Cloud Computing Gains Continue

The US cloud computing market has grown quickly for widespread usage. Up from 58% last year, about 78% of medium and large enterprises already use or are testing a cloud solution. On average, cloud as a percentage of enterprise IT stands at 4.4%. Use of cloud in enterprise IT is a mile-wide, an inch deep, and growing fast.

New research from WaveLength Market Analytics and Winn Technology Group, The Continuing Enterprise Cloud Computing Evolution, shows that 2012 saw the emergence of a new segment, the multicloud users. About 19% of the market is comprised of them, called Cloud Pros. Other segments are Cloud Pioneers (59%) that actively use or pilot a cloud, Cloud Planners (12%) with cloud plans, and Stragglers (10%) with no plans.

"The enterprise cloud market and segments have quickly evolved; today's meaningful question is no longer if cloud is used but rather how much," said Natalie Robb, of WaveLength Market Analytics. "Last year, cloud users said they expected 28% of IT to be cloud-based by 2015 and now they expect around 35%. Knowing what sets Cloud Pros and Pioneers apart is crucial for technology and telecom firms to advance technologies and reach buyers."

Other key findings from WaveLength/Winn's report include:

Pros and Pioneers use multiple data centers, but nearly all Pros use AWS, while Pioneers are more likely to use IBM, Verizon, and Rackspace.

To prepare for cloud, Pros invested in network performance improvements while Pioneers invested in storage and security.

With 48% of all cloud users, human resources apps surpassed CRM and email as the most common enterprise application in the cloud.

Biggest gain in enterprise and infrastructure cloud service usage is desktop apps, which grew from 6% last year to nearly 26%, and back-up and disaster recovery, which surged from 17% to 38%.

The Continuing Enterprise Cloud Computing Evolution discusses broad trends in the changing cloud computing market. It examines penetration of different service deployment models, projects to prepare for deployment, and cloud enterprise application adoption.

The Continuing Enterprise Cloud Computing Evolution is a joint effort: Winn Technology Group collected the data and WaveLength conducted the analysis. Two more reports on the enterprise cloud market segments will be released in the coming weeks.

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This is very interesting data to review for investment in cloud computing

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Cisco Execs Plumb The Limits Of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become the all-purpose buzzword of business computing -- it can mean pretty much whatever you want it to mean, but every product better have some cloud in it. Networking giant Cisco has totally bought in to the concept, but a couple of top execs also described what they see as limits on how far pure cloud computing will spread.

In a drab conference room out by Oakland Airport (the company's planned Zeppelin excursion to highlight its cloud product launch was scrubbed by bad weather) Cisco's Murali Sitaram (VP/GM Cloud Collaboration Applications) and Lew Tucker (VP, CTO Cloud Computing) explained the company's approach as they introduced additions to Cisco's Cloudverse family.

The Plumbing Behind The Cloud

Instead of just offering its own products on a hosted basis, Cisco's approach is to work with telecom carriers, large enterprises and resellers to help them offer collaboration-and-communication-as-a-service.

The idea, Sitaram said, is to leverage Cisco's partners to provide services without having to become a carrier itself -- which is a daunting, heavily regulated proposition in many parts of the world. "We don't want to be in the carrier business, but we do want to provide services through partners."

Those services include expanding Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution to include TelePresence, Customer Collaboration (contact centers), unified communications and mobility. It also means letting large customers install the company's WebEx online Web conferencing solution in their own data centers.

That may not gibe with most people's definition of cloud computing, but according to Sitaram, many customers still demand more control over their services, either because they're in a highly sensitive industry like the military, health care or financial services, or because they're in emerging markets with restrictive regulations and unreliable public infrastructure.

"It's not easy to deliver cloud-based services" to countries like China, India, Russia and South America, Sitaram said, "especially from the United States." Besides, "the cloud isn't just Facebook and Salesforce," Sitaram added. "If you peel the onion, there are just so many nuances."

When Is The Cloud Not The Cloud?

Nuances or not, earlier this month, I noted that Oracle's Larry Ellison Has Some Strange Ideas About Cloud Computing. Cisco's use of "cloud computing" in this context reminded me of Ellison's Oracle Private Cloud oxymoron, but Sitaram said the Private Cloud version of WebEx retained the service's "quasi-multi-tenant" cloud-based architecture and still offered end-users a subscription based experience. Well, if he says so, but putting your stuff in the customer's data center still ain't what I call "cloud."

Ironically, that may be the point. "Some countries and businesses, they will never go to [Software-as-a-Service]-based clouds," Sataram said.

