Blogs

On the ReadWriteCloud channel at ReadWriteWeb, they reviewed several very helpful tools for comparing cloud providers.

Here are a few we like too..

>> CloudFail

>> A blog that tracks the RSS feeds of major cloud providers in order to monitor service updates and outages. But a number of other services exist that can help customers assess the dependability of cloud providers.

>> CloudSleuth

>> A cloud performance visualization tool initially created as an internal resource to help us gauge the reliability and consistency of the most popular public IaaS and PaaS providers. CloudSleuth uses the Gomez Performance Network to measure the performance of an identical sample application running on popular cloud service providers, assessing two basic user experience metrics - response time and availability. The tests are currently run from locations in all 50 states and from 75 international locations, and there are plans to add the ability to benchmark a user's own application.

>> CloudHarmony

>> While much of CloudHarmony still in beta, it looks to become an important resource for evaluating performance. Currently, you can use its Cloud SpeedTest to test upload and download speeds, page loads and latency on several major services. The CloudHarmony blog also contains a number of analyses of various services, including encoding, CPU performance, and memory I/O.

>> Cloud CMP

>> Developed by Duke University and Microsoft Research, Cloud CMP "pits cloud against cloud," assessing computation, storage, and network services offered by different cloud providers, then estimate performance and cost of an application if it's deployed on a particular cloud provider.

Optimizing the Cloud – Solving the Bandwidth Issue

Question: The cloud offers cost effective solutions for many of the more difficult IT business issues, such as elasticity, efficiency and access to application portfolios. Should I be concerned about how much bandwidth I will need as I move into the cloud if I have several terabytes of data?

A few years ago – BC (Before Cloud), I was involved in a project that involved accessing and manipulating a large GIS database. The users were constantly complaining about slow access and latency problems. It turned out that the problem was that the application designed for a LAN implementation was located in a data center 1500 miles away from the users. Sounds like a typical cloud application, right?

The dirty secret of all cloud applications and services are they assume that only tiny amounts of data are moving at any one time. Normally, for web, mail, FTP and other applications optimized for the WAN environment the cloud works as advertised. The problem arises when performing bandwidth and data intensive tasks such as moving large data sets, performing replications for high availability and backup purposes, or doing data mining or ETL activities. It is physically possible to move only about 12GB of data over a T1 connection a day. When even a relatively small company has several terabytes of data migrating it all to the cloud would be painful at best.

An excerpt from cloudTPer Beth Cohen's excellent blog:

>>For mid-sized businesses and consumers, the appeal of using the cloud as a very large attic to throw all your archives is very appealing.

Consumer grade cloud backup services for relatively small data sets - under 20GB, are amazingly cheap. However, for the enterprise, where the stakes for data loss and security are considerably higher, end user oriented products just will not do. Most products in the enterprise cloud storage space break into four buckets:

Cloud Storage Management Tools -
Software designed for the cloud providers and enterprises that want to take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity and need for a higher level of systems abstraction. Software offerings from Bycast, Cleversafe and Parascale provide tools to slice and dice available SAN/NAS systems on the fly, multi-tenant secure partitioning, charge-back capabilities and virtual server support.

Cloud Ready Storage Hardware -
Storage hardware with new software designed to handle the unique demands of cloud storage. EMC, NetApp and IBM have all announced or are selling products with cloud enabled features. Most are being pitched at nervous enterprises that are not willing to give up their overbuilt hardware and data center centric security blankets for the public cloud.

Wholesale Cloud Storage Services -

The Yankee Group reports:

>> More than half of U.S. enterprises now consider cloud computing a viable technology, with favorable views on cloud jumping by more than 50 percent in just a year.

>> The information technology-oriented research house said in a report that “cloud computing is on the cusp of broad enterprise adoption.”

>> A year ago, less than 37 percent of enterprises told Yankee Group that they saw cloud computing as an enabler. In the most recent survey of 400 enterprises, those seeing the concept as a business enabler had jumped to 60 percent.

>> Other findings in the report included only 17 percent of respondents saying that they view Amazon and Google as trusted cloud partners, with more companies favoring IT providers such as IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co.’s EDS, Cisco Systems Inc. and VMware; and most enterprises preferring private clouds.

We find it odd that Microsoft and Salesforce aren't mentioned in the summary above. Microsoft is moving rapidly into cloud solutions and Salesforce has mainstream adoption.

Here is Microsoft's cloud computing strategy:

>> The cloud computing venture from Microsoft promises to bring a whole lot of new ventures in the near future. They expect it to be a source to added revenues into their accounts. They expect to bring the Business Productivity Suite, Office Web Apps, Windows Azure and Dynamics CRM online. Due to all these applications and their availability online, COO terms Microsoft as the undisputed leader in the commercial cloud services. Microsoft is confident about leading the world of cloud computing with the products that it has been offering for quite some time now.

Cloud Technology Partners
Storage Portfolio Transformation (SPT)
service offering

We provide unbiased consulting about the cloud storage offerings and what they really mean. The industry consensus seems to be, there must be a way to make money at this by adding value added services, if only we could figure out how to do it! And man, managed storage is expensive.

How many companies want to drop millions of dollars on expensive storage systems if they can get cheap pay as you go services on the cloud? All the storage companies are aware that cloud uses storage differently and they want to get on that bandwagon as quickly as possible.

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