In today’s world, the digital data is everywhere. Starting with individual households to fortune 100 companies, data is getting accumulated in huge amounts. In fact, one of the estimates claims that the enterprise demand will create more than 600,000,000 new terabytes of unstructured data globally over the next four years, which is more than three times the total deployed universe of all enterprise and consumer storage to date. Handling such huge volumes of data using traditional storage techniques is next to impossible due to

• high capital expenditure and other scalability issues
• the traditional systems are inherently incapable of managing such huge volumes of data
• complexity of managing an infrastructure to suit these needs
• high operating expenditures including huge labor costs associated with hiring good storage admins

• High Availability (enterprise grade SLAs)
• High Scalability (public cloud like instantaneous scaling)
• High Data Integrity
• High Data Security and Privacy
• High Performance
• Standards based

Zetta tackled the enterprise cloud storage problem head on with their offering. They offer a truly multi-tenant architecture designed from the ground up to offer the integrity, security, reliability, performance, compatibility and value necessary to meet the primary storage needs of the enterprise. The main priority for Zetta while designing their storage technology is data protection. Zetta identified drive failure, bit rot, network failure, controller failure and controller corruption as the main causes for data loss and developed the RAIN6 N+3 encoding algorithm which is configured to offer 3 parity copies of encoded data. This enterprise class redundancy is one of the crucial aspects of Zetta’s technology which ensures one of the top levels of data integrity. Not only this redundancy, they also use an advanced algorithm to constantly seek out and correct corruptions in the data at multiple layers of the Zetta File System. When coupled with their worry free rich snapshot and replication solutions, the enterprises are presented with a truly state of the art cloud storage solution.

The other features of Zetta’s storage technology include

• Compatibility with the existing enterprise infrastructure by relying on POSIX compliant standards for storage systems and support for widely used protocols like NFS, FTP, sFTP, WebDAV and rsync, instead of proprietary APIs used by some of the storage vendors focussing on consumer and SMB market . This makes it easy for enterprises to add Zetta storage solutions as an extension of their existing infrastructure. They fully implement the native file system which will be handy for enterprises to use it with existing native file system apps like the ones used for eDiscovery
• Comprehensive security that meets or exceeds the compliance requirements customers face for their data storage is another salient feature of their platform. Along with the necessary support for encrypted movement for data, they also offer encryption for data at rest with the key securely stored in government-grade, FIPS 140-2 certified hardware security modules. When the 100% logical separation of data through virtualization is combined with the key per volume practices, the privacy of the stored data is maintained at the highest levels in the industry
• High SLAs with excellant performance compared to the same levels of latency offered by on-premise storage solutions
• Highly cost effective with pricing starting at $256 per Terrabyte per month. The ROI is very high. In fact, according to Marc Staimer, founder and senior analyst at Dragon Slayer Consulting. “The TCO of the Zetta Data Protection solution removes the financial reasons or rationale for not having a BC-DR plan.”  

What is it?

The Openstack iPad app is based on Rackspace’s iPad app but it has few other features not present in Rackspace app at present. Some of the features in Openstack iPad app are

• Uses Openstack Compute and Storage APIs to manage compute and storage resources
• Viewing RSS system status feeds
• Ability to ping the nodes from different parts of the world
• Emailing files from Openstack object storage
• Integration with chef platform 

Being an unabashed advocate of open source and someone who got excited about Openstack from the beginning, I find this exciting for many reasons

• Users will be able to access any provider who uses Openstack platform using this app. If my dream of an open federated cloud ecosystem happens, this will be the one stop app for many cloud providers
• This app is released under an open source license (Apache license) and anyone can add value on top of this app and customize it for their needs. If enterprises start embracing Openstack, this will give them an opportunity to customize the app to meet their needs based on their policies
• This app is integrated into the Chef platform. This means that I can take any recipe and run it to configure my infrastructure while I am waiting in the line to pick up my coffee in Starbucks

Bottomline

The fate of this app is linked to the fate of Openstack. If Openstack gains traction like many of us expect, this app will be one of the widely used/forked app by the IT folks. Even otherwise, it is an interesting experiment to study how an open source app evolves in a proprietary ecosystem like iPhone.

Please see the following video for a demo of what you can do with this app. If you want more information, check out this post by Mike Mayo.

Public clouds taught the world some important lessons. IT need not be unnecessarily complex and it can be simple. IT need not walk like a tortoise but can run like a hare and still be successful. IT need not be an economic fair weather friend but can grow even in recession. However, public clouds are not yet ready for large scale enterprise adoption because there are still issues related to security, performance and human psychology. If the traditional IT security kept IT managers awake in the night, the cloud security makes them wet the bed. There are still some performance issues related to network, storage I/O, etc. in the public clouds. Last, but definitely not the least, enterprise IT folks are still finding it difficult to accept that the ground under them has moved and it is time is running out fast for them to adapt or perish in the aftermath of the big shift.

