Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack company, today announced strategic partnerships with leading cloud infrastructure automation companies Opscode, Puppet Labs and RightScale. These partnerships enable Piston Cloud’s customers to easily automate the tasks necessary to manage applications within their private clouds, simplifying the adoption curve. “Today’s private cloud solutions are poised to transform IT economics for the enterprise,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. “Automation and orchestration are key to realizing the operational efficiencies of private cloud. By supporting solutions like Opscode Chef, Puppet Enterprise ...

This video provides an overview describing what will be covered in this 8 part video tutorial on building a multi-tier cloud application.

If it's a feature your customers are asking for, it's difficult not to want to provide it. Although one of the benefits of public cloud computing is the ability to provision computing and storage resources from anywhere in the world on-demand, enterprises in Europe are wary that if their cloud-based assets are migrated to servers residing in the U.S., then they could (even if they never have yet) be subject to inspection by U.S. law enforcement authorities, even though the assets themselves are not American.

It's still the most controversial provision of the U.S. Patriot Act, signed into law in October 2001. Because of this, European cloud customers specifically request that their service providers (CSPs) block any live migration to U.S. servers. And because it's such a frequent request, CSPs including Zurich-based CloudSigma are offering what they call "Patriot-proof" clouds as a feature.

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"I think it's largely a theoretical risk. I don't believe the U.S. Government is rampantly going around, getting data off of U.S. subsidiary-operated clouds," admits Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma's chief technology officer, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "But also, I think people do have a genuine concern, because the penalties are quite strict."

Disconnect

There's now raw data to verify the suspicion that European CSPs restricting all or some of their cloud services to geographies outside the U.S. - or even just to Europe - is costing Europe valuable investments and prestige. Last year, according to data from U.K.-based telecom analyst firm Informa, the Middle East/Africa region nearly pulled even with Western Europe in the number of operators offering viable cloud services. The rate of growth for European cloud services is among the lowest on the planet.
Prior to the Informa data's release, European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding asked her country's CSPs to refrain from making these offers, saying the free flow of data between nations is essential to healthy trade and a vibrant economy. But as CloudSigma's Jenkins tells us, some European CSPs actually don't have a choice. In Germany, for example, cloud customers may be subject to criminal sanctions if their cloud deployments expose personally identifiable data (PID) to any agency outside Germany.

"The reality is, there's a disconnect between the U.S. position and the European position at the moment," remarks Jenkins. "And the problem is that companies are in a position where essentially they comply with European law, but then they would break U.S. law if they work with a U.S. company, or vice versa. It's a big mess, and for sure, it needs clarifying."

Despite Comm. Reding's calls for CSPs to open up, Jenkins says the E.U. already has very clear laws mandating them to protect citizens' personal data - laws which are unlikely to ever be changed. Those laws state service providers must notify users and seek their permission before transferring their PID to any third party. This is the case, he says, not only for cloud service providers but conventional co-location providers as well.

Jurisdiction

Jenkins says CloudSigma has designed its IaaS servers to be separable by the customer when necessary. Although CloudSigma does have a U.S. subsidiary, there is not a free flow of data between its American and European servers. "We've done that deliberately to allow customers in Europe to say, 'I'm only using a European cloud, therefore I'm not exposing myself to U.S. jurisdiction.' Likewise, the U.S. company can [choose to] only use the U.S. cloud, and only expose themselves to U.S. jurisdiction because we're a U.S. company in the U.S... Our aim is to make it easy for the customer to understand what jurisdiction they are exposing themselves to."

For CSPs that provide PaaS and SaaS, the CloudSigma CTO points out, this level of compartmentalization is not so easy to achieve. Data replication is common in order to ensure resilience and service reliability, so it's conceivable that replicated data may cross jurisdictional boundaries. There will be no way, he predicts, for Google to be able to guarantee its Gmail or Google Apps customers that their data will never fall under some particular, questionable jurisdiction - say, China.

But how CloudSigma lets its IaaS customers approach the jurisdiction problem is during the account creation phase. This way, a customer who may need to operate services in Shanghai can easily be informed as to the possibilities of oversight by Chinese authorities. "It's not an anti-U.S. or pro-Europe question, 'Can I control who has access to my data?'" Jenkins says. "Our job is to try to make it as transparent and as controllable as possible, so a company can go open an account in a specific location, and that's their home jurisdiction. Then they can opt into other cloud locations as they see fit."

