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Customized Solutions in the Cloud

This entry is part of a series of postings that consider the challenges of deploying enterprise software into the cloud. Specifically, how to customers can solve their unique business problems in the cloud. Normally customers will customize their environment to suit but the cloud is an environment that typically does not tolerate customer-specific customizations.

As usual this is a balancing act. If you can take the cloud solution “as-is” and just configure it then you are in the best place from a technology and risk perspective. If you can isolate your custom processes outside of the core cloud offering then you can still leverage the benefits of the cloud but still have your custom processes. If you have to customize the core solution then you may have to stop calling it a “cloud” solution and call it an “managed service” or “hosted” model; not as sexy on your resume but a more accurate representation IMHO.

Why does the cloud create a customization issue?

Technically it isn’t the “cloud” or even multi-tenant models that cause the issue. It is the fact that the cloud provider wants to manage a large number of systems ‘en masse’. Specifically, they want to be able to push out updates, patches and performance enhancements to all of the systems without any risk of something in a specific instance breaking.

This does not just increase the hosting company’s profit margin it also gives you a much higher quality end product. How? If hundreds customers are all using exactly the same stack of software, at the same patch level and on the same hardware configuration then the chance that you will find an environmental bug is much lower. Also, the software developers will typically develop the code, do QA and benchmark on that exact stack so you have the most optimal environment possible.

So, we have established that the cloud provider wants you to run on a predictable platform. What does that mean from a practical perspective?

Customization vs. Configuration

People a lot smarter and more eloquent than I am have explained the difference between configuration and customization, usually around "writing code" vs. "using an admin client or changing XML files". However, in this case the difference is a little more specific. For the cloud, a configuration change is something that will not change the service provider's ability to manage the environment in a predictable way. However, a customization is something that removes that predictability.

The Problem with Customizations in the Cloud

An example of a customization might be custom code that writes to a non-standard database table or bypasses the standard APIs to perform operations using direct service calls.

• Writing to non-standard database tables: As the cloud service provider I have standard processes that backup the database tables...at least all of the standard ones. If my scripts don’t back up your tables and you need them to be recovered then you’ll be mighty upset. Even you adding a non-standard index to a table could be enough for one of my performance updates to take down your system.
• Bypassing supported APIs: The cloud provider’s contract with you is probably that they will document all API changes, give you fair warning before they start to deprecate functions etc. That contract only relates to the supported API set, they can change other private API calls without telling you.

Remember that in a multi-tenant model if you take down your system by bypassing these controls then you could also be taking hundreds of other systems down at the same time so the service provider is unlikely to make exceptions.

Your options: configure, customize or try something else.

Configuration:

By far the best model is to move to a configuration-driven solution. This should include configuration components for clients, server services and admin tasks. Vendors moving their solutions to the cloud cannot continue to rely on the model where they “are an open, fully extensible, platform for your custom applications”. To survive, vendors need to wake up and to start to support complex, business driven and predictable configuration-only models.

Customization:

I think that vendors need to make a call here.

1. Don’t support customizations – this restricts what your customers can do in the cloud but supports a low cost model.
2. Allow customizations but know that your cost to manage the services just increased exponentially and involves a lot of professional services work.

The latter model is closer to a managed service than a typical cloud deployment.

Something else:

This is the area where there’s the most latitude and opportunities for some creative thinking, maybe just until the configuration models mature.

Ideally, we are looking for a model where the customer gets his/her customizations but the cloud service provider still gets the predicable, uniform environment to manage.

Isolation:

The core cloud offering runs without any custom components/services but it communicates with a custom environment that includes all of the customer’s specialty code. The cloud provider can manage the core environment en masse and then someone (the cloud provider, partner or customer) is responsible for ensuring that the isolated custom pieces survive any changes to the core system. This model can work well in many cases but is predicated on the custom code not needing to run on the same servers as the actual core systems. This can work especially well for custom clients and interoperability with 3^rd party systems where the delineation is clear.

Certified Customizations:

This sounds good in principal but the reality is a little less clear. In this model the cloud service provider will publish a guide to the operations and behavior that can be tolerated in a customization. A 3^rd party (e.g. the customer or a partner) will build the custom code to that specification. An audit of the source code will be carried out which will ensure that only supported actions are being taken.

In theory, this means that the code will support the en masse management while also giving the customer the custom behavior that they need. So why isn’t this a clear winner?

1. It is expensive to carry out the certification process.

2. The process is not always 100% reliable at finding potential trouble spots.

3. Partners/customers may not be comfortable handing over the source code to the service provider for the audit.

4. In many cases the custom code will make calls to third partner components that are not available to be certified.

OEM the Cloud:

In this model the cloud service provider makes available the core product offering to a partner who then builds their solution on top of that. The partner is then responsible for delivering the end solution to their customers. They take the updates from the cloud service provider and certify that they will not do any harm to their end product before implementing them.

Conclusion

As I said at the start, this is a balancing act. If you can take the cloud solution “as-is” and just configure it then you are in the best place from a technology and risk perspective. If you can isolate your custom processes outside of the core cloud offering then you can still leverage the benefits of the cloud but still have your custom processes. If you have to customize the core solution then you may have to stop calling it a “cloud” solution and call it an “managed service” or “hosted” model; not as sexy on your resume but a more accurate representation IMHO.

Cloud Computing Business Considerations - Overview

I started writing a series of articles on the virtualization stack that you'd need in order to host something as big and complex (and non-cloud designed) as an enterprise ECM solution. Then I went quiet...not because I got shutdown or bored but because I realized that I was focusing on the wrong part of the stack for my profession.

If you are a regular reader of my Blog then you'll know that I tend not to talk about EMC-specific technology but in this case the topics I am going to cover don't make sense unless you understand that we have basically cracked the technical issues around moving legacy enterprise software into a cloud environment. We have a container that we call a VCUBE where we can host non-cloud-designed systems in the cloud. The VCUBE has been announced publically and the first customers have already started using EMC solutions in a limited deployment model.

This gives me the opportunity to get back into the area that I think deserves the most attention today:

What are the business issues that you need to consider when moving corporate assets into the cloud?

I am going to focus on the topics that you as a customer need to be thinking about as you move to the cloud. I’ll pick a topic at a time and expand on it in an entry and I’ll add new entries as I think of them. Just to set expectations: I might not have all of the answers but I’ll try to give you questions to mull over.

