5 KEYS TO ENTERPRISE CLOUD COMPUTING

[ A Look Into the It Industrys thIrd revoLutIon ]

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CONTENTS
Limitations of the PubLic cLoud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 cLoud economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 enteRPRise cLoud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 instantontm soLutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 concLusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

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cloud computing, sometimes referred to as the third revolution in the it industry, follows the personal computer and internet revolutions and is already transforming the way we think about computing . but what is it? Gaining agreement on the definition of cloud computing in the tech industry is approaching the level of a religious war, with definitions running the gamutdescribing everything from simple shared infrastructure, to software as a service, to pay-as-you-go computing power and storage space, to a systems architecture abstracted from physical location and ownership .
the cloud concept represents a fundamental shift in computing, providing a platform for agile and cost-effective business applications and It infrastructure. new traffic patterns, new forms of content and new applications are key drivers of the need for dynamically allocated, scalable compute resources. It is no longer feasible to pre-provision to account for the peaks of demand. Amazon.com, the poster child for this kind of usage, really created the cloud computing movement as we know it today. In Amazons case, infrastructure was optimized to handle the surge in retail traffic from Black Friday through the new year. the under-utilized resourceslargely idle for the rest of the yearrepresented a huge opportunity cost for the company, which led to the development of Amazon Web services. now Amazon, Microsoft Windows Azure and others provide access to their compute resources using a pay-as-yougo model that creates financial value around their previously under-utilized It assets. While these extreme use cases of cloud computing show the power of the model for content providers and highly seasonal businesses, enterprises rarely experience these kinds of patterns. Quite simply, cloud computing is the convergence of virtualization technology and utility-based billing.

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LIMITATIONS Of THE PUbLIC CLOUD

over the last 24 months, enterprises and federal agencies have begun evaluating cloud technology and not surprisingly, have come to the conclusion that public cloud as we know it today is not a viable solution for core enterprise It infrastructure.

environment. this is the underpinning of enterprise architectures and used to define traditionally-hosted security domains and boundaries. In the public cloud, basically everyone is on the same network. to enforce security controls, you need to do so with local firewalling in each virtual machines operating system. Monitoring, ticketing and service management In the public cloud, the person deploying solutions is on the hook to provide service management. enterprise customers running production applications demand service management delivered as part of the solution and expect the contents of the virtual machines to be monitored for health, performance and availability. these are just a few of the challenges Carpathia hosting has heard from customers who are adopting or evaluating cloud solutions. these challenges have driven the development of our own 2nd generation enterprise cloud solution, Instanton.

the cloud concept represents a fundamental shift in computing, providing a platform for agile and cost-effective business applications and it infrastructure .
With significant commercial and federal customers, Carpathia hosting has gained a lot of insight into what customers think about using public clouds for their own production-ready applications. Common themes Carpathia hosting has heard from its customers include: Authentication / user access models Public clouds assume one person in each organization has full control over all operations. to allow multiple people to collaborate on a single cloud deployment, most public clouds recommend sharing accounts. Invoicing / billing often, there is no invoicing in the traditional sense, simply one line on the buyers credit card. enterprises and federal customers especially are looking for much more than a credit card swipe to support production environments. Customer service enterprises are looking for more traditional ways to interact with customer servicesuch as 800 numbers, trouble-ticketing systems, etc. Forums, twitter and other new methods work great for non-mission critical apps, but overlay a sLA or revenue generating solution, and customers want a human to talk to directly. Virtual machines or virtual environments? Private networking, which allows two or more machines to communicate in isolation, is something taken for granted in every traditionally hosted

CLOUD ECONOMICS
Cloud is not always the most economical solution to It problems. If, as a customer, you can commit to a specific amount of resources (be they compute or storage), buying managed dedicated can often be more effective. For example, a customer moved its financial support system to a public cloud provider from an internally hosted solution. Before moving to the cloud, a roI was created to highlight immediate savings. the model was extremely complete and took into account power, cooling, etc. one month into the project, however, the first billing statement was received, and the cloud costs were 45% more than the internally calculated costs. the issue? the model was built on a per CPu hour basis. Because of the application architecture, the customer wasnt able to switch off virtual machinesthus driving the cost upand exposing one of the significant challenges of this approach. Another good example of how cloud economics can break down is storage. Many content providers have looked at simple storage solutions like those provided by public cloud providers. Paying 15 cents per GB sounds like a great value if you are purchasing in small increments. however, if you are able to commit to a larger block of storagelets say 30tBthis comes

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in at $4,500 per month! Add in bandwidth charges for access to the data, miscellaneous charges for access to the data, and you are quickly closer to $5,000 a month.

the cloud makes more sense in situations where you need to grow in smaller increments or to scale up and down to meet the peaks and troughs of customer usage .
In a hosted environment assuming some degree of redundancy in storage, customers would expect to pay $1,800$2,400 per month for the same amount of storage. In this case, dedicated has much higher I/o rates. the cloud makes more sense in situations where you need to grow in smaller increments or to scale up and down to meet the peaks and troughs of customer usage. this is a good financial use case for a hybrid solution of dedicated and cloud resources. see www.WhatIsInstantOn.com to find out more about Carpathia hostings hybrid approach to dedicated hosting and cloud computing.

