Enterprise Cloud Computing Blog

Cloud Strategy

Redefining the New Enterprise Cloud

Posted by John McEleney on Aug 25, 2011 at 10:30 AM

By 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.

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Top 5 Questions Asked by CloudSwitch Customers

Posted by Dave Armlin on Aug 23, 2011 at 7:40 AM

By Dave Armlin, Director of Customer Support

New CloudSwitch customers and prospects are coming up to speed every week and there are a number of questions that show up frequently enough that I thought it would be helpful to cover them in a blog. When we work with customers, our goal is to make their experience getting started in the cloud fast and easy, and to make sure they feel comfortable with the ongoing simplicity and security of the CloudSwitch model.

Here are their top 5 questions:

1. How do I move applications to the cloud?

CloudSwitch literally makes moving an application to the cloud a simple drag-and-drop operation. A virtual machine (or group of VMs) is selected from a VM location (vCenter,ESX machine, or CIFS share) in the CloudSwitch user interface, the target public cloud region/zone/location is selected, and the machine is moved over a secure tunnel to the cloud.  Storage for the virtual machine in the cloud is automatically allocated and encrypted, and keys are kept under the customer’s control.

Virtual machines that are moved to the cloud retain their MAC and IP addresses, since the CloudSwitch appliance acts as a layer-2 bridge allowing these machines to appear as if they are running in the data center behind your firewall.

2. What applications should I move to the cloud?

A wide variety of apps are good candidates to be moved to the cloud.  As Ellen Rubin blogged about recently, legacy applications are certainly great candidates for offloading from your internal data centers. Web servers and web applications like SharePoint, .NET, J2EE/SOA, Drupal, Wordpress, Wikis, corporate intranets, or batch processing applications are all good candidates as well.

When selecting applications for the cloud, you need to be aware of latency between the data center and the cloud. Latency is a function of physical distance between the data center and the cloud region you’ve selected. For instance, a data center on the East Coast in the US should see around 20ms latency between the various public cloud regions on the East Coast.

Select applications and place them in closest proximity to the virtual machines and data center services that are accessed most by these applications. For instance, a web application that utilizes a database heavily may perform best if the web tier and the database are both deployed to the same cloud and region.  A web application that utilizes a database infrequently and caches results may perform well with the database in the data center and the web tier in the cloud.

3. What changes to my network do I have to make to use CloudSwitch?

Minimal. Outbound port 443 to the Internet has to be opened for the CloudSwitch appliance to create a secure encrypted connection to the cloud. This is outbound traffic only, nothing inbound. There are no changes to your network configurations.

The CloudSwitch appliance requires promiscuous mode and forged transmits set to “Allow” on the Virtual Switch or Port Group for the network adapter assigned to CloudSwitch in your virtual environment. For more information, check out this blog article on networking and ESX.

4. Can I get a virtual physical console to my machine in the cloud?

Yes. CloudSwitch provides a virtual console accessible from the CloudSwitch user interface via a browser that allows you to interact with the base system to make network changes or other tasks one might perform at a physical console. Access to this console can be secured to specific users or groups using Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) in the CloudSwitch user interface.

5. Can I allow traffic from the Internet reach my machines in the cloud directly as opposed to going through my corporate firewall?

Yes, CloudSwitch supplies a cloud firewall that allows you to assign a public IP to a virtual machine and control access to VMs in the cloud from the Internet. Pavan Pant, our Director of Product Management, blogged about this a while back. You have full configurability for permissions/access to all cloud resources through this firewall. 

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Is Encryption the Solution to Cloud Computing Security and Privacy?

Posted by Guest Blogger Erik Heels on Aug 04, 2011 at 7:30 AM

By Guest Blogger Erik Heels, Partner at Clock Tower Law Group, experts in patent law

Wikipedia defines "cloud computing" as "the logical computational resources (data, software) accessible via a computer network (through WAN or Internet etc.), rather than from a local computer.  Managing local computers is hard: there are security issues, computer lifecycle issues, accessibility issues.  Cloud computing, ideally, is easy: set it and forget it, access your data from anywhere, outsource your IT headaches to your service provider.  To end users, whether individuals or companies, "the cloud" is an abstraction, a computing environment that can expand to suit users' needs.

What's The Problem?

One problem with cloud computing is that both cloud computing providers and law enforcement agencies can access your files, usually more easily than if your stored the files on your own computer.

