Ah, this is a story to warm the cockles of the capitalist heart.
Parallels, the originally Russian virtualization company best known for letting Windows run on Macs, is figuring on going public in the second half according to what it told Bloomberg the other day.
It all depends on market conditions of course but it’s planning to use the money raised to expand in the $40 billion cloud services market where it already counts Sprint Nextel, American Movil, Telenor, CenturyLink and Rackspace as clients.
The company, understood to be profitable, reportedly had revenues of $100 million in 2008 and having already made a slew of small acquisitions will doubtless make more.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
ownCloud Tackles File Synch and Sharing
ownCloud allows organizations to integrate existing security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools with simplicity and flexibility.
OwnCloud, Inc. recently released the latest version of the ownCloud Community Edition with a number of usability, performance, and integration enhancements.
Based on an open-source project of the same name, the ownCloud file sync and share software, deployed on-premise, not only offers users greater control, but allows organizations to integrate existing security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools, while still taking advantage of the software’s simplicity and flexibility.
File sync and share services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and Box Inc. have revolutionized the way users share information. These cloud-based services make it easy to share files with clean interfaces and seemingly endless amounts of storage. However, not everyone wants to turn over their information to a service provider – for those who prefer to control how and where their data is stored there’s ownCloud.
Cloud Expo New York: NoSQL and Big Data, the No ‘BS’ Edition
A lot of companies are checking the NoSQL conversation box these days but end up getting confused by the sheer amount of information that is available on the Internet.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Sam Bisbee, Director of Technical Business Development at Cloudant, will look at how NoSQL impacts your application building decisions. He will discuss some of the insider baseball in the NoSQL community, cover a few tons of misconceptions, and discuss Cloudant’s views on what all this NoSQL and Big Data hullabaloo is all about. The session will be littered with case studies and examples from clients and previous projects.
Choose the right tool for the job
by, Adam Bogobowicz, Director of Product Marketing for Service Providers, Parallels
This Blog is a follow up to a conversation on Parallels Forum. It highlights Parallels Plesk Automation (PPA) architecture options and related hardware and licensing fees. My forum response is reposted here as it may be of interest to a broader audience or hosters considering Parallels Plesk Automation as their next Professional Hosting Platform. The core of the forum question was related to business logic of Parallels Plesk Automation for micro-hosting scenarios. My answer comments on a broader set of scales and architecture options possible with Parallels Plesk Automation.
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With the number of Parallels Plesk Automation deployments increasing I am now able to provide an answer to your questions based not only on product architecture but also on experiences from in-production deployments.
From what I can see it is quite clear that value of PPA over a single Parallels Plesk Panel deployment increases with the scale of the system. This is consistent with the way PPA is architected. We wanted this product to be the platform for professional hosting and optimized it for hosters for whom hosting is a full time business.
This means that if you are running a hosting business with 100 or less customers/domains Parallels Plesk Panel is the best solution in town. It is simpler than Parallels Plesk Automation and with 100 customers, scale and management is still not a problem. It still makes sense to run at this scale with Parallels Plesk Panel Unlimited dedicated license to qualify for free support but if money is short, you can find a discounted Parallels Plesk Panel 100 domain licenses with one of Parallels infrastructure partners.
At even smaller scale of micro-hosting you will find an even lower cost solution with Parallels Plesk Panel 10 domain offered for free by many of our partners.
Please Note: There are specialized hosting services scenarios, where security or customer requirements dictate isolation and multi-server architecture with low customer counts. If this is of interest to you I am happy to address it separately.
Now the good news is that you do not need to start your hosting business on Plesk Automation to be able to move up to it later on. The transition from Plesk 11 to Plesk Automation is easy so when your business grows you can simply make the choice to move to the professional hosting platform.
You should consider Parallels Plesk Automation for the first time at the 300-500 user level or when the number of VPSs and server you are managing starts to be (technical term) “a pain to manage”. Managing more than 4 servers without centralized Management Panel would give me a headache.
Here you have a choice of managing a Plesk Automation on a series of VPSs or managing a dedicated server that you provision containers onto. My advice is, if you have the skills, you should go with the dedicated box and run Parallels Cloud Server virtualization on it.
I suggest one quad core server with 32Gb RAM and 1Tb hardware RAID 10 storage like Dell PE620, Intel Xeon 2609 2.4 Ghz 4C x 2, 32Gb RDIMM RAM, 300Gb SAS 6Gbps x 8 (1.2Tb available storage), Perc H710 Hardware RAID 10 (Dell offers it for $171/month lease) and run 4 Parallels Cloud Server containers on it.
