There has been a lot of talk about private versus public clouds because of data security concerns. A private cloud is a proprietary network or data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. Private clouds generally pose fewer security and privacy risks than public clouds.
What distinguishes private clouds from the average data center is the ability to pay-per-use and scale usage up or down as demand dictates. This scalability is made possible by the pooling of storage resources.
With cost and scalability being two important business issues, private clouds are extremely attractive to many businesses. According to a recent InformationWeek survey, more than half of the business technology professionals interviewed said that “they’re either using private clouds (28%) or planning to do so (30%).” That said, there is still a lot of hesitation when it comes to implementing a private cloud environment. With a heavy technology investment needed, businesses quite rightfully are trying to determine whether the long-term savings will be worth the upfront investment.
Forrester Analyst, James Staten, believes that most businesses are not ready for an internal cloud because they “lack the experience and maturity to manage such an environment.” Staten says that “to be ready, they must first scale operational standardization, automation, and virtualization mountains.”
With automation and consolidation being best practices for running a better, more efficient data center, perhaps preparing for a private cloud will inadvertently help companies optimize their data center?
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings are finished applications that companies rent. SaaS applications are delivered via the Internet and priced based on consumption (number of users or “seats”). While you cannot modify SaaS applications, it is possible to make small customizations. Some examples of software-as-a-service are online social media monitoring tools such as ScoutLabs.com and CRM tool Salesforce.com.
The cost to use an SaaS application ranges from $0 to $500 per user per month depending on the application, use, and addition of supplementary modules.
When we talk about the maturity of the various cloud computing offerings, SaaS, which has been around as a technology solution for more than 10 years, is at a higher level of maturing than most other cloud services that have fewer than three years on the market.
According to Forrester, SaaS has become an established software delivery model for certain segments of the market. Forrester survey data shows that 20% of enterprises and small-to-medium size businesses have implemented or are piloting at least one SaaS solution. All major enterprise ISVs have SaaS offerings, and all major SIs are building large SaaS practices.
That said, software-as-a-service still has room for growth. Not all applications are suited to SaaS delivery, and not even all implementations of SaaS-suited software are appropriate for a SaaS delivery. SaaS does, however, have the potential to significantly increase corporate efficiencies and productivity.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) refers to software and product development tools hosted on the provider’s infrastructure. You pay the host for the use of their platform, but may also pay someone else for other software or services. A good example of PaaS is Google Apps.
According to Forrester Analyst, James Staten, PaaS is a “build-deploy-manage environment. These cloud services provide a framework and a software system for application developers to create new services and rapidly deploy them on the Internet. They typically support a particular type of programming language or environment and provide cloud-implemented services that the developer can integrate into their application. It’s becoming common to see PaaS offerings designed specifically for the enhanced use of a SaaS service. For example, Force.com is primarily
used to create new applications that directly leverage the Salesforce.com CRM service.”
The biggest challenge with PaaS is how limited it is in terms of applicability. Many PaaS platforms are focused on a particular class of developer or application, which means that applications will not run on other platforms. The “lock-in” that PaaS provides is therefore a big downside. According to Staten, PaaS will take 3 – 5 years to reach the next stage of development because “significant function build-outs are still needed, as well as maturity of the platforms and greater enterprise adoption.”
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is often referred to as Utility Computing because it offers a “pay-based-on-what-you-use” model for data storage. Via IaaS, Cloud Computing enables companies to only pay for the storage capacity that they need and use. IaaS is, in essence, an on-demand virtual hosting environment.
IaaS is used to deploy Web service, VM- or SOA-based applications to the Internet. Examples of vendors using IaaS are: Amazon, AT&T, GoGrid (ServePath), Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and Verizon. Estimated cost to implement IaaS starts at $0.10 per CPU hour.
As Forrester Analysts, Jennifer Bélissent and James Staten, state in a recent whitepaper, “despite the overwhelming buzz of cloud computing, few firms worldwide have adopted a pay-per-use, self-service model of computing, based on virtual service at a public service provider.” Adoption varies from region to region; IaaS clouds are local and so are their implications.
Forrester’s data shows that IaaS adoption is slower in North America and Western Europe than in other emerging markets such as Latin America and Asia. Data security and privacy concerns are certainly top of mind for IT professionals in North America considering cloud computing as an option.
The physical location of the cloud data center is important because of data protection regimes. Customers need to understand where their data will be transferred, processed and stored. According to Forrester, “Rather than merely claiming that data is in the cloud, tech vendors must be prepared to identify the location of data and provide location guarantees (at a premium) if required. The implications of local legislation necessitate a greater degree of transparency than that currently offered by some cloud providers.”
