Big 4

IBM Blue Cloud

IBM’s latest announcement, IMHO, finally puts them on the map as far as private cloud infrastructures go. I still believe they have a long way to go, but they have a very powerful infrastructure with their Cloudburst architecture backed by TSAM, ITPM, and ITM.

VMware vSphere

VMware has gone through a few iterations over the last year trying to define thier private cloud offering. Much like IBM’s Blue Cloud, VMware’s cloud offering has been a moving target. vShphere seems to be VMware’s first solid stake in the ground very much like IBM’s recent announcment.

Sun/Oracle

Sun’s cloud story was starting to get really interesting until the great un-believer purchased them. Sun’s acquisition of Qlayer was starting to play out nice for the Sun private cloud story. As acquisitions go, they should be getting back on track this year as long as the chief ninja doesn’t screw things up.

Computer Associates (Cassatt)

I agree this is a stretch, however; I still believe Cassatt is strong technology and CA has to understand that it’s life blood must exist in the cloud.

Little 4

3Tera

3Tera passes my I know one when I see one test. 3Tera’s Applogic provides a private grid like infrastructure for true cloud computing. They have been providing a solid private cloud for a few years now.

Enomaly

A front runner for “The Best Tweet” cloudie award this year is this one from @ruv …: “its like a game of survivor . The Enomaly motto should be, Outwit, Outplay, outlast.” Enomaly has recently announced a Cloud Server Provider Edition. This seems like a nice white label approach to providing other providers a cloud in a box.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus is a fascinating story. Rick Wolski, UCSB professor, tasked his students to build an open source version of Amazon’s Web Services. One year later they are funded by Benchmark Capital and have 11 employees. This is very promising technology. I guess the big question for me is, “Do 3Tera and Enomaly have to far of a head start?”

Cloudera

No ‘good” Big 4/Little 4 discussion can be complete with out a miss placed vendor I have called the Cloudera guys the 1927 Yankees of Hadoop. Hadoop is changing the way IT looks at data and these guys are leading the charge.

Here is the press release..

Tera Brings Windows to Cloud Computing

3Tera’s AppLogic™ 2.4 beta now supports the most popular datacenter operating systems – Linux, Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows

(Aliso Viejo, CA — October 1, 2008)— 3Tera®, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, announces beta availability of AppLogic™ 2.4 which includes support for virtual appliances running Microsoft® Windows Server™ incorporated in all infrastructure components necessary to run Web applications including storage, networking and load balancing. The new functionality is available immediately both as a service in the cloud and as private clouds in enterprise datacenters. For the first time, a cloud computing platform enables virtual datacenters that exceed the capabilities of traditional datacenters in commercial enterprise environments.

Complete Cloud Computing Solution
Adding Windows to AppLogic’s existing support of Linux, Sun’s Open Solaris™ and Solaris™ 10 follows 3Tera’s Cloudware™ architecture for open cloud computing, announced earlier this year. Users of AppLogic can now utilize the most popular datacenter operating systems in their applications, and even mix and match operating systems within applications as needed. This advance opens cloud computing to the ever growing number of users seeking IT scalability and flexibility beyond what is possible today in traditional datacenter environments.

“Windows support is an important requirement for an open cloud computing environment robust enough to take on any Web or enterprise application,” said Bert Armijo, senior vice president of sales and marketing, 3Tera Inc. “Solutions like .net, IIS, SQL Server and Exchange have made Windows a critical part of IT infrastructure.”

“3Tera’s announcement is ground-breaking news from both technology and business perspectives,” said Todd Abrams, President and COO, Layered Tech. “Enterprise datacenters today are heterogeneous, and now AppLogic allows customers to use their preferred operating systems when running their applications in the cloud. As a hosting provider, having a unified cloud platform simplifies our operations and opens new markets.”

Strong Customer Acceptance
Today, AppLogic delivers world-class, highly scalable infrastructure to small companies and major enterprises alike. As the AppLogic user base has grown beyond Linux, support for Windows has been the most requested enhancement.

“As a service provider we are extremely pleased with the flexibility and operational efficiencies we have enjoyed with AppLogic,” shares Dante Orsini, Managing partner, CorePLUS, Inc., a turnkey on-demand service for enterprise class collaboration and productivity solutions. “While businesses continue to search for new ways to cut costs, we are seeing a tremendous demand to outsource the management of Microsoft environments. It is extremely exciting to work with 3Tera and be able to deliver both Windows and open source applications as a managed service over one instantly scalable platform.”