I would run:
- · PPA Management node on container #1 and give it 4GB of RAM and 10GB of storage
- · Apache Web Server and MySQL server on container #2 and give it 4GB of RAM and 300GB of storage
- · Apache Web Server and MySQL server on container #3 and give it 4GB of RAM and 300GB of storage
- · Postfix mail server, Parallels Premium Antivirus, Secondary DNS, Webmail on container #4 and give it 4GB of RAM and 200GB of storage
This system will scale to 600 Users at 1GB storage allocation but can handle 2x of easily depending on type of resource allocation method used and actual resource utilization.
At this scale cost value calculation is very different from your calculation with licensing cost now being a much smaller fraction of the overall system cost.
In fact in this configuration you would only pay (with no partnership discounts) $39 x 4 for Plesk licenses, + $70 for PCS (5CT) and + 6 for Parallels Premium Antivirus = $232 / month. You can lease this server from Dell for only $171/month and collocate it for less than $200/month or lease it directly from one of the infrastructure service providers. Thus your monthly cost would be around $600/month or around $1 per customer in this configuration.
And of course you can mix in an IIS Web Server and MS SQL server node into the system and for that I would add a virtual machine with 8Gb RAM and Windows 2008 R2 using Parallels Cloud Server.
From what I see in deployments of Parallels Plesk Automation next scale level comes from hosters running PPA on multiple physical servers and dedicated backup node.
For example, let’s say you are running two production boxes with 32Gb RAM and 1Tb RAID 10 storage running Parallels Cloud Server (PCS) and one backup box with 8 Gb RAM and 1Tb RAID 10 storage and running Parallels Cloud Server.
On the first box you can run
- · PPA Management node on container #1 and give it 8GB of RAM and 20GB of storage
- · Web server on container #2 and give it 4GB of RAM and 200GB of storage
- · Web server on container #3 and give it 4GB of RAM and 200GB of storage
- · MySQL on container #4 and give it 4GB of RAM and 200GB of storage
- · Primary DNS server #5 and give it 1GB of RAM and 20GB of storage
On the second box
- · Secondary DNS server on container #1 and give it 1GB of RAM and 20GB of storage
- · Web server and MySQL Server on container #2 and give it 4GB of RAM and 200GB of storage
- · Web server on MS SQL Server container #3 and give it 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage
- · SmarterMail Server on container #4 and give it 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage
A third backup server would be dedicated to the backup role.
Again you can mix and match, extend with Windows hosting and sell to 2000+ users
At full Parallels Plesk Automation scale, hosters usually go into fully dedicated server roles and scale up to 6+ physical servers with at minimum two 32 GB RAM and 1Tb RAID 10 storage servers dedicated to the web server role. At this scale you will be able to support thousands of users.
Please let know if this answer was useful and if I can answer any additional questions.
Cloud WAN Optimization Holds the Key to Driving Enterprise RaaS Adoption
In a constant effort to improve customers’ cloud experience and increase adoption, cloud providers are starting to introduce WAN optimization capabilities into their service offerings. This technology will allow organizations to realize significant performance improvements for cloud applications. For providers who have global cloud ecosystems, this is an extremely important step forward. One area in particular that will benefit from WAN optimization is Recovery as a Service (RaaS), a cloud-based solution that uses predetermined sets of processes to allow enterprises to implement disaster recovery in the cloud. Traditional disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) solutions, including hot sites and secondary data centers, have commonly been costly to implement, and RaaS solutions have emerged as a better alternative.
Seven-Step Checklist for Evaluating a Cloud Provider
A move to the cloud brings serious benefits, particularly for startups who often need to ramp up their IT capacity quickly without the burden of investing in new hardware or training staff. If your company is ready to offload its applications to the cloud, how do you decide which provider is right for you?
The standard questions about pricing and capacity are fairly obvious. For example, most people would probably think to ask things like: How much will this cost me (i.e. what is the cost per hour)? What hardware specs do we get for the price?
Yet beyond budget and capacity, there are several other factors that can impact your experience. Here are seven other questions every startup should ask a potential cloud provider:
You need to know if a service will be up and running when your business needs it. Of course, all cloud providers will promote their system’s stability. You need to dig beyond the marketing materials to understand the provider’s infrastructure and if it’s backed up with a meaningful Service Level Agreement. Research their outage history: what were the average and maximum downtime lengths? How did the provider respond to past outages?
BMC to Be Auctioned Off & Taken Private: Reuters
While Dell struggles to go private, private equity is reportedly staging a run on fellow Texan BMC Software, dying to take the thing private and satisfy Elliott Management, which got Novell sold off to Attachmate a while back.
According to Reuters KKR and TPG Capital, which turned their noses up at Dell, have formed a consortium to bid on BMC. So have Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital. Ditto Thoma Bravo, which is said to be participating in still a third consortium.
