Cloud Computing and Security Conference: SecureCloud 2010
Next Tueday and Wednesday I’ll be attending SecureCloud 2010 in Barcelona, Spain. This looks to be a very promising conference, totally focused on cloud computing and security. Admission is free, and the event is organised by the Cloud Security Alliance, ENISA, ISACA and IEEE. On Wednesday, I’ll present “Skylab: How To Create A Simple Secur […]
NaviCloud is a next-generation platform that combines the economic efficiencies of cloud computing with true enterprise-class reliability and security. With built-in high-availability, a state of the art operations center, and a highly resilient service delivery infrastructure spanning multiple data centers, NaviCloud ensures business continuity. In his sess […]
“When VMware entered the production data center it was the beginning of a massive IT disruption with profound implications for careers, vendors and the next tech innovation cycle, driven by deep reductions in network operating expenses and equally uplifting increases in network flexibility and intelligence.
VMware set the stage for the multibillion dollar system virtualization category by allowing operating systems and applications to be easily set up and moved on top of commodity server hardware. They automated systems that had been requiring ever increasing amounts of manual labor as data centers grew ever more complex by creating an abstracting layer between software and hardware.”
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<param name=”closeTag” value=”“> “Yeah, you’ve made that clear—it’s evolving. I get that,” says Jack the CEO. “What I’m asking is, what is this cloud computing evolving to, and why should I care?” “Jack, I’m not trying to talk in circles here—it’s just that to understand where cloud computing is headed, I had to give you a little bit of where it’s been, and why it’s more than just the internet. So let me skip right ahead to the future and what it can mean for us,” says Patty the CIO.
“What it means for us is speed. And in this case speed means revenue. Forget all the drawings with cylinders and squiggly lines and rectangles—that’s all IT mumbo-jumbo and by this time next year it’ll all have new names and pictures anyway. What I want you to think about is speed—speed and revenue—and what our company could do if we could move faster in every aspect of our operations.”
Note: ESJ’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor’s statements.
Double-Take Software has leveraged Amazon Web Services to create a real-time workload recovery platform, Double-Take Cloud, to protect businesses from disaster and keep companies up and running without any upfront costs. Double-Take Cloud leverages the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often reserved for those companies that can afford to build and manage a second data center, complete with back-up servers standing by in case of a disaster or outage — a costly practice that requires significant resources. Other IT departments rely solely on the capabilities of local tape backup, also a time-consuming process with limited recovery capabilities.
An in-depth look at the types of cloud as a service and how to utilize the cloud for business continuity.
By Brace Rennels
If you listen to the IBM advertisements on television “The Cloud” is described as a “workload optimized service management platform” but what does that mean? Basically, in the most simplistic form, the Cloud is a virtual data center. That is it! People often ask me to explain what it is, how it is used and why is it so popular? Usually, to avoid the deer in the headlights look by trying to explain what an optimized workload is, I will usually explain that it is a virtual data center. However, there are unique characteristics that allow it to be referred to as the Cloud. First, it is usually fully virtualized and accessed via the internet (or cloud), whether it is a virtual private or public network. The technical concept actually isn’t new. Companies have been implementing their own virtual private data centers for years. However, now companies are looking to adopt cloud computing as a service to help reduce costs as well as time to implement new infrastructure, service platform or software application. One of the fastest growing areas of cloud services is utilizing it for disaster recovery and or improving recovery time objectives for storage backup processes.
Most, if not all, Fortune 500 companies have had the Cloud for years. Basically, they have created their own virtual data center for disaster recovery or for centralized server management. These are considered virtual private data centers versus what the Cloud is typically referred as a virtual public data center, like Amazon, where services, platforms or infrastructure is accessed via the Internet. Google has been the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) model for years and is a way to access legal briefings and decisions for research. Lexis-Nexis® is probably the most notable provider of these types of services, they provide thousands of law firms worldwide with of content-enabled workflow solutions specifically tailored to professionals in the legal industry. Therefore, it essentially becomes a commodity type of service that you lease for as long as you need that information or service.
Another benefit of the Cloud is its ability to be utilized as a disaster recovery facility to enhance backup and recovery requirements. For smaller businesses the cost to create a data center is usually too expensive, therefore many companies don’t have the business continuity they would like. With the introduction of Cloud, it became more cost effective for SMB’s to lease infrastructure for disaster recovery rather than gathering funds required to make a purchase all at once. Another benefit in leasing infrastructure is that the company doesn’t need to acquire resources or staff to manage the additional datacenter. Also, a company only needs to pay for what it uses. The Pay-as-you-go model may have one of the largest advantages of utilizing cloud services. So, rather than purchasing all the equipment needed for a data center with three years of storage, the Cloud leases what you need and expands dynamically if more storage, processing or memory is required.