As an example, Jenkins offered the case of a Zurich-based customer who wants to add failover and geographic load-balancing in the U.S. That customer will see a warning saying that her customer records will be replicated in the U.S. as well, and explaining the implications of that data falling under U.S. jurisdiction. If both jurisdictions are linked together as one service, the explanation will also add that authorities in either location may have access to customer data from the other. A multi-national company which has offices across the globe, he adds, may actually not have the luxury of choosing an IaaS service that's centered in Zurich.

This opt-in approach, he believes, gives his company an advantage insofar as Europe is concerned. The flip side is that it may be a disadvantage for CloudSigma in the U.S.

"For us, it would be a very advantageous thing to have a consistent approach, as well as for the cloud in general. I think overall, we're a net winner because we're on the European side and we could potentially benefit. But [on the other hand], in Switzerland we don't because it puts people off of the cloud in general, and that's a bad thing. It's something that's in the interest of European cloud providers to resolve... I think finding some middle ground would be beneficial, maybe some sort of framework that goes between the U.S. and Europe. Maybe there's a way to provide some oversight in Europe that would make the E.U. people happy, and then the U.S. would feel like they have some level of access to prevent terrorism. There needs to be some sort of balance... [that] doesn't break either system fundamentally."

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This article maps various Windows Azure caching capa­bilities to caching strategies for output, in-memory data and file resources. It attempts to balance the desire for fresh data versus the desire for the best performance. Finally, it covers a little bit of indirection as a means to intelligent caching.

CIOs today have a top operational and strategic priority (not technology priority) to support the mission of the business through the application of technology. While they are under pressure to reduce costs, CIOs must deliver agility and efficiency to the organization. The CIO is also VERY concerned about risk. CIOs don’t want to disrupt what’s working while chasing new opportunities. Think of the CIO as managing a portfolio of applications, technologies, people and processes. The technology portfolio is allocated to initiatives that are designed to 1) Run the business 2) Grow the business and 3) Transform the business. Like a good portfolio manager, the CIO must balance risk and reward by allocating resources in a balanced manner. The degree of risk is a function of the objectives of the board of directors and the strategic plan and operating plans of the companies.

Join the discussion on the changing role of the CIO at EnterpriseCIOForum.com

Activities in the Run the Business (RTB) category are the CIO’s bread and butter and usually consume most of the investment. If keeping the lights on sucks up too much investment, it will prevent the company from moving forward on projects that can support long-term growth. RTB activities generally are low risk because they’re well understood and drive existing revenue.

Grow the business (GTB) activities are usually business projects that IT needs to support. They drive new shareholder value and stock appreciation. This is why (for example) mobile is such a high priority. These projects are higher risk but also higher reward.

Transform the business (TTB) activities are strategic. They involve major new ventures and longer term break evens – hence they are more risky. But they can be transformative in the sense that they position the company for new opportunities, new markets and efforts that will drive sustainable competitive differentiation. There certainly is a lot of discussion about how cloud computing and big data can help transform the business and provide new revenue streams.

For more on Application Modernization, check out SiliconANGLE’s newest publication, DevOpsANGLE

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VANCOUVER, BC, Feb 1, 2012 – ActiveState, whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud smarter, faster, and safer, announced today the release of Komodo IDE 7: The world’s fiercest IDE. Komodo is an award-winning, professional integrated development environment (IDE) for Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl, web and cloud development. Komodo IDE 7 offers groundbreaking new features, in addition to technical and performance improvements. Integration with Stackato, ActiveState’s cloud platform for creating your Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), provides a smooth desktop-to-cloud development path. Komodo Sync allows users to ...

ISLANDIA, N.Y., Feb. 1, 2012 – CA Technologies announced new CA ERwin products and releases that help a wider audience of stakeholders accurately visualize data assets across the enterprise, from on-premise platforms to the cloud. Today’s resource-strapped organizations struggle to manage data complexity and share accurate information as new platforms and increasing volumes of data are added to their IT environments. With CA ERwin data modeling tools, business and technical users can reap the benefits of a centralized, common view of business data in context–enabling them to better understand and enforce ...

Today, Alfresco today launches its Enterprise v4, perhaps the biggest update since they began operations. The new software comes with mobile and tablet apps, business app integrations and is loaded with social features that help users share, comment on and collaborate on content. The software is built around an open source content management system that is used by more than 2500 enterprises in 55 countries around the globe. They call it cloud connected content.