“Inovaware evaluated a number of service providers to find a cloud computing platform that could support our billing and customer management SaaS business,” said Bruce Kim, CTO, Inovaware Corporation, a recognized leader in online billing and customer care solutions with over 600 customers in more than 30 countries. “3Tera’s AppLogic platform gives us the flexibility we need and the availability of Windows is a significant factor for our business.”

World-wide Reach
3Tera is currently the only company offering cloud computing solutions on a global scale by partnering with datacenters on four continents. As the only provider that enables others to build clouds and offer cloud computing solutions, 3Tera ultimately allows customers to choose their locations and expand or move to a different location as the business demand requires, without having to change a single line of code in their online applications.

“Hybrid infrastructure solutions will have a key role in the new cloud computing and SaaS markets,” explains Stephen Hurford, communications director, DNS Europe, a pan-European hosting and outsourcing business and 3Tera partner. “We are already seeing demand for OS-agnostic solutions, combined with the need to reduce infrastructure costs and increase the volume, complexity and global reach of the Web service offerings that our customers are building.”

Availability
AppLogic 2.4.5 is available immediately to preferred partners and customers. For more details, visit www.3Tera.com.

About 3Tera, Inc.
3Tera, Inc. is the innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, simplifying the deployment and scaling of Web applications. Named “Cool Vendor in IT operations, 2008” by Gartner Group and one of the “Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008” by Linux Magazine, 3Tera‘s AppLogic™ grid operating system enables the first true utility computing services to completely remove the cost and complexity associated with infrastructure. AppLogic converts commodity servers into scalable grids on which users can visually operate, deploy and scale transactional Web applications without any modification of code. Software-as-a-Service providers, Web 2.0 companies, enterprises and open source developers can now get new online services quickly to market by utilizing resources from commodity hosting providers on a pay-as-you-go basis, while maintaining complete control of applications including visual operation, scaling and on-demand resource provisioning. For more information, visit www.3Tera.com.

• The Citrix Announcment
• Econmics of the Citrix Deal
• 3Tera and Globalization
• Geopolitics as a reason for NOT NOT using the cloud
• Is 3Tera the Pass in the IaaS?

Listen to the Podcast Here

I wanted to add a special thanks to Florence Neal for the artwork and Mike Colletti for the music. If you find any of their works interesting, please feel free to link their sites and contact them directly.

Other blog entries related to 3Tera…

By combining the new Citrix Cloud Center (C3) solution with 3Tera’s AppLogic Cloud Computing Platform, the companies are elevating the benefits of virtualization to a new level – from physical servers and virtual machines to entire virtual datacenters and applications running in the cloud. The initial focus of the collaboration between the companies will center on the new Citrix XenServer Cloud Edition, a key component of the Citrix C3 product family. XenServer Cloud Edition offers the full benefits of the proven Xen-based virtualization technology enhanced with advanced cloud infrastructure capabilities specifically defined by 3Tera. 3Tera will also embed XenServer Cloud Edition in future versions of its AppLogic Cloud Computing platform.

XenServer Cloud Edition offers the full benefits of the proven Xen-based virtualization technology enhanced with advanced cloud infrastructure capabilities specifically defined by 3Tera. 3Tera will also embed XenServer Cloud Edition in future versions of its AppLogic Cloud Computing platform.

Read more for the press release…

3Tera Partners with Citrix to Bring Cloud Computing into the Mainstream

(VMWorld 2008 – Las Vegas, NV – September 15, 2008) – 3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, announced today a partnership with Citrix Systems, Inc. to make enterprise grade cloud computing solutions available to customers of all sizes in external hosted clouds, or as a platform that can be deployed in corporate data centers behind customer firewalls. By combining the new Citrix Cloud Center™ (C3) solution with 3Tera’s award winning AppLogic™ Cloud Computing Platform, the companies are elevating the benefits of virtualization to a new level – from physical servers and virtual machines to entire virtual data centers and applications running in the cloud. The initial focus of the collaboration between the companies will center on the new Citrix® XenServer™ Cloud Edition, a key component of the Citrix C3 product family. XenServer Cloud Edition offers the full benefits of the proven Xen-based virtualization technology enhanced with advanced cloud infrastructure capabilities specifically defined by 3Tera. 3Tera will also embed XenServer Cloud Edition in future versions of its AppLogic Cloud Computing platform.

“With the introduction of Citrix Cloud Center (C3), Citrix offers a solution to manage the information technology infrastructure of next generation data centers,” said AJ Jennings, vice president of business development, Citrix Systems. “We carefully chose 3Tera to be one of our first strategic partners for C3 because of their deep experience offering a full and open cloud computing platform for running multi-tier applications in a massively scalable global cloud.”

