My reaction on reading this article were mentioned in the last paragraph. Do the existing ISP infrastructures allow for wide use of this type of cloud service?
Personally, as long as I have complete control over what may be sent to a cloud, and what will not be sent, I'm all for hybrid cloud computing.
Call me old fashioned, but if I were running a business the idea of my data being kept by another company wouldn't sit right with me. I personally am not a supporter of cloud computing overall, but I'm also paranoid.
For all of this Cloud storage to be happening despite peoples suspicions suggest to me that someone is getting kickbacks to move to these solutions high up on the chain of these companies.
yeha because soem douche manager heread the word cloud somewhere googled it and thinks "We need that too" without knowing anything about it and possible consequences. At the company i work this will never happen. But it's a large company so a datacenter is justified anyway. I'm also nto a cloud fan but for small companies that don't need a real datacenter and couldn't pay for extra staff I guess it could be the cheapest solution but I must admit I have no idea about the prices.
Well you would have to be a VERY large company to own and run a Datacenter. And unless you do that, even good old school hosting companies will still have your data anyway. And if you move to Colocation, your DataCenter will still have access to your Data. I mean, it is really base on trust.
To me, cloud hosting and old hosting has zero difference in terms of data security.
Agreed. I can't see the customers of the company I work for ever being okay with their sensitive data being stored in the cloud. Until they make a hack-proof network, the cloud will remain primarily a consumer backup service.
It really depends what your needs are. If you're a small business, I can guarantee Amazon is better at running a server farm than you are, and they can do it far cheaper and more securely than you can. While Amazon's downtime is high-profile, it's also much less likely than if you're running a non-redundant system in your office. All it takes is a bad storm to knock out your connection to the internet.
Also, if you run a business doing anything other than IT, you probably don't have the understanding of security to secure your data, or the time/discipline to maintain best practice processes around backups and disaster recovery planning. If you want to protect customer data on S3, wall it off and encrypt it. But I can guarantee whatever system you have set up is easier to bypass than S3. Most real data breaches come through compromised workstations anyway; so it doesn't matter where the data is actually located.
Anyway, the hysteria about "not having control" of your data is hogwash; owning the servers gives you the illusion of control where you actually don't have any. Having less responsibilities related to things outside your companies core business functions is generally considered a good thing.
Not sure how long you've been in the tech field, but there are a LOT of businesses/organizations that have been handling their own data needs internally just fine, thank you very much.
The fact that a business is small does not automatically result in them running a "non-redundant system".
While you are correct that Amazon is probably better at running a server farm, their main concern is *their* data, not yours. They are very careful to avoid responsibility should your data on their cloud go "poof!".
Banks, research facilities and major corporations having been dealing with data security, integrity and storage since day one.
The need for an IT department usually arises out of infrastructure concerns, not end user computers.
Yes, there are businesses that fail to plan and fund this area properly, but that's usually a one-time mistake. It's amazing how willing a company is to spend money on disaster recovery after they've had a disaster.
Nor is control of ones data "hogwash". Issues of confidentiality go far beyond commerce transactions, especially in the area of research. It's not simply a matter of owning the servers, it's also where the servers are located.
Your last sentence is true only within the context of having 100% confidence in another entity handling those services that are outside of the core business.
The job of someone working for your company is directly related to their performance. When you outsource a service of any kind, that person is no longer directly responsible to you. The further out you go in the outsourcing chain, the less likely that person is as concerned about your data as you are.
With the release of vcloud connector 1.5, a vsphere based organization can build a hybrid cloud easily with a vcloud service provider. Bandwidth and latency needs to be considered even if the organization wants to setup a DR or secondary site of their own for business continuity. Planning those with a service provider makes the DR or capacity on demand (CoD) an opex based model with outsourced risks than a capital intensive project/service.
You mention vCloud Controller and it's downsides but neglect to mention Rackspace (and NASA's) OpenStack, which aims to alleviate all the issues by making the visualization voodoo open to everyone. I personally can't see why you would want to choose a closed, proprietary system when you don't even trust the cloud to begin with! I fear a large part of the bad taste people get when they talk about the lack of guarantees and security regarding the cloud comes from the fact that you don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. Open Stack at least hold the promise of allowing companies to host their own clouds AND not have to worry about traffic spikes - they can just let it overflow to another OpenStack cloud, Granted, it's not here yet, but it still feels awfully relevant.
