PRIVATE CLOUD e-zine Strategies for building a private cloud In this issue: q TRENDS IN CLOUD COMPUTING 1 1 0 2 By SearchCloudComputing.com Staff R E B M E V q OPEN SOURCE IN THE CLOUD: BOON OR BUST? O N | By Bill Claybrook 4 . 0 N | NO DEMOCRACY FOR APPS IN THE CLOUD? 1 q . L O V By Mike Laverick 1E EDITOR’S LETTER OPEN SOURCE MEETS CLOUD COMPUTING HOME AS CLOUD COMPUTING continues to for evaluating your data center’s mature, IT managers want more. application portfolio and associated They are clamoring for better inte - concerns, including poor application EDITOR’S LETTER gration of cloud platforms with performance and latency, data leak - existing tools, greater control and age, and issues with compliance or TRENDS management, improved self-service, other regulations. and greater portability among cloud But first, in our Cloud One on One environments . interview, we catch up with Altaf OPEN SOURCE Enter open source software, Rupani, the VP of global strategic IN THE CLOUD: which has become the architectural planning and architecture at Dow BOON OR BUST? foundation for many cloud projects . Jones, to explore the company’s Open source software is often lower private cloud rollout and some of cost than proprietary alternatives, its challenges in working with public NO DEMOCRACY FOR APPS IN and its open code base can prevent cloud providers to get the project THE CLOUD? the vendor lock-in common with up and running. The company’s proprietary technologies. Open ongoing efforts may provide a source comes with its challenges, guide for your own initiative. I though, including spotty support and a substantial skill requirement. LAUREN HORWITZ Open source and cloud expert Bill Senior Managing Editor, Claybrook examines how open Data Center and Virtualization source fits into the cloud as well as Media Group, TechTarget Inc. some technologies that have begun to define this maturing “second wave” of cloud computing. Interoperability and data portabil - ity are just two vexing issues. So, next, we delve into another core problem on many IT managers’ minds: migrating applications to the cloud. Virtualization expert Mike Laverick takes you through the steps PRIVATE CLOUD E-ZINE • VOL. 1, NO. 4 2 1T TRENDS IN CLOUD COMPUTING TRENDS HOME in cloud computing EDITOR’S LETTER TRENDS Cloud One on One Cloud] for business-critical apps; the public cloud isn’t ready for the INCHING TOWARD enterprise. There needs to be more OPEN SOURCE HYBRID CLOUD governance controls that cater to IN THE CLOUD: the enterprise. BOON OR BUST? Altaf Rupani , the vice president of global strategic planning and architec - Aren’t these kinds of controls ture at Dow Jones, is on a mission to tough to build in a private cloud NO DEMOCRACY FOR APPS IN get the best out of new cloud comput - environment, too? Or can anybody THE CLOUD? ing architectures for all the usual rea - at your company jump on your pri - sons: reducing time to market on new vate cloud and provision services? apps and avoiding the capital cost of Yes, you need to establish gover - new hardware. In this interview, Ru- nance and rules and introduce rigor pani discusses his company’s private so that you are following role-based cloud rollout and the challenges of access controls, but this is easier to working with service providers to get a hybrid cloud system up and running. “You need How long did it take to build to establish your private cloud? governance About a year and half. and rules and introduce rigor.” Why did you go this route versus tapping into readily available public cloud resources like Amazon Web Services? Altaf Rupani, We don’t use EC2 [Elastic Compute VP of global strategic planning at Dow Jones PRIVATE CLOUD E-ZINE • VOL. 1, NO. 4 3 1T TRENDS IN CLOUD COMPUTING do today inside your own four walls. Dell for example, give you any advantage in your private cloud Is there training involved? How do architecture? you get employees up and running? No. We use off-the-shelf hardware. We have an on-boarding process; Dell, HP, IBM—it doesn’t matter, we we enlighten and educate people on just need a service-level agreement the portal. Otherwise you could (SLA) for response time, a de-dupe shoot yourself in the foot if you let rate for storage, etc. We created the HOME people on who don’t know what framework for a resilient cloud first, they are doing. We leave it to the then we picked vendors that met tech leads to spread the word. Oth - that criteria. EDITOR’S LETTER erwise you could have 400 virtual machines or 4,000 provisioned for What software do you use for TRENDS 10 minutes of use. virtualization and automation? VMware and