Core Business Issues
Service Level Agreements	Do you understand what you need from an SLA? Who is the SLA with? What does it cover? What are the implications of non-adherence to the SLA?
Pricing	How does the new pricing model work? Who ultimately owns the software? Everyone gets excited about OpEx vs. CapEx but is that ok for you? Maybe your OpEx budget is more tightly managed that your CapEx budget.
Liability/Insurance	Who is liable for what and do all the parties have coverage should it be called upon?
License ownership	Who is responsible for providing software licenses? For the core offering, 3rd party software, the OS, DB, add-ons etc.?
Regulations	Are you sure you understand who is obliged to adhere to a regulation? Does the service provider have their own regulations?
Exit strategy	Can you back out of the solution if it isn’t working out for you?
Initial Implementation Issues
Services	Are you free to employ your preferred professional services companies or do you have to use the Cloud providers’?
Migration	Are you going to forklift existing data, processes, policies etc. into your cloud solution? If so, how’s that going to work?
Connectivity	Can you connect in your other enterprise systems efficiently? What about connecting custom clients?
Customizations	What level of customization (if any) will the vendor support? This can range from zero to unlimited but there are prices to pay across the board.
Day-to-day Management
User (de)provisioning	Is there an unacceptable latency in how quickly users are provisioned and (more importantly) de-provisioned in your cloud systems.
Monitoring	Who is responsible for monitoring access violations, system performance, etc.
Location issues	Do you know where your data is? You might not care but some solutions need to know, (especially in the EU).
Backup, HA, DR	What’s your requirement for disaster recovery?
Patch management	Who patches what, when and how? Can you opt in and opt out?
Environment management	What environments are provided? Dev, Test, Production, Sandbox? What’s the connectivity between them, etc.

My thoughts on the week at the Cloud Computing Expo. Ugly Babies, Duct Tape and DevOps.

My one big insight – in the future when the Cloud Computing Expo has 50% of the sessions on cloud- based applications, end user solutions and real customer usage stories then cloud computing will have arrived. Right now it is just starting to mature...an exciting time to be involved!

• This is a fast growing but still immature space. This is obvious because:
• There are lots of very specialized vendors selling point solutions.
• Most people here are talking about the issues and not solutions.
• There's a lot of work going on in areas that should 'just work'. Most of these areas will become commodities in the longer term but right now there's a lot of duct tape holding lipstick onto pigs.
• The lack of clarity around industry definitions is amazing, the industry needs to agree on what some of these words mean!
• There's a severe lack of real-life customer use cases. This is odd because vendors stand on the stage announcing that they've been selling cloud solutions for ten years. To whom?
• The focus right now is on solving IT issues down at the IaaS level. IMHO this will/should be short lived because this really should be a commodity. The sooner we can move out of IaaS and be looking at eSaaS (Enterprise Software as a Service) the better.
• Segregation is probably going to be a big deal. The cloud aggregates things into a single location and sometimes that's not a good thing, we need to be able to segregate some things (data, access, services, etc.). Don't neglect to build your infrastructure to be able to withstand this data mobility.
• An even bigger deal will be policies. Not just for segregation but also for provisioning, access, etc.. Here's one...how about a policy for when you will take down unused systems in the cloud. I've ranted on about uncontrolled silos being a huge liability for ten years now...oh lookie, here's another one appearing!
• Security. we need to be able to secure the cloud, no doubt about it. We could do ourselves a favor however by *comparing* the cloud apps to on-premise apps. The elephant in this room is "how secure is your existing infrastructure?" Before you call my baby ugly take a look in your own crib!
• Self-service is a big deal but only because it is the key touch point with the end users but it really only solves once tiny part of the issue with the software lifecycle - deployment. Let's not get too carried away.
• Open source cloud solutions. These will help especially at the IaaS level and will play a large part in driving IaaS into a commodity. I want to see IaaSaaC not just be a biblical figure but a reality.
• One blocking factor is confidence. We need to find a way to get companies to try the cloud, the other might be related to IT departments and job security!
• Convincing IT that the cloud will allow them to focus on adding value to the business not just "breaking rocks" would be huge.
• Talking of IT...IT and engineering are going to have to form new alliances. DevOps was a word that I've heard bandied around a lot this week.
• One thing that I don't know for sure is "who is going to win". At any level of any part of the stack. What does this mean in an area like this? Don't get too tied in to anyone's specific technology if you can avoid it. Remember 'agility' is the word of the week.
• The cloud is global...rules, regulation, laws, etc. are not. Don't assume that the regulations that govern *your* data apply elsewhere. This one is a killer.
• Leverage the cloud, don't just move to it. If you think that a move to the cloud is just about moving from the on-premise datacenter to the off-premise datacenter then you will be missing out on a lot of the potential - especially the financial potential.
• Make sure that your cloud service provider will turn on the lights for you. Remember what "assume" did...
• Cloud computing seems to lead to Choice computing. If your cloud solution only runs on a VT220 terminal or Windows then you might not be happy with adoption.

The conference was very good, I'd like to see a few more customers speaking and many more sessions on deploying SaaS. Good energy level, friendly people and I didn't have to speak so I could dress like a homeless person.

Cloud Expo #4: Agile Development, CMOs and the Borg

The fourth and final day of the conference. I sat through a few higher-level, vendor pitches today which were ok but they didn't introduce anything blogworthy.

The “interesting” section today is the section Cloud Scar Tissue below.

Agile Development in the Cloud - Jan Aleman, Servoy

I wouldn't normally attend a session with 'Agile Development' in the title but this level of the stack seems to be very neglected. As I've mentioned in previous posts the focus seems to be on the infrastructure and platform layers. According to Jan:

• 65% of new offerings are SaaS
• 30% of total market is SaaS
• 70% of all software is on premise.

So, why not write your apps to run in both? Again the speaker reiterated that as a developer IaaS is of no interest to you, all you really care about is the PaaS layer. (Force.com and Azure are the leaders in the PaaS space.) PaaS gives you the multi-tenancy, security, I/O support etc. As a developer though, how mature are their development offerings? Are you locked in? Can you develop one code line and have it deployed into on and off premise.

I was hoping that this session would be a little bit more of an academic presentation about how agile development works in the cloud but it really was just a marketing pitch for their agile development platform. They use Eclipse as the UI and he did build an application in real time during the session which he published out to the web and we were able to use it from our iPads/laptops. That was neat but I didn't learn anything to take back to the office.

CMO Panel discussion

How much of a role does branding make in a Cloud company today?