Also, security breaches, like the much-publicized Dropbox security breach, during which all Dropbox accounts were accessible to all users without any password protection, can occur in the cloud.

For users, it is important to know whether your data is secure, who can access it, and what happens when there is a security breach.

For service providers, it is important to comply with both US and non-US laws including (1) data retention laws, which are ostensibly designed to help law enforcement entities do their job and (2) data disclosure laws, which are ostensibly deigned to help users know when their private information has been compromised.

Is Encryption The Answer?

Most cloud computing providers (1) authenticate (e.g. transfer usernames and password) via secure connections and (2) transfer (e.g. via HTTPS) data securely to/from their servers (so-called "data on the wire"), but, as far as I can tell, none (3) encrypts stored data (so-called "data at rest") automatically.

So if you want your data to be secure in the cloud, then consider encrypting the stored data.  And don't store your encryption keys on the same server!  It is unclear whether a cloud computing provider could be compelled by law enforcement agencies to decrypt data that (1) it has encrypted or that (2) users have encrypted, but if the provider has the keys, decryption is at least possible.

I have used and abandoned both Microsoft's Encrypting File System (EFS) and Apple's FileVault for encrypting data on my desktop computers.  But desktop encryption is painfully slow! Perhaps cloud computing providers can leverage the power of their data centers to make the performance hit of encryption-decryption imperceptible to the user.  That would be cool.  And would make the benefits of cloud computing greatly outweigh the risks.

Here are three security questions you should ask of your cloud computing provider:

  1. Data on the Wire.  Are files transferred to/from cloud servers encrypted by default?
  2. Data at Rest.  Are files stored on cloud servers encrypted by default?
  3. Data Retention.  If files on cloud servers are encrypted and there is a request from law enforcement to decrypt the data, then what do you do?  Bonus question: What if you have the key(s)?

I searched for answers to these questions for four cloud computing providers (sourced in part from TechTarget's list of top cloud computing providers and Wikipedia's list of cloud computing providers) that are popular with small businesses like mine:

Simple Google searches of these providers' websites provided more questions than answers on the topic of encryption:

Cloud service providers need to do a much better job of communicating what is and what is not secure about their offerings.  For example, I would characterize Dropbox's security page as misleading at best:

"Your files are actually safer while stored in your Dropbox than on your computer in some cases. We use the same secure methods as banks and the military.... Like most online services, we have a small number of employees who must be able to access user data for the reasons stated in our privacy policy (e.g., when legally required to do so).  But that’s the rare exception, not the rule."

Just because your files are transferred securely to Dropbox does not mean they are stored in an encrypted format on Dropbox's servers.  And it is the "rare exception" that is, or should be, the concern of users.

For More Information

Summary

As more individuals and companies move their computer files and computer applications from local client computers (over which they have a great deal of control) to remote server computers (over which they have limited control), security becomes a bigger concern - both for users and for service providers.

Erik J. Heels is an MIT engineer; trademark, domain name, and patent lawyer; Red Sox fan; and music lover.  He blogs about technology, law, baseball, and rock 'n' roll at ErikJHeels.com.  His law firm, Clock Tower Law Group, represents cool companies such as CloudSwitch.

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Cloud Wars Heat Up

Posted by John Considine on Jul 18, 2011 at 6:10 AM

By John Considine

Last week I wrote about the Cloud.com acquisition and what it means for Citrix, Rackspace, OpenStack and the industry. Next, I’d like to dig into the VMware announcement about their cloud infrastructure suite. Citrix clearly wanted to announce their news just prior to VMware’s, and for a good reason – Citrix is hitting VMware in a weak spot of their cloud strategy.  It’s pretty clear that VMware is not getting the vCloud adoption they were anticipating from service providers and even enterprises.

In Paul Maritz’s presentation, he mentioned that VMware “…has been working closely with service providers because you need the same stacks on both sides [the private cloud and public cloud] to be able to ‘slide’ applications to the cloud…and back again.”  At CloudSwitch we are dedicated to the notion that you don’t have to have identical infrastructure stacks between the data center and the cloud.  You have to expect that what a cloud provider chooses will not necessarily be the same as what the enterprise has chosen, or that they will work together in lock-step.  VMware seems committed to the strategy that they will provide the complete solution on both sides of the cloud, and that all parties will work together to stay coordinated. This is very different from Citrix’s positioning around more open and heterogeneous solutions.

