Your business is changing. With the down economy over the past several years, many delayed storage upgrades and maintained a status quo. By the day your data sets have been growing as well as your recovery time objective (RTO). In the world of 24×7 operations, your data is more at risk than it has probably ever been.
hosted storage protects data
You have a big data problem. Your backup jobs may be slow or failing to complete in your backup window. Your SMB storage or JBOD lack advanced features that will help you solve big data challenges. How long will it take for you to recover if you experience a true disaster at the storage or file system level? Days or weeks?
We help our customers solve big data problems through our Hosted NetApp Storage practice. As a provider, NetApp gives us flexibility and the ability to reserve performance and isolate data for our customers. NetApp also has advanced snapshot software and reporting capabilities we can use to identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks. We can also flex-clone volumes for our clients for patching or non-disruptive disaster recovery testing. With hosted storage we support fully hosted, protect storage, or hybrid models that allow you to colocate equipment in our data centers.
We are leveraging NetApp as the engine for our Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery practice as well. Using snapshots, we can efficiently replicate and protect customer data between multiple data centers. Add VMware SRM 5 into the mix and we can fully protect your virtual machines as well.
I can attest to the value of NetApp’s advanced features. With NetApp we were able to reduce a 60 hour Hosted Exchange RTO into a < 1 hour RTO using SnapManager tools. These are the same tools we deliver to our clients to help them better protect data.
It’s time to think differently about your storage strategy. We welcome your call at 800.556.1369 to discuss your big data challenges and storage concerns.
About Us:
We’ve been providing hosted storage in one form or another to our customers for the past 10 years. It’s been an interesting journey as MB requirements turned into GB’s and those are now growing into TB’s and beyond. To call most of us data hoarders is an understatement. Call us at 800.556.1369 to talk about your requirements and review our storage trade-in programs.
Its amazing how things come to me. Today I’m contemplating yet another blog post about cloud computing…as if we/I haven’t diluted it enough with 10 zillion post about why the cloud is the place to be.
This morning one of our cloud architects said to me, “The cloud really reminds me of flying”. I immediately thought of a corny analogy between cloud computing and flying in the clouds…I know, please continue, thats not what this is.
He continued, “a lot of people have a fear of flying because when there’s an accident involving an airplane a lot more people are involved, and the news of the accident reverberates everywhere”. This is what feeds my illusion that air travel is unsafe, even though the numbers support that air travel is much safer than ground travel.
Air travel is one of the most regulated and safety conscious industries with millions of flights each day, yet I focus on the failures. There will always be people who choose to travel by bus or train, unfortunately for them, they will arrive to the party a little late. I’m still going to fly.
enter, cloud computing.
As airlines have to ensure the safety of their travelers, we implement safeguard’s against outages too. We have superior fault tolerance built throughout our data center. Like air travel, we have audits that set standards in the data center market place. We have far more protection built into the infrastructure than what a typical business has.
Just as travelers have learned to manage the fear of flying, I’ve learned to understand the reality of an outage. Could it have been prevented if protection and redundancy were built in the application layer as well as the hardware layer?
Applications fail for 3 major reasons, protecting at all three layers, in most cases, is a requirement. The cloud offers you the ability to create redundancy on a hardware and application layer quite easily, the benefits of cloud computing far out way the illusion that servers need to be across the hall.
So flying does remind me of cloud computing. As it continues to grow as the preferred method to deliver infrastructure, rest assured, if there is a chance for the news to post a story about an outage they will, just ask Sony and Amazon.
Thankfully, I understand what an outage or a failure really means, but more importantly, I know air travel is the best, most reliable means to get me from Cincinnati to Denver.
In its simplest form, the cloud, public & private, is a combination of telecommunications, servers and data. It makes finding what you need easier, it makes us visible, findable and searchable too. The cloud connects the physical with the virtual, it allows us to connect anywhere anytime.
For two years we’ve been hearing the cloud is going to make business easier, save money, only pay for what you use, easily scaled, better fault tolerance, etc etc etc. Just look at Microsoft’s latest campaign…” I can own way less and do way more…” great things…completely accurate, and…well…the cloud does makes it possible.
But THE solution?
Truth be told, the cloud is no more of a solution than a laptop computer connected to my corporate network. I need it to get my work done, the laptop’s sole purpose is to deliver the information to me as quickly and accurately as possible, but the laptop doesn’t solve anything.
