Posts Tagged ‘IaaS’
Top Five Emerging Cloud Trends
Posted on: November 14, 2011
1. Private cloud deployment is fast and furious.
There has been a rapid rise in private cloud adoption among large enterprises. This isn’t really a surprise as there are a fairly robust set of infrastructures and applications that enterprise IT staff manage and they want to take advantage of the tools and technologies available in the private cloud space – such as multi-tenancy, service automation and self-service portals. Companies are moving past traditional San Diego Colocation, Phoenix Colocation and Los Angeles Colocation. IT staffs think in terms of three core capabilities or “services stacks” that cloud computing can provide their organizations: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the familiar Software as a Service (SaaS). Private Clouds provide a framework to streamline the delivery of these IT services to internal customers, enabling business agility while reducing cost.
2. The hybrid cloud is here to stay.
Across all sectors in both large and mid-size enterprises, it’s clear that the hybrid cloud computing model – linking an internal, premises-based private cloud with the capabilities and bandwidth of public clouds – is here to stay. Companies are looking at application stratification when making decisions. Certain types of CRM, collaboration and messaging applications are seen as appropriate for public clouds, while applications with more sensitive or private information – such as those with industry or government compliance requirements – are being architected to reside within private infrastructures or application spaces that exist within the four walls of the enterprise. “We can appreciate that separation and the reasons for it,” Doscher says. “The Enteracloud Enterprise Cloud Platform offers a shared, multi-tenancy environment that enables us to consult and build a roadmap for our customers. We leverage ITSM and business processes to allow customers to take their existing private cloud infrastructure and build a blueprint that addresses application cloud awareness, connectivity, and security in building one’s hybrid cloud strategy.”
3. Consolidation is inevitable.
Every technology and industry has gone through cycles of consolidation and while the trend isn’t new, it seems to be one that is gaining traction in the cloud. Customers are seeking to deploy applications in different ways creating demand for consolidation of the cloud delivery models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS – in the form of a unified stack as a service delivery model. This may be a harbinger of consolidation of cloud service providers as well, in order to provide greater economies of scale to customers. Today a provider may be focused on infrastructure, but with no linkage to the applications. Or a provider may be focused on software, but with no capabilities to manage their cloud-based infrastructure. There is a customer requirement for these capabilities going forward and an effort needs to be made to consolidate infrastructure and platform, bridging these two areas where integration makes the most sense. Doing so allows customers to take advantage of an elastic infrastructure with platform hooks for building and running custom applications.
4. Application-specific cloud communities are forming.
In public space in particular, discussions around application-specific cloud communities are on the rise, particularly so in three central areas:
- Application Performance Communities
- Regulatory Communities
- Location-Based Services Communities
5. Managed Services get a cloud twist.
Cloud computing has refueled interest in “outsourcing” tasks and organizations are again looking to managed services as they reassess their resource strategies. They are not focused on the ability to utilize a virtual machine, but are focused on the management of infrastructure and taking advantage of the services that cloud computing offers. So, the cloud has become the trigger for discussion and a renewed interest and demand for managed services.
1. What happens if your cloud computing resources are unavailable?
While questions about disaster recovery and high availability in the cloud will be similar to those asked about your own data center, you need to be a lot more specific when looking to implement or utilize a cloud environment.
SLAs vary widely between providers so you’ve got to make sure you’re clear on the details surrounding guaranteed uptime, and then decide if that works for your business.
2. How (and more importantly where) do you backup data?
In a cloud environment, IT executives need to be confident that their data not only will be replicated but also stored across multiple sites in separate locations to ensure they will still have access to that data in the event of a data center failure or other incident.
3. How do you handle large data migration and what are the costs?
While provisioning a cloud environment takes minutes, populating that cloud with the necessary data is an entirely different story.
For example, if you need to migrate or populate a database to the cloud that is too large to send over the network, you need to consider factors such as additional costs, available data load options, and the process for working with your provider on the migration.
4. What are my network access options – and, more importantly, the restrictions?
One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is being able to access critical data over the Internet from any location. Beyond obvious questions such as whether you can access the cloud from mobile devices is whether the provider can support VPNs or dedicated connections. This is particularly true for organizations like financial services firms that have more stringent rules around access.
5. My organization must comply with regulations. What are my options for using IaaS?
For some organizations, particularly ones that have to comply with stringent regulations, public cloud IaaS offerings might not make sense.