Like other social Intranet products, Alfresco users can like or follow particular content streams. Enterprise v4 has integrated connectors to Google Docs, Microsoft Office, QuickOffice, Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's iWork app. You can also publish your content to YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Pricing for an Alfresco Enterprise subscription starts at about $25k for the typical enterprise. You can download the new software here.

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NEW YORK, NY and MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA,Feb 1, 2012 – OpTier,the leader in business transaction-driven application performance management, and SOASTA, the leader in cloud testing, today announced a partnership to deliver a superior solution that aligns Dev, QA, Test and IT Operations to ensure the performance of cloud, web, and mobile applications. OpTier and SOASTA’s actionable intelligence allows for effective communication and collaboration across the application delivery chain — putting rapid problem identification, isolation and resolution into these traditionally siloed organizations. The joint solution helps clients create accurate cloud tests, ...

On Tuesday, we introduced you to CA Technologies' Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock platforms, and if you're a frequent reader of ReadWriteWeb, you might still be wondering, "What's a Vblock platform?" It's an emerging contender in the out-of-the-box, full-service cloud server category from a company called VCE.

And if you're wondering how a relatively unknown company goes up against the likes of HP, Oracle, and IBM, the answer is by integrating hardware and software from specialists in their respective fields. Consequently, compute power and networking switches comes by way of Cisco UCS, storage capacity is supplied by EMC Symmetrix, and the virtualization layer is supplied by VMware. Yesterday, by way of a new strategic alliance, the VCE convoy added BMC Software's management software to this illustrious list.

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"BMC is always focused on business service management - the management of services that sit above the infrastructure layer," explains Ken Berryman, BMC's senior vice president of strategy and corporate development. "We have a best-in-class set of solutions to do that, from orchestration through active management of operations. So when you think about what's really required to have a successful cloud project, it's not just enough to have the infrastructure block - the Vblock, which VCE produces. It's also mandatory to have the right level of management that fits above it, not only to take care of initial provisioning of whatever is operating in the data center, but to manage that over time."

The first stage of BMC's alliance with VCE, Berryman tells us, will see integration of VCE's existing infrastructure manager with BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management, which includes automated provisioning of resources in scalable, virtualized "network zones." Imagine simpler, virtual networks where all the physical resources are pooled together, complete with virtual firewalls and load balancers.

From there, the two companies plan to implement BMC's ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite, which Berryman describes as "a set of capabilities that allow you to predict future problems, solve them before they occur, and proactively respond to operations issues." Next will come Atrium Orchestrator, which utilizes ITIL principles for change management in implementing workflows within the Vblock, enabling end-to-end control of virtual environments.

"That's the initial set of integrations," says Berryman. "Over time, we would expect more across the full portfolio of business service management solutions... That roadmap is something we will continue to expand, in response to direct customer demand. Certainly, we are able today to provide integrations across a broader set of the portfolio on a custom basis. But what we are attempting to do here is have a very standard, configured, out-of-the-box Vblock with the BMC solutions made for it, so it's easy to set up, deploy, operate, and manage over time your private or hybrid cloud."

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"I like to describe the roots of all evil being unplanned, or poorly planned, changes," states Jimmy Augustine of HP Software. "Somewhere between 70% and 80% of all service disruptions are caused by faulty changes. Somebody goes in and makes a security change to a network device, and brings down the service. Downtime equates to costs and, in some cases, lost revenue."

You would think Step #1, or something close to Step #1, for any kind of asset migration or disaster recovery plan would be to know what it is you have that you may want to recover when a disaster happens. There's an art to this, it turns out, and it's called dependency mapping. Last December, a VMware engineer we talked to listed it as #2 among his ten tips for disaster recovery planning, just after running a business impact analysis.

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What your business has and why

Dependency mapping is a complete inventory of the software that runs your business, and the components and resources upon which they rely. What dependency mapping software tools do is quite complex, especially now that more critical business assets reside in public and hybrid clouds. Many enterprises invest in dependency mapping without even knowing what it is or why it's there. As a result, an HP software engineer tells RWW, they're racking up enormous, unnecessary costs, especially as they transition from a traditional data center to a cloud-based environment.

When the CIO or the VP of Operations discovers these costs, there typically follows a lot of cleanup having to do with fans and something hitting them. Why didn't we see this coming, they ask?