Don’t make the mistake some early adopters made; moving an application and infrastructure to the cloud doesn’t solve complex business issues.
So, what does the cloud do? It creates opportunities for solutions;
The Internet and Email changed the way business and customers communicate, the cloud will change how we deliver compute power. Remember those that were left behind in the Internet age, they didn’t invest in a website or they thought email was a distraction. Don’t be one of those guys.
The cloud is ready to deliver…find a partner you can trust, and see what solutions they provide!
In the two years I’ve been reading, selling and writing about cloud virtualization, one of the concerns I always hear is that virtualization will devore the need for server administrators.
At Profitability.Net we see completely the opposite! Over the last 18 months, we have seen an incredible increase in the need for talented server administrators.
Now don’t get me wrong, the days of only understanding the server operating system are gone. A talented server administrator must be proficient in all the hypervisors on the market as well as Windows and Linux operating systems. An IT Professional that has a solid understanding of mission critical applications like, management and monitoring software, ERP, CRM and BI will set themselves apart from the competition too.
So rest easy my server hugging friends, the need for quality server administrators is going to explode!
Here are 3 great reasons server administrators will be in high demand in the coming years;
Virtual servers are steadily increasing. In fact, 57% of companies are currently using some form of virtualization. So instead of managing 15-20 physical servers, it is feasible to manage serveral 100.
Having a virtualized environment gives great flexibility.The ability to monitor and put safeguards in place such as HA , allows IT professionals to focus on projects and moving their company forward.
Specialization. In today’s world the application is king, gone are the days of the need for just file & print, mail and web servers. Now we see virtual private, public cloud, grid, cluster, blade, database, media, private cloud and energy efficient servers in our data center. Specialize in an area and develop much needed expertise.
In contrast to the past when IT was viewed as a “cost” of doing business, most IT leaders find themselves managing departments that are strategically planning the future of the company. When CIO’s are building teams, it’s more likely they look at a diverse experience instead of certifications. It’s important to keep up with the ever changing landscape of computing, however, unlike in he past, its not a matter of taking a test to be qualified.
There is never time to rest in the world of information technology and cloud computing may not get you any additional sleep, but the sleep you do get might be much better.
The business case for “why to go cloud” seems to have taken a foothold on modern business thinking. There is no longer any doubt of the value that cloud computing adds to any business model.
In today’s social media minded business world, “going cloud” has become synonymous with “going green”; great ideas, great technology, but the path to get there is somewhat foggy. The question I hear alot is, ”How do I take my current server and storage platforms and move them into the cloud?”
YES, in fact a resounding yes! I know I know, most security purist think about security breaches as encryption, or malicious hackers but remember 85% of security breaches come from 3 causes, listed in order of most common to least common.
Lost computers and storage devices, Georgetown University established the following guidelines for students and faculty for lost or stolen laptops, or a removeable disk drives. Not a bad starting point if you have yet to develop your own policy.
Human error from employees or partners, and
Illegal or malicious activities by criminals.
To determine if data is safer in the cloud, its a matter of comparing what you have, to what the cloud provides. How does a cloud provider’s data center compare to that of a small or medium size company?
Consider most cloud providers have a substantial investment in their infrastructure. We work really hard trying to protect our customers from outages and the impact an outage can have on data.
Being in a position where a power outage shuts down servers that house data is NOT a position any IT professional wants to be in, but, just in case, there is good documentation “How to Recover a master data base file”, from Tech Republic. Just plan on having your best people unavailable for several hours as they work the process of recovery.
Another factor, how is data accessed now? How many remote users are connecting to the corporate network from various internet connections around the World. A server in the cloud will not compromise a data breech any more than that of a sales rep accessing the order entry system from a remote hotel wifi hot spot.
Lastly, when we look at data specifically, most cloud providers have a resilient SAN environment in place. Some will have a configuration that separates the data from the OS layer, which means if a server fails, your data is still safe because it resides on a separate platform.
The bottom line is make sure you have a good loss prevention policy, train your employees well and begin the process of migrating to the cloud. By moving to the cloud most businesses will see a substantial leap ahead in security and data protection. Why? A cloud providers reputation depends on it!
It seems my last post falls into the category of over saturation, it was the one billiointh post about “Why” to use cloud computing. I promise to stop diluting the cloud frenzy, its now time to focus on the “How”.