After some initial resistance, enterprise IT folks are buying into cloud computing. We are seeing more and more adoption of cloud computing from them. Only an irrational optimist will expect them to move to public clouds overnight. What I expect to see is a slow evolution in various stages.

• In the first stage, enterprises learned from the public clouds and wanted to have the same kind of operational efficiency in house. This process has already started and is evident from a very vibrant private cloud marketplace
• In the second stage, which is slowly starting to happen right now, enterprises are seeing the economic benefits of pushing non critical workloads to the public clouds (test, development, QA, training, etc.) and they also realize that the hybrid cloud approach to IT is the most efficient path to take till the public clouds mature in terms of performance and security. They are increasingly looking for solutions that will help them do the Hybrid cloud dance seamlessly from within an unified interface
• In the final stage, as the security of public clouds improve drastically and the public cloud providers ensure consistently high performance within their infrastructure, economics will push most of the enterprise workloads into the public clouds. There may be some workloads (for example, in some highly regulated industries) that will reside inside the firewall but the rest will be on the public clouds. We are at least 5-10 years away from this stage. We need to get over the unnecessary public-private debates and unwanted posturing before we can get there.

Right now, we are in a situation where enterprises are keen on implementing the hybrid clouds but they don’t have the single unified solution to do it. More importantly, they want more than just a hybrid infrastructure. They want elastic business services on top of the hybrid clouds that can increase the efficiency of the enterprises while saving them tons of money. 

The announcement made by newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus two days back is designed to tackle this very exact problem. There are three steps involved in solving the problem of delivering elastic business services. They are

• Self Service Catalog – A self service portal where various enterprise business units can “buy” standardized service packages in a typical e-commerce way. Various business units within an organization should be able to choose different services based on their needs with an automated fulfillment and tracking initiated from the portal
• Automation – The process of packaging, deploying and managing these workloads should be completely automated
• Elasticity – There should be a highly scalable private cloud infrastructure underneath which could tap into public cloud resources based on the needs of different workloads

newScale, a leader in IT services catalog solutions, is well suited to handle the self service catalog of business services on the cloud. rPath, with their experience in managing the complete lifecycle of the enterprise applications, can handle the automation part of the package and Eucalyptus, with their current standing on the private cloud market, can provide the underlying infrastructure services. Since Eucalyptus plays well with Amazon APIs, it will be easy to tap into Amazon cloud while doing the hybrid cloud dance. These three players with some help from an enterprise IT consultancy group called MomentumSI can offer enterprises an easy path to hybrid clouds. 

From my point of view, this partnership will make it easy for enterprises to buy into hybrid clouds. Along with the IT operational efficiency, enterprises will also see enormous cost savings. As far as the three players, newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus, are concerned, this partnership is more strategic than anything else. 

This will help newScale further consolidate their position as an IT service catalog provider and will help them cement their position in the enterprise cloud market. This is strategically more significant for both rPath and Eucalyptus Systems. rPath was ignoring the cloud wave for a long time with their insistence on traditional enterprise IT. In fact, they had even minimized the impact of cloud computing on the enterprises during the conversations they had with me in the past. Once they realized that cloud computing is gaining steam in the enterprise faster than what many pundits expected, they have shifted gears. This partnership gives them an opportunity to establish themselves as a player in cloud automation game and may even help them in any future consolidation in this space. Eucalyptus Systems has been slowly gaining traction in the enterprise market but the initial buzz they gained in the tech media has faded away. Even though Eucalyptus is focussed on the enterprise market and the recently announced Openstack is more directed towards service provider market, Eucalyptus doesn’t have the vibrant ecosystem of vendors around their platform like Openstack. They are not in a position to offer an end to end solution to the enterprises. By roping in some strong players in the self service catalog portal and automation, Eucalyptus can better position their platform and convince the reluctant enterprises that they can come to them for all their hybrid cloud needs. This is a marriage of convenience for all the three players and I expect to see some consolidation in the future as this space is ripe for such a thing to happen.

