Exciting times - launch of 2nd Generation InstantOn™
Over the past few weeks, I’ve described the features and functions “enterprise” clouds have been required to provide. This isn’t purely what we have dreamed up, but rather what our enterprise and federal customers have asked for over the past 8 months since the launch of Carpathia InstantOn - the first generation of our cloud platform. Because we are great believers in agile service development, we’ve been constantly enhancing our platform with new capabilities in plain sight of our customers via Carpathia Labs. And as a result, we’re pleased to present 2nd generation InstantOn.
Pulling back the covers, 2nd Gen InstantOn has some pretty big changes in play. Probably the biggest is the work we have accomplished with Citrix on our hypervisor. The first version of our platform was based on OpenSource Xen – a stellar performer that allowed us to cut our teeth and learn a lot about operating a cloud, providing services to customers, and building a backlog of requirements.
The 2nd Generation of our platform moves us to Citrix XenServer 5.5 as part of the Citrix C3 initiative. In doing so, we are able to unlock many soft benefits such as the excellent support from Citrix for the core virtualization technology, but more so for the ability to tap into many of the enterprise features XenServer provides.
A good example of this is the ability to take a live vm backup. Sounds pretty straightforward right? Well it is if you deploy some form of centralized storage, or your cloud really is a traditional virtualization platform. With XenServer, we have been able to implement this action using a distributed storage solution – a local disk with synchronous mirrors to other compute nodes. And to top it off, it’s orchestrated. Another great addition to our platform is our ability to take virtual machines created for vmware and migrate them to our cloud. There are several more things I could discuss here - the list goes on and on! Bottom line, we couldn’t be more excited about this partnership.
We have also extended Carpathia Cloud Orchestration™. Rather than having me describe the features, I encourage you to check out some examples in our behind the scenes TechXchange . Orchestration is pretty difficult to demo via a Web UI - API’s tend to be a little dry to explain! Instead, we are going to show our administration CLI that sits on top of our API - this should give a good flavor for the key concepts of our cloud.
2nd Gen InstantOn also enhances our usage of some of the existing components in our cloud. We have been extremely impressed by the performance and ease of integration of the Parascale Object storage we deployed for the first version. In this second version, we fully integrate Parascale to our XenServer hypervisor to provide template and ISO storage. Parascale excels with parallel workloads and those that are WORM in nature. This is a perfect use case for template management and ISO storage. Multiple compute nodes talk to multiple storage nodes each with their own version of the object (ISO, template, etc). Our storage workloads migrate from the network to local disk and progress back to the network during the vm lifecycle.
Speaking of lifecycles … this was a highly requested feature in the first version of our cloud. 2nd Gen InstantOn allows a full vm lifecycle to be managed. Customers can start with a generic Carpathia VM, instantiate the vm, install apps, add hardening per policy, promote the vm to a template (templates are private to customers) then redeploy. We have versioning on these vm’s. Think of it as CVS for virtual machines.
Hopefully this has provided you with a good flavour of 2nd Gen InstantOn. We’ll have alot more to share in coming blog posts. In the meantime, if you’re hungry for more now, I encourage you to check out some of the videos or contact our sales team .
What is it they say about time flying when your having fun? I was just reminded that it’s been 3 months since my last blog post. Feels like a New Years’ resolution coming my way!!
Looking back on 2009, it’s hard to believe all that we were able to achieve with our service, and more importantly, what we have been able to deliver to our customers.
Some of the high points for me include:
The reception of our eBook, “Datacenter of the Future ”.
Although we took a couple of months’ break from publishing the rest of the book, we plan to kick this back up in 2010. The "Datacenter of the Future " eBook reached thousands of readers — many of whom provided feedback on both the content and future chapters. We were fortunate to be joined by several industry luminaries including Ron Gula, CEO of Tenable Network Security and one of the industry leaders in IT security and compliance; Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic who really revolutionized Open Source Monitoring and Management solutions - now becoming even more important in the cloud era.
Launch of several tools to help customers select hosting services. The Carpathia ColoConfigurator™ – “C3” was a great example of offering customers the opportunity to select what they needed. C3 quickly captures info from customers looking to colocate infrastructure into our datacenters. Moreover, it’s really a methodology aligned to ITIL V3 that enables a smooth transition from an existing hosting or corporate IT infrastructure to Carpathia. We have a similar internal tool we use to help customers with cloud computing scenarios that we will also be web enabling in 2010.