Now that we have experience moving companies to our Appica Cloud, we have a clear process which helps prospects and clients develop a strategy and ultimately find a stable home in the cloud. The most important lesson’s we’ve learned is to understand it is a process, and its starts with the application, check out what Sam Somashekar wrote in this weeks edition of the Cloud Computing Journal…
I Want Cloud Apps, Not Just Cloud Servers!
— Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a quantum leap for provisioning servers, but it does not by itself allow you to deploy applications in the cloud. A new methodology is required for you to capture the deployment topology of your application, which you can then use to automate its deployment.
It is amazing how I continue to hear people talk about how they are still not familiar with “cloud”, what it is and how it will help their specific business. Just the other day I spoke to a customer prospect who believed they had a private cloud – as it turns out they had a virtual server farm which still could not be accessed through a self-service portal. But I am not surprised – after years of “cloud-washing” incumbent IT management solutions that cost a lot of money, time, and resources to implement, vendors have dictated how YOU should use the cloud. But, you need to figure out how the cloud actually applies to your specific business. Click here to continue…
The bottom line is, one of the major factors we consider when developing a cloud strategy is control, how much control of each application do we need? This is key in determining what type of cloud service fits each application.
Cloud computing has definitely opened the door for small and midsize companies to compete with the Enterprise. To learn more about Migrating to the cloud, drop me a note nathan@appica.com.
I still regularly find myself answering the question “why go cloud?”. As a cloud sales professional I recognize the challenges in attempting to convince people that a cloud computing strategy is a must, especially in a day and age of a marketing frenzy that does more harm than good. The frenzy has created alot of attention, but much to the dismay of cloud providers, it seems to diminish the value of what the cloud can really do.
So I submit: 10 compelling reasons to give cloud computing serious consideration:
When forecasting utilization becomes a guessing game. Gone are the days of a Network Administrator guesstimating the amount of compute power they will need for a server running a new application. Instant Scale-ability in the cloud gives Server Administrators peace of mind knowing they can easily meet business demands.
When the same mistakes are repeated. Today servers are ordered only to find out 6 months later that the $15,000 piece of hardware is out dated or insufficient…or even worse, the project never gets off the ground! Check out this study that ZDNet compiled, more than 68% of IT projects FAIL!
When validity of a project is necessary. Proof of concept is a step in the process that sometimes gets overlooked. We use cloud infrastructure as a way of proving the validity of our projects, we spin up a server and destroy it when we’re finished. Simple. Done.
When you want flexibility. Built on API platforms, customers can pay only when they are using the service. A manufacturing firm may only need servers running from 7am-5pm Mon-Fri, which equates to a 40% savings in monthly recurring cost.
When 99.999% up time is needed. Most cloud providers have substantial investments in theirdata centers with redundant power, network infrastructure, generators and onsite fuel. According to Data Center Knowledge its $3,000 per square foot to build a data center! Combine that with a cloud providers business survival rest with delivering up time, makes it difficult for a company to even consider doing it themselves.
When adding storage is an ongoing project. Cloud providers with SAN based storage give great flexibility in adding volumes, taking snapshots and developing online back-up strategies.
When you need serious compute power. Where else can you get 24 CPU’s at your disposal for around $5 per hour. Note: When someone spins up this kind of server…we ask A LOT of questions.
When marketing needs refreshed. Imagine what your partners, customers and competitors will think when they hear you’ve gone cloud. Regardless of their overall opinion of cloud computing, they will take notice.
When you need to know your spend. Its a budgetary item than may fluctuate from time to time, but most providers have standard pricing that gives you the ability to forecast. (capex versus opex)
It’s Cheaper! My CEO is going to want my head on a platter for this one, but yes I said cheaper. Its not cheaper in the old fashioned sense that we used cheaper materials (Plastic Versus Metal) or sacrificed Quality Control (We went through a rigorous 10 month testing and beta period), but cloud computing is cheaper because it’s eliminating having underutilized hardware in data center’s. Spending $20,000 on a server and only see 13% utilization is a thing of the past, that’s $17,000 for something not being used!
This will not compute with today’s modern CIO!
To get started int the cloud find a trusted partner that has experience as a service provider. The greatest technology isn’t great unless it has the right people behind it.
On February 9th, We will be attending The Ohio Information Security Conference. It is a one day, multi-track technical conference targeted toward business owners, managers, and security professionals who have a vested interest in protecting their company’s information and communication systems. This year, O-ISC will model the success of previous conferences. This event is an opportunity to learn about the latest trends and look to the future of information technology security.
