud industry as well.
We’ve been working together with Terremark for almost two years and have built great relationships with Verizon and Terremark, based on our hands-on experience with the Terremark clouds. It’s clear that F1000 companies are looking for enterprise-class cloud services that cover a broad range of their needs – not only commodity clouds, but also higher levels of SLAs, enterprise procurement processes, professional services, security models and dedicated systems. And they want these to be provided by a trusted name in enterprise IT services like Verizon.
The other critical aspects for enterprise cloud adoption are the ones we founded CloudSwitch to address: enterprise control, simple on-boarding, tight integration with enterprise networking, security and management systems, and the freedom to move application workloads to the right cloud without complex re-engineering or lock in. The combined capabilities of Verizon, Terremark and CloudSwitch offers enterprises what they’ve been looking for and moves the industry forward, helping to further define the enterprise-class cloud model.
It’s important to highlight (and very important to us at CloudSwitch) that Terremark is strategically committed to open policies and will maintain support for multiple clouds and hypervisors, since we believe that enterprises truly value this openness. We’re also impressed at Verizon’s commitment and leadership strategy in the enterprise cloud market: after acquiring Terremark for $1.4B and creating a subsidiary within Verizon, they’ve now brought on a software company to add software development and innovation capabilities to the team. That’s the kind of leadership the enterprise cloud market requires.
We’re looking forward to working even more closely with Verizon, and our whole CloudSwitch team will be staying right here in Boston to build and scale our software and deliver new software-based capabilities. We’ve been at the forefront of cloud innovation since 2008, and this begins a new chapter for us as we team with Terremark to take enterprise-class services to the next level.
In-Path WAN Optimization for your Cloud Deployments with CloudSwitch and Riverbed
By Pavan Pant
As our enterprise customers embrace the cloud, we’ve been hearing a growing demand to help them optimize enterprise network connectivity as they scale their cloud deployments. At CloudSwitch, we’ve been thinking about the issue of network optimization for quite some time now and working with partners like Riverbed to tackle network performance in the cloud.
Today we are pleased to announce our support for Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead® to help customers optimize their hybrid cloud deployments. Many of our existing customers have already invested in Riverbed infrastructure in their data centers, and want to extend these trusted resources into the cloud. The primary drivers for WAN optimization in hybrid cloud architectures are twofold:
- Improving network performance between data centers and the cloud for better end-user experience
- Reducing bandwidth between the data center and the cloud, thereby reducing cloud costs
In a hybrid model the public cloud acts as a remote data center, making infrastructure resources available to distributed teams of users, but requiring connectivity back to corporate data center resources. Riverbed’s WAN optimization technology can reduce bandwidth requirements and accelerate a number of applications and protocols including Windows file shares, NFS servers and Oracle forms. Riverbed’s innovations in data compression, de-duplication, and other techniques enable much more efficient data movement between customer data centers and the cloud, while freeing up bandwidth for other applications. In our testing we have seen anywhere from a 5 to 100x improvement in your application’s performance, and 60-80% reduction in bandwidth costs.
Simple and Secure Deployment in the Cloud
Our joint solution allows customers to easily select Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead from CloudSwitch’s network library and launch it unmodified in the Amazon EC2 and Terremark clouds. The user can simply select the cloud networks they would like to optimize, and the Riverbed appliances will take it from there – automatically selecting the network traffic and applications to optimize.
Once Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead is running in the cloud on CloudSwitch’s isolation technology, customers simply enable automatic peering through Riverbed’s user interface. This ensures that network traffic is optimized as soon as servers in the data center try to communicate with servers in the cloud or vice-versa. In addition, CloudSwitch ensures that all communication and data are automatically encrypted so that your extension of infrastructure into the cloud is always protected, end to end.
CloudSwitch allows Cloud Steelhead to be deployed in-path so that all network traffic on the optimized LAN for your servers in the cloud runs through Cloud Steelhead. This allows the WAN optimizer to accelerate cloud traffic automatically without requiring any additional modifications (no agent installations, no drivers, no changes) to your servers in the cloud. This is the unique advantage CloudSwitch offers– simplicity, security, and the ability to offer WAN optimization with full configurability and control by the enterprise.
