public cloud
Data Center in a Box
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BuzzBy Damon Miller
Years ago I had the privilege of helping to grow Bladelogic from early-stage startup to a profitable organization of over 300 people. In the early days one of my first challenges was figuring out how to show our product to prospective customers effectively. I needed to show our ability to manage a large IT infrastructure but I had to do so without actually dragging a data center to each of our sales calls. (My first attempt involved renting a fleet of trucks but visitor parking turned out to be a real challenge.) As I look back on that situation now, I realize that CloudSwitch offers a perfect solution to this “data center in a box” problem. In this article I’ll walk through the use case and describe a new CloudSwitch feature, Sample VMs, which makes this possible.
The first step toward a virtual data center is to use virtualization, of course. In late 2001 VMware released the third major version of their Workstation product. Given my demonstration requirement, I bought a copy of Workstation, found the biggest “mainstream” laptop available at the time, filled it with memory, and deployed as many VMs as it would run without completely falling over. Depending on the end user’s patience, that number was somewhere between four and six. While not exactly a world-class data center, the end result served us well for demonstration purposes. It was, however, limited in capacity, slow, expensive, and difficult to maintain.
In retrospect, what we really needed was a way to:
- Quickly start new servers and turn them off when finished;
- Use existing, internal virtual servers or public server images; and
- Connect to these servers as if they were on the local network.
Fast-forward nearly ten years and the first of these points—utility capacity on demand—is all but ubiquitous courtesy of providers like Amazon and Terremark. We of course know this as “the cloud” and companies use it every day for a variety of reasons. The second two points are more interesting.
Today’s cloud providers have implemented their platforms on a particular virtualization solution—and in many cases they’ve customized these solutions to suit the needs of their product offering. This is of course perfectly natural, however one practical effect is that end users cannot simply take their own virtual machines and expect to run them within a given cloud provider’s environment. The reasons vary—different virtualization solution, different underlying hardware, different capabilities—but the end result is always the same: cloud providers will not allow end users to upload custom VMs and run them. For this, CloudSwitch is needed.
One of CloudSwitch’s fundamental benefits is the ability to run customers’ virtual servers in whichever cloud provider is most appropriate, regardless of the underlying implementation details. After deploying our appliance, users can select virtual servers within their internal VMware environment and migrate them to a public cloud provider such as Amazon or Terremark without being forced to modify those servers in any way. No additional software or configuration change is required for this to work. Users literally “point and click” to migrate virtual servers from their data center into a cloud provider.
In many cases, users want to leverage the cloud but don’t want to migrate existing servers. CloudSwitch supports this approach as well. With the recent GA release, CloudSwitch allows customers to select from a set of public “Sample VMs” for access to cloud capacity. Customers can use these sample VMs for a variety of purposes—evaluation, production, or anything in between. Further, since these machines have already been moved into the cloud, starting them is quick and efficient. Current Sample VMs include a stock Centos 5.4 base image, SugarCRM, and BugZilla running on a Windows OS. We’re expanding the list of Sample VMs based on a range of customer use cases, and have plans to include many open source and partner products.
The final point—seamless connectivity—speaks to the way cloud providers offer connectivity to their instances. Today, each provider has chosen a particular network architecture for delivery of their services. For example, if you start a Linux instance in Amazon’s EC2 service and run “ifconfig eth0” you will likely see a 10.x.x.x IP address assigned to the interface. This is because Amazon has chosen the 10.0.0.0/8 private address space for connectivity to customer instances. Other cloud providers use different addressing schemes but regardless these are different and disconnected from what customers are using within their own data centers. Further, secure connectivity to these instances is not convenient and in many cases is not possible. CloudSwitch addresses this problem as well.
As part of the deployment process, CloudSwitch automatically creates a secure overlay network within the chosen cloud provider’s environment. This overlay network extends a customer’s internal data center into the cloud so the cloud-based servers are part of the customer’s data center network. When migrating existing servers into the cloud, end users see no difference; they can SSH or RDP to migrated instances without even realizing that their servers are no longer running within the data center.
So, CloudSwitch offers a way to leverage the power of the public cloud without forcing end users to change the way their infrastructure is configured. We also offer a set of sample content customers can use if they simply want to establish a footprint in the cloud without migrating existing servers. Finally, end users connect to cloud servers just as if they were running within the data center network. The implication for my “data center in a box” use case is probably obvious: I could have installed the CloudSwitch Appliance on my sales engineers’ laptops, created a set of demo servers in the public cloud, and used these for field sales activity. We would have saved money on the laptops but more importantly my team would have been more effective.
Ultimately the cloud is about better service delivery. Better can certainly mean less expensive but in my case better would have meant more effectively expressing the value of our product to prospective customers. Regardless of the definition, CloudSwitch offers a simple, secure, and effective way to leverage the cloud. Since the early startup days in 2001 my goal hasn’t really changed much; I still want the opportunity to show you how our product can make you more effective. The difference is I finally have my “data center in a box” to prove it to you (and I don’t have to take up all of your visitor parking spots).
Private Clouds: Old Wine in a New Bottle
By John McEleney
I recently read a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report about cloud computing, and they described private clouds as "old wine in a new bottle." I think they nailed it!
The report points out that a typical private cloud set-up looks much the same as the infrastructure components currently found in a corporate data center, with virtualization added to the mix. While the virtualization provides somewhat better server utilization, the elasticity and efficiency available in the public cloud has private clouds beat by a mile.
