Wallace and Bird Hosting soar: how they save on hardware while delivering more complex apps

Many of the cloud service providers that we are working with here at CA Technologies are small, but aggressive. These are the guys that know their business really, really well and are the ones who are targeting their niches pretty successfully. The ability to focus and be nimble are some of the key indicators of success in the service provider space.

We’ve been calling folks like these “Cloud Accelerators” – given how instrumental these service providers are being in the adoption of cloud computing -- and we have been profiling some of the more interesting ones.

Bird Hosting strikes me as a great example of one of these “accelerators.” They may not be on your radar screen yet, but Bird Hosting is a cloud service provider that’s nimble and all about the personal touch. They not only deliver cloud hosting and other key services to customers, you can find them answering questions on WebHostingTalk.com. They post reviews talking through the pros and cons of the newest rev of their cloud platform. They even run a hardware review site. (After all, there are benefits for a service provider to know this stuff.)

They do all this with 10 employees, 3 locations…and they have 3,600 customers.

Bird Hosting’s CEO, Michael Wallace, answered a few questions about their operations, what’s key for a service provider’s cloud platform, and even what’s up with their name. Read on:

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: You’re a relatively small service provider. How many data centers do you need to effectively serve a nationwide customer base? What else is important?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: We started in Seattle. When you have a data center in Seattle and customers in New York, the content isn’t delivered as quickly as you’d like – content delivery speed is important. We saw a need for something more central in the U.S., and so we went to Dallas. We now have 3 data centers (Seattle, Dallas, Washington, D.C.) and can cover the whole United States effectively.

In fact, we have customers across the world. We have customers that range from small shared-hosting accounts to large corporations. For example, we support a travel organization in New York, a food chain also in New York, as well as Costco. We host and produce videos that have 360-degree views of sheds and playgrounds that Costco sells.

DCD: How did you get started in the service provider business?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: We originally started in 2005. My father was one of the pioneers of the Internet; he started an ISP in 1991. I started out doing web hosting with some big corporate website hosters. I found that they were subpar, both from how they presented themselves to the services they offered. So I decided to do my own. I had the knowledge to do it. And I had just returned from a lengthy tour of duty with the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and was ready to take a bold move and launch my own business.

DCD: A recent article in SearchITChannel by Carl Brooks talked about the fact that the market is starting to realize that enterprises who are building private clouds and service providers that are selling public cloud services have some very different needs. Can you talk a bit about what you think is important to have in a cloud platform for service providers like yourself?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: Two things that are very important are cost savings and flexibility. With CA AppLogic [what Bird Hosting uses], I’m not limited. It’s a platform that allows me to offer a full range of services. Before I had to have separate machines for each individual task. We had to have a box for Windows, a box for Linux, and when we added customers, we had to add more dedicated boxes. With AppLogic, you don’t have to be limited to a certain OS. You have a cluster of servers and it allows us to run all of our applications on top; it’s neutral. So that helps us save money – we are able to standardize hardware and we can even save power.

DCD: Speaking of saving power, I’ve heard you talk about how much you’ve reduced your environmental impact. Can you quantify what you’ve been able to do?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: When we first started our business, we sold a lot of dedicated servers. Each would have a power draw even when idle. CA AppLogic allowed us to take those boxes and cram them into a virtual environment. Customers on dedicated servers were able to run as virtual dedicated servers instead. Customers were paying for a given amount of resources; we would give them the resources and they would run their environment. We cut back from 6 full cabinets to just one cabinet in one data center.

We were able to take 200 boxes and put that into 10 boxes. In our Dallas facility, for each of our cabinets we have two power drops, which costs $960 per cabinet – just for power. We were able to cut back 10 power drops, saving us about $10,000 per month.

DCD: Service providers are all looking for ways to define a niche that they can own, build up new revenue opportunities, and grow their margins. What has your cloud platform decision and approach meant competitively?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: It allowed us to broaden our market. We could have stayed where we were and offered shared hosting and dedicated servers. But using AppLogic has allowed us to venture into more complex application hosting. It allows us to create more complex environments with ease. Those environments usually would have taken us a long time to set up if we were going to do it in a physical environment—running cables from an end gateway or a firewall to a hardware load balancer to machines. That’s what AppLogic does in software.

We can support more complex applications. We wouldn’t be able to offer as many value-added services without AppLogic. We can do so quickly and efficiently, scaling things up or down as much as they need. And then we can charge per resource.

DCD: Do you see IaaS providers like Amazon as competitors?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: I don’t consider Amazon a direct competitor – they can’t do what we can do. We have a running joke – customers come in and say “our uptime is 70% with Amazon Web Services.” We can give them close to 100%.

DCD: You also do a lot of stress testing with your hardware. What has that meant for customers? What have you found?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: CA AppLogic is designed to take a bunch of small systems and merge them into a cloud. With more cores and more memory on each machine, you can get more out of each machine without adding more hardware footprint. We decided to start a little testing to find out what are our limits, what can we do? We tested different types of hard drives and configurations, different controllers, to see what worked best.