Citrix and VMware have been competing in the virtualization space for years with a battle of features (mostly Citrix catching up with VMware and trying to gain share in the enterprise virtualization market), but the scope of the competition has been growing thanks to cloud computing.  Cloud computing expands the server virtualization fight from hypervisor features to integrated stacks for deploying/managing infrastructure.  The hypervisors remain important, but the new frontier contains everything from core networking to storage management, to large scale deployments to self-service IT.  In this new battle, Citrix has some real strength in networking (Netscaler, etc.) and application delivery, and with their Cloud.com acquisition, they are capturing some proven orchestration technologies. 

VMware is investing huge resources to expand their cloud offerings (Maritz claims a million man hours). Their focus is on adding features to their hypervisor and layers to their stack (vSphere+vCenter SRM+vCenter Operations+vShield+vCloud Director).  They have lots of expertise in this area and direct interaction with enterprise customers and requirements. On the service provider side, they are dependent on feedback from VMware-based partners to provide input and learn how to build and run large-scale infrastructure clouds. We’ll have to see how this approach plays out vs. Citrix’s CloudStack.

In the end, this competition is great for all of us as well as for CloudSwitch specifically.  The competition in the cloud space will continue to drive innovation, new features, and simplification of deployment for this great new platform called cloud computing.  CloudSwitch is all about choice and giving enterprises control and flexibility in their cloud architectures.  As the world of cloud computing evolves, we love to see different options, technologies, and capabilities – because a world filled with different cloud choices needs a CloudSwitch to connect all of the pieces.

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Buying the Cloud

Posted by John Considine on Jul 12, 2011 at 5:30 PM

By John Considine

Here we are on July 12, mid-summer when you think most people are wondering about going to the beach in 90 degree weather, and instead we have big cloud news. Early this morning we were greeted with the announcement that Citrix is buying Cloud.com for more than $200M.  After the initial congratulations to Sheng and the team at Cloud.com, the twitter-sphere and blogosphere went wild with thoughts and deal analysis.  At the same time, everyone was waiting to hear what VMware was going to say in their “Cloud Infrastructure Launch” webcast.

I’ll start with some thoughts on the Cloud.com acquisition.  Rather than go into the rationale and size of the deal, I’d like to focus on what this acquisition means to Citrix, OpenStack, and Rackspace. 

It’s clear that Citrix has been a major supporter of OpenStack and that support makes sense since it’s a great way to compete against VMware.  OpenStack is shaping up to be the answer to the closed source solutions being developed by VMware for building both public and private clouds.  It’s also clear that Citrix needed a boost to gain traction and credibility in the market for producing cloud infrastructure.  They have a good hypervisor and are busy building out more features, tools, and performance – but cloud infrastructure is a lot more than hypervisor + new features. 

Enter the Cloud.com guys. They know how to build clouds, and already have traction with service providers and enterprises alike.  They have proved that they know how to make a cloud scale – and this is not as easy as it sounds.  Keep in mind that building clouds is more complicated than standing up virtualized clusters and running standard tools; there are complex networking, storage, and workload placement problems, not to mention versioning, maintenance, and operations.

So this is clearly a good thing for Citrix, and on the face of it, a good thing for Cloud.com – but what about OpenStack?  The bigger question here is: what does this really mean for the OpenStack community?  Is this a case of Citrix providing the enterprise/supported version of OpenStack as RedHat does for Linux?  Will we see a set of capabilities delivered by Citrix that are built on OpenStack, but that are exclusive to Citrix’s CloudStack?  Will OpenStack be increasingly driven by Citrix’s needs and integration with Xen (versus other hypervisors)?

If Citrix remains committed to its stated direction of providing the software for clouds (rather than building a cloud themselves), they are in a great position to capitalize on OpenStack.  Rackspace, on the other hand, has a more complicated opportunity with OpenStack.  They created the idea and built the community, but they are limited by the fact that they are themselves a cloud provider, so it would be hard for them to sell and support OpenStack software to other cloud providers and vendors.  That leaves the door open for someone else to step in and become the enterprise software vendor for OpenStack.  Clearly Citrix has been targeting this, and the addition of Cloud.com adds the full software stack and knowhow for building and deploying a cloud.