Generally IT take way to much top management time. Its a waste. The IT people talk a language nobody understands. Fair enough. From here it just looks like they try to protect their own job talking a fake technical language nobody understands. Man if marketing or sales were using the same language, they would be told to express themselves proporly. Why this Cloud datacenters is not really taking off long time ago, is because all those vauge arguement, with no effects. What is the cost of security when you do it yourself? what is the added benefit in $ of holding the security yourself? Man, its like companies ensuring themselves. Its stone age thinking. And absolutely the most waste of ressources. Where else in the chain do you have this waste of ressources? The IT people continue to talk nonsense, cloud bla bla bla, and then someday all the IT department is outsourced, and then the service provider can decide if they want to use datacenters. Who thinks they will have their own private servers. This waste of ressources stops the day, when top management get enough, and realises they can use their time better than talking about cloud at datacenters.
I have to disagree. First "being able to get the message across" is the core business of sales and marketing, so your comparison to IT is very flawed. If we follow that reasoning, IT has the same right to complain about the incompetence of many sales and marketing people to make use of the right IT tools as we are living in the information age.
Outsourcing IT completely is very dangerous, I have witnessed the result of that more than once. The result is that no one understands why the third party charges for some services and whether they are important or not. A third party might for example be a HP and EMC partner and they have to get sales targets. As a result they sell you what the OEM wants to sell, not what you really need. At the very least you need one IT person that understands, talks and controls what the third party IT company offers.
And i never thought Rackspace was THIS large. I know they are much larger then GoGrid or StormOnDemand, VPS.NET etc. I never knew they could be; I mean rivalling Amazon?
And RackSpace is not even really a true cloud. last time i heard as their Storage is not Redundant and Fail-Safe.
They are probably only this large in the US, or in parts of the US. I don't believe they have much marketshare outside the US. Amazon has a datacenter in Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo. So they are definitely larger if you look at it globally.
I believe most storage solutions in the cloud are not really fail-safe, but I do believe most of them have some form of redundancy.
Their storage options are definitely redundant and fail-safe...unlike Amazon who's massive outage back in April cause data loss and downtime for websites all over the net. When news like that hits, it makes it hard to believe that Amazon is as big as it is - I'd expect to see their customers leaving in droves!
In some ways, cloud computing or hybrid cloud computing is kind of irrelevant for technical and high performance computing.
The biggest limiting factor is the time it takes to move the data around.
A small simulation that I run on a somewhat regular basis takes between 10-15 seconds to run on our local cluster, and generates around 2 GB of data.
The time it would take for me to just move the data back and forth makes it unfeasible.
And that's considered EXTRA small.
Other bigger projects normally take 9 days for us to run. I don't even want to try to guess how much data those runs generates, but suffice it to say...it will be a lot. Possibly into the hundreds of GB. And if a company can afford the high speed link, they probably can most likely afford to acquire the systems in-house.
"It is after all quite hard to offer a good SLA when your uptime is also dependent on the internet connection between the customer's datacenter and the hosting provider's datacenter. Your thoughts?"
Johan, first off, great post. I think you've hit the nail on the head that users of public IaaS need to consider cost efficiencies and hardware reuse via private IaaS. With regard to your comment above, here at RightScale (disclaimer, where I work), we often see customers investigating hybrid cloud. A key reason for this is that these 'enterprisey' customers have multiple datacenters with large hardware footprints which can be utilized in the same manner as public IaaS with higher levels of compliance / security / cost control / etc. If they have multiple datacenters though, the SLA between their datacenters becomes just as challenging as it would be between a public provider and any one of their own datacenters.
In the end, I think that it's a valid concern to iterate on and try to solve. But, can it really be solved 100%? I'm not convinced. And yet, I believe that the hybrid approach has real merit, in particular with bursting (I need more resources and it takes time for me to procure) and geographic bias (I want to launch a service in a new country). I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether the benefits outweigh the concerns.
A hybrid cloud is a Cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. For example, an organization might use a public cloud service, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for archived data but continue to maintain in-house storage for operational customer data. Ideally, the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT. www.cloudways.com
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Doken44 - Sunday, September 18, 2011 - link
My reaction on reading this article were mentioned in the last paragraph.Do the existing ISP infrastructures allow for wide use of this type of cloud service?