Augustine is HP's group manager of product marketing for configuration management systems (leaving just enough room on the business card for a phone number). He talked with RWW about yesterday's release of HP's latest update, called Content Pack 10, for its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) tool. The new update addresses the ability to map assets deployed to Amazon's primary public cloud services: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS) and volumes and snapshots stored with Elastic Block Store (EBS).

"There's a mentality that, when you go through a service provider, you're going to want to have this visibility, whether it's a public cloud or an outsourcing agreement or what have you. In most cases, the trust level is implicit," explains Augustine. By that, he means the reliability level that many enterprises expect when they trust their assets to the Amazon cloud. They often assume the reliability question is out of their hands. And that's actually not the case.

"So having this appropriate level of visibility allows IT managers and CIOs to make sure that service providers are doing what they spelled out in the service-level agreements, and it allows them to have peace of mind," Augustine explains. It also enables a business to respond to performance issues that do crop up by adding capacity or compute power from within their own data centers.

Now you see it

"The dynamic nature of a cloud environment, whether it's a private or public cloud, lends itself to the thinking of what we had over the last 10 or 15 years with automated discovery. You still need visibility to get to performance availability, and probably more so with the dynamic environment."

HP's management tool for configuration is called Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB). The dependency mapping tool discovers software components that are stored here. The visual form of UCMDB's contents is what Augustine calls a topology - like a network configuration map, only with software. Some 18 months ago, he tells us, HP started implementing a dynamic service model for UCMDB, the upshot of which was that the management tool could see whenever a new virtual machine was spun, or a new application provisioned. Since HP's monitors are already in place on customers' systems anyway, he said, it only made sense to officially begin implementing them for measuring dynamic performance and reliability issues associated with virtualization and cloud deployments.

In an HP/TechValidate survey of 13 of HP's existing UCMDB customers, 8 of those customers reported that DDMA with UCMDB reduced their time spent in the auditing process by as much as 30%.

Revealing the kind of engineering knowledge that makes him a perfect fit for HP, Augustine divides the use cases for UCMDB into the "change" group and the "steady state" group. For the latter, the transition to virtualization and/or cloud has already taken place.

"Let's say the router goes down, or we have a problem with an application. The UCMDB, by virtue of automated discovery, will allow me to understand how important that application or router is, in terms of the service it delivers to the business," he explains. "So it matters to me if I'm facilitating an e-commerce service or a back office service - the way that I respond to that performance or event is going to be different for those two examples." In other words, it's easier for you to craft separate strategies for responding to "negative impact" events - responding in different ways depending on how your customers will be affected by your response - when you have greater, more granular, visibility into what's going on.

Whereas in the case of the "change" group, Augustine repeats his warning about the root cause of all evil, which, contrary to Internet rumors, is neither money nor patents. "We've helped companies avoid disruptions altogether because they now have the visibility to understand how things relate to each other, so they're not making this change at certain points in time during the day. They're also able to respond to central issues much faster because they understand the context of mundane things like routers. When teams don't have the underlying technology or foundation that we provide, they spend a lot of time trying to understand, 'Okay, who owns that router? And how important is it?'"

He says the service maps that DDMA provides chart, from a high-level perspective of the business service, the underlying application, database, servers, storage elements, and network elements.

"IT is not getting more simple; it's getting more complex," HP's Jimmy Augustine remarks. "You add virtualization, private cloud, public cloud, mobile applications. What this is doing is increasing the layers of complexity. We have some clients with hundreds of thousands of configuration items in their UCMDB, we have some clients with millions. You have to keep everything up to date; it doesn't automatically happen. Having the discipline to go out and discover these items, either on a daily or weekly basis - an up-to-date view of how these things relate to each other - is fundamental. It's a prerequisite to managing IT as a business."

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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The "G" in its name used to stand for "Graphics." A few decades ago, the most delightful room for one to be in during a computer conference was the one where Silicon Graphics was showing a demo. It was like one of those dreams where you knew you weren't really on-board the Starship Enterprise, but you forced yourself to ignore that fact and look at the pretty lights and colors. When SGI ceased to be a company unto itself in April 2009, most folks wrote off the SGI brand as an historical remnant.

Wrong. It's wonderful to see a brand that never says die. Ever since Rackable Systems adopted the SGI name, it's been lucky. It's finding its way back as a high-density storage provider. This afternoon, the company is introducing a very high density storage server platform designed, its engineers tell us, to pack the maximum number of terabytes into a 19-inch rack while staying cool.