One of the panelists said that none of the companies on the stage was big enough to have a real 'brand' technically. The challenge that I think they have is communicating their value in a way that people can understand. Marketing via t-shirts seems to be a valid and effective approach that they are using right now just to gain awareness. They are in the stage of just standing out and raising awareness.

The topic of Bloggers arrived. They see the blogosphere as a place to take your brand (it is agnostic, cheap and a leveler). In the blogosphere, 'cloud people' are relatively well behaved and it is fairly flat. For example, with security blogs we get huge spikes as things happen but in the cloud blogs it spikes less.

The most interesting thing to me? The marketing guys were very pragmatic which is probably because the companies are small and they are stuck the technical intricacies right now. I'm sure they'll change as their companies grow and they forget their roots!

Cloud Scar Tissue: Real world implementation lessons learned from the early adopters. Anthony Skipper, ServiceMesh

Best session of the week IMHO. Anthony walked through a comprehensive list of lessons learned in deployments. He had issues but he also had answers!

One big thing though...he said cloud provisioned systems are like the Borg, each one is the same as the others...what? Non-geek alert, intruder detected. I thought that the guy with the mullet and sandals in the second row was going into apoplexy. Dude, the Borg were not clones, they looked really different but were part of a common hive. I'll overlook this just because the rest of your session rocked but if you are going to quote Star Trek at a cloud convention then tread carefully my friend. ;-)

So, back to the session...Anthony listed the main areas where customers have issues. I'm not doing it justice but here are my highlights:

Not believing that org change is needed

• IT fiefdoms. IT and the business are not built around the same structure as the cloud. Your cloud implementation is likely to cross the existing organizational boundaries and IT needs to be prepared for this.
• Operations will be much closer to the developers and will have good feedback for engineering. Again, the organization needs to be prepared for this new relationship.
• Architects will be forced to come down from their ivory towers and become more 'real-time'. The effects of their work can be seen almost immediately and that feedback loop will change the way they think and work.

Boiling the ocean

• This was not about how quickly you can get to the cloud, it was more realizing that you are not going to move everything to the cloud, some systems may never move. Greenfield apps will have a much better chance to survive out in the ether but some of your existing apps will not. You need to decide whether to live with this, rebuild the apps or change your business processes.
• The more service providers that you use the more connection points you are creating. You might just want to have one...or as few as necessary.

Failure to simplify

• We've all heard the adage that "complexity kills". It is not uncommon for a basic VM to have between 80-150+ integration points. When you move to the cloud those integration points are still there but now they are away from your existing infrastructure.
• Think about this level of complexity and then realize that a decent sized company could be spinning up hundreds of images a day. If you have too many integration points or complex relationships then this may not be manageable.
• The integration points may not be automatable, if any part is not automatable then the entire process becomes a burden on someone in IT again.
• In the world of enterprise software this is very important, especially with legacy systems. Can you simplify the integration points? Can you fully automate the provisioning?

Vendor management relationships

• Negotiating contracts with cloud providers should not be underestimated as a task, especially for a large scale contract. This can take 6+ months just to negotiate the deal and this has been known to actually stop a project.

Believing the vendor hype

• Customers believe too much of the story. Companies claim to "cloudify" any existing app in minutes with a new widget. If this sounds like a reasonable claim then email me because I have a bridge that I'd like to sell to you.
• Watch out for cloud providers with their own management tools...sure "as eggs is eggs" those tools will not work across platforms.
• This was a very long list of things not to believe...maybe it would have been a shorter list if it was exclusive not inclusive!

Cloud addiction (consuming too much and not knowing when to say no).

• Think about how you are billed. If you cannot predict those billing factors then your costs could balloon. Is it I/O, storage, compute cycles?
• There are solutions that are cost effective in the cloud but as they grow they may be more effective to have on premise.
• People find it hard to believe that it might NOT be cheaper to deploy in the cloud because of the hype but the cloud is cheap because of scale...once you have that same scale in-house then you might not see the savings.
• Have a policy (that word again) to review whether the cloud solutions are cost effective

Failure to implement policies from the start.

• This is just a great opportunity to drive process improvements.
• don't forget that just because it is technically possible to move to the cloud doesn't mean that it is legally possible.
• What to do if a bright spark in the business starts his/her own cloud deployment armed with a credit card and a browser? What's your policy there?
• The policy list seems like it could go on for a long time so here's what I'd say. Moving to the cloud is like any other piece of technology. It will only facilitate the running of your business, it will not drive it. You need to know what you are trying to achieve.

How is it possible that Security wasn't on his list? He said that there are security solutions to most of the problems and he reiterated that moving to the cloud may improve security.

Cloud Expo #3: Segregation, Policies and Breaking Rocks.

Interesting Section

Almost without exception every presenter stands up and says “The single biggest issue is X…oh, by the way we have a unique solution for X.” but there’s definitely a pattern for the areas. You can easily see that the vendors will split into IaaS, PaaS & SaaS groups because they will all be selling into different parts of the business.

There are a few interesting themes that I hear consistently throughout the conference:

• The industry is focused on solving IT issues with the Cloud but we need to be focused more on solving the business problems.
• Policy is going to be the next big buzz word. Not just access control...users, workloads, datasets, geo, laws and a policy management system. Watch out for this – those of us in the ECM business have a lot to offer here. Who else has policies for n-levels of access, reporting, audits, retention, geographical placements, etc.?
• Segregation. Servers, services and data. The general theme here is that there times when you have to compartmentalize your ‘stuff’. If your infrastructure or apps can be location aware then you can more easily adhere to regulations.
• For example, UK HR data cannot cross the UK country boundary so if I am in the UK I can see local HR data but if I step over the border into Ireland then I should not be able to access that data. Also, the underlying storage needs to be location aware…no storage or backup off the UK soil. While we are at it, in theory IP packets should not be routed via servers not in dear old Blighty.
• That last one might keep you up at night…
• The cloud tends to give better predictability and reliability.
• Anecdotally one customer claims to get 100% success in systems deployed from the cloud but only 85% in conventional deployments. They claim this is mainly because expectations are better set and outcomes are more predictable.
• As a follow on from the anecdote above I’ve noticed that everyone quotes anecdotes and analyst surveys. I’m guessing that this is also a sign that we are in an immature area – not so much real data.
• I’ve noticed that the vast majority of devices are non-Microsoft. Are the cloud guys driven by ‘choice computing’ or are they just rebels or both?
• Already IaaS seems to becoming a real commodity. Why would you want to be given a VM when you could be given a platform?
• Love this - One customer was scared to move to the cloud because they didn’t trust it but then they had an independent assessment of their own data center and it only came out as a level2 facility. Whoops!
• In the c-level discussion one member of the panel said the following…and I agree entirely.
• The biggest challenge is how to message the cloud to the market. Stop using the language of a vendor and start using the language of an industry.