In short, the term "private cloud" is usually just a buzzword for virtualized internal environments that have been around for years. By replicating existing data center architectures, they also recreate the same cost and maintenance issues that cloud computing aims to alleviate.
Despite their limitations, there is still a lot of industry talk about creating internal private clouds using equipment running inside a company’s data center. So why do people consider building private clouds anyway?
To answer this question, you have to step back and examine some of the fundamental reasons why people are looking to cloud computing:
- The current infrastructure is not flexible enough to meet business needs
- Users of IT services have to wait too long to get access to additional computing resources
- CFOs and CIOs are tightening budgets, and they prefer operational expenses (tied directly to business performance) vs. capital expenses (allocated to business units)
In every case, the public cloud option outperforms the private cloud. Let’s examine each point:
- Flexibility – the ability to access essentially unlimited computing resources as you need them provides the ultimate level of flexibility. The scale of a public cloud like Amazon’s EC2 cannot possibly be replicated by a single enterprise. And that’s just one cloud – there are many others, allowing you to choose a range of providers according to your needs.
- Timeframes – to gain immediate access to public cloud compute resources, you only need an active account (and of course the appropriate corporate credentials). With a private cloud, users have to wait until the IT department completes the build out of the private cloud infrastructure. They are essentially subject to the same procurement and deployment challenges that had them looking at the public cloud in the first place.
- Budgets – everyone knows that the economic environment has brought a new level of scrutiny on expenses. In particular, capital budgets have been slashed. Approving millions of dollars (at least) to acquire, maintain and scale a private cloud sufficient for enterprise needs is becoming harder and harder to justify — especially when the "pay as you go" approach of public clouds is much more cost-effective.
There are many legitimate concerns that people have with the public cloud, including security, application migration and vendor lock-in. It is for these reasons and more that we created CloudSwitch. We’ve eliminated these previous barriers, so enterprises can take immediate advantage of the elasticity and economies of scale available in multi-tenant public clouds. Our technology is available now, and combines end-to-end security with point-and-click simplicity to revolutionize the way organizations deploy and manage their applications in public clouds.
Sir Isaac Newton may not have dreamed about clouds, but his first Law of Motion, "a body at rest tends to stay at rest", has been a good harbinger of cloud adoption until now. It is fair to expect that people will grasp for private clouds simply because it’s more comfortable (it’s the status quo). However, the rationale for public cloud adoption is so compelling that a majority of organizations will choose to embrace the likes of Amazon, Terremark, and other clouds. As adoption increases, private clouds will be used only for select applications, thus requiring far fewer resources than they currently demand. We’re also seeing the emergence of “hybrid” clouds that allow customers to toggle compute workloads between private and public clouds on an as-needed basis.
In the end, we will have new wine and it will be in a new bottle. With CloudSwitch technology, 2010 is shaping up to be a great vintage.
Making Cloud Computing Secure for the Enterprise
For cloud computing to gain traction in the enterprise, IT and security executives need to be certain that their company’s applications and data are safe. But when security is partly out of enterprise control, it becomes impossible to know if sensitive information has been accessed or compromised.
Today, using a public cloud means moving from an internal environment where a company has complete control of data and processes to an environment where that control belongs to someone else, and is often opaque. Within the cloud, applications run in a multi-tenant virtual environment, sharing physical machines with other customers. Companies considering moving an application to a cloud have legitimate concerns about data being compromised or stolen, including unauthorized access by cloud administrators, exposure in the internet or rogue employees using the cloud to corrupt or leak sensitive information.
One solution is to keep sensitive data within the corporate data center and put the other application tiers in the public cloud. While this approach works well for some use case scenarios, the latency impact of the “reach back” into the data center can be unacceptable for many applications and users. The other option is to move the entire application to the cloud – including the database tier – for better performance and scalability, but this exposes the application to new potential threats such as those mentioned above.
Encryption is a well-known approach to addressing these types of security threats. For protection in the cloud, the enterprise would need to encrypt all data and communications. While it’s not that difficult to add encryption software initially to the application environment, the new configuration requires ongoing management and maintenance. And in order to run the application in the cloud, the enterprise needs to deliver the encryption keys to the cloud to decrypt the data, creating additional security risks by exposing the keys in the operating environment. In the worst case, poor configuration can expose the corporate data center to threats from the cloud.
In developing our security model at CloudSwitch, we worked closely with CSOs and security teams at several large enterprises to understand their requirements. As a result, our architecture addresses three areas of protection required to make cloud computing secure for the enterprise:
- In the data center: Role-based access control protects data and processes from unauthorized access.
- In the Internet: Connections are authenticated and data is encrypted to prevent data in transit from being exposed or compromised.
- In the public cloud: Data is encrypted with keys under enterprise control, and can never be accessed by the cloud provider or unauthorized users.
The CloudSwitch security strategy is a key part of our vision to make the cloud a seamless extension of the corporate data center. Using CloudSwitch technology, companies can move applications and data to a cloud without modification, and back to the data center as needed. Companies can also select the right cloud for a specific application, based on security and compliance levels as well as service offerings and pricing structures. Only with control of applications and data at all times can enterprises take full advantage of cloud resources without sacrificing the security required by customers, internal users, regulators and other stakeholders.