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The result is what SGI describes as a module full of "drive bricks." Each brick can be loaded with up to nine 3.5-inch SATA or SAS drives, or 18 2.5-inch SAS or solid-state drives. If you've ever washed dishes in a cafeteria, you may have experienced something similar to the situation of hot-swapping drives in a storage rack. So SGI used a little something called "computer-aided design" to engineer a solution.

"Any time you get a system that is this dense, data center managers need to be able to access it," SGI's director of storage products, Floyd Christofferson, tells RWW in an interview. "If you've ever pulled out a large, very dense system, typically they only allow access from the front. The weight of those trays pulling all the way out adds a lot of strain on the internal cables. In large data centers, people would like to be able to access these hot-swappable parts, but really don't want to do so in a way that either puts strain on the rack itself or on the internal components."

So the slider on SGI's Modular InfiniteStorage (MIS) units can be pulled from the back or front on a nice drawer, all without tripping up a cable or maybe tripping off the power.

Each 4U MIS chassis may have one of two configurations. One is as a storage server with one or two motherboards, each with dual-socket Intel Xeon E5-2600 "Sandy Bridge" processors clocked at up to 3.3 GHz. The remaining space can be populated with either 72 3.5-inch or 144 2.5-inch drives. Alternately, the unit can be maxed out with 81 3.5-inch or 162 2.5-inch drives.

So with that many drives packed that close together, how do they keep from becoming a virtual radiator unit? We asked SGI's chief storage architect Lance Evans, who told us there's a secret in being tight but not too tight. When you push air into certain spaces under pressure, it's like breathing in through your mouth with your teeth shut tight.

"Imagine a cross-sectional slice through the chassis. At any given point along the front-to-back axis of the chassis is a certain cross-sectional air channel," explains Evans. "The smaller those channels are, the higher the pressure that the air channeling system has to be able to generate to pull more air through. Second, you have to be very careful about where that air flows. It needs to be able to flow over the components that are generating heat. If we have airflow through the machine, but it's not passing over components that are creating heat, then it's really not doing us much good. Every last little bit of air that you pull in, you need to be able to use effectively to cool the machine."

So SGI designed a high-pressure air movement system, comprised of six 60mm twin-axial, high-RPM fans positioned in the middle. They're stationed in such a way that, if one of the fans fails, it doesn't result in backflow.

Doing some math on the fly, Evans estimated the total power requirements for a fully populated SGI MIS rack at about 20 kW. That's on the high side of normal, compared to recent analysts' estimates, and perhaps a bit above normal for rack requirements circa 2009. But with firms like Dell now warning customers to expect as much as 30 kW per rack, MIS may be a viable solution for fitting big clouds into tight spaces.

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Ever since human beings landed on the moon, the state of technology in government appeared to be on a downward slope. Never mind that it was really the U.S. Government that facilitated the original Internet; in public sector offices, the state of computing started lagging behind the private sector ever since IBM mass-produced the microcomputer.

That slope may have bottomed out two years ago, with the urgent need to cut costs, reform practices and save jobs leading to an extraordinarily rapid adoption by federal and state governments of private cloud infrastructure. Now a government IT survey commissioned by MeriTalk, and funded by Microsoft and NetApp, reveals the extent of progress: Among just the agencies whose IT managers were surveyed, federal, state and local governments report saving a total of about $15 billion from their fiscal year 2011 budgets.

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The total federal outlay for IT investments in fiscal 2011 totaled $78.8 billion, as shown below in this graph from the U.S. Government's IT Dashboard. The segment chart shows the enormous chunk of that budget devoted purely to IT management costs, easily triple the size of the outlay devoted to defense and public security.

MeriTalk's survey of IT professionals in 302 federal, state, and local government agencies should have revealed the usual, much anticipated technology adoption gap. The report was, after all, entitled the "Virtualization Vacuum." But you can't complain much about what's not there, and this year the vacuum may have been swallowed up. Some 82% of federal IT workers and 77% of state IT workers polled said their agencies have implemented some form of server virtualization, with most of those efforts in both camps reported to have already reached their virtualization goals.

The result was calculated, at least among the agencies whose workers were surveyed, in $15 billion of savings, expected to grow to $23.6 billion by 2015.

In search of some type of vacuum someplace, MeriTalk found it in the field of desktop virtualization - hosting government workers' applications remotely.