I’m going to keep the notes much shorter and relevant today…probably.

Day 3 Keynote | Ops or Apps - Who'll Own the Data Center of Tomorrow? - Pete Malcolm, Abiquo

Self-service gives agility, rapid provisioning, pay as you go and pre-built configurations for users to choose from. It also reduces the IT infrastructure load as they can focus on the physical world while users work at the virtual level. But there are risks too. The old black box/dark room issue again, we don't know what is actually going on in the cloud data center so how do you test resilience if you don't own and test the whole stack?

The answer? 'Policy based automatic allocation'. This is automation of provisioning of systems. Deciding where they will run, what resources will it consume, which hypervisor to use, server segregation, data segregation, load balancing, co-locating with the servers, etc.

A self-service model needs to include "full empowerment". If your user needs to call IT for anything then this does not work

• Provide Compute (create VMs) - we do this well,
• Storage - can you support the appropriate class and amount of storage without calling IT to provision this. This is often not done correctly.
• Networking - can you auto provision the isolation, manage the firewalls, load balancers etc?

We need policies to drive the automatic, self-service provisioning of environments.

The Inevitability of an Open Cloud - John Engates, Rackspace

When most people say cloud they are imagining the Public Cloud. These tend to be proprietary; AWS, Google app engine, Windows Azure, force.com etc. You tend to get locked into these technologies, the alternative approach is to build a private cloud. Often times this is no less expensive or complex than your existing on-premise solution.

The answer…Open Source!

"The Cloud will have an Open Source OS". OpenStack is open source cloud software starting with infrastructure as a service IaaS based on technology originally written by Rackspace and NASA. Citrix and Dell were part of the initiative too. Three components in the OpenStack are: Compute, Object Storage and Image Service (VM images not scanned).

CEO Power Panel | Enterprise-Level Cloud Computing: Far-Off Dream or Present Reality? Lots of C-level people

Question 1: What's the fly in the ointment?

• It’s still very immature. We are at the “386” stage...but the pace of change is amazingly fast.
• Compliance and security need to be dealt with if we want the enterprises to adopt the cloud.
• Only 6% of IT staff are using the cloud...which means that 94% are not.
• It’s not about technology right now; it is about confidence in trying it. Start with something low risk to get the confidence.
• We start crossing the chasm this Thursday, (after the conference ends and we all get back to work I guess).

Question 2: What has happened recently that makes you feel good about the cloud?

• One word? “Easy.” One click, one system.
• The biggest challenge is how to message the cloud to the market. Stop using the language of a vendor and start using the language of an industry.
• The cloud business was being driven by gaming in the cloud but it seems like we are moving towards enterprise apps.
• Told a story about a company that went out of business but no one told (or paid) the cloud vendor...the servers kept running for three months serving customers without anyone doing noticing…they just kept running. I’m not sure if this was good or bad but I get the point.

Question 3: What's going to change in the next five months?

• More scale in both directions
• Easier
• More confidence in the cloud

I enjoyed the panel discussion until one of the c-level bods started a self-serving commercial for their products and every other one then followed suit…

The Big Win: Stop Playing Small-Ball with Your Cloud Strategy - Dave Roberts, ServiceMesh

Nothing that we had not already heard in this except that he said that thje reason that convicts used to be made to break rocks is that forcing people to do meaningless work that serves no purpose is mental torture. Much of what IT does falls into this category today but the self-service cloud model allows them to break out of jail.

If you are a large company then you are already at scale so why would cloud be cheaper? Virtualization

Think Outside the Box - Creating a Hybrid Cloud Storage Infrastructure the Unconventional Way - Peter Chang , OxygenCloud

I nearly didn’t attend this one because i wasn't sure that I care about storage virtualization but I'm glad that I did. Here's the proposition at a high level. Your app probably expects its data to be on a local storage device. If it can cope with the data being out in the cloud then it probably expects it to be in a single cloud location. However, what if you want to have some data in a private on-premise cloud, some in Amazon and some in a private off-premise cloud? While we are at it, how about applying some cross location caching rules and enforcing consistent policies across objects on these disparate devices?

Oxygen Cloud's solution stops your app talking directly to the storage in the cloud (public or private) and instead it talks to a middleware layer that aggregates and normalizes the communications. They call this layer a "cloud storage broker"

Across all of the layers in the broker is a security layer, for example encryption may not be consistent across the Cloud storage devices but encryption from the broker would be common. Oxygen effectively makes cloud storage look like a simple storage device so you can open a file from the cloud from within Windows. By presenting the storage as a file system oxygen creates a synchronization/caching model. This allows them to deal with network latency by caching locally and by optimizing data transfers.

Controlling Cloud Sprawl - Rodrigo Sousa Coutinho, Outsystems

We focus on the problems with the cloud:

• Data outside of the enterprise
• Immaturity of lifecycle
• Vendor lock-in
• Integration

But note that these are IT problems, we should focus on what the business wants:

• Instant gratification
• Flexibility to change
• Easy to get in

When the business gets answers to these three points then they buy!

A recent survey showed that 20% of the business people questioned had bought cloud services without IT’s knowledge. There reasons are listed in the slide…check out the last one on the list. Priceless!

PCI and HIPAA Compliance in the Cloud - Jeff Uphues & Stacy Griggs, cBeyond

Good little session this but it was all very low-level compliance stuff. They made yet another reference to the fact that the cloud might be less of a compliance issue than your own datacenter. In the case of HIPAA who is more likely to be able to protect your data? The admin in your Dr's office or a major cloud provider?

Using vApps to Simplify the Deployment of Multi-Tier Applications in the Cloud - James Weir, UShareSoft

The speaker did a great job considering it was 7:00PM…

At a super high-level, UShareSoft has a toolkit that allows you to have a template for building a specific vApp. Once you have all of the steps programmed to provision a vApp the tool can then build one for any specific hypervisors or Cloud vendor. The tools allow cloud providers (internally and externally) to create a "cloud app store" from the set of template.