Our mission at CloudSwitch has always been to make it easy and secure for customers to launch virtual machines in the cloud. Last year, we enabled public IP access to cloud resources by adding an open-source firewall to our network appliances library. As we learn more from our customers about their requirements, we continue to build our library of partner offerings, demonstrating the strength of our platform and our ability to act as a cloud gateway. We’re excited to support Riverbed’s Cloud Steelhead and are hard at work integrating with market-leading firewalls, load balancers, storage appliances and other devices. Our software lets joint customers easily deploy these virtual appliances in the cloud with secure, in-path configurations to enable much more efficient data movement and scalability in the cloud.
To learn more about how enterprise customers are optimizing the cloud today, please join our upcoming webinar with Riverbed, “Optimizing Your WAN Connectivity for Hybrid Cloud Deployments.”
Verizon/Terremark – A New Phase in Cloud Computing Begins…
By Ellen Rubin
Back in September, I blogged about a strange situation I had noticed in the cloud market: Where Are the Telcos? At that time, Verizon had made their initial announcement about their new CaaS offering for the SMB market, which only seemed to highlight the relative lack of leadership and progress by telcos in the cloud market. With yesterday’s big news about Verizon acquiring Terremark, it appears that the telcos are starting to show up.
Several people commented on the earlier blog that my arguments were mainly true for North American telcos, and as I’ve learned since, outside of North America, the telcos have been far more active in building clouds and embracing this new business model. But as a global leader, Verizon’s recent activities are a major step in the evolution of the cloud industry, likely to have significant impact on the market overall. While it’s too early to understand how the acquisition of Terremark will play out in terms of specific services, data center locations, etc., what’s clear is that one of the largest telcos with massive resources, broad reach and enterprise credibility has made a real commitment to integrating cloud computing into their business model.
Till now, there really hasn’t been a large, enterprise player to compete with Amazon – Terremark has made impressive progress over the past few years (as we've seen first-hand as a partner), but is still relatively small on its own. With the strength of Verizon behind it, Terremark now has the opportunity to scale in an unprecedented way and extend enterprise cloud computing, leveraging its technology stack and expertise. Stay tuned for more thoughts as the acquisition plans unfold, but one thing is certain: 2011 is off to a very interesting start…
Register for a live webinar with Terremark and CloudSwitch:
Hybrid Gets Real: Blending Private and Public Clouds
March 3, 2011: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST
Happy Holidays…Happy New Year
By John McEleney
You can’t turn on the radio without hearing holiday music, and one of my favorites is John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas.” As he and Yoko sang, “Another year over, and a new one just begun.” It really is hard to believe that we’re saying goodbye to 2010 and welcoming 2011.
2010 was a great year at CloudSwitch! We were extremely busy as we launched the company and our version 1.0 product, secured large enterprise customers whose use cases drove important new functionality in our version 2.0 (which we launched two weeks ago), and added some great new members to the team.
Members of the press always like to compile a list of predictions for the new year, and you can read our take from John Considine (Founder & CTO) and Ellen Rubin (Founder & VP Products) on how things may unfold.
As we lift our champagne glasses on New Year’s Eve, we wish you “a happy New Year, let's hope it's a good one!”
CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 Delivers Greater Flexibility and Control in the Cloud
By the CloudSwitch Team
It feels like just yesterday that we unveiled CloudSwitch Enterprise to the world. Since then we have closed many large commercial customers, learned a lot from their use cases and have been hard at work building major new functionality in the product. Time flies when you’re having fun – in less than six months, we have delivered version 2.0 of our award-winning CloudSwitch Enterprise software. This release has some great features and improvements driven by our customers’ use cases as they move to the cloud. The 2.0 Enterprise release is further proof that we can innovate at a brisk pace on our core architecture, building on our patent-pending Cloud Isolation Technology™.