Personally, as long as I have complete control over what may be sent to a cloud, and what will not be sent, I'm all for hybrid cloud computing.
lunarx3dfx - Sunday, September 18, 2011 - link
Call me old fashioned, but if I were running a business the idea of my data being kept by another company wouldn't sit right with me. I personally am not a supporter of cloud computing overall, but I'm also paranoid.Chadder007 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
For all of this Cloud storage to be happening despite peoples suspicions suggest to me that someone is getting kickbacks to move to these solutions high up on the chain of these companies.beginner99 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
yeha because soem douche manager heread the word cloud somewhere googled it and thinks "We need that too" without knowing anything about it and possible consequences.At the company i work this will never happen. But it's a large company so a datacenter is justified anyway. I'm also nto a cloud fan but for small companies that don't need a real datacenter and couldn't pay for extra staff I guess it could be the cheapest solution but I must admit I have no idea about the prices.
iwodo - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Well you would have to be a VERY large company to own and run a Datacenter. And unless you do that, even good old school hosting companies will still have your data anyway. And if you move to Colocation, your DataCenter will still have access to your Data. I mean, it is really base on trust.To me, cloud hosting and old hosting has zero difference in terms of data security.
Spivonious - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Agreed. I can't see the customers of the company I work for ever being okay with their sensitive data being stored in the cloud. Until they make a hack-proof network, the cloud will remain primarily a consumer backup service.Exelius - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
It really depends what your needs are. If you're a small business, I can guarantee Amazon is better at running a server farm than you are, and they can do it far cheaper and more securely than you can. While Amazon's downtime is high-profile, it's also much less likely than if you're running a non-redundant system in your office. All it takes is a bad storm to knock out your connection to the internet.Also, if you run a business doing anything other than IT, you probably don't have the understanding of security to secure your data, or the time/discipline to maintain best practice processes around backups and disaster recovery planning. If you want to protect customer data on S3, wall it off and encrypt it. But I can guarantee whatever system you have set up is easier to bypass than S3. Most real data breaches come through compromised workstations anyway; so it doesn't matter where the data is actually located.
Anyway, the hysteria about "not having control" of your data is hogwash; owning the servers gives you the illusion of control where you actually don't have any. Having less responsibilities related to things outside your companies core business functions is generally considered a good thing.
ggathagan - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Not sure how long you've been in the tech field, but there are a LOT of businesses/organizations that have been handling their own data needs internally just fine, thank you very much.The fact that a business is small does not automatically result in them running a "non-redundant system".
While you are correct that Amazon is probably better at running a server farm, their main concern is *their* data, not yours.
They are very careful to avoid responsibility should your data on their cloud go "poof!".
Banks, research facilities and major corporations having been dealing with data security, integrity and storage since day one.
The need for an IT department usually arises out of infrastructure concerns, not end user computers.
Yes, there are businesses that fail to plan and fund this area properly, but that's usually a one-time mistake. It's amazing how willing a company is to spend money on disaster recovery after they've had a disaster.
Nor is control of ones data "hogwash".
Issues of confidentiality go far beyond commerce transactions, especially in the area of research.
It's not simply a matter of owning the servers, it's also where the servers are located.
Your last sentence is true only within the context of having 100% confidence in another entity handling those services that are outside of the core business.
The job of someone working for your company is directly related to their performance. When you outsource a service of any kind, that person is no longer directly responsible to you. The further out you go in the outsourcing chain, the less likely that person is as concerned about your data as you are.
prophet001 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
I agree 100%rjanakan - Sunday, September 18, 2011 - link
With the release of vcloud connector 1.5, a vsphere based organization can build a hybrid cloud easily with a vcloud service provider. Bandwidth and latency needs to be considered even if the organization wants to setup a DR or secondary site of their own for business continuity. Planning those with a service provider makes the DR or capacity on demand (CoD) an opex based model with outsourced risks than a capital intensive project/service.Xenoterranos - Sunday, September 18, 2011 - link
You mention vCloud Controller and it's downsides but neglect to mention Rackspace (and NASA's) OpenStack, which aims to alleviate all the issues by making the visualization voodoo open to everyone. I personally can't see why you would want to choose a closed, proprietary system when you don't even trust the cloud to begin with! I fear a large part of the bad taste people get when they talk about the lack of guarantees and security regarding the cloud comes from the fact that you don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. Open Stack at least hold the promise of allowing companies to host their own clouds AND not have to worry about traffic spikes - they can just let it overflow to another OpenStack cloud,Granted, it's not here yet, but it still feels awfully relevant.
war59312 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
A small typo. ;)"The 1.0 version, was a virtual a virtual appliance"
Notice the double "a virtual" in there.