Additionally, cloud on-boarding is something enterprises are coming to expect. having great APIs and web uIs, etc. is fine, but when it comes to moving applications and data to the cloud, enterprises are looking for consulting and professional services. they need help understanding what should move and what should remain on dedicated infrastructure, understanding the roI, potential savings, building a migration strategy and developing a dr planall key items an enterprise looks for when embracing the cloud. If we take a look at enterprise workloads, we get a little more insight into the characteristics that become more important for an enterprise vs. a 2.0/developer customer. Many enterprise cloud deployments are project-basedthat is, the enterprise needs to add a new feature (e.g. CrM), needs it up quickly, wants to avoid capital expense, etc. the need for extreme elasticity is rarely included in the workloads of an enterprise. sure, once a month having some extra horsepower to close the books is great, but its not an hour-by-hour swing of multiples of the environment we might see from a social media site. there is also the need for short-term project-based solutions (e.g. a company needing a development environment for a few months to build out a new version of an app, do a trial with a new software solution, etc.)

ENTERPRISE CLOUD
Carpathia hosting developed Instanton to meet the needs of customers as they experienced challenges on-boarding applications to public clouds. Lets start with the facility. Instanton v2 is hosted in two sAs70 type II facilities. sAs70 type II is the musthave certification for all hosting companies. Its basically a definition of a set of controls and an auditors review and opinion on those controls. A control could be as simple as we lock the data center door, which an auditor could review and pass. sharing the auditors opinions of these controls is something enterprises often demand. very few public cloud providers offer this level of transparency. When enterprises do take the plunge, they need more than just a flat pool of virtual machines. they look for a higher-level construct, group or application. Grouping allows architecture to be defined, blueprints created and run books produced. they also look for topology in that virtual appliances such as loadbalancersneed to connect to firewalls, and web servers via vlans/virtual switches. they want the same degree of isolation they have with todays dedicated infrastructure.

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INSTANTONTM SOLUTIONS
Carpathia cloud architects can help design a solution that meets your business and financial demands. using our cloud foundation, we can take cloud compute, storage and networking building blocks and construct a solution. these solutions can be deployed in minutes to create the agility required for todays It. Virtual Compute on-demand computing services for both simple virtual machines and complex topologies including connections to existing dedicated infrastructure in a secure manner. Instanton uses Citrix Xenserver 5.5 hypervisor providing industrial level technology and support for virtualization. Virtual Storage object and block storage solutions designed to support enterprise compute requirements. storage can be shared between multiple virtual machines and dedicated servers with multiple copies of each object. storage is provided in redundant configuration that is persistent after virtual machines are stopped. Virtual Networking networking solutions to support virtual compute and storage allowing Instanton to be deployed in enterprise configurations taking advantage of solutions like Citrix netscaler vPX.

Disaster Recovery

Development Test CLOUD ORCHESTRATION

Desktop

*Virtual

CLOUD SOLUTIONS

Virtual Networking

Virtual Compute

Virtual Storage
*Q2 2010

CLOUD FOUNDATION

Instanton also has a number of cloud solutions available; this ever-expanding list is focused on common enterprise It challenges. Private Cloud or Private Virtual Data Centers virtual Compute and storage solutions deployed in a private or reserved deployment. Combines the advantages of cloud technology such as dynamic scaling and instant provisioning and a fully managed environment. Compliant Cloud designed to meet government It standards including FIsMA and dIACAP. enhancements include rsA authentication, ssL vPn for management access and inter/intra virtual machine firewalling. Virtual Disaster Recovery replicated data ensures you have a current off-site copy of mission critical information at a fraction of the cost of traditional disaster recovery solutions. Pay for cloud resources on-demand during dr testing and dr events.

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Virtual Development & Test virtual Compute and storage solutions designed specifically for test labs for easy deployment and promotion into production at a dramatically lower price-point than deploying dedicated development and test lab environments.

Private Hosted Cloud

Compliant Cloud

SPECIALIZED CLOUDS

CLOUD ORCHESTRATION Virtual Networking Virtual Compute Virtual Storage CLOUD FOUNDATION

CONCLUSION
As weve seen here, enterprise cloud is a little more than enterprises using the cloud. to support mission critical workloads, enterprises look for the right blend of people, process and technology. the cloud isnt one size fits allif it was, the battle for the cloud would be over. there is plenty of room for innovation in the enterprise cloud realm. the key is for an enterprise to define its requirements and seek out a cloud service provider that will work with a customer to architect and implement the right solution vs. forcing them into a cloud solution that meets the service providers requirements to scale and manage their own standardized cloud offering. For more information on Carpathia hostings unique enterprise cloud solution, Instanton, visit: www.carpathia.com/enterprise-solutions

Carpathia hosting is a leading provider of managed hosting services, delivering secure, reliable and compliant It infrastructure and management for some of the worlds most demanding enterprises and federal agencies. Founded in 2003, Carpathia is a growing, profitable business run by a seasoned management team with deep experience in delivering enterprise hosting solutions including colocation, managed services and cloud computing. Carpathias suite of services is designed for organizations seeking scalable, secure, robust and enterprise-grade hosting solutions that can be quickly provisioned or tailored to meet unique requirements. Backed by its e3 Promise, Carpathia consistently delivers an experience that exceeds customers expectations. Carpathia qualifies as a small business. Contact Carpathia at 1.888.200.9494, or visit www.carpathia.com for more information. references to other products are made to show compatibility. All companies and/or products mentioned in this document are registered or trademarked by their respective organizations. the inclusion of third party products does not infer endorsement by these parties, unless otherwise noted.

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