A real point solution but for many of the legacy application companies this might be very useful.

Cloud Expo #2: Dark Rooms, Mobility and Hybridization

Day two at the Cloud Computing Expo…

"Interesting Section"

I noticed that these entries are long and rambling so I'll put the interesting stuff here at the top. Everything else just constitutes the details .

• A lot of what happened today reinforces the fact that this is obviously a very immature area of the industry. For example, I have heard the word "hybrid" defined in three different ways in two days, the expo is full of small startup companies, and people list issues not solutions in their sessions. I heard it described as the "wild, wild west" twice today alone!
• Ever heard of a "disaster recovery cloud"? This is a copy of your virtualized environment for disaster recovery and continuity purposes. I'd never thought of this but it is a very cool idea.
• There’s a subtext here that has not quite emerged to the surface but it will – in fact I’ll be using this tack myself. Moving to the cloud raises compliance/security/privacy issues – yup. Moving to the cloud may constitute a better solution to compliance/security/privacy issues than your own on-premise solutions can offer.
  • Need to write a separate Blog entry on this one…
• The term "bare metal" in the cloud world means "without virtualization".
• There's a new relationship forming between engineering and the cloud service provider. Think about those little niggling issues that slow down an individual installation but can be tolerated by customers who only install the solution a couple of times. The cloud provider may not be able to scale with those if they have to provision not replicate. Also, think about the hooks into management capabilities that the cloud providers need. Engineering are going to have to listen to the service providers because they could represent their single biggest customer.
• As enterprise software dweebs we need to think about mobility – what needs to be mobile. I posted a blog entry on this specific bit.
• There might not be a need to differentiate between on/off/hybrid models in the future. Cloud computing topology is all about the "context of deployment" - not every cloud technology works in every deployment model so we have to differentiate. Most of the companies are working on ways of normalizing their tools to work in any environment and then we will probably stop caring about the distinction between on/off/hybrid and we will just have deployments. I love this BTW but I suspect that apps will have to be reengineered to be data-location aware.

A clarification from day one.

• In Sam Machiz from Voxel's session he mentioned that disk I/O was the weakest link in the elastic part of the cloud infrastructure. I didn't quite get why but I had a chat with one of the Voxel guys and he explained that you can add CPUs and network capacity as a 'fungible' commodity (my word not his so if I'm misusing it then blame me). However, when it comes to disks you tend not to dedicate a single disk to a single VM because that does not scale...you buy a nice big disk array and share that across loads of images. So if some of those images get greedy you can see degradation across the board. Think of it this way – a CPU and a block of memory are both empty when you pass them a work unit so you can use any available device. When you need to use a disk it needs to be fully populated with the data because it is the persistent store. The Voxel chap mentioned that one solution is to move to SSD devices but then explained that this is a "brute force" solution insomuch as it just gives you faster native devices so you are delaying the inevitable. It does not solve the underlying issue…I’ll leave that to my colleagues in EMC core!

Session One: Hybrid Clouds Get Real...Tools for blending public, private and virtual private clouds. Bill Lowry (Terremark) and John Considine (Cloudswitch)

I learning the tricks here - you hear a different view of virtualization vendors depending on whether you are talking to providers of IaaS, SaaS or PaaS. These guys refer to "hypervisor types" when talking about virtualization solution vendors so they must be IaaS guys.

Bill started talking about Hybrid Clouds...the usual definition of a blend of community clouds, disaster recovery clouds, virtual private clouds etc. but I noticed that later in the Q&A John said that "hybrid" included co-located VMs that use different versions of a hypervisor in the same location. This idea came up again in another session – mobility is not just about between vendors, it might be between versions of a single vendor’s virtualization within a single datacenter.

Ok – I just went off and wrote this because I think that the mobility issue is something that we enterprise types need to better understand. If this was the only thing that I got out of Bill’s part of the session then it was definitely worth it.

I’ll check this with the Terremark guys tomorrow but I am pretty sure that Bill said that if you want you can install YOUR hardware in their datacenter and only you will have access to it. This gives you the feeling (slight cynical tone in my head there) that your data is private and protected but it is co-located for bandwidth/latency issues.

John from Cloudswitch walked through a few interesting concepts but the one that is blog-worthy relates specifically to enterprise software. Enterprise software is by definition intrinsically bound into other systems. This hybrid, mobile relationship created what he calls "the hard stuff"

Security

• Protecting servers
  • In the cloud you are extending your on-premise datacenter outside of the organization especially when your cloud systems are linked back into your own datacenter
• Protecting data
  • Where did that old Amazon disk drive go when they were finished with it? It was scrubbed wasn’t it?
  • Could your data be discovered and delivered as part of someone else's ediscovery notice? What if it was on a backup tape that was seized?

Dependencies

• Stack
  • There’s a huge stack of bits between the app and the iron – many more layers in a virtualized environment. There are parallel bits too – other virtualized systems sharing bits of your stack.
  • The existing tools and the system dependencies that you already have in place may not work in the new environment - just think about the network and storage issues.
• Infrastructure
  • Your apps are dependent on services (DNS, AD, Databases, other servers, etc.) Where did they go? Can you virtualize them? Will they be recognizable?

Management

• Lifecycle of your application
  • As you bring a cloud version of your code online you are adding a branch to the usual processes and maybe even code line
• Updates and Patches...to the infrastructure...are you ready if the datacenter pushes a change to the environment without you being ready? What if you need to push an update out to your apps?

General Panel Discussion

Question one - it has been a terrible quarter for the cloud...is it all going to fail?

The panel suggested that the issues with Amazon were a result of the cloud's success. I think that was a terrible answer but I guess most of the people on the panel didn't want to be too controversial when discussing the biggest gorilla in then room

Talking of potential for failure they asked McAfee about the increased potential for attack in the cloud.

• Is the "attack surface" larger? Yes.
• Will there be a shift towards attack on the cloud? Yes.

But McAfee suggested that the average cloud *should* be better protected than the usual datacenter...that's that interesting suggestion that potentially the cloud offers a better compliance and security option than your current on premise deployment. As I mentioned previously this is a recurring theme. The cloud makes for a better target but can be better protected…in theory.

Question two: what are the most obvious missing tools? The higher hanging fruit yet to be picked.

