Blog | Appica - Part 2

Hacking by the hour

May 16th, 2011

Hacking by the hour

A server on Amazon’s EC2 service was used as part of the second-largest online data breach is U.S. history according to a recent Bloomberg article. This scenario was not a matter of if, but when. It’s been a tough month for negative cloud news, but don’t judge the marketplace as a whole for actions taken via a cloud server from any individual provider.

Fact: Public cloud services that allow automated online sign-up simplify the lives of hackers. No longer do hackers need to build large farms of botnets when the cloud is available by the hour. With stolen credit cards and a few clicks of a mouse a hacker can begin to wreak havoc using large computing resources and networks. Don’t be fooled though, hackers will find a way whether they are paying by the hour or they just hijacked your mail server sitting in your office or remote data center.

cloud data protection

Fact: Security risks exist everywhere whether your gear is in the cloud or not. Amazon can’t be blamed for the fact that a hacker used its servers for nefarious purposes, albeit an automated sign-up process won’t stop motivated hackers. This level of attack should be a wake-up call to any company who is storing data online. All too often we fail to ask simple questions such as “Why do we need this much data?” A guiding principle should be the least amount of information to serve the purpose. It’s great that marketing wants to know everything about a consumer, but there are costs, risks, and responsibilities you assume in conjunction with storing that data.

We have met the enemy and he is us: Recognize that security attacks are likely happening right now. Don’t assume that the cloud is any more or any less secure than your current environment. A significant amount of cloud server security has to happen at the OS and application layer. Ask security related questions of your cloud partner about how they manage risks. Finally, build out application security profiles and identify what data you need and why. Chances are you might find out you’ve been storing more information than needed to serve your customers.

Aaron Larkins

513.361.0800
Data center brochure

Posted in Aaron Larkins, Security | No Comments »

The REAL basics of CloudComputing.

May 10th, 2011

“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.

Nathan Fultz

Email: nathan@profitability.net

Twitter: http://twitter.com/AppicaCloud

Web: http://www.appica.com/nathan

Tags: appica, business continuity, Cloud, cloud storage, cloud strategy, cloud webinar, CloudComputing, Colocation, coud servers, Data Center, IaaS, public cloud, Servers, Technology, Virtualization
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Scale creates opportunity at Facebook

April 7th, 2011

Facebook opens up with Open Compute Project

I’d like to tip my hat to Facebook’s Open Compute Project team and their willingness to share ideas in the industry. As a data center professional it is certainly frustrating to see the utility meter running as we cool our multi-tenant facility to ensure adequate supply temperatures. It’s refreshing to see different approaches to using airside economization and evaporative cooling systems.

Open Compute Project

What the Open Compute team has done with a clean slate is impressive and is definitely a “run until fail” model at the server level. When you do anything at scale and make a server “plain vanilla” you can start to justify that level of investment.

They’ve solved a number of challenges for themselves (weight, energy, efficiency) and you can do that in a large environment where you don’t have many flavors or servers, storage, and networking equipment with manufacturers that hold the line on warranties. For the Appica cloud we looked at all of the major server manufacturers and some claimed that their servers would run at 90 degree supply. Awesome. Unfortunately our SAN storage wouldn’t like operating in those same conditions.

Many multi-tenant data center operators would like to raise the temperature in their facilities, but most have come to realize that customers aren’t willing to budge given their past experiences and opinions on cooling. For several years it was a process for us just to explain to our prospects why not having a raised floor in our facility reduces our operating costs. Those customers equated a data center with a raised floor. Changing perceptions takes time and the more the industry as a whole is willing to communicate, the more opportunities we will collectively have to innovate.

For more information on Open Compute click here.

Aaron Larkins

513.361.0800
Data center brochure

Tags: Cloud, CloudComputing, Data Center, open compute project, Servers, Technology
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Are you ready to be popular?

March 24th, 2011

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!

Ben A Baker

Email: ben@appica.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/AppicaCloud

Web: http://www.appica.com/

3 Wishes for Cloud Computing

March 17th, 2011

3 Wishes for Cloud Computing

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.

Aaron Larkins

513.361.0800
Data center brochure

Tags: appica, business continuity, CIO, Cloud, cloud storage, cloud strategy, cloud webinar, CloudComputing, Colocation, coud servers, Data Center, IaaS, PaaS, private cloud, public cloud, Servers, Technology, Virtualization
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CIO’s have a crystal ball!?

