How to Address Steve Wozniak’s Cloud Concerns – Just Win, Baby

August 7, 2012 by 2 Comments

I read an article where Steve Wozniak talked about the concerns he has with cloud computing. He does raise really good points about the fact that you completely trust your data to someone else.

Additionally, it is not uncommon these days for the data itself to be the most valuable asset a company possesses so the idea of not controlling that data behind your own firewall isn’t that attractive to the business ownership or the IT department.

It’s really unclear the percentages of companies that are willing to allow someone else to house their most valuable assets, but I suspect that Wozniak speaks for the majority of business owners and managers right now.

 

Overcoming D’oh!

With the well-publicized cloud outages like the one we’ve seen recently with Amazon, who is among one of the oldest cloud providers, there are obviously still trouble spots that have to be addressed.
Hopefully no one told these companies that cloud computing would offer 100% uptime, but that seems to be the mentality of some people who are selling the idea of cloud services. That just further creates unrealistic expectations for cloud service providers to have to overcome.

 

Just Win, Baby

American Football team owner Al Davis was famous for his motto “Just win, baby”.

So what cloud services needs are consistent wins. As a cloud service provider, one of the biggest, most consistent wins can be with Disaster Recovery (DR). Disaster recovery solutions are a perfect use case for cloud computing.

Here are a few thoughts to why I think DR to the Cloud may be the best first solution for companies wishing to leverage cloud computing.

 

  1. It addresses the Wozniak concern: Your company maintains control of the data at your privately-owned primary site. You are just replicating a copy to the cloud to use in case of emergency.
  2. You control your own Service Level Agreements: The regular production uptime at the Primary site is still under your company’s control on your own servers, maintained by your team meeting your Service Level Agreements (SLA).
  3. Cloud-based DR can save you money: DR to the Cloud is like an insurance policy and hopefully you never have to fail your production over to the disaster recovery site. Since most cloud-based solution models are paid by the usage of the equipment and assets, the relative cost for maintaining a cloud-based disaster recovery site should offer significant savings over privately hosted DR sites.
  4. No storage arrays needed: A real constraint historically for virtualized cloud-based DR has been a cost prohibitive requirement of array-based replication. Now with small business targeted basic host-based replication in VMware SRM vSphere Replication or the much more capable enterprise grade host-based replication DR from Zerto, array-based replication is no longer required. In fact, shared storage isn’t even required with host-based replication.
  5. The DR site can be anywhere: With host-based replication and a cloud provider with multiple locations, you can have your DR set up in a one-to-many configuration where you can choose what region to recover the server.
  6. It allows for the learning curve: Cloud computing has a great deal of new IT logistics and processes that have to be blended into a hybrid solution.  If a totally cloud hosted service is ultimately desired by the business, it allows time for the business management to learn how to deal with external vendors hosting their IT assets while not impacting the production environment.
  7. Testing recovery reliability: Businesses can measure reliability while developing their DR run books by performing failovers and failbacks on test or lower-tier servers.

Apparently, DR to the Cloud service providers see things similarly to the way I do since Zerto recently announced they had over 30 cloud providers sign up to their new host-based replication Zerto DR to the Cloud solution.

I’ve Seen This Movie Before

I’ve seen this happen before with virtualization itself and cloud computing can take a similar adoption path.

For years, virtualization was only performed for the “low hanging fruit” servers. Even if a server failed because of configuration or other issues, they weren’t high profile, mission-critical server failures that was blamed on virtualization.

Just as importantly, it gave time for the physical server administrators to learn and to catch up to virtualization’s capabilities. That created an environment where virtualization produced constant wins for the IT organization.

Even though DR is far from low hanging fruit, the idea is the same. You don’t impact Production services while building out your DR.

DR to the cloud is the perfect way to build confidence in cloud-based solutions for businesses and over time can help companies discover other areas where cloud solutions fit in their company.

 

Photo credits: http://wikipedia.com

Filed Under: Clouds, Commentary, Zerto Tagged With: , ,

Patching and Updating Virtual Appliances: Come on Vendors! Get with the program.

July 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I’ve seen some posts on twitter and other bloggers raising a very important problem with virtual appliances.

I’m glad I’m not the only one that has struggled with keeping virtual appliances updated, or even more basic, trying to install the VMware tools in an appliance so it plays well with other virtual machines in the cluster.  Recently I was trying out a multipurpose Linux OS with some pre-configured services that are pretty well put together, but the gaping hole in making it truly well done was the complete lack capability through the well-laid out web management GUI to install and update VMware tools. I had to go to the shell (which is fine for me, I’ve worked with Linux for years) and had to install several modules to the appliance to get the tools to install.

The whole purpose of virtual appliances is their convenience and maybe the struggle to keep them patched might be because the change to VMware Update Manager  from when they originally architected the appliance program by removing guest OS patching, but it doesn’t excuse why these appliances have no VMware tools installed or an easy installation process now.

If we have to spend time figuring out what modules are missing and go through the download process to get them installed then go through the process to get them installed, it marginalizes the convenience factor. So, come on vendors, let’s take the final step necessary to make really useful virtual appliances that play well with others as soon as the installation is complete.

Filed Under: Blogging, Commentary, VMware Tagged With:

Quest Foglight NMS – Free 100 Nodes Forever

July 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Using twitter pays off in different ways. I saw a post recently that you could get 100 free nodes forever monitored with Quest Foglight.

I had a need for it and installed the product. I am impressed on how easy it is to configure and learn about your network environment.  I like the fact that you are able to set up 100 devices knowing that its not trial ware or you can’t get your whole small or lab network all in the monitoring tool.

It’s been quite useful after a month of monitoring and I definitely recommend it if you’re needing more insight into your network devices. Here is a screen grab of Foglight NMS in action. 

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: ,

Chinwags, Hamachi and Other non-Sequiturs

June 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

While listening to a fine Chinwag with Mike Lavernick and Bob Plankers, Bob mentioned that he used Hamachi as a handy VPN solution.


I hadn’t thought about Hamachi for quite a while, but I’ve been looking for a better solution for accessing my home network while on the road.  I am a learner by nature, but I honestly have very little interest in deep diving network and VPN solutions from a build-it-myself perspective. I just want something easy to use and reliable.

So I googled Hamachi and found that it is at the LogMeIn site. LogMeIn is another technology that I tried a long time ago, found it to be a bit lacking and moved on to other remote solutions.

I downloaded both to do the trials. Wow, was I surprised. The folks at LogMeIn have been busy and have created a really nice remote access solution. I’ve been using it for several weeks now pretty constantly and it’s been rock-solid and performs very well.

During the LogMeIn Pro trial, you get access to all their features. The management dashboard is pretty impressive. You can actively monitor your machines, install patches, check processes, run remote commands, regedit’s and do file transfers while monitoring system performance.

Hamachi is working great too. You get 5 nodes for free and you can build different types of networks like mesh or gateway.

Filed Under: Commentary, virtualization Tagged With:
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