This is where the 1970s may yet be alive and well. Among federal IT workers surveyed, 57% said they believed their goals for server virtualization to be more important than their goals for desktop virtualization. For state IT workers, the number was 64%. Now, one possible reason for these lopsided figures could be the obvious one: Any enterprise, public or private sector, needs to have a solid virtualization infrastructure before considering a move to VDI.

Keep in mind, Microsoft helped pay for this survey and has a stake in application virtualization. Nevertheless, the #1 challenge that 43% of those polled said they faced was getting their existing "legacy" applications to run on newer platforms. To quote the MeriTalk report, "Some servers/apps can't be virtualized due to performance or because they are legacy-type applications that will not run on newer architectures and agencies do not have funds to re-engineer them." The #2 reason might actually be related to #1 anyway: Some 39% of respondents said the migration would take too much time.

This led Mark Weber, the president of NetApp's public sector division, to make this comment: "When agencies do begin developing their virtualization plans, they should look beyond servers and consider desktop virtualization as well. The more opportunities that agencies are able to recognize and incorporate into their modernization frameworks, the greater their long-term benefits."

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Stackato is a cloud application platform based on Cloud Foundry for creating a private PaaS. This video shows deploying an application to a locally running “micro cloud” then re-targeting and deploying the same application to a Stackato cluster running on HP Cloud Services. It also show the new Stackato interface in Komodo IDE 7 and touches briefly on the use of the ‘stackato run’ command and post-staging hooks.

Need support for Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux or Microsoft Windows on AWS? Amazon is now offering support for setup, configuration and troubleshooting of system software as part of its support program. The company is also adding a “trusted advisor” feature to inspect AWS environments and offer help ranging from performance improvements to security suggestions.

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The third-party support is being offered to customers with premium support packages. If you have gold or platinum support (starts at $400 for gold, and $15,000 for platinum), you can now ask questions about operating systems and “common application stack components.” This includes Apache, IIS, Sendmail, Postfix and (oddly) FTP.

Trusted Advisor

What’s more interesting is the addition of the Trusted Advisor, which will perform checks and offer suggestions about how to improve the AWS experience. Amazon is starting with eight checks, ranging from checking open ports to flagging unused elastic IP addresses.

Most of these center around AWS offerings, like suggesting customers purchase reserved instances if there’s a scenario where it would save customers money based on past usage. (Which also dovetails nicely with AWS interests, since reserved instances no doubt help Amazon with capacity planning.)

The services that Amazon is offering advice on, right now, is pretty limited. However, with the data that Amazon has at its disposal, it’s conceivable that this could be expanded to become a major selling point for using AWS. Again, the Trusted Advisor services are available to customers who gold or platinum support members.

Amazon’s support offerings are still pretty limited, so I don’t think they’ll be challenging Rackspace’s “fanatical support” anytime soon.

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Today CloudPassage boosts security for your cloud-based servers by announcing an enhanced version of its Halo SaaS security tools called NetSec. The new version brings two-factor authentication methods for remote terminal access, as well as improvements to cloud firewall policy creation and management. As with earlier versions, the tools only work on Linux-based instances, since you need to install their agents on each cloud-based server. The tools are being used by Foursquare, for example, to help manage their increase in weekend check-in traffic.

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The issue is that the cloud is chaotic: servers come and go and it is hard to use traditional firewall products amongst all these changing IP addresses and network configurations. Halo NetSec is expressly designed for this environment and logically groups servers by application to make it easier to view the security policies, as you can see from the screen shot below. So you can set up rules between all your app servers and your database servers, for example.

Another feature, which has been part of the Halo Pro package, is what they call GhostPorts. CloudPassage has worked with Yubico's USB two-factor authentication keys to make remote communications with your cloud-based servers more secure. Typically, you open up an SSH terminal session with your cloud server, and that can be a vulnerability for someone who is attempting to attack your server. What Halo GhostPorts does is tie that session with a user who has the USB key so that no one can see an open port or have access via SSH. You can see how this sorts out on its management console below:

There are three different pricing plans for Halo: There is a free Halo Basic plan that can be deployed on up to 25 servers. Next level up is NetSec, which costs 3.5 cents per server hour. The top tier is the Pro plan which costs 10 cents per server hour. There are volume discounts for multiple servers. More information on Halo's pricing and plans can be found here.