Ultimately, everything is shared even though it’s separate both logically and from a security perspective. For this reason, many CIOs may look to community clouds, which enable companies with similar requirements – for example, two pharmaceutical companies that both must meet strict FDA regulations – to share a cloud and achieve true economies of scale.
6. What’s the cost to decommission an IaaS project?
While most cloud providers are upfront about the cost of specific IaaS offerings (for example the cost per megabyte for storage), it is much more difficult to provide a cost for decommissioning – a critical but often forgotten step in the cloud life cycle.
- Node4, a data center and communications firm, recently launched nCloud, a cloud-based infrastructure that offers organizations ultimate IT flexibility by allowing them to build a bespoke solution that works hand in glove with business requirements.
- Using Node4’s network of data centers, nCloud enables organizations to select the services they need and outsource the hosting of their applications and services to suit their current business strategy. With the platform, an organization has the flexibility and control over which of its IT assets it wishes to outsource. Also, an organization that keeps specifically sensitive information on its own private infrastructure can continue to do so. Everything else can be delivered through Node4’s shared platform that can dramatically change how a company utilizes its IT services.
- nCloud reduces capital expenditure and allows the company to replace significant upfront costs with operational costs, according to company officials. Instead of the hefty initial cost of IT equipment, nCloud allows firms to pay a monthly fee for the service they need.
- Worldwide revenue from vendors selling external disk storage subsystems for cloud-based systems will grow from $267.4 million this year to $1.45 billion in 2015, according to Gartner.
- In a recently released research report, Gartner said companies selling private and/or public cloud storage have seen annual revenue grow some 56% to date this year compared to 2010. As external cloud computing emerges as a new segment of the storage market, competition is increasing with leading commercial ECB (external controller-based) disk storage vendors developing or acquiring technologies that will serve as a good fit for external cloud deployments,” said Gartner analyst Sid Deshpande in a statement.
- According to Gartner, the term “external cloud” refers to any public, private or hybrid cloud that serves multiple customers. “Internal clouds” are those deployed within a corporate data centers to serve the company’s internal clients. External clouds currently represent only 1.4% of the overall external array-based disk storage subsystem revenue last year, Gartner said, noting that the market is still in an early build-out stage.
- Additionally, while small, midsize and large companies are utilizing software-as-a-service technologies (SaaS) today, the primary consumers of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are still mostly smaller organizations at this point, the report stated. SaaS and IaaS provider segments will continue to constitute the bulk of revenue for ECB disk storage sales through 2015, Gartner predicted.
- The Asia Pacific region is set to adopt public cloud computing services at a faster rate than the rest of the world over the next six years, according to predictions from analyst group Ovum.
- The region’s cloud computing industry will grow at a compound annual rate of 34.2 percent between 2010 and 2016, the analyst group forecast this week.
- Ovum could not break down those figures by country on request.
- Most of the growth would be in the infrastructure-as-a-service market, the analyst group said, which was far less mature in the Asia Pacific region than software-as-a-service today.
- This fiscal year, Ovum expects SaaS to generate US$2.6 billion in the region and US$18.2 billion worldwide. The market will grow to around US$8 billion in 2016, it reported.
- That represented a slower rate of growth than infrastructure-as-a-service, which would generate only US$180 million this fiscal year but more than US$2.6 billion by 2016, Ovum reported.
- Similarly, platform-as-a-service would generate US$90 million this fiscal year but over US$1.7 billion by 2016, Ovum said.
- Despite the strong growth rates in the Asia Pacific, Ovum expected North America to continue to be the largest consumer of these services, representing half (US$33 billion) of the global cloud computing market by 2016 (US$66 billion).
Linux Labs Launches Beta Program for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) Cloud Computing Platform
Posted on: November 11, 2011
- Searchlight Solutions Ltd. today announces its subsidiary, Linux Labs International, Inc., is launching a beta program for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) style private and hybrid clouds based on their proprietary Indigo file system and Nimbus cloud operating system. The platform provides a single interface that lets users access high performance computing infrastructure resources available in private clouds.
- Linux recently completed a key upgrade of its proprietary NimbusOS for use as the Operating System for its High Performance Cloud Computing (“HPC2”) service. Linux Labs NimbusOS was developed to be compatible and configurable for almost all HPC applications. The integration of the proprietary Indigo file system will provide customers a cost effective way to store their data in addition to the high performance processing services offered as part of the Company’s HPC2 service.
- This beta program is another major step forward towards full deployment of the Company’s complete suite of HPC2 services.
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