Only paying for the storage you need is what makes cloud providers like the Amazon EC2 an attractive backup and recovery option. Cloud computing can now provide a more readily available copy of data that can be recovered anytime and anywhere. It can also greatly reduce the recovery time objectives of using a tape archive solution. Company’s today are using cloud computing to enhance their existing backup solutions to reduce the amount of money spent on the tape, storage services and shipping but also reduce the amount of time it would take to recover. Tape has been around for a long time so I don’t see cloud computing replacing tape backup anytime soon. However, it will definitely be used to improve business critical servers that need a lower recovery time. Tape can still be used as an offsite archive solution to meet industry compliance regulations, such as when documents and data need to be available for upwards of 7 years before they can be destroyed.
So, what have we learned about the Cloud? It is a virtual data center that can dynamically add resources as needed in a Pay-as-you-go leasing model. But the real difference is how a data center is built, managed and utilized by companies. Cloud computing provides infrastructure, software and platforms as a purchasable service that would not be an option for most companies The cloud provides opportunities for companies to rapidly spin up data center resources without the need for knowledge experts, software administrators and hardware startup costs. The three functions that cloud computing can provide is serve as a disaster recovery facility, a platform and infrastructure for enhanced backup procedures as well as the ability to lease software as needed versus trying to disrupt the company organization to implement yourself. This is only the tip of the iceberg regarding cloud computing, over the next few years this industry will rapidly grow. In fact, it forecasted by many analysts as being a 25 billion dollar business opportunity.
The Different Types of Cloud as a Service
The next step in understanding the cloud is to comprehend the different types of services offered and how to use them.
Written by Guest Author / February 27, 2010 2:00 PM
Cloud computing means many things, but almost all definitions include some key value propositions: scalable on-demand resources, a metered pay-per-use model, access over the Internet, and infrastructure management and optimization that is better than most data centers.At a more conceptual level, cloud computing abstracts away all the undifferentiated IT tasks. Most businesses don’t add any value to their customers or create any competitive advantage for themselves when they buy, build, configure, and manage servers and storage. This is doubly true for disaster recovery equipment and data centers.
Conversely, poor performance in these tasks can cost value and competitive advantage. There is no benefit in doing these tasks well, but there is cost to doing them badly. This is like the opposite of a financial call option – lots of downside risk, but no upside.
For companies planning their first disaster recovery data center, with the associated selection, build, and maintenance tasks for servers, storage, and networking, cloud computing seems like an obvious fit. They can trade the capital expense that buys them no new value, for a no-commitment operating expense that probably buys better operating practices than they could achieve themselves.
Solutions are beginning to grow up around this idea of cloud recovery. The name is a little optimistic because most offerings today are traditional backup solutions, with little or no ability to actually recover in the cloud. Although a lot of vendors in the backup industry are making cloud announcements, they are mostly just letting users store backups in the cloud. In order to really deserve the cloud recovery title a solution should have the following features.
The ability to recover workloads in the cloud: The cloud can offer more than just a place to dump your backup files. It can provide the computing systems to run your recovered systems, and after a production system fails, the ability to quickly restart a complete replacement with data, applications, and complete configuration in the cloud.
Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning: A few vendors can offer rapid, off-site recovery, but they don’t really qualify for the cloud title unless they provide lots of stand-by capacity with no up-front reservations or configuration. While this seems like a lot to ask, this is the promise of cloud computing.
Pay-per-use billing model: A defining characteristic of cloud computing is that we only pay for the things we use. Use a little this week and pay a little; if we use a lot next week then we pay more, but only for that specific week.
SAN FRANCISCO — Bob Muglia, president of the server and tools business at Microsoft, pulled out a Cloud Computing for Dummies book during his keynote at the Goldman Sachs technology conference today, having found it on his admins desk. He said it was an indicator that the market was growing, but that it still has a ways to go.
“Cloud has a lot of focus right now but will not drive revenue growth over the next two to three years … Windows Server and SQL Server … are the big dogs really driving it,” he said, of Microsoft’s outlook for 2010.
Cloud not material to revenue for next several years
Muglia was bullish on cloud computing transforming the IT industry over the long term, but said that it will not be financially material (meaning more than $1 billion in revenue) to Microsoft’s business for several years.
In the early 1990’s the then administration had intense discussions about what was important to economy and the phrase “It’s the Economy Stupid!” came to light and ultimately helped win the election in 1992. I was thinking about this the other day and realized this same phrase applies to server backup and recovery, then realized that it isn’t the backup that is important but more so the ability to recover. IT managers ever day perform backups to protect data, servers, applications in the event the need is to recover those systems but just because there is a duplicate copy never ensures the ability to recover that copy of the server workload in a timely manner. This is where many cloud providers as well as storage vendors may be making the same past mistakes utilizing proprietary solutions only between like hardware or infrastructure.
Just because data may be backed up to tape, disk, a data center or cloud computing infrastructure never guarantees the ability that it can be recovered quickly and efficiently to a new server or virtual machine. In fact, many pains IT managers face is that backups can’t be recovered to dissimilar hardware. If you have a backup of a HP or IBM blade, what are the changes of being able to restore that to a Dell PowerEdge. Probably not good! The challenge is the inoperability of compatible drivers and or hardware and not to mention licensing of recovering that workload to a new or different server that may be available.