Novell is taking a multi-pronged approach to (private) cloud computing. On one side, they tout their Intelligent Workload Management as a smart way to do clouds and they also emphasize on getting the cloud security right and offer what is called as Cloud Security Service. Their solution to cloud puzzle has many different parts and they are trying to assemble these different parts slowly. Let me dig a little bit into their cloud strategy before talking more about the Novell Cloud Security Service. This section offers an overall picture of Novell’s cloud strategy (from my own understanding of their strategy using the information given in their website)

Novell is pushing their Suse Studio as a way to package applications as appliances to be deployed on either a virtualized environment or cloud. These appliances are built using OpenSuse or one of their enterprise distributions and delivered as either as an image to be installed on a physical hardware or VMware or Xen images for virtualized and cloud environments. Their Intelligent Workload Management tools for the cloud is based on their Platespin acquisition. The Platespin platform has been updated to offer the following features

• Analyze workloads, gain intelligence and optimize them
• Automate workload portability and integrated testing
• Workload protection through replication and seamless DR
• Cloud orchestration
• Support for multiple hypervisors

Cloud security is not simple. There are many aspects to cloud security on many levels including application security, network security, etc.. Novell’s first step in tackling cloud security is about identity, access and compliance. Establishing trust, managing access and keeping the necessary logs for compliance audit are very crucial to any enterprise’s cloud computing plans. Novell Cloud Security Service sits between the enterprise and the cloud provider by extending the enterprise identity manager to manage access to SaaS and PaaS. In short, it is acting as a trust broker between the enterprise and cloud providers. Some of the benefits of Cloud Security Service include

• Support for existing enterprise identity service or acting as a single sign-on for cloud providers
• Automatic provisioning and deprovisioning of users
• Extending the enteprise access control policies to the cloud
• Consistent compliance reporting for all cloud applications

• Cloud Security Bridge – This small footprint component (currently, a windows service) resides inside the enterprise firewall and provides protocol proxy, policy agent, audit agent, secure communication manager and a key agent. It operates over standard firewall ports without any need to modify their existing firewall. 
• Cloud Security Broker – The brain behind the service which resides on a cloud selected by the enterprise or on one of the Novell certified clouds like Amazon EC2, GoGrid or on eof the vCloud IaaS providers, ensures that the trust is maintained between the enterprise users and cloud providers.
• SaaS/PaaS Connectors – Cloud Security Broker communicates with the cloud provider using these connectors. Right now, connectors are available for Salesforce.com, Google Apps, any service built on top of the Spring Framework, etc.. It is quite easy for any SaaS/PaaS provider to build a connector which will work seamlessly with the Novell Cloud Security Service.

Novell has taken the first step towards delivering a more secure cloud experience. According to Jim Reavis of Cloud Security Alliance, Novell and CSA are working to address many of the trust concerns end-user organizations have with cloud computing, including issues that go beyond just technology solutions. I would like to remind you about the Trusted Cloud Initiative started off last year by Novell and CSA in collaboration with others to develop an identity management reference model, education and certification criteria for cloud providers. This move by Novell helps enterprises trust cloud providers more and easily implement their policies on the cloud. This is only a small slice of the big cloud security pie. Novell has plans to expand their cloud security offerings as they push further into the cloud market but there are big opportunities for other vendors to step in too. I have seen CA Inc. offering a similar product through their Identity Access Management suite. I have heard some noise from IBM on doing something along these lines through their Tivoli product line. There are other areas of cloud security that needs immediate attention. There is a long way to go before cloud security matures to a level where enterprises can trust cloud providers with most of their workloads.

Ever since Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure at PDC ’08, there was some expectations about their private cloud strategy. It was interesting because a private cloud play is necessary because

• Enterprises were not ready to dump everything on public clouds, even if Microsoft os the one providing the public cloud infrastructure
• Microsoft will want to use private cloud strategy to plug the loss of revenue on their server products as companies move to cloud based world

VMMSSP can be used to pool, allocate, and manage resources to offer infrastructure as a service and to deliver the foundation for a private cloud platform inside your datacenter. VMMSSP includes a pre-built web-based user interface that has sectionsfor both the datacenter managers and the business unit IT consumers, with role-based access control. VMMSSP also includes a dynamic provisioning engine. VMMSSP reduces the time needed to provision infrastructures and their components by offering business unit “on-boarding,” infrastructure request and change management.

In short, with VMMSSP, one can

• Manage all the resources in the datacenter
• Simplify business unit on-boarding
• Manage infrastructure requests from various business units and provide forms for self-service virtual machine provisioning
• Extend and customize virtual machine actions including an ability to add third party extensions

Well, this app is already out in the Apple App store and I played around with it a bit. It basically does the following

• It gives an option to the users to select files they want to store offline
• It caches some recently used files for the users just in case if they need it without internet connectivity

Well, the point about this post is entirely different. According to SiliconRepublic.com, the reason for this feature is a study Box.net conducted with D7 Consulting where they found that there is a clear need for offline support in a world where connectivity is still not as ubiquitous as the cloud providers would like.