Carpathia InstantOn™ cloud computing platform . Close to six months of beta testing and open collaboration with our customers allowed us to launch the Carpathia InstantOn cloud computing platform in June. Seems like an eternity now. InstantOn pioneered two key concepts in cloud technology/service. Enterprise/Federal customers are looking for cloud to be a first class citizen when it comes to management, security and compliance, and cloud can not be mutually exclusive with traditional IT. Mixing and matching cloud and dedicated infrastructure — be it storage, network or servers — provides customers with the solutions they need. To date, a majority of our cloud customers are meshed with other Carpathia infrastructure services such as colocation and managed. Our cloud is also deployed in multiple “cells” in our datacenters with key hubs in northern Virginia and Arizona.
Industry events and interviews. This year has been our busiest ever with industry events. I’ve spoken or been on panels at a number of events during the year on all aspects of the datacenter industry. I’ve also spent some quality time discussing and debating emerging technologies with various analysts. Carpathia Hosting has received a significant amount of coverage from all the major analysts covering the hosting space. We look forward to continuing theses discussions in 2010 and being open to question some of the group think around cloud and emerging technologies.
Building relationships with our partners. It certainly takes a village to deliver IT services, and Carpathia has worked hard during the past year to extend relationships with our infrastructure partners. Working closely with Citrix in the cloud computing space, we have extended our Xen-based cloud platform to meet the demands of enterprise customers, added Netscaler products to our portfolio of both cloud and dedicated solutions, and are very proud to be an active part of the Xen community. In the cloud storage space, we successfully deployed the ParaScale platform, extending it to multiple datacenters and enabling standards based cloud storage to many enterprise and federal customers. Most recently, we announced the integration of HighWinds CDN services into our portfolio (both cloud and dedicated). Now customers can directly deliver content from our cloud storage and retire the concept of CDNs requiring “origin servers”.
Acquisition of ServerVault . One of the most exciting announcements of the year was the coming together of Carpathia Hosting and ServerVault – both industry veteran companies. This is one of those acquisitions where I can honestly say that 1 + 1 = 3. We already have seen much success with our portfolio-based approach to services, allowing Carpathia the flexibility to meet the needs of any customer, even those with the most stringent security, privacy and compliance requirements in both the enterprise and federal sectors.
1% of the internet. Back in October, Arbor Networks released a groundbreaking report, examining 256 exabytes of Internet traffic to produce a report - a “state of the union” - for the Internet. What I found most interesting is the contrast from the Internet of just 5 years ago. Carpathia was highlighted in that report as approaching 0.8% of the Internet’s weighted traffic. To put in context, Google is 5%. We are looking forward to seeing the next report, as we have continued to add more capacity to deliver massive amounts of high quality bandwidth to an ever-growing list of content providers, backup providers and other high bandwidth customers.
We all caught our breath over the holiday season and already executing our plans for 2010. We have a lot of very exciting things to share. Watch this space…
One part of my job I really enjoy is talking to customers. I probably sit in on 20+ calls with customers and potential customers a week. Over the past 6months two common themes have emerged. The challenge of achieving compliance (both commercial and federal) and how to best take advantage of cloud computing. This is why the news we are sharing today is so exciting.
Carpathia Hosting is acquiring ServerVault, both companies are industry veterans and have a long history of delivering excellent customer and financial results. Each are headquartered in northern Virginia, home to some of the highest demand for hosting services on the planet. Also happens to be the home of the worlds largest IT department, the federal government spending over 77 billion a year.
ServerVault has had a laser like focus on delivering highly secure, compliant hosting to commercial and federal customers. This strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It has taken close to a decade to build up the right mix of people, process and technology required to truly deliver compliant hosting.
Carpathia by contrast has focused on developing an industry leading portfolio of services that allow us to engage with customers no matter where they are on the IT adoption curve from foundational services like colocation to managed cloud computing.
Bringing these two companies together allows us to both take Carpathia’s portfolio into a highly secure/compliant facility “The Vault” and also take the process rigor from ServerVault and deliver compliant hosting in Carpathia’s footprint of 9 datacenters across North America.
If you can’t tell by the tone of this post, this is a very exciting time for us. Expect to hear a lot more of our plans over the coming weeks.
