Welcome to our new weekly feature “Cloudy Wednesdays”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

We continue today with a look at private cloud computing deployment options as talked about in a recent joint presentation with Evolving Solutions and IBM’s Chief Strategist, Don Cotey. In an IBM study, over half of U.S. companies are expressing high interest in adopting many workloads in either public or private clouds.

Private cloud deployments with IT capabilities provided “as a service” over an intranet, within the client and behind the firewall offer two deployment options:

• Client owned and operated private clouds on the client’s premises
• Client owned but third-party operated

Check back next Wednesday, September 7th for a look at hybrid and public cloud computing deployments.

Evolving Solutions partners with each customer to define the best data center virtualization and networking solutions. As part of this process, Evolving Solutions also looks to some of the leading IT product producers to ensure ultimate performance and the best IT and business benefits. Evolving Solutions works closely with Cisco and its Data Center 3.0 to offer:

• Lower total cost of ownership – improved asset utilization and reduced, infrastructure, power and cooling demands
• Increase resilience
• Improved agility and responsiveness
• Proven designs that enable low-risk, incremental evolution

As Kyle Forster points out in a recent Gigaom post, OpenFlow may be one of the hotter buzzwords in networking solution technologies these days, but how does one nail down what OpenFlow is. Mr. Forster points out that as of today, that is not easy, since OpenFlow is a sort of infrastructure-of-infrastructure that can be applied many places and new contexts of use are evolving as the technology expands.

At its most basic level, OpenFlow is a protocol for server software to send instructions to OpenFlow-enabled switches where instructions give direct control over how those switches forward traffic through networks. OpenFlow features and benefits are changing as new uses for the technology evolve, but today we see the following:

• Non-tree architecture
• Custom, flexible forwarding
• Ability to program the network to meet specific application needs

Welcome to our new weekly feature “Cloudy Wednesdays”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

In a recent joint presentation by Evolving Solutions and IBM’s Chief Strategist, Don Cotey, we discussed the five deployment options for enterprise cloud computing. In the following weeks we will highlight the aspects of each deployment.

Today, cloud computing is fast gaining traction and is the logical ‘next step’ from virtualization. Here are the five deployment models as seen by IBM for cloud computing:

• Client managed private cloud
• Third-party operated, client owned private cloud
• Third party owned and operated private cloud
• Share cloud services
• Public cloud services

Check back Wednesday, August 31st for a deeper dive into each cloud computing deployment.

We continue today with a look at another Evolving Solutions networking solution partner, Juniper Networks. Evolving Solutions can provide its customers access to Juniper’s New Network technology, which is an open approach to high-performance networking.

Some of the benefits of Juniper’s New Network are:
• Improved productivity through fast and reliable network connectivity
• Improved user satisfaction by accelerating applications over the network
• Reduced network expenses by simplifying operations

On Wednesday, August 24th Evolving Solutions will feature a new weekly series, “Cloudy Wednesdays”, highlighting the latest news and information on cloud computing. Be sure to check back.

In today’s world of telecommuting, the demands of building a scalable network are getting tougher. Evolving Solutions works with each customer to design the right networking solution and uses industry leading products to ensure reliability.

Recently, Brocade, a provider of storage area network technology to ESI, was awarded the “Most Important Enterprise IT Product for 2010” by CTO Edge for the Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switches. The VDX 6720 provides the following innovative benefits:

• First true Ethernet fabric switch built for highly virtualized and cloud-optimized data center.
• Allows management intelligence to be embedded at the Layer 2 of the network
• Most innovative technology available for simplifying a network

Learn more about Evolving Solutions partnership with Brocade. Check back Monday, August 22nd for a look at Evolving Solutions partnership with Juniper.

IT analysts report in a recent CIO article “How Desktop Virtualization Can Help IT Manage Consumer Devices” that desktop virtualization in many of its use cases fits neatly into problem areas that client companies face, such as the consumerization of IT. In other words, end users using non-standard computing devices such as tablets and smart phones, anytime and anywhere.

The clearest solution is to create a virtual desktop that runs on a server in the data center that can be launched and viewed easily by any end user and device. This is, of course, the full blown virtual desktop solution. But it is important to remember that desktop virtualization should be looked at as a range of implementations not as “a solution” or even a “set of solutions”. Working with a partner such as Evolving Solutions to identify the range of desktop virtualization implementations will help organizations at all levels find a solution right for their situation and their budget.

Even though the cloud doesn’t force any documentation or make it any easier to enforce documentation, there are clever ways to use cloud application features and Web service protocols to make modern systems more self-documenting reports David Taber in his recent article on CIO, “How to Document in the Cloud.”

All consumers of public or private cloud computing services need to document what the service does, how it is used and what behaviors the consuming side uses or depends. One best practice is to create a centralized repository whose content is created and maintained by every member of the development team. Developers, of course, are not typically in the documentation area while they are entering code or changing an application variable. In this case, another best practice is in-line commenting encouragement and measurement.

Finally, in some Cloud applications and frameworks there are scripting, workflow and formula languages that don’t natively support comments, so its worth pointing out that there’s always a way to plant comments via inoperative code fragments containing the document message. Bottom line is that document-as-you- go must be explicitly measured and encouraged for both the developer and administrator and there are creative ways to accomplish this even within the cloud.

After forming and stalling a couple of times reports Nancy Gohring of CIO, the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) formally launched this month in an effort to encourage the adoption of open cloud principles.

With cloud computing growing much faster, the OCI board thought the time was now right to bring about a standard to certify services. Currently the organization has released a draft of Open Cloud Principles which is open for comment.

The OCI hopes to set parameters around a couple of functions such as the ease of moving data into and out of the cloud service. It also promotes itself as a ‘community initiative’.

In our last blog post we identified two tips from Network World’s recent article “The 5 Biggest IT Security Mistakes” to help IT Security groups navigate the new challenges faced in the era of virtualization and cloud computing. Here are three more tips for success:

• Although virtualization holds tremendous promise in eventually improving security, especially disaster recovery, the reality today is that many IT security teams are lagging in this area. IT security needs to recognize and evaluate the new challenges to determine what works best for their virtualized environments.
• Develop a comprehensive plan for dealing with data breaches. Many states have different compliance laws to follow if data is breached. Add to that federal law requirements and the cross-organizational impacts and you’ll see the need to have an action plan prepared and in place.
• Although it is necessary to have solid “partnerships” with IT and security vendors, the organization continues to need to keep a critical eye on vendor innovation and offerings.