And in other news...VMware announced its Cloud Infrastructure suite today.  Given that the VMware announcement was previously scheduled, I can only conclude that Citrix picked today to overlap with their announcement.  These two announcements occurring on this sleepy mid-July date point to high activity in the cloud space, and the coming wars around who is going to provide the cloud infrastructure for both service providers and the enterprise.  This may become a battle of closed source solutions from VMware and open source solutions from Citrix (and OpenStack)… I’ll write more about the VMware announcement in my next blog, but the battle between Citrix and VMware is definitely heating up.

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The Black Eyed Peas vs. Motherhood and Apple Pie

Posted by John McEleney on Jul 05, 2011 at 1:15 PM

By John McEleney

Gotta get-get… the Black Eyed Peas get it, heck they wrote a song about it: "That future boom boom, gotta get it now…"―we gotta get moving to the cloud!

We're officially halfway through 2011 and many senior IT professionals are probably looking at their 2011 objectives and thinking to themselves, "How am I going to get everything done?" I am sure all of the IT professionals have long lists of company-specific items, and I am equally confident that they all have something about "cloud strategy" on those lists.

We work with customers ranging in size, regulated industries, purely commercial as well as government agencies. But the organizations that we see making real and measurable progress have one thing in common: they have a forward-thinking executive who is willing to take some risk and simply wants to get moving and demonstrate some progress as they learn.

We also see a lot of fear about determining a cloud strategy, ultimately leading to analysis paralysis. Consider the following "Dilbert" advice from a technology author (I removed his name to save embarrassment):

As part of this process, firms should develop a high-level "cloud adoption vision," as well as a short-term business case for cloud computing anchored to the long-term vision. Align your strategy with your organization's business objectives and risk management framework. Establish a governance process and standards that address security requirements, support consistent and logical cloud adoption, and prevent the proliferation of random, uncoordinated initiatives around the enterprise. And recruit people who understand cloud services and can lead strategy development, vendor selection and ongoing management. Considering these factors and approaching the cloud thoughtfully will make for a smoother, more successful ascent.

This "motherhood and apple pie" strategy is very logical, hard to debate and in theory will eliminate risk; however, I would argue that gaining practical experience faster will ultimately yield better results. No amount of careful planning and organizational discussion will substitute for seeing how different cloud services really work and how specific applications behave in the cloud when end users test-drive them.

It's reasonable to start with lower-risk applications and less-sensitive data, but the most important thing for IT organizations that need to make progress this year is simply: Gotta get-get… get moving to the cloud!

eBook Download - How to Run a Successful Cloud Pilot: A Practical How-To Guide for Enterprises >

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Planning for Outages in the Cloud

Posted by Dave Armlin on May 04, 2011 at 7:40 AM

By Dave Armlin, Director of Customer Support at CloudSwitch

The Amazon US East outage of just over a week ago was an eye-opener for many people. Here at CloudSwitch it validated what we know about best practices for using the cloud. Not surprisingly, these reflect traditional IT processes and systems that enterprises know are needed to protect data and ensure that applications remain available to users.

From an enterprise support perspective, I’m very happy about the variety of options we have to protect and backup data, scale and shrink application capacity, and bring applications on and off-line. It’s also easier than ever to make sure that you don’t have all of your “eggs in one basket” due to public clouds and products like CloudSwitch.

CloudSwitch was designed to bridge the worlds of the data center and public cloud, making it extremely easy and safe to move virtual machines into the cloud over an encrypted tunnel onto encrypted storage. You can also deploy multiple copies of your virtual machines to different availability zones, regions, or even clouds. Because CloudSwitch acts as a layer-2 bridge between the data center and cloud, virtual machines in the cloud are able to seamlessly access the data center and visa-versa, allowing data and applications to live in either the data center or the cloud. This provides some great opportunities to continue to use your existing IT management tools while taking advantage of cloud storage and cloud compute power in powerful new ways.

We encourage our customers to make full use of the opportunities that CloudSwitch enables:

  • Deploy virtual machines to multiple availability zones, regions and/or clouds.
  • Clone existing virtual machines or create hot “point in time” snapshots.
  • Continue to utilize traditional backup methods.
  • Employ traditional file system and/or database replication and load balancing to make your applications as available as possible.
  • Automate scripted deployments and life cycle actions on virtual machines.

