Jon Greaves’ Blog

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

1. Burstable capacity to support production environments where some demand event - be it seasonal or more dynamic - requires compute/storage for a short duration.
2. 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.
3. 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…