I was lucky enough to survive the 2 hour I-71 Cincinnati to Columbus morning commute and land at the TechColumbus campus for a round table discussion featuring several IT professionals from the region.
What made this roundtable unique, each panelist was in a different stage of implementing their cloud strategy.
Jeff Lusenhop discussed his business model and how 6 months ago the cloud was an intricate part of his ventures start-up plan. Janova is a company that provides testing services to the software development community. Jeff explained, ”our company has taken a 10 hour process, and with the use of the cloud, reduces it to 30 minutes!” However, that’s only a small part of why the cloud is a win for his company. He strategically developed algorithms to “spin” up cloud servers when the demand presents itself, which translates to only paying for the horse power he needs when he needs it. No upfront infrastructure costs, completely scalable, and quick time to entry into the market. There is no doubt his company wouldn’t be experiencing the success without the cloud.
Ron Savoia seemed to be no stranger to the cloud computing circles, Ron is a strategic consultant assisting companies with the impact the cloud can have on business. What really grabbed my attention is Ron’s belief that the cloud’s greatest strength will be as cloud computing begins to specialize in vertical market applications, even creating a trend toward business platform service providers…I have a hunch with Ron’s expertise he is on to something.
Brian Shea and Angelo Mazzocco provided insight on how they are using and evaluating cloud services. Angelo has moved their business management and accounting system to a PaaS provider, this gives them the ability to customize the solution for their specific needs without investing in an infrastructure. When asked about why PaaS over other cloud options. “A SaaS provider gives you the software for a subsrciption fee, but will not allow for the flexibility my team needs,” stated Angelo.
Brian expressed his concerns with security, as healthcare providers are subject to HiPAA compliance regulations most businesses don’t have to contend with. He discussed how the cloud computing will ultimately change the way his team delivers IT to his users. Brian made a unique remark in that “Ultimately it will help my team focus and return to the day to day basics of monitoring and troubleshooting the infrastructure and network.” Definitely food for thought as my mind started racing with how the cloud is going to impact the age of the new IT professional.
There were great questions ask throughout the event, but none as compelling as the impact the cloud will have on IT staffing for business owners. One of my biggest takeaways from today’s discussion is, the cloud won’t take away from IT jobs, but it will demand that IT professionals have expertise in aligning IT tools with business goals. The days of hiring IT professionals to be watchdog’s on the infrastructure are almost gone. Find me the IT professional that can evaluate things like cloud computing to help achieve business goals… and you are getting a headstart on altering the IT atmoshpere with cloud computing.
Over the past 6 months I have given more than my fair share of cloud demonstrations, what I am learning is how many different perceptions of the cloud are out there.
Certainly the mainstream media is’nt helping matters by relating everything from my phone contacts, email and online bill paying as “cloud” living. There are a variety of factors or philosophies that I must get past before I consider taking the time to evaluate a cloud provider as a business solution.
First, recognize that this will NOT change my philisohpical approach to computing.
I will still implement the same security policies, back-up & retention scedules, user standards, storage Initiatives, DR Strategies and redundancy. What the cloud is giving me is another method to deploy the infrastructure to accomplish meeting the goals of the business.
Second, this is not a cost savings solution!
On the surface when I compare buying hardware versus a monthly service fee to an IaaS provider, the numbers aren’t too far off, in fact the infrastructure provider can easily cost more. The value I get is soley based on the provider I choose.
Some entry level providers only offer storage on each server instance, some high end providers deploy a more persistance storage strategy and build NAT firewall capabilities into the instance. For new and emerging companies I am seeing the benefits of an easier and quicker means of entry into the market place. When I look at the upfront cost to build a virualized cluster of servers, SAN redundancy and 10GB switch gear all supported in a SSAE-16 certified data center…I am seriously giving the cloud a long hard look.
Lastly,I need to come to terms with control.
How much control of my environment do I need and want. For the CRM application that I spend coutless hours supporting, it might make sense to look at a SaaS offering that takes full control and lifts the support burden from my team. I might want complete control of the infrastructure so IaaS is the direction I need to focus.
Regardless of the cloud bucket I am looking into, the key is understanding the cloud is not a decision that should be about savings. It should be about scalability, speed of delivery, high availability, SAN storage, back-up and disaster recovery.