When reviewing DR strategies with customers, we recommend the following approach:

  • Review all applications and associated virtual machines and prioritize them to determine the appropriate DR strategy.
  • Review and test monitoring of each application to ensure that you can detect and be alerted to application failures as quickly as possible.
  • Eliminate single points of failure for critical applications by providing multiple points of presence in the cloud.           
  • If you are using replication technology to keep copies of virtual machines in sync, ensure that you have appropriate alerts in place to detect synchronization failures.
  • Determine if failover and failback must be automated or manual processes.
  • If load balancing is required, weigh the options and limitations of the different load balancers. Amazon’s ELB for instance can balance across availability zones but not regions.
  • For lower priority systems that don’t require HA, consider scheduled automated clones/snapshots or traditional backups or both.

Eating Our Own Dogfood

In our own internal operations, we’ve deployed www.cloudswitch.com to both Amazon’s US-East Region and US-West as well as Terremark’s Enterprise cloud.  We utilize an open source file system synchronizer to keep these copies in sync. This application also has an automated backup process that backs up data to Amazon S3.

CloudSwitch’s web portal for download/activation and support consists of database and application servers which are deployed to multiple regions within Amazon utilizing database (master-slave) replication.

As our CTO John Considine noted in last week’s blog post, we and our customers had a range of experiences during the Amazon outage, which only reinforced the importance of planning and implementing the procedures outlined above.  In some cases, we relied too heavily on snapshots for some of our internal systems, and recognized after the fact that we needed a careful DR review and prioritization of the many applications we have running in the cloud.

Any DR/HA plan should be routinely validated. We’ve taken this recent event as a good opportunity to do this internally and have been working with our customers to remind them of the options that are available to them with CloudSwitch to protect data and make systems more resilient.

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Amazon's Outage: Winners and Losers

Posted by John Considine on Apr 27, 2011 at 7:00 AM

By John Considine

In case you haven’t heard, last week Amazon’s Web Services had an extended outage that affected a lot of cloud users and has created a big stir in the cloud computing community.  Here is my take on the outage, what it means, and how it affected both us and our customers.

First, the outage – Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage (EBS) system failed in one “small” part of Amazon’s mammoth cloud.  The easiest way to identify with this failing system is to think of it as the hard drive in your laptop or home computer dying.  Almost everyone has experienced this frustrating failure and it is always a frightening event.  Your hard disk contains all of the data and programs you know and love (as well as all of the complex configurations that few really understand) that are required to give your computer its identity and run properly.  When it fails, you get that sinking feeling – what have I lost, do I have any backups, how long is it going to take me to get up and running again?  If you are lucky, it’s actually something else that failed, and you can remove the disk drive and plug it into a new computer, or at least recover the data from it.

Well, that is what happened in Amazon – the service that provided disk drives to the virtual machines in the cloud had a failure.  Thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of computers suddenly had their hard drives “die”, and the big question was (repeated over and over)– what have I lost, do I have any backups, how long is it going to take me to get running again?  At a more pressing level the question becomes did Amazon lose our data, or just connectivity to that data?  In some circles there is no distinction between the two, but for most people, it just like that laptop – can I get my stuff back, or do I have to start from scratch?  The good news is that it appears that most, if not all, of the data was recovered from this failure – indicating that the failure was in connectivity or that the data protection scheme that Amazon has in place was good enough to recover the data from the failed systems (or both).

There were three startling revelations from this failure:

  1. Cloud storage can fail – Ok, so this should not be startling, but we have not seen a failure like this in Amazon before, and we took it for granted that Amazon had “protected” the data and systems.  There are nice features like “snapshot to S3 storage” that let users make copies of their disks into Amazon’s well known and respected Simple Storage Service (S3).  This feature made people feel safe about their backups – right up to the point that they could not access the snapshots during the failure.

  2. People were using this storage without knowing it – Amazon is using their own infrastructure to deliver their other services as evidenced by other features being degraded or un-available when the EBS system went down.  Some have speculated that in addition to the RDS service and the new Elastic Beanstalk, that some core networking functions could have been affected.