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.net, says the company is doing research with D7 Consulting in order to ascertain how the app is being used by small industries.

It found that one of the biggest feature requests from D7 Consulting was to be able to access files offline.

Connectivity was seen to be an issue particularly if users were travelling on an airplane or if they were using Wi-Fi only device.

This is particularly interesting because few other cloud providers had offered offline access for their web applications and found out that it was not used by their users as they originally expected. For example, Google released Google Gears, a plugin for the browsers to take web applications offline. Later on, they stopped development on the plugin and it is not supported on Chrome browser right now. Even though they promise to include offline functionality through HTML5 later, the very fact that they stopped supporting Gears before they could get HTML5 functionality working speaks about the kind of traction they must be seeing on the Offline usage. I also had a chance to talk to Raju Vegesna of Zoho (disclaimer: Zoho is a sponsor of this blog but this is my independent opinion) more than a year back on this topic. He mentioned to me that even though their users want to have the offline feature enabled by Gears technology, Zoho is not seeing significant usage by their users. I heard similar opinions from few other vendors who were either using Gears technology to offer offline functionality to their SaaS apps or exploring such an option.

Yesterday’s announcement by Box.net brings this topic into focus again. Do people really want to have offline access to their data stored in cloud services? Even if they have access like in the case of Box.net, what is the use of such an access without the availability of apps that can open such files/data? As we go further along with SaaS and other cloud based services in a world where ubiquitous connectivity is still a pipe dream, this issue is going to come up again and again. I am really keen to know how users and vendors feel about giving offline access to their cloud services. After all, offline access goes against the very spirit of cloud computing. How do you feel? Do you think SaaS and other cloud providers should offer offline access to your data?

Disclaimer: Box.net is a client of Diversity Analysis.

After launching Virtual Private Cloud in 2009, Amazon has been slowly improving their offering with some features enterprises will love to have including the ability to use your own kernel, a way to use your own IP address while launching VPC, etc.. But they remained somewhat silent on penetration testing. In fact, blogosphere was full of discussion on how cloud providers face difficulty in allowing vulnerability scanning and possible alternative approaches to the issue, etc.. The wait is finally over.

Yesterday, Amazon announced that AWS users can now request permission from Amazon in a straight forward manner. They have put up two pages in AWS Security Center, one about how they report vulnerabilities and the other is a page outlining the procedure to get Amazon’s permission to do external penetration testing without violating AWS Acceptable Use policy.

Security is a top priority for Amazon Web Services. Providing a trustworthy infrastructure for you to develop and deploy applications is a responsibility we take very seriously. One important aspect of gaining your trust is being open and transparent about our security processes and continually working toward achieving industry-recognized certifications. Other important aspects include providing you with mechanisms for contacting us about potential security issues and enabling you to conduct security tests of the applications you deploy on AWS. I’m pleased to announce today two new policies: one that outlines our vulnerability reporting process and one that describes how to receive permission to conduct penetration tests of the applications running on your EC2 instances.

This is a good first step but they have to do more before they can become the darling of the enterprises. It will be interesting to watch where they go in the next year on the security front. 

Having made my thought process clear about Microsoft’s willingness to embrace the idea of “openness”, I thought I will share my opinions on their interoperability/portability claims. Ever since they lost out the first mover advantage to Amazon in cloud computing, Microsoft is touting openness and interoperability with their Azure platform. They preach interoperability almost in the same way Richard Stallman preached software freedom, with a zeal. Now, they have even come out with a website for interoperability standards in the cloud. Having lost the marketshare to Amazon, it is only natural that Microsoft sprinkles “open” and “interoperability” in their campaign. We have seen again and again how companies falling big behind the market leader embrace openness as a tool to fight back. I guess Microsoft’s love for interoperability follows the same trend.

In fact, I am excited about Microsoft talking about openness and interoperability. In fact, as open source evangelists, many of us have long worked hard to make this happen. An interoperable world lead by Microsoft is very good for the industry, especially the users. It will lead to increased innovation while empowering the users of cloud services with more freedom. However, I am still not happy with all the interoperability talk by Microsoft. Yes, I agree that we can now run Java, PHP and other open source applications on top of Windows Azure. But is it the true meaning of interoperability?