Today some very exciting news was announced by the Xen Project. The Xen project team announced the launch of the Xen Cloud Platform. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts Xen is a corner stone of our InstantOn platform, in fact all of the relevant cloud computing platforms have Xen as a foundation.
Over the past 9 months we have been working on extending Xen as a pure hypervisor into a platform that can deploy cloud services meaning provisioning across machines, seamless access to storage, deploying in a multitenant model etc etc. We also firmly believe that enterprises will embrace cloud by extending not replacing managed and dedicated infrastructure hence the development of Cloud Orchestration™ and its adoption by all our cloud customers.
So the announcement from the Xen project comes at a great time. The plan is to extend the Xen project beyond a pure hypervisor with other technology already in flight to provide security availability and performance needed to deliver cloud solutions directly attacking the enterprise market.
Carpathia is very excited to be part of this movement and looking forward to a new degree of engagement with the Xen team to further the adoption of cloud in enterprise and federal customers.
Congratulations to the Xen team, this helps all of us create the solutions our customers are demanding.
Over the past few months we have been busy putting the finishing touches on our cloud computing platform. Rather than taking the usual technology approach and announcing the platform when it was ready, we decided to take a more agile service development approach by engaging with existing customers and prospects and evolving the platform with their input. So today, we are announcing both the general availability of our cloud platform, which we call Carpathia InstantOn™ and discussing the solutions we have built for real customers. We believe this approach has led to something rather special.
It should be no surprise to folks who have been reading my previous posts, that Carpathia Hosting believes that blending dedicated and cloud technology leads to the best solution for customers both in terms of capabilities and price. Allowing dedicated infrastructure to request capacity from a cloud, or enabling synchronization between the cloud and dedicated is a non-trivial task. We developed Cloud Orchestration to make this possible.
So what is cloud orchestration? It’s an interface that sits on top of both our cloud computing and dedicated infrastructure inside the Carpathia Services Platform (CSP™). Its purpose is to blend resources based on a number of criteria such as SLA’s, predicted capacity spikes, CLI, API, disaster-recovery events, etc. It’s also a series of Carpathia Hosting-developed virtual machine images that provide the glue to make this possible. For example, we have a virtual machine that can monitor the performance of dedicated infrastructure. When certain conditions are met, it automatically provisions more compute resources in the cloud and then removes them when the demand subsides. We also have virtual machines that provide load balancing, layer3-7 switches, and firewalls with capabilities to automatically reconfigure to support more application virtual machines as they are provisioned.
In addition to virtual machines that respond to dynamic events, we also developed a number of virtual machines that allow dedicated infrastructure to make use of cloud storage. Both at the object file store level, in our case it’s as simple as mounting a filesystem. The underlying OS on the dedicated hardware has no knowledge it’s talking to a cloud or the cloud is providing multiple copies of its data for both availability and performance reasons. Our block storage solution is also very interesting, allowing for local storage for day-to-day operations for virtual machines. We extended this capability by creating a virtual machine that republishes block storage in the form of a virtual NAS appliance to dedicated and cloud resources.
More importantly, the above techniques have been used to build some very unique solutions for real customers. A couple of quick examples.
We built a transcoding cloud that takes video content in one form and encodes to another (i.e. mpeg to Flash). To simplify its use and integration into dedicated infrastructure, the customers simply drop a mpeg video clip into a directory called “incoming” which is mounted on their collection servers. The cloud detects this, spawns a new VM which collects the file encodes and writes the resulting Flash-formatted video to a directory called “outgoing”. The file systems both live inside our object-based storage solution. The virtual machines that provide the encoding are optimized for cores/memory to provide the most efficient encoding solution. As more files are dropped, more VM’s are instantiated by the orchestration layer to keep up with demand.
Another solution we engineered provides a load test solution powered by the cloud. We use apache jmeter built into a custom virtual machine. As one virtual machine reaches capacity for load testing, the orchestration layer creates more. This capacity management is fed into a single jmeter test console that can now generate thousands of concurrent connections.
We have many other examples of cloud orchestration that we will be talking about in the coming weeks. If you would like to learn more please join me and some of our customers for a webcast Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 11:30am EDT. We’ll take a deep dive into what it takes to build a cloud computing platform and how to leverage it to deliver value to your customers. Register today at http://whatisinstanton.com/
Its been a month since my last post, and in all honesty I’m not sure where the time has gone! Carpathia Hosting has had one of its busiest months ever - both in terms of bringing on board new customers, and sponsoring and attending several industry events.