So how far will cloud computing go? "There's going to be a world of many clouds," Tucker predicted. Most things will go into the cloud, but many may not. "Many companies want to be their own cloud providers to their workers - but using a cloud model with self-service and pay-as-you-go pricing… the consumer could be an employee."

When I tried to pin down Tucker on exactly how far he thought cloud adoption would go, Tucker guessed 60% cloud, 40% on premeses. That seems low to me. After all, once the utilities started providing cheap, reliable power, how many customers still wanted to generate their own electricity?

 

Photos of Sitaram and Tucker by Fredric Paul.

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The Open Source Cloud is Ready for Hadoop, Projects Say

Two major trends in enterprise computing this year show increasing overlap: big data processing and open source cloud adoption. 

To Hortonworks, the software company behind open source Apache Hadoop, the connection makes sense. Enterprise customers want the ability to spin up a cluster on demand and quickly process massive amounts of data, said Jim Walker, director of product marketing at Hortonworks, in an interview at OSCON in July. The cloud provides this kind of access by its ability to scale and handle computing tasks elastically.

The open source cloud offers the additional benefit of low-cost deployment and extra plugability you won’t get with a proprietary cloud infrastructure.

All three major open source IaaS platforms -- OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus -- have made much progress this year in testing Hadoop deployments on their stacks. And Eucalyptus is working on full integration with the platform.

Although no formal relationship exists between Hadoop and the open source IaaS platforms now, Hortonworks does see potential for collaboration given the nature of cloud computing, in general, Walker said.

“(Hadoop) could be a piece of any open cloud platform today,” he said.

Here’s what each of the three major platforms had to say recently about their progress with Hadoop on the open cloud.

OpenStack

In the past, deploying Hadoop in a cloud datacenter proved too challenging for business-critical applications, said Somik Behera, a founding core developer of the OpenStack Quantum project at Nicira, which has since been acquired by VMware. Big data applications require a guaranteed bandwidth, which was difficult to do, Behera said.

OpenStack’s Quantum networking project, which was recently integrated in the new Folsom release, offers an Open vSwitch pluggable networking patch to help ensure performance on Hadoop deployments, Behera said. His Quora post on the topic explains it best:

Read Quote of Somik Behera's answer to Apache Hadoop: Has anyone tried to deploy an Apache Hadoop cluster on OpenStack? on Quora

CloudStack

The biggest challenge for deploying Hadoop on CloudStack has been allocation of resources, said Caleb Call, manager of website systems at Openstock.com and a CloudStack contributor, via email.

“In order to crunch the data we need to in our Hadoop cluster, we currently have many bare metal boxes,” Call said.  “Reproducing this same model in the cloud, even being a private cloud, has proven to be tough.”

Though CloudStack is not currently working on an Hadoop integration, the team has built its cloud environment to guarantee performance for Hadoop workloads by building a dedicated resource pool, said Call, who oversees a team of engineers on the CloudStack project’s “Move to the Cloud” initiative.

“We've also built and tuned our compute templates around Hadoop for this cluster so we don't have to throw large amounts of computing power at the problems,” Call said. “Same as you would do for a bare metal system, but now the saved resources are still left in our compute resource pool available to be used by other Hadoop processes.”

Eucalyptus

At Eucalyptus, performance challenges with Hadoop in the cloud have been largely overcome in the past year, said Andy Knosp, VP of Product at the company.

“There’s been some good research that’s shown near-native performance of Hadoop workloads in a virtualized environment,” Knosp said. This has made Hadoop “a perfect use case” for the open cloud.

Amazon Web Services currently offers the Elastic MapReduce (EMR) service, a hosted Hadoop framework that runs on EC2 and S3. Through the company’s partnership with AWS, Eucalyptus is developing a similar offering that will provide simplified deployment of Hadoop on Eucalyptus.

Customers can run Hadoop on the Eucalyptus private cloud platform as-is – no plugins required, Knosp said. But the company also has a team working on integrating Hadoop with the platform for simplified deployment.

“We want to make it as simple as possible for our community and partners to deploy,” Knosp said. “It improves time to market for Hadoop applications.”

 

Libby Clark

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MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB): The Revolution of Software Defined Networks

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Earlier tonight  (October 16th, 2012), I had the honor of moderating the panel:  The Revolution of Software Defined Networks hosted by The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB) with a fantastic set of panelists including:

• Michael Beesley, Chief Technology Officer, Platform Systems Division at Juniper Networks
• Kelly Herrell, Chief Executive Officer at Vyatta
• Awais Nemat, Chief Executive Officer at PLUMgrid
• Jake Flomenberg, Partner at Accel Partners

With their permission, SDNCentral is making available the slides from the event below.