Our fundamental value proposition remains unchanged. We continue to provide customers with the ability to extend their internal virtual infrastructure to the cloud environment of their choice, independent of the provider’s underlying virtualization platform (VMware, Xen, etc.). This allows customers to run applications in the right cloud computing environment without requiring them to make any modifications to their applications or management tools – we maintain the same IP address, MAC address, storage controllers, subnet information, etc. Everything continues to work in the cloud just as if it were running locally in the data center.
We are seeing a growing level of confidence in how enterprises use the cloud. They are starting to move towards a production-oriented set of workloads beyond the initial development and test scenarios we saw earlier in 2010. With that trend in mind, we’ve developed new features that allow customers to provision new applications in the cloud, to extend network topologies into the cloud with full security and control, and to scale and better manage their growing cloud workloads via our CLI tools and intuitive web-based user interface.
Provisioning in the Cloud
This capability was driven by numerous requests from our customers to provision exactly the image they want in the cloud as opposed to relying on a cloud provider’s options, which may not always meet their specific requirements.
With CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0, customers can now provision virtual machines in the cloud following the same process that they would in the data center. Our user interface gives you the ability to provision in the cloud with point-and-click simplicity by configuring virtual machine parameters such as the operating system, memory, number of disks, storage controllers, network settings and boot options to provision your application stack in the cloud either using your gold ISOs, or by leveraging PXE boot. You can provision as many virtual machines as required, add as many NICs as necessary, generate new MAC addresses for them and get console access to the virtual machines being provisioned in the cloud. Our CloudFit™ function allows you to use any combination of a cloud provider’s instance sizes to customize the cores, memory, storage, compute capacity and region before you provision in the cloud. All these features give you the freedom to create new virtual machines in the cloud without having to change other data center services such as DNS and identity management.
Now that customers can provision in the cloud, the next step is to automate the process of creating virtual machines in the cloud so they can scale up or down to meet peak demand. CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 has SOAP-based web services and command line interfaces to enable auto-scaling in the cloud, for capacity on-demand, such as cluster scale-outs and website scaling during marketing campaigns and seasonal peaks.
Extending Enterprise Network Topologies into the Cloud
Firewall in the Cloud & Public IP Access
As discussed in one of our previous blog posts, CloudSwitch gives customers secure, public connectivity to their applications in the cloud through a fully-featured firewall in the cloud. This allows customers to securely host multi-tiered applications in the cloud and give end users direct access to these cloud resources–reducing bandwidth constraints within their data centers and improving performance by moving compute resources closer to the end users.
There are also scenarios where customers use CloudSwitch to handle peak demand in the cloud using the load balancer that is part of our firewall solution. This is particularly useful when handling spikes in traffic during cyclical events such as tax season and holiday shopping. Our infrastructure allows customers to seamlessly direct traffic to the most appropriate load-balanced resource in the cloud.
Check out our how-to video to learn more about how you can create a secure, public IP gateway to the cloud.
Layer-2 Connectivity with Layer-3 Support
A core aspect of our architecture is to provide layer-2 connectivity between the data center the cloud. This allows our customers to run their workloads in the cloud without changing any network configuration data such as IP addresses, MAC addresses and netmasks, since this is transparent when connectivity is established at the data link layer.
Over the past several months, we have heard requests for layer-3 connectivity to use IPSec and other capabilities. For instance, if customers want to create IPSec connections from their branch offices directly to the cloud they now have the option to do that using our firewall in the cloud. This is in contrast to other technologies where all traffic is routed from the data center to the cloud. CloudSwitch provides customers with options to use their own routing controls, and leverage their existing networking tools. Internally, we still have layer-2 transparency so we can maintain the same IP address and MAC address for virtual machines in the cloud. Every enterprise customer has a unique and often highly-complex network configuration and CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 provides the flexibility to mix and match layer-2 and layer-3 connectivity based on their needs.
Multiple Subnets
CloudSwitch now offers sophisticated networking capabilities that allow customers to configure their networks in the cloud according to their specific requirements. CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 gives you the flexibility to build network topologies in the cloud that extend organizations’ internal data center networks. Customers can represent multiple subnets in the cloud, span subnets across clouds if necessary, easily map multiple NICs to multiple subnets through our user interface, and use a firewall to connect two subnets much like a colo deployment.
