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 .

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/