Testing the efficiency of servers brought me into a whole new area. I now run a hardware review site on the side. The stress-test work helps us figure out what machines can handle without impacting performance.

[Note: you can contact Michael directly to talk about any of his results if you’re interested in more details.]

DCD: Do your customers know anything about cloud computing? Does it matter to them?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: There has been a lot of confusion and debate with the cloud. When I started out, we heard concerns about sharing data. We see less concern about that now. They do see the power of cloud computing and interact with it if they are using our virtual private data center offering. We dedicate a given group of machines to a customer and they get access to the CA AppLogic portal so they can build applications the way they see fit. They use CA AppLogic to virtually build their infrastructure.

…

Thanks for the time, Michael.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the name, you’ll be happy to hear that I (of course) didn’t let that go. Here’s what Michael said about the name: “When we started looking for names, I was also looking for a mascot. That’s where Bird Hosting came from.” Did he try other more, er, ferocious names? “HostGator was taken,” said Michael. “And Dog Hosting was too gangster for me.”

The resulting mascot has an uncanny resemblance to Twitter’s feathered friend, if I do say so myself. Or the stars of a certain iPad game I’ve gotten myself hooked on.

But no Angry Birds here. Just a set of happy customers benefiting from Bird Hosting’s personal focus on delivering what experience dictates is required for service providers to soar: performance, reliability, and value.

You can read the Cloud Accelerator profile of Michael and Bird Hosting on the CA Technologies site. The site also features other luminaries who are setting the pace for cloud computing.

A service provider ecosystem gaining steam in the cloud is good news for enterprises

If you’re in enterprise IT, you (or that guy who sits next to you) are very likely looking to figure out how to start using cloud computing. You’ve probably done a fair bit of sleuthing around the industry to see what’s out there. Stats from a number of different analyst firms point overwhelmingly to the fact that enterprises are first and foremost trying to explore private cloud, an approach that gives them a lot of control and (hopefully) the ability to use their existing security and compliance implementations and policies.

And, all that sleuthing will most likely lead you to one pretty obvious fact: there are lots of approaches to building and delivering a private cloud.

So, here’s an additional thing to think about when picking how you’re going to deliver that private cloud: an ecosystem is even more valuable than a good product.

While your current plans may call for a completely and utterly in-house cloud implementation, you just might want to expand your search criteria to include this “what if” scenario: what if at some point you’d like to send a workload or two out to an external provider, even if only on a limited basis?

That “what if” should get you thinking about the service provider partners that you will have to consider when that time comes. Or even a network of them.

The CA Technologies cloud product announcements on July 27 talked a lot about the offerings from CA Technologies (including those targeted for service providers specifically), but I wanted to make sure that the cloud service provider ecosystem that’s building steam around CA AppLogic got the attention it deserved as well.

Kick-starting a cloud ecosystem

In the early days of cloud computing (and prior to being acquired by CA), 3Tera made a lot of headway with service providers. Over the 16 months since 3Tera came onboard, CA has been working to build on that. We’ve really seen why and how to work closely with our growing set of partners. You can’t just focus on technology, but you must also figure out how to enable your partner’s business. For service providers, that’s all about growing revenues and building margin.

We’re now seeing results from those efforts. In the first half of this year alone, we’ve announced new and extended partnerships with ScaleMatrix, Bird Hosting, StratITsphere, Digicor, and others around the world.

A benefit to enterprises: service providers as a safety valve

Interestingly enough, enterprises view this ecosystem as a real benefit as they consider adopting a private cloud platform like CA AppLogic. Not only can they quickly get a private cloud up and running, but they have a worldwide network of service providers that they can rely on as a safety valve for new projects, cloud bursting for existing applications, plus the real-world expertise that comes with having done this many times before.

A number of the partners and service providers using CA AppLogic to deliver cloud services to their customers joined in on the announcement of CA AppLogic 3.0 on July 27. Many posted blogs that talked about how they believed the new capabilities would prove useful for their own business – and why it would be intriguing for enterprise customers as well.

Here are a few highlights from their blog comments:

Kevin Van Mondfrans of Layered Tech pointed to CA AppLogic’s continued innovation for application deployment “with its intuitive drag and drop application deployment interface.” The visual interface, he said, is the “hallmark of AppLogic,” and it “continues to differentiate this platform from the others. AppLogic enables complete deployment of entire application environments including virtual load balancers, firewalls, web servers, application server and databases in a single motion.”

The new AppLogic 3.0 capabilities “are interesting enhancements,” said Kevin in his post, “and they “enable a broader set of use cases for our customers with privacy requirement and who want to migrate VMware and Xen environments to the cloud.”