 

• We need a really good way to predict the costs of hybrid models. This would be really helpful. In order to do this we need to be able to provide a costing model for self-service systems.
• More efficient deployment and provisioning in the cloud because a person and a credit card can spin up multiple environments in minutes.
• Need significantly better transparency into the cloud infrastructure. "Moving into the cloud is like moving into a room with no lights on". Customers need visibility into the environment so they can be comfortable with what’s going on in the cloud.
• There's a lot of lock-in and proprietary stuff going on and developers need standards to build to. Write once and run in many clouds.
• Microsoft claim that they are encouraging open source. Running eclipse on Azure for example. I didn't really get this and the other panel people all looked a bit sheepish.
• Interoperability. There are so many people building tools and services but there's no coordination between cloud providers. Again, a sign that this is such an immature area right now.

Question three: What about the argument around public, private and hybrid? Is there really a distinction?

• One panelist postulated that this still works as an architectural model in order to think about the deployment options but they may not actually be that different.
• Microsoft claims that the future is hybrid with interop between in-house and off-premise. This is interesting because I’m not sure that Office 365 and SharePoint Online are that open to a hybrid deployment.

Question four: What is the one thing that completely changes because of cloud computing? Especially for the CIO.

Answers:

• IT management process becomes much more agile.
• IT service requirements change but user expectations change too - not sure whether this was a positive, negative or just a comment!
• OpEx not CapEx focus
• Scale on demand
• Focus moves from asset management to service management. Probably my favorite given that IT are supposed to service the organization not manage assets.
• Speed to opportunity - time to value
• Reaction time to changing in business focus

Nothing really ground breaking there but it was good to hear the sincerity (yes I recognize that tone) and passion in their answers...they really do believe this and I think that’s because it is true!

Question five: The moderator said that he'd never seen so many happy technologists. He asked why this was.

This was one of those times when I was glad not to be on the stage because I came up with five inappropriate answers within 3 seconds.

In summary - The business used to love cloud but now the technologists have caught up and are delivering what was promised. We are in the middle of a revolution. Less hype now than ever before...we are seeing app suppliers building on the infrastructure which means that this is real now.

Question Six: What's New because of the cloud?

• You can run a cloud in your house.
• The impact to the end user who does not know anything about technology is huge because it just works but has huge potential
• Changing the model for how we collaborate. No details
• Gives us a chance to help the developing world. You have a $10 laptop but now you have a $1.00 server which gives compute power "democratizing IT"
• Gives more power to academia to solves problems
• For the CTO it more directly provides what the business needs where it needs it.

Two Very Different Clouds. How data protection and privacy cultures in Europe and the US collide in the cloud. Tim Cole - industry analysis

We are heading towards a situation where we have multiple clouds which defeats some of the objectives of the cloud. Data protection and privacy are handled very differently in different parts of the world.

What do Europeans mean when they hear "privacy"? In Europe they have “Informational Self-Determination” - this is the idea that each individual owns their own information and should be responsible for it. This started in Germany where there's a basic right “Informational Self-Determination”. This is different to the US where there is a right to “privacy”. Essentially in Europe an individual can decide what information can be shared, the US’s right to privacy is more about a right to be left alone.

When storing and processing data you need to be aware of which country's laws apply to the data that you are storing or processing. The details behind this are way too complex for me to attempt to describe. By Tim’s own admission these often conflict between countries so you may not be able to be in compliance anyway.

One answer is to have a two cloud strategy. Amazon - they have European cloud in Dublin. They will guarantee that your data will never leave Europe. Not sure how that's possible with packet switching being transparent but Amazon say that it will not. Microsoft has opened a datacenter in Amsterdam and are opening one in Dublin. The big deal here is that the providers are guaranteeing that data will stay in the borders.

What about other locales? China, Latin America, Russia, the Middle East, Australia and new Zealand, Africa, etc. How will we cope with multiple clouds each with its own rules?

The solutions include Safe Harbor, Data anonymization, and Identity Management – my advice. Contact Tim is you are in this position, he seemed very knowledgeable!

Public Cloud Adoption with Sensitive Data - Terry Woloszyn (PerspecSys)

• Only half of professionals can define cloud computing...(hopefully not the half that were crammed into this session!)
• Many are confused about security and the reality of cost savings.

There are standards at each level of the stack that certify the data centers.

IaaS SAS-70 II

PaaS. OWASP Some federal customers have already mandated that they will not deploy I to non-OWASP environments.

SaaS. You just gave over your data. You own the data but the service provider controls it. If they receive a subpoena then they will just hand over whatever is asked for...maybe even by virtue of your data being on the same tape as a tape seized for someone else’s case.

So, how do you protect your data? Recently in Germany there was a ruling that said that data encryption is meaningless because the NSA *could* decode it if they wanted to. This is wild because it suggests that data encryption is not sufficient to protect information or guarantee confidentiality of personal data.

Terry’s solution?

Data segregation...to be fair, that’s what PerspecSys’s solution does and without something like their framework it is very hard to do. If you segregate your data then you don’t have an aggregated view of it. PerspecSys’s solution segregates the data but then aggregates results on demand without actually transferring the data off-location.

What would really help is Homomorphic encryption - the ability to add/multiply/etc. encrypted values together and the end result is the encrypted value of the sum of the original values. Alas, this doesn’t exist yet.

In order to do what PerspecSys does they need to actually intercept calls and break the SSL relationship. With SSO they also break this to intercept SAML2 assertions and it open them, sees who it is and then forwards the assertion over to the off premise solution....I don't understand all of this but it tells me that this is a band aid solution and that the native apps need to be able to deal with multi-located data sets.

Dell. Developing, Migrating and Managing Enterprise Applications in the Cloud.

Kanna Venkatasamy & Bill Johnson.

Kanna listed all the benefits of the cloud and then asked if we needed to hear it again...we said that we didn't so he moved on. A speaker who changes his presentation plan in real time – that’s what we needed given it was after 6:30 PM!

Highlights:

• Select your apps based on what is highest value to the organization not which is easiest to move.
• It's not just about the bit you move to the cloud it is about how that works with the bits left behind.
  • Consider “Lift and shift" vs. re-architecting
• Look at the usage of an app and say if it fits the move. Consider file IO, Intranet usage, remote usage requirement, SQL usage etc.

Kanna did a great job and because (1) I’m blogged out and (2) I took pictures of his slides – I’ll let his slides do the talking!

Mobility and the Cloud

So this topic came up in one of the sessions at the Cloud Computer Expo during a Terremark session and I think that it stands alone for those of us in the enterprise software space.