Register to download the slides:

Event Description:

On July 23, 2012, VMware bought Nicira for $1.26B validating this revolution in Networking.Next week, Oracle acquired Xsigo. Just recently Cisco acquired vCider. Upstarts claim they will commoditize the expensive networking gear sold by the incumbents, with standards like Software Defined Networking (SDN), and OpenFlow (OF). Already, Google and Facebook deploy their own network hardware and software – and not the proprietary offerings of incumbent networking players. Many entrepreneurs are betting on SDN and OpenFlow. VLAB engages a robust discussion on SDN.

• Are we ready for chasm crossing?
• Is Cloud Computing driving SDN?
• Who else is using SDN and why?
• Is SDN a tectonic technology shift, or just a niche?
• Will incumbents co-opt SDN with closed proprietary implementations?
• Are we to have a win-win between users and vendors?
• Where are the opportunities?

About the Author

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Matthew Palmer

Matt has 20+ years of software-defined networking (SDN), cloud computing, SaaS, & computer networking… More

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Very useful information on the latest in SDN

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12 hot cloud computing companies worth watching

While big-name players such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Verizon and VMware sit atop the burgeoning cloud computing market, an entire ecosystem of early stage startups are looking to stake their claim, too.

And why not? As Ignition Partners' Frank Artale sees it, enterprises are on the precipice of the next major shift in computing and venture capital firms are "very aggressive" in looking for companies that can help customers ease their transition to the cloud.

"Initially this move will create more complexity," he says. "Companies that can enable the use of cloud, virtual networking and storage will gets lots of attention."

IN PICTURES: Cloud companies to watch: A product sampler

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Our list of a dozen such cloud computing upstarts, hailing from locations as far apart as Silicon Valley and Israel, includes those leveraging mobile devices for worker productivity, integrating software-defined networking and provisioning and monitoring cloud-based services. These companies -- many of which have been able to get up and running by taking advantage of cloud services themselves -- have attracted some $161 million in funding (one snared a $60 million round by itself) and are hungry for more as they look to grow their businesses.

CloudOn

Focus: Optimization of Microsoft Office apps for mobile devices 
Founded: 2009 
Location: Palo Alto, Calif., with offices in Herzliya, Israel 
Management: Former Cisco employees Milind Gadekar (CloudOn CEO) and Meir Morgenstern (CloudOn VP of engineering/operations) 
Funding: $26 million from Foundation Capital, Embarcadero Ventures, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Translink Capital 
Product availability: Free download available on Apple, Android platforms now

Why it's worth watching: Ask Milind Gadekar, and he'll tell you that the workforce of the future will rely even more heavily on mobile devices. But for many workers, the most popular applications they use at their jobs are not optimized to work on mobile devices. That's where CloudOn comes in.

The folks at CloudOn are aiming to make that mobile workforce more productive with their free app that's in public beta. The company specializes in optimizing Microsoft Office for use on phones and tablets across a range of mobile operating systems, including iOS and Android, all using a cloud-based service.

Cisco purchased Gadekar's first startup, named P-Cube, which focused on network optimization for service providers, for $200 million in 2004. After heading up product marketing for the firm, Gadekar left the company three years ago to explore mobile optimization opportunities. That's when he founded CloudOn with Meir Morgenstern, who led the technical side of P-Cube and now serves as VP of engineering for CloudOn. Within a year of founding CloudOn, Gadekar says the best thing that could have happened to the company did: Apple released its first iPad.

With the release of the tablet, employees started bringing their iPads to work, looking to get access to email and their applications. "This was the exact problem we were trying to solve," Gadekar says. In January 2011, CloudOn launched a free version of its app, available in the Apple App Store. Within 12 hours it was the No. 1 app in the entire app marketplace, not just in the productivity category where the company placed it. "Since then, it's been a complete whirlwind," Gadekar says. CloudOn has launched in 80 countries and in 70 of those it became the top downloaded app within 24 hours of launch. The app is now available on Android devices and in just over seven months it's been downloaded 1.8 million times. "People are clearly looking for ways to be more productive, to enhance their mobile experience and to have a way to be mobile-centric," Gadekar says.

CloudOn powers its application using proprietary software developed for optimizing Microsoft Office for use on a gesture-controlled mobile device. On the back end, it leverages file sharing services DropBox, Google Drive and Box, while hosting the software as a service (SaaS)-based application in the Amazon Web Services cloud. The success has fueled the company's further development. Having raised $26 million through two rounds of funding, the company is aiming to start monetizing the product early next year.