Mike Vignato of ScaleMatrix notes that he believes “having the ability to use VMware inside the AppLogic environment will turbo charge the adoption rate” of CA AppLogic as a cloud platform. Why? “It will allow enterprise CIOs to leverage their VMware investment while simplifying cloud computing and lowering overall costs.”

DNS Europe thought the ability to import workloads from VMware or Xen using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) import feature was a “further testament to CA's longstanding commitment to open standards. OVF import simplifies operations, increases agility, and liberates VMware- or Xen-based workloads for operation within AppLogic applications.” They also called out Roll-Based Access Control, as well as the new Global Fabric Controller: “Automatic detection and inventory functions further boost AppLogic as the number one ITSM friendly cloud platform.” (Go here for my interview with Stephen Hurford, their cloud services director.)

Christoph Streit of ScaleUp posted this summary of what’s important to their business in AppLogic 3.0: “One of the most important new features from our perspective is the new VLAN tagging support. This has been a feature that most of our customers, who are mainly service providers, have been asking for. This new feature enables a service provider to offer their customers cloud-based compute resources (such as VMs or complete application stacks) in the same network segment as their co-located or dedicated servers. Also, this makes it possible for a service provider to segregate customer traffic more easily.”

Mike Michalik, whose team at Cirrhus9 spent over 200 documented hours working with the beta code, agreed. The new VLAN capabilities, he writes, “will allow Cirrhus9 to basically build true multi-tenant grids for our MSP clients. This will give them the flexibility to have a single grid that has truly segregated clients on it, as opposed to having multiple grids for each one. It will also allow for easier system administration per client and geographically disperse data centers for the same overall grid.”

ScaleMatrix’s Mark Ortenzi was on the same page. “The ability for CA AppLogic 3.0 to allow VLAN tagging support…is an amazing new feature that will really change the way MSPs can go to market.” (You can read a Q&A I did with Mark a few months back about their business here.)

“The really cool thing I’m excited about,” writes Mike Michalik at Cirrhus9, “is the bandwidth metering. I like the flexibility that this option gives us now because we can have several billing models, if we choose to. Tiered billing can be in place for high consumption users while fixed billing options can be provided to clients that have set requirements that don’t vary much.”

The value of an ecosystem

ScaleUp’s Christoph Streit underscored the importance of these kinds of partnerships in the cloud space. He used ScaleUp and CA AppLogic as an example: “We can effectively show the value of cloud computing to everyone – IT departments, business users, developers, the CIO and, in some cases, even the CEO.”

We’ll be working with these partners and many others even more actively as part of the CA Cloud Market Accelerator Program for Service Providers that we announced this week as well.

Watch this space for more updates on the ecosystem. For profiles on many for them, you can check out the Cloud Accelerator profiles we’ve created as well.

Why it pays to be early -- especially with this much cloud choice

It pays to be early.

Take my flight today, for example. I’ve done this flying-to-New York thing a few times. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s a good idea to reserve your seat early. I know when to head toward the line at the gate to minimize time spent standing around and maximize the chance that there’s still overhead bin space onboard. And, if it looks like this particular flight is headed for delay or cancellation, I already have a pretty good view of what my options are likely to be. I might even already be dialing/browsing customer service.

I think the same applies for cloud computing. To really have a good view of what you need to know, the folks who have been through this a couple times certainly have a head start. Being early to the party lets you assess what’s happening from a position of experience – peppered with a humbling but healthy dose of reality along the way.

I think today’s big cloud announcements from CA Technologies help drive home this point. (As you might have guessed, they are part of what I’ve been working on recently: 10 new/enhanced offerings for enterprises, 4 for service providers, plus a market accelerator program.) The announcements represent quite a bit of early market experience wrapped up for the benefit of very specific customer sets.

What we (and our customers) learned in the past 18 months

Last year, IT was asking some very basic questions about cloud computing, the core of which boiled down to “So, what is cloud computing, anyway?” CA Technologies kicked off 2010 with an aggressive cloud acquisition spree that surprised more than a few folks. We brought aboard a series of key technologies, some very smart folks, and a lot of on-the-ground services experience. Customers and industry-watchers showed interest (and skepticism, as you’d expect) as we brought the pieces together.

If you look back at our CA World announcements last year, you’ll see that we described the way cloud was changing IT and the solutions that we thought were needed. We talked about the IT role morphing into more of a supply chain orchestration job, focused on delivering IT service. We saw a need to understand those services, figure out ways to compare them, manage them, and control them.

But the market hasn’t been standing still. In fact, I think most would agree with me that the changes in IT as a result of cloud have accelerated. Our view that the IT function is shifting seems to be supported by some proof points (especially if you read some of the survey data I’ve seen in the past year). But that doesn’t mean we got everything perfect, right out of the gate. By being in the game early, we’re in a prime seat to watch the evolution. And react.

