Jon Greaves’ Blog

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 .

In the last blog entry I talked about the business, financial and contractual side of enterprise cloud. Lets change gears and discuss the technology.

Basically there aren’t a lot of differences and the premise is the same - use virtualization to provide a different ROI (not necessarily lower) for the computing needs of the enterprise.  If we take a look at enterprise workloads, we get a little more insight into the characteristics that become more important for an enterprise vs. a 2.0/developer customer.

Many enterprise cloud deployments are “project”-based — that is, the enterprise needs to add a new feature - e.g. CRM - needs it up quickly, wants to avoid capital expense, etc.  The need for extreme elasticity is rarely included in the workloads of an enterprise.  Sure, once a month having some extra horsepower to close the books is great, but it’s not an hour-by-hour swing of multiples of the environment we might see from a social media site.  There is also the need for short-term project based solutions – e.g. need a development environment for a few months to build out a new version of an app - do a trial with a new software solution, etc.

When enterprises do take the plunge, they need more than just a flat pool of virtual machines. They look for a higher-level construct, group, or application.  Grouping allows architecture to be defined, blueprints created, and run books produced.  They also look for “topology” in that virtual appliances - such as loadbalancers - need to connect to firewalls, and web servers via vlans/virtual switches.  They want the same degree of isolation they have with today’s dedicated infrastructure.  The good news is we are seeing a high degree of innovation in this space with the likes of Citrix, Vyatta, Nicira, and Altor really pushing virtualization in the network.

Another big difference is the applications themselves.  A couple of days ago I had a really interesting conversation with a prospective customer.  They have a very cool app that automates document processing using OCR, bar code reading and assisted processing.  When they onboard new customers, there is a large ramp to digitize the historic data.  This company created a very smart queue-based solution decoupling the collection of the raw data from the processing.  So far, so good – the perfect candidate for some form of capacity of demand.  But there is a catch - a big one - and one we see all too often when architecting enterprise solutions…the software license terms.

The OCR package is licensed on a per processor basis.  Traditional perpetual license.  Scaling up is no issue - just purchase more licenses – but scaling down isn’t an option with the vendor. Today, they optimize for the worse case scenario, the cost of the compute in this equation is tiny compared to the cost of the license. Until ISV’s offer license models that fit the infrastructure deployment models, we will have a cadence mismatch.  We spend a lot of time looking for creative options to solve this – e.g. rather than scaling out - scaling virtual machines up by adding dynamically more memory, if its a per server license adding more CPU’s.

One area we are seeing good traction in is the virtualization of disaster recovery .  Providing offsite data storage via the cloud, then applications on demand, pay per use is hitting the mark.  If we go back to the software licensing schemes for a second, this is a place where we have some degree of synchronization.  Many vendors provide a “DR” license for a limited amount of time per year.  Now we can finally show compliance, based on the actual number of hours a DR instance was active.

So, enterprise cloud is a little more than “enterprises using the cloud”.  To support mission critical workloads enterprises look for the right blend of people, process and technology.  The cloud isn’t one size fits all — if it was, the battle for the cloud would be over.  Thank goodness there is plenty of room for innovation.

I was catching up on Twitter posts while enjoying the Australian Open and came across this

eekygeeky RT @cloudbzz : Quick Poll - What makes something an "Enterprise Cloud?" <~ enterprises use it?

This is a topic I’ve spent much time discussing with our customers who certainly fall in the “enterprise” bucket.  So here is my take (sorry Twitterati, 140 characters didn’t cut it!)

Lets start at the beginning and talk about how Enterprises want to pay for cloud.  While individuals/developers/2.0’s are more than happy to swipe a credit card and buy virtual machines, this doesn’t help your average Enterprise CFO.  They require more documentation, control, and accountability for using the company’s financial resources.  It would be very interesting to see a public company go through its SOX review and discuss how its infrastructure maps to this line item on the IT Managers credit card.  Who gets the points?

Who will use the cloud?  Cloud services assume one person makes all the cloud provisioning and purchasing decisions.  That’s not the case in enterprises.  Checks and balances, functional responsibility, approval chains, and change control boards, etc. are the reality.  Having one person with an ecommerce account they purchased a book with, isn’t good enough.  What is required are roles that can have permissions assigned, and for bonus points, delegate permissions.  That’s not to say “pay per drink” models are not what enterprises want, they just want to have them delivered via familiar fiscal terms and contracts.  Programmatically managing a cloud doesn’t remove the burden of responsibility, it changes it.  API-centric approaches need to take this into account.

Speaking of contracts.  A click -through a developer accepts during provisioning or signup, isn’t sufficient for an enterprise’s IT department.  Therefore putting T&C’s in place to protect the enterprise is essential.  As such, you can expect redlines and tweaks to meet requirements for service even if its delivered virtually.

So who’s watching the farm?  Enterprises are used to hosting/outsourcing infrastructure, and when they do, they expect a certain level of service that includes being able to reach someone responsible for the infrastructure 24×7.  Along with being able to reach someone they also want SLA’s on the responsiveness to resolving issues.  Many of the enterprise RFP’s we respond to now want to go one step further and ask for the framework being used to manage the infrastructure.  We elected ITIL and most recently moved to its latest revision.

And then there are certifications.  SAS70 Type 2 is the “must-have” certification for all hosting companies.  It’s basically a definition of a set of controls and an auditor’s review and opinion on those controls.  A control could be as simple as “we lock the datacenter door” which an auditor could review and pass.  Sharing these controls is something enterprises often demand.  Without knowing what the controls are, it’s very hard to judge how effective the policy is.  Very few cloud providers offer this level of transparency.  More so, we are now seeing other standards to make inroads; a good example is ISO27001 which is really starting to get some attention with its security focus.

Finally, cloud on-boarding is something enterprises are coming to expect.  Having great API’s and web UI’s, etc. is fine but when it comes to moving applications and data to the cloud, enterprises are looking for consulting and professional services — helping understand what should move and what should remain on dedicated infrastructure, understanding the ROI, potential savings, building a migration strategy, developing a DR plan – there are all key items an enterprise looks for when embracing the cloud.

Next post… The technical differences…