DeepField

Focus: Cloud and network mapping and performance benchmarking 
Founded: 2011 
Location: Ann Arbor, Mich. 
Management: CEO Craig Labovitz, previously chief scientist/chief architect at Arbor Networks 
Funding: $1.5 million in seed funding from DFJ Mercury and RPM Ventures
Product availability: Public beta 

Why it's worth watching: Just how well do you know your cloud?

Do you know all of the service providers in the supply chain that make up your cloud service? If you're a service provider, do you know exactly what's going on in your network? DeepField claims it has the answers.

Founded in the fall of 2011 by network security experts who specialized in DDoS protections, DeepField gives customers a deep analysis of what the company calls the cloud genome. It's the exact makeup of a cloud infrastructure and the various vendors and users on the network.

DeepField installs virtual machines on the network to conduct a range of analytical functions. "This allows anyone with a large network or compute infrastructure to get a clear handle on exactly what's happening in their network," says DeepField Chief Data Scientist Naim Falandino. DeepField officials are releasing scant details of how the system works because of a patent pending on the back-end technology, but Falandino says it has the ability to conduct real-time monitoring and mapping.

The company's product is currently in public beta, but DeepField is ramping up for its general availability this fall.

As Network World's Carolyn Duffy Marsan explained in a recent profile, mapping a cloud's architecture can help network operators better understand their cloud services, more easily launch new services and improve system performance.

DeepField engineers have already used their data to yield some interesting findings. In April, for example, co-founder Craig Labovitz described how he used DeepField technology to monitor weeks of network data from several million Internet end users to find that nearly one-third of all Internet traffic is somehow connected to Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

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Great to see who are the emerging players in the cloud space

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NASA Mars Mission Fueled By Amazon Web Services

Curiosity's Mars Mission

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Cloud computing helps many businesses to wrangle and transmit data packets from different parts of the world. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have now upped the stakes with a project that manages the flow of information from another part of the solar system--Mars.

The space agency's $2.6 billion Curiosity rover successfully landed on the red plant early on Aug. 6 and immediately began transmitting information back to Earth. These messages, which travel at the speed of light, take 14 minutes--at the planets' present orientation--to speed across the cosmos to waiting scientists. This long-distance transit would be logistically daunting under any circumstances, but NASA faced an even greater burden because of the huge volume of data these transmissions carry.

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To address this profound challenge, JPL is using a wide gamut of AWS tools and services, including EC2, S3, SimpleDB, Route 53, CloudFront, the Relational Database Service, Simple Workflow, CloudFormation, and Elastic Load Balancing. This array of services is vital not only to the mission's research objectives but also to public outreach, as images recorded by the rover are made available almost immediately via JPL's Mars Science Laboratory site .

"NASA wanted to ensure that this thrilling experience was shared with fans across the globe by providing up-to-the-minute details of the mission," according to a case study AWS released to illustrate the project's technical accomplishments. With hundreds of thousands of concurrent visitors anticipated during traffic peaks, the case study asserts that "availability, scalability, and performance of the [site] was of the utmost essence." It also says that prior to AWS implementation, NASA/JPL did not possess the requisite Web and live streaming infrastructure to push hundreds of gigabits of content per second to the legions of site users.

"The public gets access as soon as we have access," Khawaja Shams, manager of data services for tactical operations at JPL, said in an interview. "All the images that come from Mars are processed in the cloud environment before they're disseminated." Services from Amazon "allows us to leverage multiple machines to do actual processing."

The processing itself is complex, as the rover captures images using a stereoscopic system that uses two camera lenses. "In order to produce a finished image, each pair (left and right) of images must be warped to compensate for perspective, then stereo matched to each other, stitched together, and then tiled into a larger panorama," Jeff Bar, an AWS evangelist, wrote in a blog post.

Though complicated, this method is vital to the mission's research goals. "One of the big misconceptions about rovers is that they're driven via joystick," Shams stated, "but even at the speed of light, we can't get there." Because of this limitation, a plan must be uploaded into the rover, which then "semi-autonomously takes care of the whole thing." The image acquisition technique allows researchers to generate geographic metadata that serves as a foundation for these plans. "It gives scientists situational awareness to do the best science and keep the rover safe," said Shams.

According to the AWS case study, such awareness maximizes "the time that scientists have to identify potential hazards or areas of particular scientific interest." This enables researchers to send longer command sequences to the rover, thereby increasing "the amount of exploration that the Mars Science Laboratory can perform during any given sol," or Martian day.

JPL's use of AWS technology furthers NASA's reputation as an early and avid adopter of cloud computing. It likewise continues the agency's goal of addressing the general population, an effort that has led to close relationships with Google and Microsoft, among others. In this instance, public engagement culminates in the Mars Research Laboratory site, which is based on the open-source content management system Railo, running on Amazon's EC2.