Evolving and targeting to match how enterprises and service providers adopt cloud

It’s now a little more than a year later, and we’re evolving our cloud portfolio. Today’s announcements are a set of next steps, and they reflect some pragmatic reactions to what we’ve seen. We’re enhancing the offerings we already have. We’ve built some new ones. And all of these are driven by what customers are saying and doing.

Here are some of the highlights, as I see them:

More than ever before, cloud means choice. Looking at cloud forces lots of internal and external decisions. As I’ve noted previously, these are decisions about technology, about organizational structure, about IT ownership and policy. With all of these options, there is no “one size fits all” for cloud. Instead, you have to make your own, very specific choices. And you want to have a portfolio of options that can help you regardless of which choices you need to make for your business. We, as a partner in that business, need to enable you to have your cloud, your way.

A broad portfolio to work from is a plus. The work to enable customers to use and provide cloud computing means a bunch of topic areas need to be covered. Management and security really end up jumping to the top of the list. (The CA portfolio is well-tuned to cover that emphasis, I might add.)

We see a lifecycle of decisions, and a set of capabilities at steps along with way. We think customers need to plan, design, deliver, secure, and assure their cloud efforts. And then constantly optimize these decisions for what’s best for their business.

Enterprises and service providers have very different needs and will make different choices. Enterprise and service providers are doing an interesting dance. Each sees benefit – and profit – in cloud computing, and is adopting it pragmatically. Enterprises are trying to evolve what they have invested in already, while maintaining the control they require and processes they’ve built up. That lets them continue with the heterogeneous components they have. That doesn’t lock them into a proprietary (and probably quite costly) “cloud stack.” Unless they want to be. In some cases, that’s a useful trade-off. But it still needs to be managed and secured.

Service providers are, in many cases, leading the charge to cloud, looking for ways to quickly deliver cloud services but to do so in a way that is going to mean differentiation and revenues, while building margin. Those that don’t won’t be around long. They are feeling pressure from big guys like Amazon and Rackspace. They’re trying to find the right niche. They’re trying to balance the right infrastructure with the financial structure to result in a winning (and sustainable) formula.

As a result of these differences, you’ll see sets of solutions from CA Technologies that address these very specific needs, but help make the connection between the two – the world of hybrid clouds – possible and appealing.

Finally, if you add new perspectives, experience with customers, and resources to some pretty innovative technology, you can move the needle. Several of today’s announcements show the combined effort of the vision of entrepreneurs that joined CA Technologies through the cloud acquisitions and the organic development efforts since then. A lot of these folks have been working on cloud since long before the term “cloud” existed.

Several of those are near and dear to my heart, and I’ll highlight those here:

CA Business Service Insight 8.0. We’re calling it 8.0, because the previous 7 versions were called Oblicore Guarantee and were focused on service level management. However, the work done on CA Business Service Insight since last year opens up new territory. The latest release gives enterprises information about their existing services and the ability to compare and contrast what they are doing internally with services they could choose externally. All this, while also managing the service levels from what they acquire from outside. In addition, CA Business Service Insight’s connection to the Service Measurement Index and Cloud Commons will become more and more intriguing as it matures.

CA AppLogic 3.0. The ability to work at an application level rather than dwelling on low-level hypervisor questions takes a huge step up with the addition of VMware support in this release. Now, you can think in terms of virtual business services instead of ESX or Xen. That’s an important extension to the vision that the 3Tera team brought to CA Technologies, especially if you’re an enterprise.

Service providers are probably still interested in the financial equation of using Xen, but now have new options in working with enterprises who’ve made big VMware investments. And, frankly, that’s everyone at this point. The new languages, VLAN tagging, and role-based access features are probably even more interesting to service providers and how they make money from a cloud business using CA AppLogic as their cloud platform. The service provider ecosystem that’s building around CA AppLogic is should get a mention here, too, but that’s worthy of its own post.

I’m personally pleased to see Cassatt capabilities woven in here, too (check out the Global Fabric Controller to see my previous company’s influence).

Learning pragmatically

There are a lot of moving parts here, mostly driven by the huge number of options that the cloud now presents. In my opinion, CA Technologies made a pretty prescient decision to jump into this market with both feet (and wallet), and to do so early. Much of what you’re seeing come to market here has benefited from early moves by both the innovators CA acquired -- and by CA itself.

The resulting time and experience have infused our offerings (and those of us working on them) with what I’d call a healthy amount of pragmatism. This pragmatism is something that I think will serve CA Technologies, its ecosystem partners, and our collective customers well as cloud computing continues to evolve.

And, of course, it’s good to see all those hours I’ve spent waiting for flights are paying off in interesting ways.

Hurford of DNS Europe: service providers and SaaS developers are showing enterprises how cloud is done

The antidote to cloud computing hype is, well, reality. For example: talking to people who are in the middle of working on cloud computing right now. We’ve started a whole new section of the ca.com website that provide profiles, videos, and other details of people doing exactly that.