DynamicOps. What systems did you put OPEN SOURCE in place to guard against that? Which applications run in produc - IN THE CLOUD: You need to create an auto-approval tion on your private cloud today? BOON OR BUST? process for certain groups of users. Corporate applications, including For example, developers can provi - back-office stuff like SharePoint sion assets without as many hoops 2010, have been consolidated from NO DEMOCRACY FOR APPS IN to jump through as other employees five separate instances to one in- THE CLOUD? less familiar with the system. Our stance running on the private cloud. mobile development team can pro - Business-to-business apps on the vision as many instances at a time cloud include DowJonesNews.com as they need, as this is a high- and our archive. Business-to-con - priority job. sumer apps include WSJ.com, Mar ketWatch.com and Barron’s. How large is your private cloud? All have some presence on the pri - All new instances are provisioned vate cloud and are using it more through our private cloud and we and more. have 350 active instances, but this spikes up or down depending on What advantages have you workloads. seen so far? [Rupani declined to say what per - One of the biggest advantages is centage of Dow Jones’ total server that we no longer need to spend so environment the private cloud repre - much money on transitional tech - sents, but it is likely less than 10% nology setups for new projects. It’s a today.] cost-avoidance strategy, as we don’t Do hardware choices, HP versus need net new assets. There’s also a PRIVATE CLOUD E-ZINE • VOL. 1, NO. 4 4 1T TRENDS IN CLOUD COMPUTING cost-efficiency advantage as we are that would be useful. getting better usage out of our exist - Let’s say there’s an employee in ing servers. We tripled our average Europe working on a big marketing utilization to 35% to 40% per physi - launch, but there’s no Dow Jones cal machine. capacity there. The system will say, “Here are the templates available That still seems low. for services,” and it’s the same Why not 60% to 70% utilization? workflow and policies as internal HOME We leave headroom to account for services, but it launches on the pub - peaks. lic cloud. It federates with the enter - prise. EDITOR’S LETTER What about labor? Do you save costs there? What challenges have you faced TRENDS Yes. Cloud instances are half the in getting this hybrid model to cos t of physical instances, including work? labor. When the provider is a black box, OPEN SOURCE it’s not good; single sign-on and IN THE CLOUD: How many administrators identity and access control is not BOON OR BUST? maintain your private cloud? easy. It’s less than five. Are there other challenges NO DEMOCRACY FOR APPS IN What about hybrid cloud? with the hybrid model? THE CLOUD? Does that make sense for Service providers had not envisaged your company? the workflow we needed, so we are We’d like to extend our internal really pioneering this path; it takes a private cloud to public cloud in a lot of trial and error. hybrid model, but we’re still working on the SLAs and data residency How have your users responded mandates with public cloud to the private cloud? providers to make that viable. People are lining up to use it. The time to market for new apps is so When will that happen? much faster. Users are willing to pay Before the end of the calendar year, more [for it], as they get their server we’ll be able to use hybrid; through before they come back from lunch application programming interfaces instead of in three weeks. [That] is we will be able to plumb providers’ awesome from an application deliv - capacity behind our portal. ery standpoint. —BY JO MAITLAND Give us an example of why PRIVATE CLOUD E-ZINE • VOL. 1, NO. 4 5 ePlus eCloud Solutions Expedite are built on technology Your Journey from: to the Cloud with ePlus Let ePlus® be your guide to cloud computing. Converged With our eCloud™ offering, we can design a Infrastructure cloud computing strategy tailored specifically to your business, allowing you to: + Gain tighter control over security Specialist + Lower your total cost of ownership + Better manage provisioning + Improve services orchestration + Virtualize and scale your existing applications For more information, please contact [email protected]. www.eplus.com/cloud 1 OPEN SOURCE IN THE CLOUD: BOON OR BUST? OPEN SOURCE IN THE CLOUD: BOON OR BUST? Open source may address some of the vexing problems that have kept IT managers out of the cloud. But these HOME technologies aren’t for the fainthearted. BY BILL CLAYBROOK EDITOR’S LETTER AS COMPANIES cautiously explore source and proprietary code.