When you say “Mobility” in the context of clouds people start to think about moving VMs between environments but if you accept that all enterprise clouds will have some element of hybridity (wow, that’s a real word!) then you have to accept that there will be differing levels of mobility depending on what you are looking at. You are going to have systems in the cloud and systems on premise and they are not going to work in isolation.

Here’s my swag at a list of potential mobile elements.

• VM images – infrequent. You don’t want to move these puppies around other than in a very controlled fashion. Movement between dev, test and production or from on-premise to off-premise during initial deployment perhaps. Moving VMs because you change cloud vendors is rare and probably not a good idea.
• Data objects – frequent. The chances are that data may be flowing back and forth on a regular basis. Best case (least movement) you are going to bring data back on premise as you realize that it is:
• Needed by another process
• Just became a record (formal or informal)
• Is subject to a subpoena
• Should never have been out there in the first place
• Metadata – frequent. Probably even more frequently than data objects. Imagine that you have an ERP system in the cloud but you store your attachments on premise. The synchronization of metadata about these attachments needs to be mobile.
• Log data/reporting – frequent. Not a big payload but there’s a good chance that your internal team are going to want to be able to store and analyze log/reporting data locally. If they don’t then you probably have not finished your audit qualification process yet.
• Configuration Information – moderate. Maybe it is user account information, group membership, policy changes…whatever it is you will have to be able to push/pull this on a periodic basis.
• Software (patches, etc.). Oh yes…depending on the model, someone needs to push changes out to the actual enterprise software.

Is this a comprehensive list? Have you ever seen a comprehensive list from me? I’m guessing that you get the point though; you will probably never see a real ‘Cloud only’ deployment of enterprise software and the thing that makes it hybrid is that relationship to the other systems. Why never a ‘Cloud-only’ enterprise deployment? Because by definition enterprise software means playing as part of the larger enterprise ecosystem and you don’t do that on your own.

Oh, the graphic? You need to be British and over the age of 35 to understand that one.

 

Cloud Expo #1: Security, Choice and Redundant Arrays of Jet Engines

I am at the Cloud Computing Expo in NYC this week...it's great to attend a conference where (1) i am not presenting and (2) I have a lot to learn about the subject matter. I'm going to post brief summaries of the sessions that I attend with an eye on how it relates to enterprise software.

Session One

I arrived half way through and passed the other meeting rooms which were sparsely attended but the session I wanted to go to was filled to overflowing. It was a session on "how to move legacy apps into the cloud". What does that tell us? Seems like people might be thinking about reengineering their apps for the cloud but in the interim we all want to get our current code lines up into the ether. Not too much to report because I missed the meat of the session. The bit I heard was a discussion about the 'best' hypervisors and how to select a vendor; annoyed that I missed the beginning of the session. Ho hum.

Session Two - War in the Clouds - Terry Woloszyn.

This was all about security and the cloud. This was interesting primarily because he took a very different approach than I'd expected. I'll summarize "if you put all of your eggs in someone else's basket then make sure that basket is secured". He wasn't talking so much about how to secure a cloud but more about understanding that a single data breach into a cloud provider can affect dozens/hundreds of dependent systems. Common sense but worth reminding people I guess.

Terry seemed fairly certain that the serious 'bad guys' were going to be attracted to the cloud because their effort to breach a cloud provider can yield much higher rewards – killing multiple pigs with one bird.

Session Three - Sam Machiz from Voxel - Why a "cloud only" strategy does not make sense.

Nice opening point - moving to the cloud is NOT a business goal...it is a deployment topology!! Your real goal MIGHT be satisfied by moving to the goal but your real goal is more likely to be cost savings, efficiency, speed to deployment, etc.

Another interesting point that hit home with my past life in compliance was what Sam called “VM sprawl”...who is governing where your VMs are and who has access to them? Who is auditing your VMs and making sure that they are being turned off and secured when necessary? Each VM is a potential silo which can contain data, metadata and processes that can represent a compliance headache.

Sam seems to be an advocate of using cloud solutions to supplement your existing on-premise systems using a hybrid deployment topology. He thinks that this works especially well for medium and large companies with existing investments in infrastructure. He also mentioned that if you are scared to put certain data in the cloud then deploy it locally but make it available to the cloud.

Session Four - Why Windows Will Not Be the Desktop of Cloud Computing by Rick German from Stoneware

Great session title if you want to get people in the room and stir up some Redmond controversy!

Rick relished the “Cloud computing is similar to mainframe computing” argument. We are bringing all of the compute power back from distributed computing into centralized computing...regardless of whether centralization is to a 3^rd party datacenter or your own. Rick questioned whether cloud computing is just marketing's answer to what to call the return to the mainframe model ;-)

He jumped into what we at EMC all "choice computing". Choice computing means that people want to use their choice of device (like my personal iPad that I am writing this on) and not the device that the company wants me to use. Delivering a Windows desktop solution for every problem isn't going to be the answer unless we virtualized Windows to every device which we will not be doing. Most of us would rather use a native app than a virtualized environment. Oh, BTW I'm not going to let IT manage the device that I purchased...the cloud needs to consider all of these factors.

His proposed answer...browser based solution. Why? The browser is pretty much the only app that exists on every single device in every single form factor. I guess that he is saying that a browser is like a hypervisor for choice devices. If you program to a browser then you are abstracted from the underlying implementations.

Seems like this wasn't a session about why Windows is NOT appropriate specifically but why we need a common deployment platform and the browser is the closest that we have so far.

One interesting thing he talked about was that systems in the future should make decisions on how to deliver an app depending on device, context, and user and then deliver the optimal service. What this means is that if you want to launch Excel the system should look at your device, bandwidth, user type, content type, etc. and launch either local Excel, web Excel, a virtualized Excel app or whatever makes the most sense. I liked this idea.

Session five - Evaluating Enterprise Clouds.

A bit of a marketing pitch for Terramark and very infrastructure focused but he did say one thing when comparing data centers to planes planes that resonated - he said that he likes to see that his plane to have "a redundant array of jet engines" before he boards. You know that the room is full of geeks when that gets the biggest laugh of the day!

Last session of the day (starting at 7:10) - How are Collaboration tools and Cloud trends coming together? Vipul Aggarwal from iGATE Patni.

Started with a way too detailed explanation of what collaboration is. I'd have to say that the speaker could have assumed that anyone attending the session would understand the basics of collaboration but maybe I'm just getting tired. Nope, after 15 minutes we are still hearing about different types of collaborative tools and reasons. More than half way in and we've learned nothing about “Cloud AND Collaboration”. The expo opens in 11 minutes and there's food there...I try not to walk out of sessions part way through but I'm probably going to have to...bye.