One of the people highlighted on this list of Cloud Luminaries and Cloud Accelerators is Stephen Hurford of DNS Europe. DNS Europe is a London-based cloud hosting business with over 500 customers across the region. They have been taking the cloud-based business opportunities very seriously for several years now, and provide cloud application hosting and development, hybrid cloud integration services, plus consulting to help customers make the move to cloud.

I convinced Hurford, who serves as the cloud services director for DNS Europe, to share a few thoughts about what customers and service providers are – and should be – doing right now and some smart strategies he’d suggest.

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: From your experiences, Stephen, how should companies think about and prepare for cloud computing? Is there something enterprises can learn from service providers like yourself?

Stephen Hurford, DNS Europe: Picking the right project for cloud is very important. Launching into this saying “we’re going to convert everything” to the cloud in this short period of time is almost doomed. There is a relatively steep learning curve with it all.

But this is an area of opportunity for all of the service providers that have been using CA 3Tera AppLogic [like DNS Europe] for the last three years. We’re in a unique position to be able to help enterprises bypass the pitfalls that we had to climb out of.

Because the hosting model has become a much more accepted approach in general, enterprises are starting to look much more to service providers. They’re not necessarily looking to service providers to host their stuff for them, but to teach them about hosting, because that’s what their internal IT departments are becoming – hosting companies.

DCD: What is the physical infrastructure you use to deliver your services?

Stephen Hurford: We don’t have any data centers at all. We are a CSP that doesn’t believe in owning physical infrastructure apart from the rack inwards. We host with reputable Tier 3 partners like Level3, Telenor, and Interxion, but it means that we don’t care where the facility is. We can deploy a private cloud for a customer of ours within a data center anywhere in the world and with any provider.

DCD: When people talk about cloud, the public cloud is usually their first thought. There are some big providers in this market. How does the public cloud market look from your perspective as a smaller service provider? Is there a way for you to differentiate what you can do for a customer?

Stephen Hurford: The public cloud space is highly competitive – if you look at Amazon.com, GoGrid, Rackspace, the question is how can you compete in that market space as a small service provider? It’s almost impossible to compete on price, so don’t even try.

But, one thing that we have that Amazon and Rackspace and GoGrid do not have is they do not have is an up-sell product – they cannot take their customers from a public cloud to a private cloud product. So when their customers reach a point where they say, “Well, hang on, I want control of the infrastructure,” that’s not what you get from Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid. From those guys you get an infrastructure that’s controlled by the provider. Because we use CA 3Tera AppLogic, the customer gets control, whether hosted by a service provider or by themselves internally.

DCD: My CA Technologies colleague Matt Richards has been blogging a bit about smart ways for MSPs to compete and win with so much disruption going on. Where do you recommend a service provider start if they want to get into the cloud services business today?

Stephen Hurford: My advice to service providers who are starting up is to begin with niche market targeting. Pick a specific service or an application or a target market and become very good at offering and supporting that.

We recommend starting at the top, by providing SaaS. SaaS is relatively straightforward to get up and running on AppLogic if you choose the right software. The templates already exist – they are in the catalog, they are available from other service providers, and soon will be available in a marketplace of applications. Delivering SaaS offerings is the easiest technical and learning overhead approach and that’s why we recommend it.

DCD: Looking at your customer base, who is taking the best advantage of cloud platform capabilities right now? Is the area you just mentioned – SaaS – where you are seeing a lot of movement?

Stephen Hurford: Yes. The people who have found us and who “get it” are the SaaS developers. In fact, 90% of our customers are small- to medium-sized customers who are providing SaaS to enterprises and government sectors. It’s starting to be an interesting twist in the tale: these SaaS providers are starting to show enterprises how it’s done. They are the ones figuring out how to offer services. The enterprises are starting to think, “Well, if these SaaS providers can offer services based on AppLogic, why can’t I build my own AppLogic cloud?” That’s become our lead channel into the enterprise market.

DCD: How do service providers deal with disruptive technologies like cloud computing?

Stephen Hurford: From a service provider perspective, it’s simple: first, understand the future before it gets here. Next, push to the front if you can. Then work like crazy to drive it forward.

Cloud is a hugely disruptive technology, but without our low-cost resources we could not be as far forward as we are.

One of the fundamentally revolutionary sides of AppLogic is that I only need thousand-dollar boxes to run this stuff on. And if I need more, I don’t need to buy a $10,000 box. I only need to buy 4 $1,000 boxes. I have a grid and it’s on commodity servers. That is where AppLogic stood out from everything else.

DCD: Can you explain a bit more about the economics of this and your approach to keeping your costs very low? It sounds like a big competitive weapon for you.

Stephen Hurford: One of the big advantages of AppLogic is that it has reduced our hardware stock levels by 75%. That’s because all cloud server nodes are more or less the same, so we can easily reuse a server from one customer to another, simply by reprovisioning it in a new cloud.