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ISLANDIA, N.Y. and LONDON (Cisco Live), January 30, 2012 – CA Technologies today announced CA Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock™ Platforms, a new solution that drives Business Service Innovation by enabling IT to provide rapid, predictable and secure provisioning and delivery of cloud infrastructure and critical IT and business services. This is the company’s fifth solution certified for use with VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, all of which are based on CA Technologies Unified Automation solutions. Enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs) use cloud management software to enable their Infrastructure as a ...

Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.

"As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. "This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006." Independent analysts say this is indicative of the growth of the cloud in general and of Amazon's striking dominance of the market.

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"Stunning, isn't it?" Randy Bias, co-founder of Cloudscaling said to me about the news by email. "From 150% to almost 200% growth. That's crazy. 500,000 requests per second at peak. Blows my mind."

Bias says these are the big take-aways.
"S3 growth is accelerating, not just increasing. If other AWS services are accelerating similarly then we will see a major shift this year in AWS usage and likely revenue reporting in SEC filings.

"This is the largest storage system in the world bar none; there isn't anything like it anywhere else that I'm aware of unless it's some secret government/NSA vault.

"Check my math, but at 1Kbyte average per object, that would be 780PB of disk storage:
- 762,000,000,000 * 1024 (traditional KB)
- 780288000000000 / 1000 (KB for disk) / 1000 (MB for disk) / 1000 (GB for disk) / 1000 (PB for disk) [ disk capacity is in even 1,000 increments, not multiples of 2 ]
- That's 780PB, but unclear if that's replicated or unreplicated; probably replicated, which means 260PB of data with 3x replication.
- Average of 1Kbyte is probably too low.
- At 100TB per storage system that is 7,222 storage *servers*, each with 36 spindles at 3TB each; that might not be their configuration, but even if it's 2 or 3 times as dense, that is a *lot* of storage servers.
- At those numbers, it's a 26M/month business and a 300M/year run rate, which means it's still roughly 30% of AWS revenue with EC2 being most of the rest.

"I don't understand how people can't see this kind of thing and just have their jaw hit the floor. People are paying for this. At this rate they will have 2 TRILLION objects in another year and it will be a $600M/year business."

What's behind such numbers? Widespread technology change.

"What we are seeing is the geometric explosion of cloud growth from multiple points," Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang told ReadWriteWeb.
"First, broad based adoption driven by consumerization of IT. Second, the shift from transaction to engagement - we have social, mobile, analytical, and other unstructured data. Third, true elasticity has come to fruition as the promise of the cloud gets delivered. People are taking to the cloud because the tools are easy to use and they don't have time or money to provision expensive servers. Instead they are using elasticity, which was the original premise of AWS. We could see it happening last year but this leap in growth is tremendous."

Dave Linthicum, CTO and Founder of Blue Mountain Labs, says Amazon's dominance is clear. "The rapid growth of AWS S3 is pretty much in-line with what I'm seeing in enterprises adopting cloud computing. The reality is that they are the 800 pound gorilla, and continue to gain weight. Unless they do something stupid, they are the storage provider to beat."

Ray Wang concurs. "There are only a few companies in the world who can compete with Amazon," he told me by IM tonight.
"It has established itself as one of the leading contenders. The barriers of entry are high. Very few folks can afford to build the data centers, the software infrastructure, and momentum to be profitable. Amazon is in the same league as Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. The only other folks that could do it if they woke up are the telco's - but we've all been telling them that for years. They haven't paid attention."

Amazon's Barr explains the growth thusly. "Although we definitely made it easier for you to delete objects using Multi-Object Deletion and Object Expiration, we also gave you plenty of ways to upload new objects using Multipart upload, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Import/Export," he wrote in his blog post. He concluded by noting that running a system so complex is hard work and pointed to open jobs at AWS.

Discuss

The latest release by CA Technologies of a product called Private Cloud Accelerator is being described, by folks who only read the press release and skipped the details, as a new catalog for rapidly provisioning and deploying services over a company's private cloud. But what's really nice for a prospective customer to have at a time like this, is a private cloud.

So the real news from CA today is actually this: By means of a partnership deal with Vblock infrastructure platform maker VCE, CA is making available an all-in-one, rapidly deployable private cloud package, both hardware and software, that competes directly with out-of-the-box solutions from IBM, HP and Oracle.

Sponsor

"VCE is competing directly with Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic offerings, the whole app-plus-hardware in a box. It's competing with HP's CloudSystem Matrix and IBM's CloudBurst platform," states Trevor Bunker, CA's chief technology architect, in an interview with RWW. "And why CA's partnered with VCE is, we're the only software ISV at this point to have this level of software integration and partnership with VCE."