Cloud backup and recovery solutions solve much of these issues. Virtualization certainly can add level of complexity to the situation but also greatly helps solve many of these issues. The great thing about being able to backup and recover to a virtual cloud platform as there is no need to care what the server is, just that there is the ability to spin up the virtual machine in the event of a failure and access the workload from the cloud. This is rapidly becoming the 4th dimension of cloud computing platforms, “recovery as a service” in addition to Paas, IaaS, and SaaS.
So just because you have a backup when was the last time there was an attempt to recover? Focusing on improving the speed and efficiency of the recovery process will be better spent than just throwing in another tape to make you feel good. This will also ensure when there is a disaster event there isn’t a scramble to find the latest backup because the recovery procedures have been well exercised and streamlined to bring business operations into production with minimal downtime. Improving recovery will not only let you sleep well at night but will make you a rock star when you can quickly bring workloads online and prove to your executive team everything is under control. So, it isn’t just about the backup it’s the recovery!
The Microsoft Azure blog discussed it’s three principles of the Hypervisor which focus on efficiency, reduced footprint and tighter integration. Director Hoi Vo discusses these frequently asked questions regarding the Azure Hypervisor below..
We are frequently asked about the Windows Azure Hypervisor, and whether or not the code will be made available to customers as a product they could run in their own datacenters. We built the Windows Azure Hypervisor with three principles:“
Double-Take Software today announced the release of Double-Take Cloud which provides full server protection, failover and recovery using Amazon Ec2 Web Services infrastructure. According to Peter Laudenslager, Double-Take Cloud project leader, this is the only solution that allows businesses to replicate entire server workloads, including the operating system, applications and associated data in real-time and failover to the Amazon Ec2 infrastructure in the event of a failure.
Peter went on to differentiate the Double-Take Cloud solution from others who claim they backup to a cloud computing infrastructure. “With the Double-Take Cloud solution, a customer can recover a failed server into the cloud in less time that it would take a traditional vaulting company to deliver a tape. This isn’t like all the on-line backup offerings that seem to be sprouting up; this isn’t some scaled-up, laptop oriented, file-copy application rebranded as “cloud”. This is best-in-class, real-time replication and full system state recovery. It’s an industrial grade solution capable of protecting Exchange, MS-SQL, and Windows Domain Controllers – in fact, it will protect just about any Windows application or file server, and recover it perfectly, in the cloud.“
This is an interesting challenge to the market that could subvert the traditional backup paradigm as there are many companies that claim they provide solutions to backup and recovery full server workloads what they don’t tell you is they haven’t solved the original problem of being able to recover rapidly to dissimilar hardware. So, there may be a backup copy of the server somewhere accessible from the internet but the chances are it isn’t any easier to use than if it was sitting on a tape that needed to be recovered.
Peter Laudenslager from Double-Take Software went on to say: “In the past, businesses had to choose between investing in the equipment, facilities, and expertise to quickly recover critical business systems from a failure, or not investing, and having little or no ability to recover. Double-Take Cloud is simple enough and inexpensive enough that every business can have a great recovery solution. Now, for a monthly fee, they can get all the hardware, software, and infrastructure they need to get real-time data protection and rapid system recovery, in the cloud.“
This is a relatively new model for Double-Take Software as they will be providing the ability to purchase Double-Take Cloud licenses online at https://buy.doubletake.com/cloud for a low monthly fee in a pay-as-you-go service. There are then the Amazon storage fees that would be in addition but according to the Amazon pricing structure for the EC2 this could be as little as a few cents for every gigabyte of data stored.
The Double-Take Cloud release could be a challenge to some storage providers offering propietary storage solutions that realistically don’t reduce the recovery time objective any more than traditional tape recovery solutions. It will be interesting to see if storage vendors and or other cloud providers will open up new opportunities for Double-Take Software to provide the real-time replication and full server recovery capabilities they are missing in order to increase their adoption in the cloud computing marketing.
Recovery as a Service (RaaS) is a new cloud computing service model and is a combination of the three primary models – Infratructure, Platform or Software as a Service. However “Recovery as a Service” is utilized by companies looking to reduce the recovery time objective for their IT infrastructure backup processes. The RaaS model is an extreme benefit to smaller business that may not have the initial capital or experience to create a redundant or disaster recovery data center. The length of time it takes to even receive archived tape media from an offsite location and recover the lost server renders it an ineffective disaster recovery solution. With a “Recovery as a Service” model, companies can easily backup entire servers in real-time to a cloud provider like Amazon EC2 all for a very low cost service fee that includes the cost of software, hardware and storage. This isn’t a consumer solution like Mozy or Carbonite that backs up your kid’s iTunes. This is a big boy solution that allows companies to backup entire servers or data centers including the operating system, applications as well as the associated data.
In the event one of those servers or an entire data center is lost those replicated server images can be spun up in the cloud infrastructure and run from the remote location as if you had a duplicate data center with up-to-date data for maximum productivity. This provides a company a business continuity solution and the ability to service their customers even when there is an interruption of business critical systems at the office. When the original primary data center or server has been all the changes that have been made to the server workload running in the cloud can be replicated back and restored with minimal interruption. This is “Recovery as a Service” and it will be one of the fastest growing cloud computing trends in 2010.