“As cloud computing moves from early adopters to mainstream users, new customers are demanding enterprise levels of reliability, support and control. Our Cloudware architecture allows us to work with Citrix to incorporate commercial, industrial strength virtualization into AppLogic,” said Barry X Lynn, Chairman and CEO, 3Tera. “Adding XenServer Cloud Edition to our application packaging technology, global cloud presence, and disaster recovery appliances creates the first open cloud computing platform ready for mission critical applications.”

Benefits for Customers
Cloud computing is dramatically changing the way applications will be developed, delivered and deployed by everyone from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses and startups. The Citrix / 3Tera partnership adds industrial strength virtualization to an already massively scalable platform. The resulting benefits are particularly important to the enterprise.

• Reinforcing its industry leadership, Citrix is working with 3Tera to add powerful capabilities for data center scalability, management and portability to offer enterprise customers secure, easy to use virtual infrastructure services scalable on demand with remote management through a browser.
• Offering an OS agnostic platform for cloud computing solutions and virtualized data centers leveraging 3Tera’s support for all major server operating systems, Linux, Solaris and Windows.
• The proven leadership of Citrix in virtualization helps make AppLogic an even more dependable platform on which multiple operating system components can operate in the same applications.

About 3Tera, Inc.
3Tera, Inc. is the leading innovator of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, simplifying the deployment and scaling of Web applications. Named “Cool Vendor in IT operations, 2008” by Gartner Group and one of the “Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008” by Linux Magazine, 3tera‘s AppLogic™ grid operating system enables the first true utility computing services to completely remove the cost and complexity associated with infrastructure. AppLogic converts commodity servers into scalable grids on which users can visually operate, deploy and scale transactional Web applications without any modification of code. Software-as-a-Service providers, Web 2.0 companies, enterprises and open source developers can now get new online services quickly to market by utilizing resources from commodity hosting providers on a pay-as-you-go basis, while maintaining complete control of applications including visual operation, scaling and on-demand resource provisioning. For more information, visit www.3tera.com.

# # #

3Tera, the 3Tera logo, AppLogic, Cloudware and Cloud Computing without Compromise are trademarks or registered trademarks of 3Tera, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Citrix®, Citrix Cloud Center™ and XenServer™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Comments

Johnmwillis: Hello, Botchagalupe, its good to have you back again.

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure.

Johnmwillis: What have you been up to?

Botchagalupe: Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.

Johnmwillis: The last time you were here you were talking about Botchanomics.

Botchagalupe: Nah, I am getting a little tired of the whole IT thing. These days I am just throwing rocks.

Johnmwillis: Throwing Rocks?

Botchagalupe: Your obviously not a bowler.

Johnmwillis: Surely you have something to say about all this “Cloud” talk that is going on.

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure, Clouds, yea, yea.

Johnmwillis: Please do tell.

Botchagalupe: Dude, Nick Carr has brain washed us all. He has everyone thinking that there has to be some kind of big switch that has to occur when it comes to the cloud. In the enterprise the debate always centers around will the enterprise switch to the cloud or won’t they. Carr’s got everyone thinking it has to be an all or nothing. I prefer to call it the “Dimmer Switch” when it comes to the enterprise.

Johnmwillis: Hey come on, you got that “Dimmer Switch” from my Cloud Cafe Podcast with Micheal Crandall the CEO of Rightscale.

Botchagalupe: Dude whatever, the point is that the enterprise will migrate into the cloud the same way they have always migrated into new technologies. They will use applications on the edge and once they get the warm on fuzzy on those they will move up the stack. I remember working with VMWare back in 1998 and now 10 years later it’s pervasive in the enterprise. It took a lot of trail and error and guerrilla projects to get VMWare accepted in the enterprise.

Johnmwillis: There has been a lot of discussion about security concerns and how the enterprise might not be ready for the cloud. Are there enterprise companies using the cloud today?

Botchagalupe: There is an under the radar groundswell of enterprises activity in the cloud. Wall Street companies are begging for advice on which applications should go to the cloud first. GigiaSpaces, well positioned in the financial services space. has recently put their application on EC2. It’s only a matter of time before their customers start using the cloud.

Johnmwillis: Then why are we not hearing about the large enterprises in the cloud.

Botchagalupe: Dude, sometimes I wonder about you. Of course the large enterprise are not going to broadcast their use of the clouds. I have been at some large companies that won’t even let you take a picture of their building. Do you think they are going to give competitors and hackers the blue prints to where their applications are running. A lot of the vendors and customers that I have talked to tell me that the enterprise is definitely using the cloud.