On July 19th, Evolving Solutions was pleased to welcome Forrester Analyst, James Staten, to our annual customer event. Staten delivered a presentation on Cloud Computing, including the challenges and the benefits.
According to Staten, the biggest challenge with Cloud Computing is understand what it really is. Forrester defines cloud computing as “a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way.”
Over the next 7 weeks, we will be posting a series of blog posts introducing you to the various types of Cloud Computing:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas)
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Private Clouds
Public Clouds
Combined Private & Public Clouds
Is the Cloud Right for You?
Check back next Wednesday (August 4th) for a post on Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
Evolving Solutions will be hosting a number of AIX classes in July. Sign up to attend!
AIX Basic System Administration – Level 1
July 7 & 8, 2010
Cost: $1,000
This class is designed for administrators that are new to AIX and the IBM Hardware, or administrators that have had very brief exposure (migrating from architecture to AIX). Basic functions, such as operating system installation, update (patching), and backups are covered as well as an introduction to the HMC (Hardware Management Console) and LPAR’ed environments. Some troubleshooting basics are also covered (disk replacement, adapter hot-add, etc).
AIX Intermediate System Administration – Level 2
July 12 & 13, 2010
Cost: $1,000
This class is designed for administrators that have AIX experience, but have not virtualized their environment as of yet, as well as administrators that want a review of intermediate level functions. Implementing NIM (Network Install Manager) is a subset of this class. Discussion of Dual VIO is covered, as well as additional ways to make your systems more robust and resilient. Setting up initial performance monitoring is also covered.
AIX Advanced System Administration – Level 3
July 15 & 16, 2010
Cost: $1,000
This course is designed for seasoned AIX administrators. Experience is a must, because it is assumed that the student already knows basic tasks and concepts. This class requires advanced systems (P6, or P7) for the labs. Live partition mobility is covered in this class, as well as NPIV, Zoning Lun Allocations, etc. Available tools for AIX (IBM and Shareware) are covered in this class.
For more information or to register, please email Joanna Puklich at Joanna.p@evolvingsol.com
Data replication involves data being replicated and sent across your Wireless Area Network (WAN) to a remote disaster recovery location. Replication is scheduled for a certain time every day and automatically backed up to your remote server.
Data deduplication is the process of backing up data by eliminating redundancies. With data deduplication, only one unique instance of data is retained, meaning that every subsequent instance of that piece of data is referenced back to the one saved copy.
Data deduplication is beneficial for both replication and tape backup. With replication, it reduces replication time and bandwidth, improving recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) at the disaster recovery site with increased replication frequency. With tape backup, the increase of data retention on disk may result in lower frequency of tape copies and less tapes being stored off-site.
A more sophisticated version of replication is synchronous replication. This is a technique for replicating data between databases (or file systems) where the system being replicated waits for the data to be recorded on the duplicate system before proceeding. The synchronous replication approach requires access to all slave databases and 100% network availability for the replication to be successful. Therefore, network managers have to plan for synchronous replication and ensure that network availability is sufficient.
With synchronous replication, you have the guarantee that the duplicate system has a copy of the data, but the disadvantages that the primary system must wait for the secondary system before proceeding and replication will not be completed without high network availability.
Synchronous replication is currently the most sophisticated and costly form of data backup.
Coming next Wednesday in our Disaster Recovery series: Virtualization.
Live Partition Mobility gives you the ability to migrate a Partition from one Managed System to another. The movement of data is transparent and will not create an outage to the client applications.
LPM can greatly reduce outages to applications caused by Hardware Maintenance and can also be used for performance management such as scaling up to a larger System. System Maintenance that may require a shutdown of the Managed System no longer requires an outage of your applications. The client LPAR’s are simply migrated to another Managed System, allowing you to perform Maintenance without an outage to your users. After Maintenance has been completed, the Partitions can be moved back to the “primary” Managed System.
Live Partition Mobility can be used to move Partitions from a Server with resource constraints to a Server or Servers that have more resources. Once the workload has been completed, the Partition can be moved back to the original System, freeing up resources on the target System.
What Live Partition Mobility Isn’t
While LPM provides higher availability by reducing planned outages, it is not an HA solution like HACMP. With Live Partition Mobility, the operating System image is also transferred to the takeover System. If the problem is related to the operating System, it will still exist once the Partition has been moved.
HACMP provides a higher level of security for your data with added redundancy by switching to a different Operating System image.
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