One of the key advantages we’ve found is that once hardware has reached the end of its workable life in terms of an enterprise’s standard private cloud, it can very easily be repurposed into our public cloud where there is less question of “well, exactly what hardware is it?” So we’ve found we can extend the workable lifespan of our hardware by 40-50%.

DCD: What types of applications do you see customers bringing to the cloud now? Are they starting with greenfield apps, since this would give them a clean slate? The decision enterprises make will certainly have an impact for service providers.
Stephen Hurford: Some enterprises are taking the approach to ask “OK, how can I do my old stuff on a cloud? How do I do old stuff in a new way?” That’s one option for service providers – can I use the benefits of simplifying and reducing my stock levels, reducing my management overhead from my entire system by moving to AppLogic and then I won’t have 15 different types of servers and 15 different types of management teams. I can centralize it and get immediate benefits from that.

The other approach is to understand that this is a new platform with new capabilities, so I should look at what new stuff can I do with this platform. For service providers, it’s about finding a niche – being able to do something that works for a large proportion of your existing customers. Start there because those are the folks that know you and they know your brand. Think about what they are currently using in the cloud and whether they would rather do that with you.

DCD: Some believe that there is (or will soon be) a mad rush to switch all of IT to cloud computing; others (and I’m one of those) see a much more targeted shift. How do you see the adoption of cloud computing happening?

Stephen Hurford: There will always be customers who need dedicated servers. But those are customers who don’t have unpredictable growth. And need maximum performance. Those customers will get a much lower cost benefit from moving to the cloud.

For example, we were dealing with a company in Texas that wanted to move a gaming platform to the cloud. These are multi-player, shoot-‘em-up games. You host a game server that tracks all the coordinates of every object in space in real-time between 20 and 30 players and sends that data to the Xbox or PlayStation that renders it so they can play in the same gamespace. If you tried to do that with standard commodity hardware, you’re not getting the needed performance on the disk I/O.

The question to that customer was, “Do you have a fixed requirement? If you need 10 servers for a year and you’re not going to need to grow or shrink, don’t move to the cloud.” Dedicated hardware, however, is expensive. They said, “We don’t know what our requirements are and we need to be able to deploy new customers within 10 minutes.” I told them you don’t want to use dedicated servers for that, so you’re back to the cloud, but perhaps with a more tailored hardware solution such as SSD drives to optimize I/O performance.

DCD: So what do you think is the big change in approach here? What’s the change that a cloud platform like what you’re using for your customers is driving?

Stephen Hurford: Customers are saying it’s very easy with our platform to open up 2 browsers and move an entire application and infrastructure stack from New York to Tokyo. But that’s not enough.

Applications need to be nomadic. The concept of nomadic applications is way distant in the future, but for me, what we’re able to offer today is a clear sign-post for the future. Applications with their infrastructure will eventually become completely separated from the hardware level and the hypervisor. My application can go anywhere in the world with its data and with its OS that it needs to run on. All it needs to do is to plug into juice (hardware, CPU, RAM) – and I’ve got what I need.

Workloads like this would be liable to know where they are. By the minute, they’ll be able to find the least-cost service provisioning. If you’ve got an application and it doesn’t really matter where it is and it’s easy to move it around, then you can take advantage of least-cost service provisioning within a wider territorial region.

…

Thanks, Stephen, for the time and for sharing your perspectives. You can watch Stephen’s video interview and read more about DNS Europe here.

Right place, right time, right cloud partners

A lot of pundits have picked 2011 as the year that cloud computing goes from “hey, that sounds like a good idea” to “yikes, we need to get this project off the ground” for many enterprise IT shops.

Sure, many of those same IT shops are having strong words right now with their business counterparts arguing over what they’ve been doing in the cloud behind their backs, but at some point it will be time to let bygones be bygones. And time to really get to work. Together.

Recently, CRN provided a couple lists of important cloud providers and platforms for 2011. And, even the government is being helpful. In a sign that things are progressing nicely, the government entity that’s been tracking cloud computing since the early days is maturing its models.

Time to Go Beyond the 3-Layer IaaS, PaaS, SaaS Cake

Several cloud-savvy folks, including Chris Hoff and Christian Reilly, pointed folks to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website, where the organization has posted work-in-progress drafts of some new items, namely a cloud computing reference architecture. NIST had done a nice job on giving cloud discussions a strong definitional reference point a few years back (we use that definition as our main reference point here at CA Technologies, for example), and it’s time to move to the next stage.

My colleague Andi Mann did a nice analysis of what NIST is up to and what it means. He does have some points to quibble over, but he posted that “despite some clear flaws, I think this is a great document. More than just a series of definitions,” said Andi, “far less than a ‘true’ technical reference architecture, it is advisory and high-level, but practical and usable.”