Johnmwillis: What is the enterprise doing in the cloud?

Botchagalupe: In the enterprise there seems to be an “Ask-for-forgiveness-later” kind of attitude happening when it comes to emerging technologies. Administrators seem to be deciding to go outside the firewall and pull out their own credit cards when it comes to getting tasks done rather than waiting on internal resource provisioning.

Johnmwillis: Yea but can you give me an example.

Botchagalupe: The classic example of this kind of attitude, although not a cloud initiative, is the Blue Shirt Nation (BSN) dude Gary Koelling of Best Buy. Koeling was in advertising at Best Buy and was going to each local Best Buy store to talk to different sales associates to get their feedback. He and and BSN co-founder Steve Bendt pulled out thier own credit card and spent $100 for a domain outside of the firewall and installed Drupal. Now 20k sales associates latter Best Buy senior management is being heralded by the industry as social networking innovators.
Johnmwillis: How about a cloud example?

Botchagalupe: Probably the best known cloud story is of Derek Gottfrid of the NY Times. Gottfrid was tasked with converting 11 million old TIFF format scanned articles from 1851 to 1922. Gottfrid had already been playing outside the firewall with S3 and decided to pull out his own credit card and give it a crack on EC2. Two hundred and forty dollars latter he had converted over 4 Terabytes of TIFF files into PDFs. He wound up using 100 EC2 AMI instances to accomplish the task. I am guessing he decided $240 dollars of his own money was worth it versus the headaches he would have encountered trying to request inside the firewall provisioning.

Johnmwillis: That’s a great story; however, everyone has heard that one already. Who else?

Botchagalupe: I was recently told a story about a large Telco that plans on moving their customer support help desk software over to EC2 in order to provide better agility and delivery to their customers. Unfortunately I can’t disclose the customer nor the vendor. Let me just say it is one of the top customer support software products on the market and it is a huge US based Telco.

Johnmwillis: Gartner claims …

Botchagalupe: Dude Gartner? Gartner Smrtner, don’t let the analysts of the world fool you. Insurance companies, banks, and pharmaceuticals that traditionally have an insatiable appetite for computing resources are experimenting with the cloud. I have heard stories of EC2 being used for insurance claim analysis. Analytics, modeling and Monte Carlo simulations are natural fits for clouds.

Johnmwillis: Are there any other documented cases where the enterprise is using the cloud?

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure. Rightscale is helping ESPN with the cloud. Joyent has helped Major League Baseball get on the cloud. Nasdaq is even using the cloud.

Johnmwillis: What about inside the firewall cloud activity or what some call a fog.

Botchagalupe: Dude, a Fog? Anyway, if you look at 3Tera they are leading the way for private clouds. One of their big customer’s is British Telecom. JP Rangaswami, the CIO of BT, has been a huge advocate of emerging and disruptive technologies. Rangaswami is a CIO who not only blogs, but he communicates on twitter and Facebook. How cool is that? More than 10k BT employees are on Facebook. Nearly 16k of BT employees use a Wiki. It;s no wonder that they would be using 3Tera as a private cloud.
Johnmwillis: Wow, Botchagalupe … again you never disappoint my friend.

Botchagalupe: Yea, yeah, sure, sure.

The key to connecting all of theses new infrastructures together will hinge on traditional IT management disciplines. Applications such as monitoring, automation, provisioning and configurations will have to start to meld together to make this new IT infrastructure of the future possible. The good news for IT management vendors is that with the advent of these new emerging IT infrastructures terms like autonomics will really mean something and the ROA for well defined IT management API’s will be invaluable to enterprises. Monitoring and automation will be the key to the new IT infrastructure of the future as they will play the role of the autonomic nerve center for the infrastructure, while provisioning and configuration will be the arms and legs of this new infrastructure. Monitors will predict possible resource shortages and automation, provisioning, and configuration will allocate and make new resources available. Proprietary solutions from core vendors like IBM, Sun, HP, Microsoft, BMC, and Oracle, will definitely be part of the final solution as well as core open source plays like Hyperic, Zenoss, Puppet, and ControlTier. Monitoring and automation will be used as the autonomics to determine when to speed up or slow down service requests manage queues and other resources. Provisioning will be used to allocate resources dynamically and cloud based or virtualized infrastructures will allow this to occur with sub-minute execution time. Configuration tools will provide the last mile in ensuring uniformity, compliance, and proper execution of the provisioned services. I spoke to the guys at ControlTier last week and they said they had conversations with Puppet and the guys at HJK Solutions at O’Reily’s Velocity conference and talked about how to create some interesting cloud prototypes. An inter-operable prototype with Puppet, iClassify, and ControlTier might go a lot farther in engaging the cloud standards discussion than any premature meta-language standard. It is my belief that the core of any good cloud standard discussion most likely will lead you directly back to the old IT Management standards discussion. For which I will leave you in the capable hands of Mr. Vambenepe who is indeed an expert on said subject.