In the past, these are technologies that were difficult for small and medium businesses to manage and deploy. Thanks to the cloud, are now readily available to test and ”right-size” solutions for my business.
Virtualization, public cloud, private cloud, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, Ugh!
If you are confused on what the cloud is and isn’t you aren’t alone. The IT industry has long been a fan of marketing what is “hot.” We are going to try and do our part to clearly define our services and educate our customers when needed. That said, here is my take on computing and the struggle for the industry to define the cloud:
Silo computing: 1 application per 1 physical server
Virtualization: Many applications per 1 physical server
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or public cloud: pay as you go server and storage slices in a multi-tenant and highly scalable environment
Private cloud: a resource pool dedicated specifically to your company. Service providers like Appica can deliver a private cloud environment or it can be developed and managed in-house. In either case there is a capacity limit based upon the physical resources deployed
Software as a Service (SaaS): third party hosted software application delivery usually accessed via a browser or client such as Hosted Microsoft Exchange or Gmail
Platform as a Service (PaaS): a business application platform stack that allows development and utilization of resources. Shared hosting would be yesterday’s PaaS whereby a customer uploads html to a third party managed platform
Appica is an IaaS service offering that is available in a multi-tenant or dedicated environment for private cloud deployments. If you want to further discuss the benefits of IaaS vs. virtualization we welcome your call.
Five questions you should ask your IaaS cloud provider
With careful planning you can simplify the process of comparing IaaS cloud providers. Start with a solid list of questions to ask potential vendors. You will save time by defining some business objectives and applications for a cloud deployment. In our cloud demos we ask customers specific questions about their business, problems they are trying to solve, or opportunities they are trying to create. Here are five questions that should be on your list as you start to evaluate IaaS cloud providers:
1. Where is my data?
2. Is data storage persistent or is it tied to a single computing node?
3. What are the levels of redundancy in the cloud architecture?
4. How are customer networks segmented?
5. Will my servers automatically fail-over to another platform in the event of failure?
While the market leaders for IaaS cloud services in the past include Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers, you should expect more choices like Appica in 2011 as the cloud landscape continues to mature.
I welcome your call to 800.556.1369 if you would like to consider Appica as a cloud partner for your business.
It is common place for providers to help clients decipher all the noise associated with cloud computing. However for me, not only do we want to educate people about what to ASK a potential cloud provider, but we want to educate people on what to listen for…
Check out the blog post; “Five questions you should ask your IaaS cloud provider“ you will quickly see the top two questions are about data; where is it and what is is it tied to. Your provider should be able to give you answers that meet your business requirements.
If you spin up a server instance with a provider such as Amazon EC2 or RackSpace, by default your data resides on-board on an individual server. When the instance fails, what happens to your data? What redundancy is in place if a data disk fails? Can you take regular snapshots of data volumes or can you take a snapshot of a root disk before a Windows Server Patch is installed? There are far more risks and questions to answer when a provider stores critical data on-board a server instance.
High Availability SAN storage is Appica’s preferred storage architecture. We built an environment designed to withstand computing node failures. In our view, an IaaS cloud should be an availability upgrade from dedicated server architecture.
For example, Appica is built with three storage layers to protect your critical data. Primary storage is powered by an N+1 Intelligent Clustered Storage (ICS) SAN that protects against multiple drive or storage node failures. We designed the secondary storage SAN to store server instance snapshots and ISO images and the third storage pool stores continuous backup images or recovery points of your server…decidedly different from “on-board” storage technology.
I am finding more and more people are taking the time to educate themselves on cloud services and the differences between virtualization architecture and true IaaS cloud computing. When customers do their homework, ask great questions, and have a set of clearly defined objectives, they will end up with a cloud strategy that meets their business needs.
It is amazing in just a few minutes I can have a server at my disposal. Take a few minutes and view a live look into the Appica Server Management Console.
We are hosting webinars every Tuesdays and Thursdays in December to answer key questions you have about the cloud and to demo the Appica cloud service.
Have you been considering any of these questions?
-Is the cloud secure?
-Does the cloud make sense for my business?
-How quickly can I “spin-up” a server?
-How can I scale my business using cloud services?
-How do you configure Storage?
-Can I migrate existing data?
-How do I incorporate my back-up’s?
-Is there a private network?
-What does it cost?
Looking for a trusted partner? Try getting your oil changed…
As I am sitting at my local Valvoline instant oil change, I am wondering what it takes to become an ASE certified mechanic. Is having the certification even important? After all, changing oil is a simple task and there are 100’s of different quick lube service stations. I think I pass 4 different ones on the way to work.