The Right Time for Management to Take Center Stage

One of the things that has been frustrating about the cloud market to date is the ad hoc, shoot-from-the-hip approach. It’s great for testing the waters and there is, indeed, an important role for “good enough” computing, but as enterprises get more serious about cloud, they need to make sure they are thinking about something near and dear to my heart: management.

Andi points out that this is one of the really good things about this new NIST cloud reference architecture. “I am particularly excited that such a powerful voice in cloud computing is finally highlighting the primary importance of management in their cloud documentation. Almost half this document is focused in cloud management,” writes Andi. “NIST clearly believes a cloud computing environment needs mature management discipline.” Or, as he calls it, “grown-up management.”

Andi’s post goes on to discuss other aspects of the NIST architecture proposal, too, like service management, security, and the role of an independent “cloud auditor.” Worth a read.

Time to Find a Strong Ecosystem to Turn to

At around the same time, CRN chose to publish a couple lists of organizations that enterprises can turn to in their efforts to get some of the aforementioned cloud projects off the ground. And, yes, CA was mentioned on both lists. However, more interesting is who else is on the list with us.

Among the Top 20 Cloud Computing Infrastructure Vendors were folks like AWS, GoGrid, Eucalyptus, Joyent, Randy Bias' Cloudscaling, and Reuven Cohen's Enomaly were two of our partners: ENKI and Layered Tech. Both organizations provide cloud services based on CA 3Tera AppLogic.

· ENKI was noted for its managed cloud computing play that offers scalable virtual private data centers with performance and reliability at their core.

· CRN highlighted how Layered Tech offers managed dedicated hosting, on-demand grid/virtualization computing and Web services, helping business get into the cloud with secure IT infrastructure hosted in top-tier data centers.

The list also included Rackspace and Bluelock, two Nimsoft customers. The aforementioned ENKI is also a Nimsoft customer.

· CRN said that "with Rackspace's Cloud Servers infrastructure play, the top cloud dog of Texas is rivaling the major players with its select-a-size, customizable IaaS" backed by "fanatical support."

· Bluelock, said the write-up, offers VMware capabilities and its data cetners are secure and SAS-70 Type II certified.

As for CA, we were mentioned on the infrastructure vendor list and also as part of the Top 20 Cloud Computing Platforms for 2011, which described CA 3Tera AppLogic as “a turnkey application-centric cloud platform.”

We’re trying hard to make sure that a big part of what enterprises will find when they consider cloud-related solutions from CA Technologies are partners with technology and expertise to help them along the way, both on-premise and as a service. It’s good to see that those ecosystem partners are getting noticed.

And just in time, too. After all, 2011 is a quarter over already. Only 9 more months until we get to check back in with all those pundits to see if we all delivered on their cloud predictions.

And all those cloud projects.

This blog is cross-posted at CA Cloud Storm Chasers.

Ortenzi and ScaleMatrix show what's possible when data center experts start their cloud from scratch

Imagine for a moment that you could take all the smart things that you and a few of the smarter people you know have learned about setting up and running data centers over the past 20 years and apply it, right now. No legacy systems to worry about – you could start over using hardware configurations on the cutting edge of efficiency and a pretty hot software platform to base your cloud services on.

Too late. Mark Ortenzi and his cohorts at ScaleMatrix just built that company.

ScaleMatrix, a new Southern California-based managed service provider (MSP), started up in the middle of last year. Mark and the guys running ScaleMatrix have been in the data center space for years, and decided now was the time to get financial backing, invest in the right amount and kind of infrastructure, and run data centers the way they ought to be run. Their goal? To become an MSP offering a wide variety of cloud services that are in demand with customers while building a great business for ScaleMatrix. They became a big CA 3Tera AppLogic partner following a $3.06 million deal we (CA Technologies & ScaleMatrix) did together in January.

I asked Mark, their CEO, if he’d provide a little background on what ScaleMatrix is up to for the blog. Mark’s background includes senior executive positions with several data center and dedicated server companies. As you might guess, Mark has a strong background in data center design and he has written several industry standards articles relating to data center operations, design, and efficiency. He has several patents pending relating to his latest enclosure design that will be deployed at ScaleMatrix, one piece of their secret sauce. Read on:

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: ScaleMatrix is a brand new entity, but your team is made up of data center veterans. What’s your unique pitch to customers and what are you mainly focusing on?

Mark Ortenzi, ScaleMatrix: We’re different. We’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and things have changed in the area of heating and cooling efficiencies. And in being able to grow data centers in an environment without having to spend $50-100 million overnight.

What sets ScaleMatrix apart from other so called “cloud computing companies” is our ability to control the entire process. We’ll be able to architect, deploy, and manage the entire solution in any one of our 12 data centers across the United States or in your own private data center. By controlling the entire process we are able to offer our private cloud solution as a service. Thus, we become an operating expense and not a capital expenditure.

Plus, everybody in our org is a systems engineer. We don’t hire door openers.