On the new customer front, we are having tremendous success with our AlwaysOn/InstantOn platform allowing customers to mix and match cloud and dedicated infrastructure. Several of our competitors are now also jumping on the bandwagon with their own versions of the story. What is it they say about “imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?”. The good news is, I believe customers are now starting to seriously consider the monetary value of cloud solutions and not being blinded by the “10cents a CPU hour” message. The customers who are embracing these kinds of solutions also tend to be more “enterprise”-centric vs. developer solutions which again, fits very well with the key values Carpathia Hosting offers its customers.
One such customer asked if we would be willing to load test their AlwaysOn/InstantOn infrastructure with our cloud solution. For this customer, we created a dynamically scalable tool based on jmeter that adds new remote servers based on the number of connections requested. It’s proven to be a very effective solution that we will productize over the coming weeks to offer to other customers. In this case, cloud became a traffic generator for managed infrastructure.
I also had the privilege of participating on a panel at Tier1’s Datacenter Transformation Summit titled “Datacenter Performance: Metrics, Money, and More…”. I was joined on stage with Norm Laudermilch from Terremark and Rick Tinucci from the Bick Group. We had a lively discussion on everything from the value of PUE and other datacenter metrics to UPS vs. Fly Wheel. I held somewhat of a contrarian view in that we believe effective datacenter management is more about the infrastructure in the datacenter vs. the “mud hut”. So kudos to Tier1 for pulling together such a great event. We are looking forward to the next event in the fall.
Last Tuesday, Carpathia Hosting sponsored a networking mixer at eCitie Restaurant, followed by an Open House event at the Blue Ridge datacenter in Harrisonburg, VA on Thursday. This was a great chance to meet several hundred customers, partners and prospects and share the Carpathia Hosting story and strategy. We have a similar event coming up in Phoenix in a couple of weeks.
The stage is being set for a very interesting summer.
This week I spent some time discussing our strategy with several analysts – really in-depth conversations on how Carpathia has a different strategy when it comes to “cloud” vs. many of our competitors. While different to our competitors, our cloud strategy builds on our core competency of running IT infrastructure. Where we differ is we do not see managed and cloud as mutually exclusive - in fact, it’s just the opposite - two living in harmony within the same customer solution.
One of the ways we differ from others in the hosting industry is something we call the Carpathia Services Platform, or CSP. Many of us “Carpathians” cut our teeth in the telecommunications industry then moved to Managed Service Providers. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone when we describe CSP and developed its capabilities we used a lot of proven telco tools and techniques to create our delivery platform. We talk about operational support systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS), a service tier which gives us an abstract layer to deliver innovative services on-top of the same underlying platform. In fact we even use Erlang’s to describe the utilization and subscription characteristics of our cloud compute platform. At the end of the day, managing a finite set of resources (compute, storage and bandwidth) for a large number of customers is really no different than figuring out how many call minutes can be squeezed through a T1 circuit.
A unified storage tier is a key tenant to any such strategy. We look to optimize our storage solutions based on a number of parameters; cost, performance, availability, dispersion, etc. The building blocks in this strategy are SAN, NAS, and now Cloud Storage solutions - each meeting a set of customer requirements while all being delivered as an easy-to-consume resource.
This week one of our partners, Parascale goes GA with a cloud storage solution. We have worked very closely with their team over the last 6 months, integrating the ParaScale solution into the CSP. At a high level, Parascale provides CSP with two key capabilities:
Cloud based storage solution. Parascale quickly allows you to assemble petabyte scale storage clouds from a cluster of unbalanced machines. Behind the scenes, Parascale is an object-based store, but provides a thin virtual file-system layer allowing customers to gain access to the storage in a very familiar way; use it as a file-system vs. re-coding applications.
Cloud storage “bus”. We also use Parascale inside the CSP to create a storage bus allowing us to integrate dedicated/managed servers with our cloud solutions. This is a key tenant for our cloud-bursting solution we call InstantOn
Congrats to the team at Parascale. We will be talking more specifically about how CSP has helped customers in coming blog posts.
The blogsphere has been really active over the past couple of weeks with discussions on the economic sense of cloud computing to customers. This seems to be dominating the usual technology discussions. The debate has been triggered by some changes in public cloud pricing models, most notably with Amazon’s EC2 reserved instances - “Pre-pay for your compute and then get a lesser rate per CPU hour”.