I’m also fascinated with the constant checks and balances that happen between the mechanics up top in the “bay” to the ones below in the “pit”. All certified quick lube operations are heavily watch dogged by the Department of Transportation when working on a vehicle. They have to repeat back every communication from “bay” to “pit” and all mechanics do the procedure exactly the same way.
If they all employ certified mechanics and operate with strict policies and procedures, why do I go back to Valvoline every time?
The answer is simple, Jeff knows me and he knows my car.
He knows I take 5W30, and when I rotated my tires last. It’s a casual conversation as he leads me through the standard protocol of questioning, asking me if I want new wiper blades and points out that my air filter is looking dirty and I should consider having it replaced. I can easily say “No” as he makes his note, smiles and says, “I understand, but if you are driving on vacation this summer you might want to give it a serious consideration on your next visit.”
Perfect, a professional recommendation, from a trusted mechanic…exactly what I want!
As I am driving away and I think about Profitability.Net and our SSAE-16 audit. How detailed the audit process is and the guidelines we must adhere to with every change and communication we have with our customers. We do a good job of explaining to customers the value of the SSAE-16 and the benefit it can provide, but I fear we are missing the obvious.
The best policies and procedures are only as good as the people who implement and follow them. Fortunately for us, our CEO, CTO and VP of Operations have been working together as IT service providers since 1997! Unheard of, especially in IT.
Why are they still together, because it works. They’re committed to delivering to customers what customers want; data that is safeguarded, in a reliable data center with a trusted partner. Architecting a system with fault tolerance at every turn, building policies and procedures to protect our network and hiring the right people are key factors to the longevity of our team. And a trusted partner is what you get with a management team that’s been together 15 years!
So the next time you are thinking about a new service provider, drilling into the details is a must, but don’t forget the obvious. Are these the people you trust to make recommendations before an issue becomes a problem?
If your CEO inquires about the cloud, are you prepared?
I thought I heard a vuvuzela today, but alas it was just a pronouncement from an IT consultant that the cloud will remain a hybrid of on premise and off premise architecture. You are going to hear a lot of vuvuzela players this year touting their expertise in helping you navigate the cloud. It seems to me that any consultant or service provider that focuses on architecture is missing the point of elastic cloud computing and the role that CIO’s and IT leaders must play in their organization.
Last time I checked, prescribing virtualization and the hybrid cloud was not a one size fits all remedy. CIO’s today should continue to focus on innovation that serves your customers. The next IT battles are already being waged by IT staff and consultants to maintain control over the IT environment. For some, there is too much profit and job security in prescribing infrastructure rather than focusing on business challenges. What will you focus on?
Your CEO, VP or CIO are going to bring up the cloud this year. Are you prepared? Lead your organization through the noise by focusing on your business needs and understanding your cost of ownership for your critical business applications. Participate in webinars and research market options.
The promise of the cloud is that you can buy what you need, when you need it, in real time. For emerging and middle market companies, a solid cloud service provider will deliver enterprise technology and redundancy that you cannot cost justify in your own environment. Sure it’s important to understand the infrastructure and the operational requirements, but the decision between virtualization, hybrid, and cloud services should follow your IT strategy, not define it.
Over 8KW of pure electric mowing power, no belts, oil, or spark plugs, no gas can spills in your car, no cords, 90% less cost to operate, and chrome mag wheels as an option. Ingenuity and know-how all built into the Green Mowchine and manufactured in Harrison, Ohio a small city about 20 miles from Cincinnati.
I had the pleasure of seeing the Green Mowchine in person and speaking to Joe Conrad from the Meangreenproducts.com team about their green tractor. They hit me with some cold hard facts such as one gas mower produces as much pollution as 39 new cars driving 60 MPH. Then they cited the estimate that over 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled annually while refueling gas mowers.
meangreenproducts.com
In the past there wasn’t anything green about IT. Servers were silos and most continue to run at 10% to 15% utilization levels, “spillage” in mower terms. We all know that the IT world has produced some serious kwh hogs we call servers or “boat anchors” that consume several thousand watts 24x7x365. There is hope though for our industry.
Data center operators like us continue to invest in energy efficiency and technology such as ultra efficient fly wheel UPS systems. In many cases when you outsource to a colocation facility, you are making a choice to reduce the energy footprint of your IT resources. Most colocation facilities operate at higher levels of efficiency and utilization than small server rooms and data centers.