True interoperability is always a two way traffic. What is happening with Microsoft’s cloud initiative is that we can take all sorts of applications from other platforms to Windows Azure but we cannot do the same with .NET applications running on Azure. Yes, we can port some of the .NET applications to certain versions of Windows server operating systems running on Amazon or other clouds. For me, it is not openness. It is not the right way to do interoperability. All Microsoft is doing is to ensure that web servers like Apache and database servers like MySQL run seamlessly on the Azure platform. It is not interoperability but it is plain old opportunism. Well, opportunism is not wrong. In fact, it is even necessary for success in the business world. However, I will seriously respect their interoperability claims only if they offer me an easy way to seamlessly port my .NET applications to Linux platform. Maybe, they should work even more closely with folks at Mono project to make this happen. When the day comes when I will be able to move all my applications (whether it is based on open source frameworks or .NET framework) to any platform running on any providers’ cloud, I will definitely agree with Microsoft’s interoperability claims. Till then, it is just a tactic to get more users on to their service.

Having said that, I want to clearly state that I don’t have any problem with Microsoft’s closed approach. They have every right to take the approach and as long as there is a market for it, it is even a smart way of doing business. My problem is not with their proprietary, closed way of doing technology. My problem is only with their claims about interoperability. Interoperability is never a one way street.

Their platform can be broken down into three levels. The top most level is the interface level where IT Admins, Users and Developers can access the underlying platform. IT Admins have a simplified, yet powerful, interface to manage the entire infrastructure including provisioning of VMs, reduction of VM sprawl, etc.. It is easy to automate the processes and integrate with the existing IT workflow. One of the things I was pretty impressed about their dashboard is the powerful set of reporting features which will come handy for enterprises. The chargeback mechanism (billing for service providers) is also integrated in their dashboard. The IT Admin portal is designed to take the load of the admins away so that they can better spend their time on strategic processes which will improve the IT overall. The user dashboard allows users to request resources, manage the VMs provisioned for them, etc.. Their dashboard is one of the comprehensive ones I have seen in the market. 

There is a portal available for developers which is designed to cut down on the development time and costs. This portal along with the next layer in their platform, Application Delivery Platform, allows developers to use the existing languages, use code or applications and push it to any cloud they want completely overriding any possibility of a lock-in.

The third layer is the infrastructure control layer. This layer has three components each designed to tackle the three important component of the infrastructure, compute, storage and network. The Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC) takes the complexity out of the infrastructure whether it is on-premise, private clouds or public clouds. It supports multiple hypervisor and multiple clouds offering a complete control over the entire virtual infrastructure of the enterprise, management and monitoring, etc.. Their Unified Storage Gateway encapsulates the complexity associated with managing the on-premise and cloud storage and offers an unified and easy access to the underlying storage by abstracting and integrating underlying protocols such as FTP, SFTP, SCP, WebDAV, REST. The unified network connector allows IT departments to extend their existing network security policies to the cloud and get the kind of (virtual) isolation they want inside the cloud. 

Cloupia platform is a powerful platform with a feature rich dashboard. They are on par with some of the other players in the industry. In fact, they even have some features that are highly suitable for the enterprises looking to embrace cloud computing. I am pretty convinced about the technical capabilities of their platform. However, I am still not convinced about how they can differentiate themselves and move ahead of the flock in a highly crowded marketplace. Now that they have showcased their platform at the recently concluded Cisco Live event, people will take notice and they will gain traction. Still, it will be interesting to watch them navigate the marketplace crowded with established players and open source platforms. Their platform has the potential and it now rests on their execution.

Cisco Cius is an ultra lightweight (1.15 lbs) Android based tablet offering HD video streaming and real-time video, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, browsing, and the ability to produce, edit and share content stored locally or centrally in the cloud. Some of the product features include

• A front-mounted 720p HD camera which refreshes at up to 30 frames per second; a seven inch, high-resolution widescreen super VGA touch-target display for real-time and streamed video, and single-button TelePresence interoperability that can be utilized either when the tablet is docked, or being used remotely via Wi-Fi.
• A 5-megapixel rear facing camera that can transmit streaming VGA quality video and capture still images, and dual noise-cancelling microphones for audio conferencing.
• An on-board accelerometer readily orients applications for viewing in portrait or landscape modes as the user rotates the device to their preferred viewing orientation.
• Supports 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi for enterprise campus mobility and 3G cellular services when off-campus. 4G services will be available at a later date. Bluetooth and Micro-USB means users can work untethered and share data with a PC.
• Completely integrated with Cisco collaboration applications including Cisco Quad, Cisco Show and Share, Cisco WebEx Connect, Cisco WebEx Meeting Center, Cisco Presence, and interoperability with Cisco TelePresence.
• Integration with Virtual Desktop so that any application can be streamed to the users’ tablet for on the move productivity.
• An open platform on top of open source Android mobile operating system means that a vibrant third party ecosystem can grow around the tablet.

You can watch the live stream of Cisco Live below

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