A few of the leading cloud vendors I have talked to seem to imply it might be a little two early to start a “Cloud” standards definition. While most agree that standards will be necessary at some point, almost all agree there is a lot of work to be done before we can get there. A few cloud vendors are lining up their meta definitions as best practices and letting lessons learned guide them as the go. 3Tera is probably in the best position to start this discussion from a cloud interoperability perspective since they are one of today’s leaders of running clouds to cloud infrastructures. 3Tera has recently introduced Cloudware as their stake in the ground. Despite some mis-representations by Forbes (not 3Tera) in a recent article, I think they are on the correct path (listen to me get all googley-eyed in a recent Cloud Cafe Podcast). RightScale probably has the most experience in providing public cloud services on Amazon’s EC2 and S3. They will also have a significant say in how the IT infrastructure of the future inter-operates, based on their strong experience. Elastra is another vendor I have been following that has also introduced robust meta-defintions for cloud operations called ECML/EDML (Here is the Elastra Cloud Cafe Podcast). It is also my belief that emerging open source cloud meta definers, like Eucalyptus, Sclar, and HP’s Smartfrog (just learned about SmartFrog today from William V.) will play a huge part in the final IT management infrastructure. However, unless these open source meta proponents include the participation of other open source monitoring and automation solutions like Hyperic and Zenoss, and provisioning and configuration solutions like Puppet and ContrlTier, they might get lost in all the noise.

Cloud technology has clearly raised the bar on IT infrastructure. The traditional mantras of ESM autonomics are truly a reality with the new cloud and virtualized infrastructures. However, the technology is moving so fast it seems premature to try and screen print any cloud standards discussions at this point. What we are calling the cloud has only begun to really take shape. It is 1988 and we have installed our first Unix box. I agree with most of the cloud vendors, that a standards discussions might be a little early. There is also still a lot of work that still has to be done sorting out the basic IT management standards discussion. I am not sure we have nailed that one yet. I do think it is important for cloud vendors to put their cloud meta solutions out there as starting points for cloud standards discussions. However, I think the real discussion starts when we sort out the old IT management standards and start to figure out how these new technologies fit in. Since in my opinion this is all just one big old fat infrastructure problem, I believe the the basic “How do I manage IT” discussion needs be addressed first before we can isolate in on what the cloud brings to the table.

Armijo says that several small cloud-computing firms including Elastra and Rightscale are already on board with 3Tera’s standards group.

Bridging The Clouds

• Software as a Service
  (Salessforce.com)
• Platform as a Service
  (Google App Engine …)
• Infrastructure as a Service
  (Amazon EC2 …)

The problem I have with this list is that it it assumes all cloud vendors are aaSs and this seems like a dumb aaS assumption. I have talked to the guys over at CohesiveFT and I can assure you they are not an aaS. I don’t know the guys over at rPath , but based on what I have heard, I don’t think they are an aaS either. 3Tera is not an aaS; however, the guys over at GridLayer who host 3Tera’s Applogic might be an aaS. Google acts like an aaS sometimes and no one can dispute that. Now I am not going to call IBM an aaS as they are my bread-n-butter; however, some might say their little aaS Blue Cloud seems to missing a lot of information and calling it an aaS might be a little bit asinine. There is a lot of buzz on a new open source cloud solution called Eucalyptus from the University of California that provides software for an elastic computing architecture. I am not sure we want to call a prestigious bunch like the University of California a bunch of aaSs. Also, what about the fat aaS vendors like Rightscale, Elastra, and Enomaly who are providing an aaS that sits on top of another aaS (ouch). What kind of aaS’s are they? We have all heard of some of the problems Amazon has had with their aaS, and I have heard they are working really hard to wipe all of their dangling items clean from their aaS. It is my belief that there is a huge difference between an exposed aaS facing a customer vs. an aaS that is clothed behind something like a private aaS. Exposing your aaS in public might not be for everyone. In the end, there are a lot of hard working cloud vendors and simply calling them all as aaSs seems like an aaS backward assumption.

Remember, when you assume that everyone is an aaS, you make an aaS out of you and me.