  3. This storage failure apparently jumped across “data centers” - OK, so this is a big one; Amazon encouraged us to build applications for failures and after an outage early in 2008, they introduced the notion of Availability Zones.  These zones were designed to be independent data centers (or at least on separate power supplies, different networks, and not sharing core services).  This would allow companies deploying into Amazon to place servers and applications into different zones (or data centers) to account for the inevitable faults in one zone.  The fact that this issue “spread” to more than one zone is a big deal - those who designed for failures using different zones in Amazon’s east region were surprised to find that they could not “recover” from this failure.

This outage is a major event in cloud computing – the leader in cloud computing had a failure, a service went down for an extended period of time, and lots of companies were impacted by the fault.  Now everyone is looking for the winners and losers – those who survived this outage and those who didn’t.  Those who continued operation with little or no disruption fall into three groups – 1) Those who were lucky, 2) Those who were not using the effected services, 3) Those who had designed for this level of failure.

Based on our experiences and much of what I have read, the majority of the success cases during this failure were related to luck and those who didn’t use the service.  Keep in mind that Amazon is huge, and they have “regions” all over the world including East and West coast of the US, Singapore, Tokyo, and Ireland.  Each of these regions has at least two availability zones.  The failure was primarily focused on one zone within one region.  This means that everything running in other zones and other regions remained up and running during this outage and thus the majority of deployments worldwide were unaffected.  I have read a few blogs of major users that stated that they don’t use the EBS service and thus had little or no trouble during this outage.

So what is required to survive this kind of failure?  Many would say new architectures and designs are required to deal with the inherent unreliability of the cloud. I believe that customers can keep the same techniques, architectures, and designs that have been developed over the last 30 or more years, and it is one of the cornerstones of the CloudSwitch strategy.  We believe that it should be your choice on where to use new features and solutions, and where to use your traditional systems and processes, and it should be easy to blend the two. 

To that end, some of our customers are using a technique that extends their environments into the cloud; using the cloud to pick up additional load on their systems.  In this failure case, they were able to rely  on their internal systems to continue their operations.  In other cases, customers want to use their existing backup systems to create an independent copy of their critical data (either in a different region, or in their existing data center).  With the cloud, they can bring up new systems utilizing their backups, and continue with operations.  The CloudSwitch system allows them to bring up systems in different regions, or even different clouds in response to outages; our tight integration with the data center tools allows them to use their existing monitoring systems and adjust for problems encountered in the cloud through automation.

How did we do?  We’re very heavy users of the cloud, and many of our servers in Amazon were not impacted.  Of the few that were impacted by the outage, a few key systems were “switched” back to our data center, and a unfortunately a few went down.  On the servers that went down, we had decided to use Amazon’s snapshot feature as the data protection mechanism;  we felt this was sufficient for these applications, and therefore  we did not bother to run more traditional backups (or data replication).  Given what we have learned from this experience and from observing how the community dealt with this outage we will now review those decisions.  In the end, we’ll have a few more traditionally protected systems, and a few less that rely solely on the cloud providers infrastructure for data protection.

The outage from Amazon severely impacted many businesses and has caused many others to question the wisdom of clouds. The reality is that public and private clouds are a fact in the compute landscape, the only question is how do we insure that we have adequate protection? The answer lies in the experience that we have gained over the past couple of decades in building robust systems – in other words: what’s old is new.

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In-Path WAN Optimization for your Cloud Deployments with CloudSwitch and Riverbed

Posted by Pavan Pant on Apr 19, 2011 at 9:00 AM

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.

(ENLARGE IMAGE)

Riverbed-CloudSwitch-UI

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.” 

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What to Look for in a Cloud Gateway

Posted by Ellen Rubin on Apr 12, 2011 at 6:45 AM

Part 2 of a 2-Part Series

By Ellen Rubin

The last post explored why more and more enterprises and technology vendors are making the adoption of a cloud gateway a top priority. This post focuses on the capabilities that all stakeholders should look for.

So what exactly is a cloud gateway? A cloud gateway is technology that extends the enterprise data center or private cloud out to external clouds. It’s a core component of the hybrid model, and when it’s well-architected, it brings simplicity, flexibility, and control to cloud computing. By shielding users and IT departments from the complexity of cloud deployments, the gateway makes applications portable across different cloud architectures, platforms and even different hypervisors. It provides cloud users with easy access to the widest range of resources and services available, and gives technology vendors a platform for delivering high-value services to on-premise and cloud environments. It’s also a platform for innovation around new capabilities that now become available in the hybrid cloud model. 