Kakureru - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Wish I were in an IT job :PKoVaR - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
I work in IT support. I wish I could send my users to the could and leave all VMs on premise.iwodo - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
I wonder who are interested and current using it. For average joe most of their hosting will be Linux Xen / OpenVZ based.krumme - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Generally IT take way to much top management time. Its a waste.The IT people talk a language nobody understands. Fair enough. From here it just looks like they try to protect their own job talking a fake technical language nobody understands. Man if marketing or sales were using the same language, they would be told to express themselves proporly.
Why this Cloud datacenters is not really taking off long time ago, is because all those vauge arguement, with no effects. What is the cost of security when you do it yourself? what is the added benefit in $ of holding the security yourself?
Man, its like companies ensuring themselves. Its stone age thinking. And absolutely the most waste of ressources. Where else in the chain do you have this waste of ressources?
The IT people continue to talk nonsense, cloud bla bla bla, and then someday all the IT department is outsourced, and then the service provider can decide if they want to use datacenters. Who thinks they will have their own private servers. This waste of ressources stops the day, when top management get enough, and realises they can use their time better than talking about cloud at datacenters.
JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
I have to disagree. First "being able to get the message across" is the core business of sales and marketing, so your comparison to IT is very flawed. If we follow that reasoning, IT has the same right to complain about the incompetence of many sales and marketing people to make use of the right IT tools as we are living in the information age.Outsourcing IT completely is very dangerous, I have witnessed the result of that more than once. The result is that no one understands why the third party charges for some services and whether they are important or not. A third party might for example be a HP and EMC partner and they have to get sales targets. As a result they sell you what the OEM wants to sell, not what you really need. At the very least you need one IT person that understands, talks and controls what the third party IT company offers.
iwodo - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
And i never thought Rackspace was THIS large. I know they are much larger then GoGrid or StormOnDemand, VPS.NET etc. I never knew they could be; I mean rivalling Amazon?And RackSpace is not even really a true cloud. last time i heard as their Storage is not Redundant and Fail-Safe.
JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
They are probably only this large in the US, or in parts of the US. I don't believe they have much marketshare outside the US. Amazon has a datacenter in Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo. So they are definitely larger if you look at it globally.I believe most storage solutions in the cloud are not really fail-safe, but I do believe most of them have some form of redundancy.
Xenoterranos - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
Their storage options are definitely redundant and fail-safe...unlike Amazon who's massive outage back in April cause data loss and downtime for websites all over the net. When news like that hits, it makes it hard to believe that Amazon is as big as it is - I'd expect to see their customers leaving in droves!Zoomer - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
Are you kidding? Rackspace has been in this business even back when Amazon was bleeding tons of cash trying to sell books over the internet.alpha754293 - Monday, September 19, 2011 - link
In some ways, cloud computing or hybrid cloud computing is kind of irrelevant for technical and high performance computing.The biggest limiting factor is the time it takes to move the data around.
A small simulation that I run on a somewhat regular basis takes between 10-15 seconds to run on our local cluster, and generates around 2 GB of data.
The time it would take for me to just move the data back and forth makes it unfeasible.
And that's considered EXTRA small.
Other bigger projects normally take 9 days for us to run. I don't even want to try to guess how much data those runs generates, but suffice it to say...it will be a lot. Possibly into the hundreds of GB. And if a company can afford the high speed link, they probably can most likely afford to acquire the systems in-house.
sbindal - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - link
"It is after all quite hard to offer a good SLA when your uptime is also dependent on the internet connection between the customer's datacenter and the hosting provider's datacenter. Your thoughts?"Johan, first off, great post. I think you've hit the nail on the head that users of public IaaS need to consider cost efficiencies and hardware reuse via private IaaS. With regard to your comment above, here at RightScale (disclaimer, where I work), we often see customers investigating hybrid cloud. A key reason for this is that these 'enterprisey' customers have multiple datacenters with large hardware footprints which can be utilized in the same manner as public IaaS with higher levels of compliance / security / cost control / etc. If they have multiple datacenters though, the SLA between their datacenters becomes just as challenging as it would be between a public provider and any one of their own datacenters.
In the end, I think that it's a valid concern to iterate on and try to solve. But, can it really be solved 100%? I'm not convinced. And yet, I believe that the hybrid approach has real merit, in particular with bursting (I need more resources and it takes time for me to procure) and geographic bias (I want to launch a service in a new country). I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on whether the benefits outweigh the concerns.
Thanks and look forward to more!
--
Shivan
(Note, I work at RightScale)
evabrian - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
A hybrid cloud is a Cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. For example, an organization might use a public cloud service, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for archived data but continue to maintain in-house storage for operational customer data. Ideally, the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT. www.cloudways.com