Bad news for GoGrid customers as today we received the following breach notification by email… Dear Valued Customer: In the normal process of reviewing our system activity, our Security Team discovered that an unauthorized third party may have viewed your account information, including payment card data. We immediately took action to protect our custom […]
PaaS v2.0 should be more open than the current implementations, and cultivate tools communities. But the focus on open development stacks is ignoring the second aspect of PaaS - the management of live applications after they are built. PaaS providers need to allow for communication of SLA and business process requirements by consumers, and cloud management t […]
“Former ‘Master of Disaster’ at Amazon Jesse Robbins has a couple of fun tidbits to share about the birth of Amazon EC2. He said the reason it succeeded as an idea in Amazon’s giant retail machine was partly due to his inter-territorial corporate grumpiness and partly due to homesickness–not exactly the masterstroke of carefully planned skunkworks genius it’s been made out to be by some.
Robbins said Chris Pinkham, creator of EC2 along with Chris Brown (and later joined by Wiljem Van Biljon recruited in South Africa)was itching to go back to South Africa right around the time Amazon started noodling around with the idea of selling virtual servers. At the time, Robbins was in charge of all of Amazon’s outward facing web properties and keeping them running.
“Chris really, really wanted to be back in South Africa,” said Robbins, and rather than lose the formidable talent behind Amazon’s then VP of engineering, Amazon brass cleared the project and off they went with a freedom to innovate that many might be jealous of.”
“Ever since the introduction of Double-Take Cloud, we’ve been getting a lot of questions as to how our cloud systems are configured, where they are hosted, what type of VM hosts we’re running, etc. I thought it would be good to do a DT: 101 article on the fact that Double-Take Software is not, in fact, a cloud provider of any kind – which is saying a lot these days.
Everyone from Oracle to EMC is re-branding themselves as a “cloud company,” and for the most part they’re right on the money. Oracle has been offering Software as a Service (SaaS) for quite some time now, and EMC is a great platform to build a private cloud on (as are any of the other mass-storage providers). But this rush to re-brand as cloud companies can be confusing, especially when companies that make cloud-enabling technology (like Double-Take Cloud) can get muddled in with the cloud infrastructure providers.
So, for the record, Double-Take Software is not a cloud company. We do not host servers for Infrastructure on Demand, nor do we provide SaaS solutions, though Double-Take Cloud is pretty close to that last definition. What we are is a software company that makes quite a few technologies that can effectively power your cloud ambitions, and are used by many cloud companies as well.”
“The benefits of doing things “as-a-Service” (aaS) and leveraging cloud-based technologies are well-known and documented, such as a low barrier to entry, reduced capital outlay and infrastructure, easy scalability, and device/location independence. Many companies also appreciate the reliability of service and the ability to leverage specialized domain knowledge expertise from an experienced aaS provider.
However, there is still a great deal of confusion about the many different types of aaS and questions remain over how much companies should rely on the cloud. Specifically, when is the right time to turn to aaS rather than build and manage in-house and what are some of the pitfalls that can be avoided when moving to an aaS-based solution?
Leveraging the cloud and delivered as a service, each aaS has the ability to help you do things faster, better, cheaper. The most attractive characteristic of the aaS movement is a flexibility that allows for an incremental or selective approach to deployments. You don’t need to do it all at once, and you can mix and match.
The following is a brief synopsis of current aaS variants, when you should consider them, and what the future might hold for this technology.
First, here’s a quick cheat sheet of three most common aaSes:
IaaS – stands for both Integration-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service
SaaS – Software-as-a-Service
PaaS – Platform-as-a-Service
Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) is probably the oldest, and has historically been the most stagnant, of the aaSes. IaaS originally functioned as a connector, providing integration for businesses to transmit documents to each other, such as EDI (electronic data interchange) and VANs (value added networks). Examples of this type of business document interchange go back to as early as the 1960s and really took hold during the ’70s and ’80s when early service providers helped companies automate this exchange. IaaS improved substantially once documents could be sent digitally over the Internet.”
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.
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!
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.
I posed this question to my friends on Twitter and was surprised and the variation of answers I received. The first thought was that it already is and will continue to be but then there were some additional comments that got us thinking and expanded on that original statement. The next comment was the Cloud could be a commodity but would depend on vendors’ adherence to open interoperability standards, which I agree. However, if the past is any prediction to the future the hardware vendors will once again get it wrong by trying to force the consumer to adopt to their proprietary platforms versus an independent and hardware agnostic solutions that would allow workloads and compute power to be transferred across data centers in real-time seamlessly without interruption. Besides why do you care where your workload is running from as long as it is secure and accessible? It was a t this point where I realized that the “Cloud” itself isn’t the commodity but it is the compute power as noted by RoudyBob in our discussion. And this is what the commodity is, which will be the ability to transfer, utilize and purchase cloud compute power like a utility.
For the most part we were all pretty much in agreement but there were many different opinions of how the Cloud would arrive as being a commodity. I think it has yet to shake out for the various comments listed above but someday and maybe soon the Cloud could very well be a traded and exchanged commodity.
When the term cloud computing first generated a buzz it was typically referring to utilizing software as a service or otherwise known in the industry as (SaaS). Google is probably most known software as a service but then others in the social media industry rapidly shot up like Facebook, Twitter and My Space as well as other hosted applications that were more business critical. Although SaaS was one of the first technical adoptions of the cloud in the last few years, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) have also become viable solutions and maybe more beneficial to companies than just software.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Other than the search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo what can these (SaaS) models do to help a company. The Social Media applications are quickly replacing traditional marketing like print advertising so this is one area but there are many other SaaS available that can help improve efficiency and productivity. Anything from website hosting, content management and or just a dependable database for backend infrastructure are all available for a quick deployment.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a Service is more popular and mostly utilized by the developer community and was likely started with the introduction and popularity of Linux open source code. This cloud computing model provides a platform for developers to code, test and experiment new software without the complexity of setting up and maintaining test, development and production servers.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a service is probably where many large companies like HP, IBM, Amazon and Rackspace are focusing their attention. This service model provides both companies as well as consumers the ability to utilize already optimized and maintained virtualized resources at a data center via a web service or VPN connection. Many will use this to backup, recover data files and or full servers in the event of a loss and that resource needs to be recovered. It can also serve as the primary server and actually run the application workload from this location alleviating the company IT staff of having to procure and or maintain the server infrastructure and or application expertise to provide that service. This is typically billed on a per use basis so only the resources, processing and or storage used is billed at the end of each month.
These are the big three but is there a forth that is already in progress. It is already being adopted by some companies as well as being discussed and that is Recovery as a Service (RaaS). Stay tuned for the next blog post Cloud 101 – Recovery as a Service: How it works