Here’s what a well-designed cloud gateway needs to do:

  • Guarantee security: Data needs to be encrypted end to end, from inside the corporate firewall, across the Internet, and within the cloud infrastructure. Encryption keys need to be under enterprise control at all times, and off-limits to everyone else. The cloud becomes an integral part of the enterprise IT environment with data at rest and network communications protected from both the cloud provider and 3rd parties at all times.
  • Extend enterprise networking: Every enterprise has a unique network infrastructure for connecting its servers and applications — things like addressing schemes, topology, identity and directory services, and network equipment (firewalls, routers, and switches). Cloud providers have completely different network architectures to support their multi-tenant operations. The gateway needs to enable enterprises to match their current network topologies when they are using the cloud, and have the ability to bridge specific network segments (or LANs) to the cloud in a simple and automated fashion – including both layer-2 (Ethernet) and layer-3 (Internet Protocol) connectivity.
  • Deliver enterprise-class network appliances: As more and more network vendors introduce their own cloud versions, customers want to be able to leverage what they already have on-premise and use trusted vendor products for their cloud deployments. These enterprises have made significant investments in the management and operation of these appliances. A cloud gateway should enable the use of these trusted vendors across the various cloud offerings available to allow the enterprise to leverage policies, configurations, and expertise when extending into the cloud.
  • Integrate with data center infrastructure: A gateway should be able to tie into existing virtualization infrastructure to allow users to seamlessly combine the cloud deployments with on-premise applications and infrastructure.  The gateway should be able to interact with different virtualization technologies (VMware, Xen Server, Hyper-V, KVM) to give enterprises the broadest scope and flexibility in cloud deployments as they evolve their virtualization and cloud strategies. 
  • Provide seamless visibility and control: The gateway should allow users and administrators to monitor and manage applications running in a cloud as if they were running locally, using existing tools and polices in a single, integrated environment. Cloud resources should appear as part of the corporate infrastructure, with external pools of capacity appearing alongside internal ones.  
  • Protect roles and access: Dedicated individuals or teams are usually responsible for setting up enterprise networking, storage, virtual machines, applications, monitoring, etc. In the wild west of the cloud, with the paradigm shift towards self-service provisioning and management, these responsibilities fall on the end user — typically the developer or business user as they access cloud resources. These users are often unaware of corporate policies or configurations, and are unsure how to address these requirements.  The cloud gateway should preserve the multi-role capabilities required for enterprise control, allowing rules to be created and enforced while letting users access cloud resources on demand.
  • Span disparate cloud architectures: All the requirements mentioned above need to span multiple clouds, with their different APIs, hypervisors, storage architectures, etc. The gateway needs to give users access to the widest range of choices so they can take advantage of all the cloud has to offer. The gateway must be designed with a deep understanding of different cloud providers’ capabilities and differences, so it can deliver optimal services and the best price/performance to meet customers’ specific requirements.

A Platform for Innovation

Beyond meeting the needs of customers and vendors today, the gateway is a platform for innovation that opens the door to a new generation of capabilities. The cloud gateway sits at the nexus of new technologies – it ties into the virtualization infrastructure within the data center, tightly integrates into the network infrastructure, and connects with multiple external clouds. The ability to interact with all these key components enables new services and solutions. Here are a few examples:

  • Cloud brokerage: Workloads can be moved to the right environment based on business and technical requirements. Users can examine a menu of available clouds and choose the ones that provide the best combination of pricing, QoS, provider flexibility, or other criteria.
  • Geographically distributed applications: The cloud provides the freedom to place workloads around the world. The gateway allows simplified network management, multi-cloud support (the ability to choose clouds nearest your consumers), and central control for resource management.
  • Data management: The gateway is in a key position for managing data and workload distribution. With ties into both the data center and target clouds, the gateway can facilitate data movement, replication, remote access, and security of data.
  • Enhanced security: With access to enterprise resources as well as control of distributed networking and compute resources, the gateway is an ideal place for delivering new security models – including remote access, distributed policies, and advanced virus protection.

The concept of a cloud gateway is capturing mindshare across the cloud industry –from enterprise customers to technology vendors and service providers. It’s a key enabler for their cloud strategies, and they’re eagerly looking for ways to take advantage of it, to meet current requirements and introduce some new paradigms in enterprise computing.

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