Everybody, get in the box

VCE's Vblock systems combine ready-to-deploy cloud infrastructure systems from multiple vendors, so specialists in their respective fields may participate in an all-in-one option. The hardware is provided by Cisco's Unified Computing System with its Nexus brand switches; its storage is EMC Symmetrix VMAX and Symmetrix VNX; and its virtualization layer is based on VMware vSphere. What Private Cloud Accelerator adds to this mix is an almost turnkey approach to provisioning hardware for specific roles in just a few days' time.

Bunker tells us that scalability is often the easy part. The hard part comes when an enterprise has to present a storefront for its customer. At that point, big or small doesn't really matter so much as whether the service is available, reliable and personal.

"How can they put up a storefront - offer up services, charge for services, measure and manage the demand for those services? You can think of CA Private Cloud Accelerator as a sales office inside an apartment complex. We're accelerating the deployment and the operation of the Vblock."

Bunker's company is known for advising customers on how to jump-start failed virtualization and cloud migration projects. So he notes that one of the problems CA has often helped customers face down is the lack of content - more specifically, the trouble with getting a working service started once the hardware is provisioned.

"We can show a customer all these great end-to-end workflows, these wonderful integrations that they can do. And they'd look at it and say, 'I love it! I want that!' They'd buy it. But what the industry would sell them is a big, blank canvas. And that upset customers, because they were engaged in months - if not years - of customization, professional services. They never really got what they want, so there was a sort of general dissatisfaction with a lot of automation solutions."

Virtual portal

The system which CA jointly developed with VCE is centered around a self-service portal that CA demonstrates being used on an iPad rather than a PC. The portal serves as a simple catalog for spinning up a role, such as a database server, a test environment for SAP software, or a lab environment for Oracle E-Business suite. "We take all the processes of provisioning, configuration and automation all the way through the Vblock, and actually deploy those services," says Bunker. "If you're going to run a big platform like the Vblock that will run multiple applications or, if you're a large enterprise, support multiple departments, there's common tasks like creating virtual machines, provisioning storage, loading the software, setting up the storage, common, operational IT tasks that everyone has to do. We saw an opportunity to use our combined best practices and industry knowledge to embed those process workflows into the solution."

Since CA expects its Accelerator customers to either immediately or eventually resell their services to their own clients, it integrates billing procedures and business services. "A lot of billing solutions out there typically tend to support one, and only one, approach to billing. But it's not a one-size-fits-all world. We actually support both assets for resource-based billing and consumption-based billing," the chief architect explains. One example of the difference involves a customer providing e-mail as part of its service. The customer could pay a flat fee per month for a given number of users, or subscribe to the service on a per-user, per-megabyte basis. The former involves pre-allocation and more conventional asset-based budgeting, which some customers prefer, and which quite a bit of legacy software still requires; the latter helps businesses move the billing process from capital to operating expenditures.

A few weeks ago, we reported on public sector entities, such as cities and municipalities, that are recouping their costs for cloud migration by pooling their resources for multi-tenancy, and also selling their over-provisioned services back to storage and compute pools for use by other agencies. We wondered, would CA's billing system enable these cities to set themselves up as cloud service resellers more quickly?

"One of the things we designed into our system is the ability to take that apartment model that I mentioned before - like having multiple houses with a common water and electric supply, and be able to support n-tier tenancy," answers Trevor Bunker. While some multi-tenancy models only support "parents" and "tenants," the n-tier model enables "super-tenants" to lease services to other businesses, and also business divisions to lease services to other divisions within the same business. "We provide that visibility into the assets, the licensing, and support that from a provisioning and configuration perspective."

The overarching point that Bunker makes here is that the CA system's catalog, unlike others, offers services intended for use by administrators, not just by end customers, especially the newly-crowned IT managers who are scrambling to just get started. "How do I actually set this up, take this stand-alone application on the physical server, migrate it into the Vblock, virtualize it, and then make it ready for multiple people to consume? There's not many others out there who are looking to help those people with content."

Discuss

In a multi-tenant environment, a SaaS company can reduce costs if it shares or reuses more of its resources. However, the more the company shares resources, the more risks it faces because an outage of a shared resource can potentially affect many customers.  This article discusses the considerations multi-tenancy database in the Cloud from a DB2 perspective.