interop
Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop: A Moment in the Cloud
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BuzzBy John Considine
Despite scheduling the first of day conference to start on Mother’s Day, there was a good turnout for the Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas this week. The presentations covered everything from how public clouds “work” to the future of private clouds. Sessions were brief and moved quickly, which kept things interesting, but at times felt a bit rushed for the speakers – as I can attest to after delivering a 15-minute talk on deploying enterprise applications in public clouds.
As you might expect from an Interop crowd, the audience was loaded with people who consider their primary job “IT,” and surprisingly very few who were active programmers; a sure sign that although the developers started the cloud trend, core IT is now getting in on the game. The audience reminded me that we are still in the early days of cloud computing, and the clever organization of the summit by Alistair Croll and team helped highlight this.
By mixing “under the covers with the cloud provider” sessions and real-life case studies with panels debating the various forms and futures of cloud computing, the audience got a full dose of the hopes and dreams of the cloud as well as the nitty-gritty of what is (and is not) working today; often one right after another. An amusing example – a panel debating the “private cloud = false cloud” taking positions on whether private clouds are real or just virtualization, followed a little later by Zynga talking about how successful their private cloud is…
My takeaways from the summit: The audience and speakers represented a true reflection of where the whole industry is on the transition to cloud computing. If you want to find reasons to delay and avoid the cloud, it is easy to debate and find use cases where it doesn’t make sense. However, if you want to embrace this transformative platform shift and take advantage of the clouds, there are plenty success stories, people, and products to help you get there.
Hubs, Spokes and WANs
By Ellen Rubin
Recently, we’ve had a number of discussions with enterprises about how they’d like to use the cloud. The basic use case is around capacity on-demand (not surprisingly), but the specifics have raised some interesting issues. The companies have distributed branch offices that need the capacity for a range of applications, including dev/test environments as well as back-office and web apps. Today, these distributed groups are relying on corporate IT to meet their scaling and infrastructure needs, and they are frequently bottlenecked. This is both in terms of overall challenges in getting new capacity approved in a timely way, but also from a network bandwidth perspective. At a panel this week at Interop, Riverbed noted that 2/3 of their enterprise customers have a hub and spoke model that requires the “spokes” to backhaul to the “hub” for connectivity to the internet, and thus to cloud computing services. Only the remaining 1/3 have direct connections. At the same panel, Blue Coat agreed with the stats but commented that the branch sites are trending towards a direct-connect model as new sites are added.
All this is interesting to us at CloudSwitch since we have been hearing more and more frequently from enterprises that want more “edge” computing, and to empower the branch offices to add capacity on-demand in a controlled but self-service way. This creates a set of new requirements around cloud computing, in terms of both networking and security. In the hub and spoke model, corporate IT maintains control over all access to the cloud, which has benefits on the security and permissions side, but creates potential bottlenecks – both in terms of the need for self-service management tools to increase agility, as well as in bandwidth constraints where the backhaul traffic starts to strain the corporate networks. Backhauling also creates strain on the branch offices since it often adds significant latency to their internet connections.
Most of the vendors at the Interop panel (including Akamai, Riverbed, Ipanema and Blue Coat) claimed to be developing or are already offering WAN optimization products – increasingly in the form of virtual appliances and/or software versions – to help alleviate these bottlenecks. These will surely help, but will become even more important as the branch offices start to have more direct connectivity to the cloud. WAN optimization offerings at the “edge” will be increasingly needed, and cloud service providers are focused on building out these capabilities at their end of the network. Security in a more distributed model will also require some new thinking, since users in the branches will want to maximize flexibility and agility, while corporate IT will still need a way to limit potential threats and exposure created by opening these direct connections.
Underlying all these discussions is the fundamental issue of the laws of physics. As enterprises start to embrace the cloud model, they’ve realized that the major choke-point will be their network bandwidth. Innovation around addressing these issues, especially in the virtualized world of the cloud, will definitely be required. At CloudSwitch, we’re staying closely involved in discussions around customer requirements and vendor offerings to increase performance for workloads moving to the cloud.