Conclusions

There's a lot of public bravado right now in the world about cloud computing. When you sit down in a room with a few thousand cloud people you realize that we are at the very beginning of a revolution. Getting apps to run efficiently in a cloud environment really is subtly but importantly different to just running in the Internet or on a mainframe. We are taking apps that were designed to run on individual servers but we are now co-locating multiple instances of these apps in a single environment.

I'll post more information tomorrow...really quite psyched.

Virtualization of Enterprise Systems – vBlocks

Now includes: Instructions to build your own vBlock!

vBlocks are especially confusing because the noun “vBlock” starts with a little ‘v’ so you’d think that these things were a virtual something…but they’re not, they are physical. [Ed: See Kenny's comment below for 'v' clarification] What exactly is inside a vBlock is the interesting element, according to one official document they contain “Units of IT infrastructure”…I’m sure that there’s a more vague way of describing the inner workings of the vBlock but I can’t think of one offhand!

Another description I found described a vBlock as a “reference architecture” delivered in a box. I thought that this was even less helpful until it dawned on me that’s exactly what they are:

• Let’s start with the most fundamental thing. If you buy a vBlock you’ll receive a box with something in it, not a just link to a download. It is a physical device with pre-installed software – like a Dell computer I guess but it is built to really only do one thing…host virtual systems.
• It was created by three companies – VMware, Cisco and EMC so the technology is proprietary[1]
• Basically these three companies sat down and said asked the question, “what would we deliver jointly to a customer who wanted a virtual datacenter in a box?” Rather than just writing a theoretical joint “reference architecture” paper they actually delivered the components ready to roll.

So, what exactly is in a vBlock? Rather than describing the parts in an abstract way I thought that I could build my own version using common household objects…well common in a household full of nerds. This way you’ll be able to associate the core industrial-strength components with things you are probably more familiar with.

A vBlock has five main components…the hardware bits (processing engine, the network pieces, the storage) and the software (virtualization and general management). There are three models 0,1 & 2 but we will stick with vBlock 1 as an example. The vBlock 1 is comprised of the following which I’ll demystify below:  “Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC’s CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform”.

Here’s how I built the “vBlock-Chapman edition ®” compared side-by-side with the original.

Processing Power, Rack and Network Stuff

• The vBlock 1 has the Cisco Unified Computing System which includes between 16 and 32 blades of processing power, a Nexus 1000v network switch and an MDS storage interface.
• I found a AMD ATHLON II 250 3.0GHz X2 DUAL CORE BAREBONES PC on eBay ($259) and plus 4GB memory ($48). I added a 10/100M PCI Ethernet LAN adapter ($4.59) and a 4 Port SATA SERIAL ATA IDE PCI CONTROLLER ($3.99).

Storage

• The vBlock 1 has EMC’s CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA) with up to 64 TB of storage.
• I found a used WD WD10EADS 1TB Internal Desktop SATA Hard Drive for $52 inc. shipping. Mine was not secured by RSA but it was secured by two lengths of duct tape because I it didn’t quite fit in the case.

Virtualization and Management Software

• The vBlock 1 has the VMware vSphere, vCenter, UCS management, Ionix UIM, Navisphere plus some other major league tools and reporting software.
• I downloaded VMware player ($free), and SpeedUpMyPC 2011 ($29) which optimizes my memory, disk usage and ‘boosts my CPU’…according to their pop-up infected website.

Fabric

• The vBlock comes with a mass of fabric provisioning hardware and software.
• My fabric was stick on one side and consisted of 2 rolls of duct tape - I had some real problems getting all of the pieces working. I guess starting off with a reference architecture of my own might have been a good idea.

Hopefully comparing the contents of the the vBlock with what more common home PC components gives you the general idea. A vBlock is the is the hardware, interfaces, storage and software needed to run a virtual datacenter delivered in a pre-configured box.

Pricing So, my vBlock-Chapman Edition cost me $396.58 including tax and shipping. If I’d used the old PC in my closet which has onboard storage and networking then my vBlock would be sub-$100 but I wanted to level the playing fields! BTW, the VCE vBlock will cost you between $1M and $2.8M.

One small differentiator is that the vBlock-Chapman edition will probably run one small virtual machine (if you’re lucky) whereas the vBlock will run between 800 and 3,000 virtual machines so it might be more appropriate.

 

 

Note to the VCE coalition – Don’t be scared…I’m not really going into business in competition, this is just for illustrative purposes.

 

---

[1] I work for EMC but not in the hardware division – those guys seem to make some sort of big disk drives…I’m told it is more complex than that but I’m not so sure. I might check it out at EMC World just in case the idea catches on.

Virtualization of Enterprise Systems - Index

Earlier this year I started writing a series of articles about virtualization and the cloud. The aim is to demystifying virtualization by describing what it means in terms that someone who works with enterprise-class solutions would understand.

I’ve got enough articles now to warrant an index. If you want to add to the ‘to do’ list just put in a request in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do.

Primer
A high-level comparison of the physical and virtual world plus some brief definitions of key concepts - virtual images, vapps, vcloud manager, virtual appliances, vcenter, vsphere, hypervisor, vfabric, etc.
/2011/03/virtualization-of-enterprise-systems-primer.html

Deployment Topologies
A valiant attempt to draw the relationship between “cloud vs. managed services vs. hosted vs. virtualized vs…”. Includes a hierarchical diagram of the defintions.
/2011/04/cloud-vs-managed-services-vs-hosted-vs-virtualized-vs.html

Virtual Servers
More information about the what, how and why of virtualization of your servers. Read this is you are not sure exactly what a virtual server is or why you would even care.
/2011/04/virtualization-of-enterprise-systems-virtualized-servers.html

vApps
vApps are one of the key building blocks of any virtualized environment, this posting drills down into the content of a vApp and the OVF standard that defines them.
/2011/03/virtualization-of-enterprise-systems-vapps.html

Vblocks
Not only a description of what a Vblock is but detailed instructions on how to build your own and save yourself ~$2 million. (Your milage may vary)
/2011/04/virtualization-of-enterprise-systems-vblocks.html

Blind men and fluffy elephants
On its way: ‘What’ the cloud is depends on where you are standing. This article will consider what is important in the cloud depending on your point of view.