What’s our take?
Well let’s start with what you plan to use the cloud for. Let’s assume you have some degree of predictability in the workloads of your IT infrastructure. Very few enterprise or federal customers can “switch the lights off” at night time on their infrastructure; email doesn’t stop and databases are still used to build reports. Also very few enterprise apps like to scale (both in terms of technology and license model) in fractions of a machine. So this means enterprises have a natural “commit” level that matches their workloads.
So making the assumption you need some degree of servers available all the time, we used the online cloud pricing tools and modeled the costs for customers. We took a few sample configs for our servers, other managed hosting companies who publish prices online, and compared them to public cloud providers. What we found is, if you figure out the number of CPU hours for a month then create a comparable spec machine (cores, ghz, memory and disk capacity) in all cases purchasing a managed server was cheaper than the cloud equivalent. The same goes for storage - and even more so for bandwidth - where in the cloud model you typically pay for actual bytes transferred vs. some form of 95th percentile or bandwidth average.
So where does cloud make sense for enterprise customers?
At Carpathia we are seeing demand for all three of the scenarios presented below and have been very busy the past few months engineering solutions to meet these requirements.
Burstable capacity to support production environments where some demand event - be it seasonal or more dynamic - requires compute/storage for a short duration.
Labs, development and test environments where the ability to take advantage of the underlying virtualization software to rollback, play forward configurations, revisions, types of servers is important to simulate or test scenarios and you can “switch off the lights” when not in use.
DR, if your recovery time objective is in hours, why pay for a copy of production that’s always powered up? Why not pay for data synchronization and use the cloud when you need it?
Lets focus for now on #1. Our solution to this problem is a family of services we call AlwaysOn and InstantOn. AlwaysOn delivers the predictable “commit” portion of their IT infrastructure using traditional IT infrastructure. Customers can take advantage of servers, virtualization, san, loadbalancers, etc., etc. InstantOn connects AlwaysOn to cloud-based technology allowing storage and compute to be seamlessly added to a production environment. This provides customers the benefits of a traditional managed environment; availability, security, predictability plus the ability to take advantage of the cloud to meet bursts of capacity in very granular units.
Most importantly AlwaysOn/InstantOn are delivered as managed services so our customers know who to call if they need help. We monitor the performance 24×7 and proactively take action.
Expect to hear a lot more about these services in the coming weeks, we have lots of things we are looking forward to sharing…
During the late 90’s extranets were all the rage. At that time, I was working for a large telcom where we sold a service called “extranet complete” which was basically a portal and some simple collaboration software connected by VPN. The goal was for two organizations - typically partners - to share information to help streamline business processes. Extranet’s fizzled out before the mid-2000’s and not often discussed in today’s world of wiki’s, social software and SaaS.
At Carpathia Hosting, we are starting to see something very interesting happen. Organizations not only want to share data but in some cases, also share computing resources. This is driving a very interesting cloud formation - semi-private clouds. In this model, the organizations share not just data but compute resources to process the data or solve parts of a complex B2B problem. This approach takes out several of the problems of the previous generation extranets and makes the data a whole lot more interesting when you can directly interact with it.
I’d be very interested if other folks are seeing this trend building and the demand for these kinds of solutions.
What do you get from migrating hundreds of customers into datacenters? Experience. That’s the foundation of a new solution we are very excited about. Today we launched our datacenter migration methodology which focuses on the most efficient way of taking new or existing IT Infrastructure and moving to a hosted environment with Carpathia. The methodology itself is a five-step process that covers all aspects of a migration - from planning to testing/verification, and finally go-live - all based on ITIL V3 best practices.
To support the methodology, we have developed a tool called the Carpathia ColoConfigurator (C3). C3 guides customers through all the data points we need to capture. You can visit C3 at http://carpathiahosting.com/services/colocation
C3 comes in two flavors. Expert, a single form that captures everything we need for a customer who already knows the power, space and service requirements for an IT infrastructure. Probably best thought of as a streamlined way to share information with Carpathia. The second is the Wizard mode. This version walks a customer through the five-step process to capture all the data needed. Instead of focusing on power/space, it captures the actual make/model of the equipment. We’ll then use our database to figure out optimal space and power. In both cases our solutions engineers return a detailed proposal including best practices in 2 business days.
Blogs 