When you use virtualization or cloud servers, you are reducing your energy footprint as well. In the case of the cloud, we aren’t running systems at 10% to 15% utilization. In fact the utilization target is closer to 80% +-. We estimate that a 50 amp 208V workload in a traditional silo computing environment can be reduced by 80%. We also continue to focus on more efficient operation as we add capacity, which is vastly different from average IT departments that don’t rank energy usage anywhere near the top of their list in deploying servers. There are exceptions, but by and large the cloud will be more efficient than virtualization within an office data center.
Appica is designed to be a permanent home for your applications and data. When we architected Appica, we wanted to architect a storage infrastructure that would be highly available and scale as needed. In fact, the entire cloud stack is redundant with no single points of failure.
cloud data protection
Appica is built around three separate storage systems including:
Primary storage SAN is powered by an N+1 Intelligent Clustered Storage SAN that protects against multiple drive or storage node failures.
Secondary storage SAN to store scheduled server instance snapshots and ISO images.
Backup storage pool uses a third storage pool to store continuous backup images or recovery points of your server.
When an Appica customer creates a cloud server, the underlying operating system and customer data are stored on the primary SAN. This means that your storage is persistent and in the event of a computing node failure, your server instance will automatically be restarted on another computing node without data loss.
When an Appica customer wants to further protect their data they can take an immediate snapshot or setup recurring snapshots that are stored on the Secondary storage SAN. In addition, Appica customers can install an agent to provide continuous data protection and disk safe capabilities for recovery. This backup is stored on a separate storage system.
Our primary SAN has many powerful features including Intelligent Rebalance. If a drive fails in our SAN, ICOS automatically isolates the failed drive and rebalances the redundant copies of customer data elsewhere in the cluster. If your cloud or dedicated server provider uses onboard or direct attached storage and multiple drives fail, you will likely have an outage up to 24 hours or more and possibly incur data loss. With our storage architecture, the impact, measured in minutes, is limited to the time it takes to restart your cloud server.
Another valuable feature of our SAN infrastructure is the Intelligent Pre-Fetch technology. Rather than waiting for you to access the data, Intelligent Pre-Fetch anticipates what cloud servers may need, based on your usage profile, and pre-fetches data into the cache. The result: near instant access to the data you’re likely to request. Performance and speed boosts are significant.
In 2011, we will continue to invest in data protection and options for our clients. With our private cloud offering, customers can actually select a performance tier such as SSD, SAS, or SATA for their storage needs. We hope to roll this feature out for our public cloud customers as well.
“Grande Mocha Please!” I am not a regular at Starbucks by any stretch, but on occasion I like to indulge myself in a little treat, today was one of those days.
As I am standing in line enjoying the light Jazz, the aroma of fresh coffee, checking out the smartly displayed items and listening to constant chatter happening across the counter; At Starbucks each customer is addressed by name (And if they don’t know you, they’ll ask you your name).
“Good morning Anne, would like your regular Grande Bold?”
Starbucks get’s it, they understand how people need to be treated in order to come back and feel like regular customers.
For the last two years I have sat next to a true customer service professional. At profitability.net we have thousands of people that rely on us each day, most of whom Ben knows by name and they certainly know Ben.
Ben has been an account manager in the technology service space since the mid 1990’s. He moved to Profitability.net in 2003, where his responsibilities are customer service & sales.
Cincinnati is not a small town, but I am always amazed at how many customers knew Ben from his previous role as a front line customer service rep assisting customers getting connected to the Internet. Trust me, in 1997 supporting dial-up connections with a gazillion different PC configurations, with a gazillion different types of modems, you had to be good in order to survive in this space.
Ben is terrific at his job.
He understands the value of listening to each caller, understanding whatever it is they might be struggling with and takes immediate action. Nothing makes a customer feel appreciated more than talking with someone who knows their name, understands the situation and then fixes it! There is rarely a time when Ben has to escalate, with his depth of knowledge and expertise with email, hosting and colocation he can take immediate action and resolve most any issue.
In the morning when you’re craving a treat, you can always count on Starbucks to deliver. If you’re in the market for technology services like cloud computing or colocation, give us a call. Something is still great about partnering with a company that takes the time to understand your business, works to grow your business and most of all…knows your name.