In addition to our networking enhancements, we’ve also added broader geographic support, including all Terremark and Amazon regions and availability zones, to ensure that customers get the best “fit” for their performance and compliance needs.
Working with Our Customers to Drive Cloud Innovation
The market for cloud computing is growing quickly and we’ve seen an increasing level of confidence in our enterprise customers and prospects who are using the cloud. The features in CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 will help address customer needs for greater flexibility, scalability and control as they begin to run and scale production workloads in the cloud. We take great pride in working closely with our customers at the forefront of the cloud revolution, and being responsive to customer and market requirements through our agile development process. Watch this space for more exciting product announcements in 2011 and try CloudSwitch Enterprise 2.0 so you can start running your enterprise applications in the cloud today!
Join our "CloudSwitch 2.0 Launch Overview & Product Demonstration" live webinar to learn how our enterprise customers are running their Windows and Linux apps in the cloud simply and securely using CloudSwitch.
Using CloudSwitch to Create a Public IP Gateway to the Cloud
By Pavan Pant
We recently talked about the latest release of CloudSwitch Enterprise and since that blog post went live we have garnered a lot of interest in our public IP gateway to the cloud - the ability to provide secure access from the public Internet to servers in the cloud. There are many cases in which customers want to deploy Internet facing applications to the cloud to help reduce bandwidth constraints within their data centers and improve performance by moving compute resources closer to their customers. In order to accomplish this, customers needed a firewall in the cloud to ensure secure Internet access to their servers in the cloud which is exactly what CloudSwitch delivered.
As Director of Product Management at CloudSwitch I have had the pleasure of speaking to our customers to understand their use cases and have found that they are talking about things beyond just the migration of servers to the cloud. Customers have started thinking about adding servers to the cloud in a scalable fashion to handle surges in traffic and have frequently requested public connectivity to their servers in the cloud via a firewall. This shows a broadening of the use cases and growing adoption of the cloud. Given that our most popular feature so far is related to our public IP feature I thought it would be useful to dive into some use cases and how our firewall in the cloud can be configured to meet those use cases.
Use Cases
Use Case 1: Hosting Infrastructure in the Cloud
One of our customers was seeing heavy traffic spikes during major holidays and marketing campaigns. Rather than provision new equipment or rent more space in its colo – both expensive options – this company now leverages the cloud and CloudSwitch to handle peak overflow traffic easily, giving website visitors secure, public connectivity to cloud resources through public IP addresses, while managing these same resources through CloudSwitch’s secure data center connections. With the public IP gateway in the cloud our customers can now securely host a multi-tier application in the cloud.
Other things we have heard about include the ability to use the cloud for peak capacity for surges in traffic when the market opens and closes. The idea is to use a firewall for public connectivity to the cloud and a load balancer to have overflow traffic automatically routed to the appropriate server in the cloud.
Consider a scenario where you have two front-end web servers in the cloud, Sharepoint 2007 server, a SugarCRM server, and database servers running SQL 2008. These servers have been migrated to the cloud using CloudSwitch which means that they have the same IP addresses as they did in the data center. This diagram shows how CloudSwitch can deploy a colo-type footprint in the cloud by host a multi-tiered application in a secure fashion with public connectivity.
Once you have your servers in the cloud, the next step in allowing public connectivity to the cloud is to move our SmoothWall firewall (in the “Network Library” folder) to the cloud. Our network library only has one firewall at the moment but we intend to add many more network related infrastructure components in the near future.
You will notice that the new public IP access feature has one interface (red interface) that is assigned a public address while another interface (green interface) can be placed on the network LAN for your servers in the cloud. Once you have moved this firewall to the cloud and started it there it connects to the Internet through the red interface and acquires a public IP address (eg: Amazon Elastic IP). It then connects to your data center through the green interface on the same subnet as the CSA. The public IP address is reserved in Amazon for as long as this appliance is in CloudSwitch – the IP address is released when you delete the appliance in CloudSwitch. This means that you can power off the appliance and still keep the IP address. All this can be configured by opening a console window through CloudSwitch:
Once you have the firewall in the cloud configured, you can create firewall rules in SmoothWall to determine what type of traffic from the public Internet should be sent to your servers in the cloud.