March 17th, 2011

I can remember many years of selling hardware and software to companies of all sizes. It didn’t matter if they’re investing $20,000 in servers, switches and routers or a $1,000,000 dollars, everyone wanted to maximize their investment.

When companies are looking to expand, CIO’s and IT professionals often found themselves on the “Hot Seat”, faced with meeting the demands of the business;

“Can we expand it?”
“Are we purchasing enough?”
“Are we purchasing too much?”
“Can it handle the work load 3 years from now?”
“When will this technology become obsolete?”

As much as we would like them too, IT professionals can’t predict the next Google, Amazon or Appica, in fact, in most cases we are asking them to make impossible future recommendations.

As a sales professional if I had a nickel for every time I had to answer, “Will this last me five years?”
Today it’s different. IT leaders can PLAN and meet the needs of the business, not by using a crystal ball, but deploying infrastructure in a public cloud!

-No longer is there a need to “right-size” your purchase or tap into the capital expenditure budget.
-No longer is there a need to worry about meeting future demands from of the business.
-No longer is redundancy or fault tolerance a concern.
-No longer is scalability an issue.
-No more delays in shipping replacement or upgrade parts.
-No long delays in taking servers out of commission to make upgrades.

Appica is a service that may not make sense for everyone, but if you feel like you’re always pouring money into your servers and infrastructure, or if you’re tired of over-purchasing and over spending, it’s worth a consideration.

To learn more register for our upcoming webinar series on “Getting Started in the Cloud”:

April 5th
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/436186118
April 19th
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/355091150

Nathan Fultz

Email: nathan@profitability.net

Twitter: http://twitter.com/AppicaCloud

Web: http://www.appica.com/nathan

Posted in General, Nathan Fultz, Webinars and Videos | No Comments »

How does Appica protect your critical data?

March 9th, 2011

How does Appica protect your critical data?

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.

Aaron Larkins

513.361.0800
Data center brochure

Tags: appica, cloud storage, persistent storage, SAN
Posted in Aaron Larkins, General | No Comments »

Twitter: Goldmine or Fool’s Gold

March 4th, 2011

Twitter: GoldMine or Fool’s Gold

“I don’t re-tweet you because you don’t tweet anything!”

OUCH!!

Strong words from @thegadgetmom, who not only is a great reviewer of all things mobile tech, she also just sent me a tweet to pick up milk on my way home from work.

It’s an ongoing debate we have, she tweets for fun, and has an intimate following of tweeps, with whom she has a regular ongoing dialog. Its a group that she’s bonded with by sharing thoughts, blogs and information about mobile technology.

I am completely different. I tweet for work, anything related to my industry, news, blogs and have very few conversations with my following.

So…Why do we tweet?

I’ve heard a few schools of thought on this subject: some tweet thoughts, others news, some re-tweet news, some connect with people who have similar interest, some connect people to other people, some are the face of their companies marketing departments, some follow celebrities, some tweet famous quotes, whatever your flavor twitter has a following for you.

Does it work?

Really?

If you are worried about it working, I think you’re missing the point. For me twitter gives you a pulse of what’s going on in your world, no matter what #hashtag you follow. It gives you the ability to contribute, have an opinion and share your expertise.

Whatever you’re following, whoever’s your tweeps, however you update, twitter’s platform is contagious.

Just don’t be fooled that there’s gold in twitterville, but you will find yourself connecting, sharing, learning and becoming more informed along the way. News moves fast, opinions are abundant and bots are everywhere. But don’t be scared, twitterverse is a journey and I am enjoying the ride.

Nathan Fultz

Email: nathan@profitability.net

Twitter: http://twitter.com/AppicaCloud

Web: http://www.dailycloudreport.com

Posted in Nathan Fultz | Comments Off

Appica - your application needs a home.

Hacking by the hour

Hacking by the hour

CIO’s have a crystal ball!?

Twitter: Goldmine or Fool’s Gold

Twitter: GoldMine or Fool’s Gold

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Hacking by the hour

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Facebook opens up with Open Compute Project

3 Wishes for Cloud Computing

Wish # 1: End the hype cycle

Wish # 2: Reduce cloud confusion in the marketplace

Wish # 3: That the cloud lives up to the hype this year

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How does Appica protect your critical data?

Twitter: GoldMine or Fool’s Gold

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