Recently in Cloud Computing Category

Savvis CEO Phil Koen addresses the St. Louis Regional Chamber & Growth Association (RCGA) and members of the media at a breakfast meeting in St. Louis. He presented an update on the company, Savvis Project Spirit, and plans for the company's next generation enterprise cloud solutions platform.

  Savvis CTO Bryan Doerr today demonstrated Savvis' new enterprise cloud platform dubbed Project Spirit. Project Spirit powers the industry's first enterprise-class Virtual Private Data Center with multi-tied QoS capabilities. In this picture, Doerr is showing the new user interface to several hundred press, analysts and bloggers in attendance at VMworld in San Francisco.

Savvis CTO Bryan Doerr discusses Savvis' next generation cloud solution dubbed Project Spirit and its expected impact on the industry and the enterprise.

Dennis Brouwer, VP, Global Networks, Savvis, on how customers can take advantage of the flexibility that the cloud offers without tearing down and rebuilding their entire data center.

Dennis Brouwer, VP, Global Network Solutions, Savvis, on the impact of QoS on latency in the cloud.

Dennis Brouwer, VP, Global Network Solutions, Savvis, on how networking professionals have to change the way they think in order to provide cloud computing networks.

Savvis continues to forge a leadership position in cloud-based infrastructure solutions. Recently we caught up with Dennis Brouwer, V.P., Global Network Solutions, at Savvis, who examined a variety of issues and opportunities for enterprises considering cloud solutions. Over the next four weeks we'll post some highlights from the discussion.

Some of these include:

• Why enterprise customers should care about the cloud...
• How networking professionals have to change the way they think in order to provide cloud computing networks...
• The impact of QoS on latency in the cloud...
• How customers can take advantage of the flexibility that the cloud offers...

by Chris Richter, Vice President of Security Services

In just the last few months there have been scores of articles written about the security risks of cloud computing in enterprise data centers. With a broad brush, commentaries have painted cloud computing environments as insecure infrastructures where tenants can more easily view other tenants' data, and even hack into their virtual servers, launching attacks on neighboring virtual machines without the victim knowing. One writer compared cloud computing environments to a multi-tenant office building where thieves can break through walls and steal content from the other side. Such views are fomenting a general perception that cloud computing is synonymous with high security risk. While some of these concerns are well founded, many are not. I believe the generally negative opinion about cloud computing security is based on the belief that all cloud computing environments are created equal. They are not.

There seems to be as many definitions of cloud computing as there are blogs about this subject. Ultimately, what cloud computing comes down to is the architecture and processes supporting the provider's infrastructure. All cloud infrastructures are located in one or more physical data centers which host various forms of server virtualization, networking and storage systems deployed in a myriad of ways. Some cloud providers tie in services from third-parties to build a "community" of services that are delivered in the cloud. But the differences between providers lie in the practices governing how these systems are deployed, configured, and managed, all of which can also vary greatly. The same basic principals of data security that apply to dedicated infrastructures must also apply to cloud computing environments. If the IT environment is not properly architected and managed, security risks will abound.

While I would still argue that most cloud infrastructures are far more secure than most of the dedicated environments in existence, I am not suggesting that enterprises select a provider without proper due diligence. Providers should demonstrate the "guts" of their environment. At the very least they should be willing to share details regarding:

• How their virtual machines are segmented from those of other customers
• How their data is isolated and handled, both at rest and in motion
• Who has access to the network, security and server/hypervisor management components
• Standard and optional security controls
• Overall architecture of the service provider's cloud computing infrastructure
• Level to which the service provider works with the technology vendors whose products make up the environment
• Who those technology vendors are
• General practices used in the provisioning and management of components within the provider' infrastructure, including but not limited to patch management, change control, and monitoring

Without adequate transparency about how service providers help their customers manage IT security risks, the perception that all cloud computing environments are plagued with inherent security issues will persist. We, as an industry, can change that to ensure that enterprises no longer view security as an obstacle to embracing cloud computing.

by Bryan Doerr, Chief Technology Officer

There exists, as I have previously noted, sufficient motivation for more advanced resource controls in IT infrastructure components. But while there are encouraging indications that component manufacturers are responding to this need, we have some distance yet to travel.

Horizontal aggregation

As we consider infrastructure components, we know that the physical and virtual worlds can diverge. This divergence gives us a chance to create new physical devices optimized for scale and equipped with more granular resource management functions, while preserving in virtual form the existing industry abstractions. Put a different way, the IT industry has an opportunity to rethink its physical deployment building blocks and, in the process, insert a new level of QoS control in the environments built with these components. Some vendors are already seizing this opportunity.

I'm excited to see the development of products and protocols on the part of Cisco and HP meant to address some of these needs. These new devices share common characteristics -- they have high levels of integrated functionality provided efficiently at scale with management software designed to independently operate in the virtual and the physical worlds. These are good first steps toward the types of devices that will be the heart of the next-generation data center, where more of the enterprise data center role shifts to that of service provider in multitenant environments.

In building these new devices, the old physical device boundaries are being redrawn. For example, Cisco's Unified Computing System UCS integrates server and switching functions and also reallocates the functions of each to achieve better economics. This form of "horizontal aggregation" will be common in the IT components of the future.

The stacker

New systems won't be only horizontally aggregated. They will be vertically aggregated, too, as software building block boundaries are also revisited. Database server, application server, and web server software can be combined with hardware, creating a new IT device ready for application integration. Oracle has started discussing these types of systems as a result of its proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Other major consolidations could follow. The result may yield a new competitive landscape in IT components, where the old world of interoperable software stack components and general purpose servers and operating systems that support them (and all of the associated compatibility and integration complexity) gives way to the "stacker" -- a completely integrated application deployment platform component with sufficient resource capacity. The stacker supports several complete instances of virtualized application stacks and associated internal and external network in one physical device.

It is into this evolving physical landscape that we want to incorporate more complete QoS controls, thereby enabling enterprise-grade, multitenant cloud services. To accomplish this goal, the focus needs to be on both hardware and software resources. The stacker must support end-to-end QoS controls by preserving customer context, priority, and policy through all logical and physical resource dependencies, including required threads, memory, queuing, and concurrency controls to truly support multitenancy. The efficacy of this entire path affects the performance of the application from an end user perspective and thus must be assured.

As more and more enterprises seek to optimize their IT infrastructure spend, the challenge before IT industry infrastructure component manufacturers is to enable the service provider to deliver true shared environment economics for a wide range of enterprise applications. This will be achieved not just through large-scale systems, but through the continued enhancement of QoS controls that govern both the hardware and software resources in these environments.

The opportunity is now. The evolution of existing IT components toward the stacker and the separation of virtual and physical design forces provides the opportunity to incorporate these controls into the building blocks of the future service provider cloud. I'd like to see the industry accelerate efforts to harden and standardize newly emerging concepts and protocols in these areas.

This is the third post in a 3-part series. Please also see Part 1, Cloud Computing: A System of Control, and Part 2, Cloud Computing: Building Blocks for the Enterprise.

This post first appeared on Gigaom.com http://gigaom.com/2009/05/31/cloud-computing-enter-the-%e2%80%9cstacker/ as part of Structure 09 speaker series. Bryan Doerr is a featured speaker at Structure 09 conference http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/?a=h300x60, scheduled to be held on June 25, 2009 in San Francisco.