The Curiosity mission also extends NASA's recent effort to streamline operations and reduce costs by utilizing Amazon services for cloud-based enterprise infrastructure. NASA CIO Linda Cureton detailed the initiative in a June 8 blog post, writing, "This cloud-based model supports a wide variety of Web applications and sites using an interoperable, standards-based, and secure environment while providing almost a million dollars in cost savings each year." In the context of this mission, AWS allows NASA to track Web traffic in real time, and to scale capacity to meet demand. The cloud infrastructure also allows assets to be distributed intelligently across AWS regions depending on the part of world from which requests originate. This functionality produces a secure and stable environment despite the high bandwidth logistics, AWS said. It also can be economical because AWS downsizes activity when traffic is low, avoiding the problem of expensive but under-used resources.

"Science data is growing at an exponential rate. Some upcoming instruments will produce terabytes of data every single day," he said. Such a deluge would have left NASA "out of data center space," making the ability to provision cloud-based machines invaluable. As NASA uses the cloud to solve its own puzzles, opportunities for other applications naturally arise.

"We can provision a supercomputing cluster in the cloud that would qualify as one of the top 500 in the world" at a cost of "a couple hundred dollars an hour," he said. "Think of the possibilities."

Expertise, automation, and silo busting are all required, say early adopters of private clouds. Also in the new, all-digital Private Clouds: Vision Vs. Reality issue of InformationWeek: How to choose between OpenStack and CloudStack for your private cloud. (Free with registration.)

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This shows the influence and trust that Cloud Computing is getting.

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Cloud Computing: Rackspace Kicks Off the OpenStack Cloud Roll-Out

Despite its reported immaturity, Rackspace has gone production with the Essex version of OpenStack, making it the first large-scale public cloud deployment of the fabled open source platform.

It's positioning Open Cloud as freeing users from vendor lock-in, a taunt directed at Amazon, Google and Microsoft whose customers it expects to run off.

Other OpenStack clouds should follow quickly, say, from HP, Dell and Intel, and since they'll be look-a-likes users able to flit from one to another.

To get the roll-out started Rackspace is offering public, private and hybrid hosting solutions and says there's unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and both Linux and Windows Cloud Servers on OpenStack.

Some mojo called RackConnect will integrate public and private clouds.

What's new in the production release is the compute piece of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) widgetry, which derives from NASA, which contributed its Nova code to the project a couple of years ago, with a pinch of Rackspace's Ozone project. The space agency is no longer supporting the OpenStack effort having fled to Amazon.

Rackspace contributed its Swift storage piece and it's been running it for a few years. Its Open Stack portfolio includes Cloud Files object storage and the Cloud Sites Platform-as-a-Service for .NET, PHP and monitoring.

There's also a new Control Panel that will work with both Rackspace's legacy code and OpenStack. It's supposed to make complex, large-scale cloud deployments as easy as a few mouse clicks. It will also let users tag servers, databases and web sites to identify and organize infrastructure elements; search by name, tag and IP address; filter lists to find a server; use Action Cogs to display contextual menus of most-used actions to complete tasks faster ; and get dynamic feedback for real-time status information about the state of the infrastructure.

Rackspace won't force its 180,000 existing cloud customers to migrate, but the new and improved Control Panel is expected to tempt them to move, a process that could take 12-18 months. Rackspace is expected to produce a tool at some point to egg them on although it says it doesn't want to hurry them. How it prevents them from backsliding to the old cloud is unclear.

Otherwise only new customers will default to OpenStack.

Rackspace says users can launch 200 Cloud Servers in 20 minutes. API performance is supposed to be 25x faster for server create requests. And Rackspace claims its MySQL-based Cloud Databases benchmark at 200% faster (3x) performance than Amazon's MySQL-based Relational Database Service (RDS).

Linux servers with an entry-level 512MB of memory and 20 gigs of disk will start at 2.2 cents an hour or $16.06 a month. A Windows server with 1GB of memory will run eight cents an hour or $58.40 a month.

Rackspace means to add unlimited availability of Cloud Networks and Cloud Block Storage this fall. Cloud Networks has relied on Nicira, which OpenStack rival VMware bought last week for $1.25 billion.

The widgetry Rackspace mounted Wednesday was in beta test for four months. The push to develop the cloud stack is currently supported by 184 companies and a reported 3,300 programmers.

By the way, Rackspace is using Citrix' XenServer hypervisor in OpenStack, meaning it will have to cater to customers who want to use the VMware hypervisor.

Rackspace will roll out OpenStack in Europe in mid-August.

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Good exposure for Openstack

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