In addition to this, you can also configure the firewall to send traffic to specific subnets or exclude traffic from going to specific servers on a subnet. Once these firewall rules have been configured you will be leveraging a cloud provider’s bandwidth for public connectivity and have the flexibility to increase your footprint in the cloud instead of being limited by a traditional data center footprint.
Use Case 2: Remote Office Scenario
Another use case we hear about is related to getting remote users access to shared resource pools in the cloud. Instead of having remote users go through a VPN server in the data center and then out to the cloud, customers would like to conserve bandwidth by providing them with direct access to cloud resources via a secure, layer 3 tunnel.
This is also a scenario that is possible via CloudSwitch’s firewall in the cloud. It is possible for SmoothWall to inter-operate with any VPN product that supports IPSec and standard encryption techniques such as 3DES. As a result of this, customers can now have their employees accessing their servers in the cloud from a remote office over a secure layer 3 tunnel.
Full Feature Set for Firewall in the Cloud
Unlike the simplistic firewalls provided by cloud providers our SmoothWall firewall has some useful features that CloudSwitch allows customers to leverage in the cloud. It is probably worthwhile to go through some of these:
1. Timed Access
CloudSwitch’s firewall in the cloud has the ability to create firewall rules that allow or disallow access at certain times of the day, for a specified group of servers in the cloud. The timed access controls are only performed on the listed machines. Customers can enter one IP address or network with netmasks per line in the supplied text box. e.g. 192.168.168.0/24 will block/allow the entire range of 192.168.168.0 through 192.168.168.255; alternatively it can be entered 192.168.168.0/255.255.255.0
2. QoS
SmoothWall is able to decide if some of the network traffic is more urgent than others. Imagine your network connection is like a multilane freeway or motorway and allocate specific bandwidth to specific servers.
3. Logging
Logging for CloudSwitch’s firewall in the cloud includes reports of who was trying to do what. Much like any standard log viewer, customers can select the date they are interested in viewing using the drop-down boxes at the top of the page. The body of the page displaying the log files is made up of a table of packets that were dropped by the firewall. Included here are the Source and Destination IP addresses and ports, as well as the protocol involved.
4. IP Block Configuration
This page enables the administrator to selectively block external IP addresses from accessing the SmoothWall and any machines behind it.
5. Dynamic DNS
If our customers have a connection with dynamic IP, the dynamic DNS section of SmoothWall allows you to use dynamic DNS service provided by dyndns.org, no-ip.com, hn.org, dhs.org and/or dyns.cx. These services allow people without a static IP address to have a subdomain name pointing to their computer, allowing them to run services like a web server, VNC, etc.
The first step for using dynamic DNS with SmoothWall is, of course, to subscribe to this free service with one of the supported providers. Once this is done, you just have to fill in the following configuration information on SmoothWall's dynamic DNS configuration page.
While all these capabilities are great it does beg the question of why customers would not just use firewalls provided by Amazon or Terremark? As mentioned earlier, cloud providers typically only have firewalls with simplistic rule sets. Customers do not need to be constrained by a cloud provider’s firewall anymore – with CloudSwitch they now have the ability to define a rich set of firewall rules, services and policies that controls public internet access to their servers in the cloud.
I hope that the use cases and feature set outlined in this blog post helps customers grasp the details of what it takes to provide secure, public connectivity to resources in the cloud.
We recognize that security is of paramount importance in the cloud especially when it comes to allowing users to access servers through the public internet. Our goal at CloudSwitch has always been to provide customers with a secure, simple way to leverage the cloud. Stay tuned for more exciting new enhancements as we continue to make it easier for customers to take advantage of the cloud.
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.
CloudSwitch Enterprise - Ready for Business
By 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. 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.