DCD: Some have said that cloud computing might be the new innovation that came out of the recent big recession. Whether that ends up being true or not, there’s no doubt that you guys are making a big bet in the hopes that the timing is right for both service providers and cloud services. What market conditions convinced you to strike out on your own with ScaleMatrix right now?

Mark Ortenzi: Flat budgets in the traditional data center realm are a new norm. The role of IT must adjust to [that of] “service provider,” creating internal and external services to deliver on needs. Just about everyone is aware that IT needs to drive revenue…but the reality is that business demand is outpacing IT budgets and resources. IT had been the sole source of IT services in the enterprise until cloud computing options appeared, promising fast, simple access to new services. Instead of going to IT for everything, the business can now go around IT to cloud alternatives.

The low-hanging fruit right now for us is SMBs. Everyone has an initiative in the cloud, and we have a really affordable plan. We can bring it up, run your model, and have a presentation to the CTO – to show them that it works in an affordable manner.

DCD: We’ve recently published the results of an IDG survey about how cloud computing is affecting the IT role that pointed to the importance of many of the business skills. I’ve also talked here about IT titles that may be on their way out, and others that are now appearing. How do you see cloud computing changing the role of IT inside enterprises?

Mark Ortenzi: I see IT becoming an operating expense. The days of owning and maintaining a private data center are nearing an end. Demand for IT within the enterprise will continue to climb. Providing a “pay-as-you-go” model for IT just makes sense. Cloud computing also provides the enterprise the ability to adjust to the current IT atmosphere faster than ever before. Nowadays, it is much easier to develop flexible, scalable and reliable services on the fly.

DCD: You’re banking on some pretty innovative components and operations approaches to run data centers. Can you describe how you guys are doing things differently for your customers?

Mark Ortenzi: There are many different aspects of our business model that differentiate us from our competitors. Our newest data center is being built out on an as-need-basis. We only utilize hardware, electricity and manpower needed for the clients we currently have. Our data center is scalable, energy efficient [a PUE of 1.1 is the number Mark touts, by the way] and our proprietary rack system using commodity servers is fully self-contained. We also are the only private cloud solutions provider that manages, maintains, trains and deploys the entire solution from soup to nuts.

DCD: How are you and your team measuring your success with customers?

Mark Ortenzi: Initially every customer is asked; “What are you trying to achieve by utilizing our private cloud solution?” Once the solution is in place and fully operational, success is measured by our ability to meet their goals, our ability to save the customer money and reducing their IT capital expense.

DCD: You’re using CA 3Tera AppLogic as a basis for your new business. Why did you take that approach versus what else you could have done?

Mark Ortenzi: It’s simple, CA 3Tera AppLogic is a fundamental piece in the ScaleMatrix business model. It provides us the ability to be scalable within our organization and the ability to extend this to our customers. There isn’t any other product on the market today, to our knowledge, that provides the ability to virtualize the entire IT infrastructure of a business while maintaining ease of use and cost effectiveness.

DCD: Regarding cloud computing in general, what’s the most compelling benefit you see organizations getting from cloud computing?

Mark Ortenzi: Maximizing ROI and reducing operating cost while eliminating IT capital expense.

DCD: What are still the biggest hurdles for cloud computing, and for ScaleMatrix? How are you helping folks get over those?

Mark Ortenzi: Bringing awareness to the AppLogic product, how cloud computing works, and how to take advantage of it – these have been the most challenging. It’s so fundamentally different from how business-class computing has been done in the past. Getting the potential customer to understand that is difficult; [using cloud computing and AppLogic] is easy and we make it this way for a reason.

It’s difficult wrapping our customers’ minds around how cloud computing works and how to take advantage of it. The smarter they are, the harder it is to get. They wrap too much into it– they have a cloud initiative, but they don’t know what to do. We put a plan together for them. What you focus on to get them past the hump comes down to figuring out what their business model is and what their pain is at the moment. You find it to be different with everybody. Usually, when you’re partway through it, a light bulb goes off.

DCD: Any advice on where to start with enterprises?

Mark Ortenzi: You have to get their feedback on what they’re thinking, what they’ve learned, who they’ve worked with. Don’t go after the big animal – converting their whole infrastructure over to cloud in one shot – boy, don’t ever do that. Instead, you find that little thing that is troubling them and show them how to resolve it, the pet project that they want to do more cheaply, more quickly.

…

It will be interesting to watch how Mark and the ScaleMatrix team progress over the next few months. One way of looking at the ScaleMatrix business is that they are putting the elasticity and dynamic qualities that cloud brings customers, and using them to support their own cloud services business. Their customers get state-of-the-art data centers and cloud-ready hardware and software infrastructure, but also direct access to Mark and his team with years of operational experience. These guys have been through a lot of real-world scenarios, and it takes quite a lot to surprise them.

I’ll keep tabs on ScaleMatrix and provide updates here and on my Twitter feed about what’s going on with them. If you have questions, you can ping Mark or his team directly.