There’s a giant Leprechaun in our data center. Unfortunately he doesn’t have a pot of gold, but he did offer me three wishes since he was trapped by data center security.
Ben Baker - cloud sales team
Wish # 1: End the hype cycle
I’m thinking of terms I’m hearing daily like revolutionary, game-changing, innovative, surreal, and “yea that’s the cloud” commercials. It’s exciting to be a part of a market that is growing at such a frantic pace. Unfortunately we are our own worst enemy and there is a race to define the “cloud”.
Wish # 2: Reduce cloud confusion in the marketplace
If we can start thinking about clouds as a trusted method of delivering business applications that solve needs we will be better off as an industry. It seems boring though to marketing to delineate the nuances of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS when they can simply use “cloud” to encompass everything. Attend some webinars and conferences and make sure you define your needs and goals for cloud services at your firm.
Wish # 3: That the cloud lives up to the hype this year
If the cloud can do “everything” for your business we are hoping it does. We spent several years planning and testing our IaaS cloud and built it around a redundant architecture. There are going to be many entrants into the world of cloud computing this year and not all clouds will be created equally. Do your homework with vendor selection and pay particular attention to the underlying architecture and SLA’s for any “cloud” service you buy.
Popularity is something that we all strive for. From our first recognition of it, we are constantly striving to be more popular in our social lives, as well as our work. Every business owner wants their site to be more popular today than it was yesterday. Popularity drives traffic and traffic drives sales. But are we ready for that popularity?
Recently your marketing team has been tasked with raising awareness of your newest product and has hired a very prestigious Search Engine Optimization firm. Lots of money has been set aside, and only the brightest of marketing minds were put on the project. On the day of the launch, as expected, traffic towards the site increases at a very rapid pace. People are talking, and visiting. After your online coupon hits the social media scene, your site is quickly becoming the hot spot that you had dreamed of. Then, all of the sudden, as quickly as it came, your site crashes. The server can no longer accept the intense amount of traffic that it has suddenly had requested of it.
Orders are no longer being filled. Would-Be customers are staring at blank error pages, leading to frustration and poor public relations. Real dollars are being lost, and all because of failure to plan.
In years past, it would have taken quite a few weeks, if not months, to prepare for such a launch. On the server side, multiple servers had to be purchased, load balancers configured, firewalls locked down, servers racked, tests thoroughly ran through. A very timely, expensive, but necessary exercise in preparedness.
Today, however, with cloud technology, we can prepare for customers rushing towards our check-outs in a much more timely, and cost effective measure. With a few clicks your administrator can spin up duplicate instances of web or database servers, load balanced, and backed up across multiple SANS, and your marketing push is saved. What once would have taken weeks, now takes minutes. What once would have cost thousands upon thousands, can now be minimized to what you really need, and for how long you need it. Click here to view a short video of this process in action!
Popularity is fleeting, but with the right preparation, you can be ready for the deluge!
While preparing to move to a new home my wife and I recently found an abundance of “some day” items that we accumulated. Having lived at our previous home for 10 years and being blessed with two kids in the process, we were shocked at the pile of clothes, books, furniture, knick-knacks and building materials from the new home that my wife and I laboriously moved, sorted, and donated to Goodwill and Building Value.
Contingency Planners focus on some day
We had stored these items for some day when we might need them. I’m no packrat, but I rarely part with anything that might fit in the garage and is a potential useful part for a future woodworking or home project. Alas, some day often never arrives and there is a some day cost to bear whether it is storage or future time spent moving, sorting, and disposing of the item.
Clutter and digital noise seem to exist everywhere as well and further complicate some day. Your inbox is full 363 days of the year. You now receive LinkedIn invitations from strangers who want something or another from you. Digital photos are easier to take than delete. There is a some day cost to all of this digital clutter.
Some day your server or business application will fail. There is a cost to bear when components wear out, patches are missed, or your system doesn’t scale with your business. Virtualization for many companies created its own set of some day problems as virtual sprawl spread through enterprises. After all, virtual servers are easier to spin up than delete. Isn’t all of this technology supposed to make life easier?
We can’t afford tomorrow without a plan. My inbox is full, the garage is packed, and it’s just about time to clean up my desk this year. Today is some day for most of us. I hope to change my ways some day.
Aaron Larkins
a strategy and ultimately find a stable home in the cloud. The most important lesson’s we’ve learned is to understand it is a process, and its starts with the application, check out what 