The deal is expected to top $6 billion.
When the market closed Thursday after the Reuters story circulated and its shares jumped to $45.49 its market cap stood at $6.5 billion.
Reuters says the process is past the first round of bids. Final bids are due in a few weeks.
Cloudviews Recap: The Enterprise Cloud
By John Dixon, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne
A few weeks ago, I took part in another engaging tweetchat on Cloud Computing. The topic: the enterprise cloud. Transcript here: http://storify.com/CloudCommons/cloudviews-tweetchat-enterprise-cloud
I’ll be recapping the responses to each question posed in the Tweetchat and giving an expanded response from the GreenPages perspective. As usual with tweetchats hosted by CloudCommons, five questions are presented a few days in advance of the event. This time around, the questions were:
- How should an enterprise get started with cloud computing?
- Is security still the “just because” reason for not migrating to the cloud?
- Who is responsible for setting the cloud strategy in the enterprise?
- What’s the best way for enterprises to measure cloud ROI?
- What are the top 3 factors enterprises should consider before moving to a cloud model?
- How should an enterprise measure the success of its cloud implementation?
Before we jump in to each question, let me say that the Cloud Commons Tweetchats are getting better and better. I try to participate in each one, and I find the different perspectives very interesting. The dynamic on Twitter makes these conversations pretty intense, and we always cover a lot of ground in just 60 minutes. Thanks to all of the regulars that participate. And if you haven’t been able to participate yet, I encourage you to have a look.
How should an enterprise get started with cloud computing?
I’m sure you’d agree that there are lots of different perspectives on cloud computing, especially now that adoption is gaining momentum. Consumers are regularly using cloud services. Organizations large and small are using cloud computing in different ways. Out of the gate, these different perspectives came to the surface. Here’s a recap of the first responses (with my take in parentheses). I don’t disagree with any of them; I think they’re all valid:
- “Ban new development that doesn’t use cloud … as a means to help development teams begin to learn the new paradigm” (maybe a little harsh, but I can see some policy and governance coming through in that point – after all, many corporate IT shops have a virtualization policy that kind of works this way, don’t they?)
- 2. “Inventory applications, do some analysis, and find cloud candidates” (this is definitely one way to go, and maybe the most risk-averse; this perspective holds “the cloud” as a destination)
- 3. “Use SaaS” (certainly the easiest and quickest way to start using cloud, if that’s a mandate from management)
- 4. “Enterprises are already using cloud, next question” (I definitely agree with this one, enterprises are already using cloud for some things, no doubt about it)
- 5. “Look at rogue IT, then enhance and wrap some governance around the best ideas” (again, I definitely agree with this one as a valid method; in fact, I did a recent blog post on the same concept,
- 6. “Know what you need from a cloud provider and be prepared” (the Boy Scout model, be prepared! I definitely agree with this one as well! In fact, look here.)
- 7. “Partner with the business to determine how cloud fits in the COMPANY strategy, not the IT strategy” (this was from me; and maybe it is obvious by now that cloud has huge business benefits, not just benefits for corporate IT)
There was lots of talk about the idea of identifying the “rogue IT” groups and embracing the unique things they have done in the cloud. All in all, these are ALL great ways to get started with cloud. In hindsight, I would add in another method of my own:
- Manage your internal infrastructure as if it were already deployed to the cloud. Some tools emerging now have this capability – to manage infrastructure through one interface whether it is deployed in your datacenter, with Rackspace, or even Amazon. This way, if and when you do decide to move some IT services to an external provider, the same tools and processes can be applied.
Your organization may have some additional methods to get started with cloud (and I’d love to hear about them!). So, why not use all of these methods in one concerted effort to evaluate cloud computing technology?
Is security still the “just because” reason for not migrating to the cloud?
The short recap on this topic: yes, organizations do use security as a convenient way to avoid acting on something. The security justification is more prevalent in large organizations, for obvious reasons. I’d like to point out one of the first responses though:
“…or is security becoming a reason to move to the cloud? Are service providers able to hire better security experts?”
I think this is a fantastic, forward looking response. History has seen that specialization in markets does occur. Call this industrial specialization: eventually…
- “The price of infrastructure services will be reduced as the market becomes more competitive. Providers will compete in the market by narrowing their focus on providing infrastructure in a secure and reliable way – they specialize or go out of business.” To compete, service providers will find/attract the best people who can help them design, build, and test infrastructure effectively
- Thus, the best people in IT security (a.k.a., the people most interested in security) will be attracted to the best jobs with service providers
Who is responsible for setting the cloud strategy in the enterprise?
Common answer was C-level, either CIO or even CEO. Cloud computing should enable the strategy of the overall business, not only IT. I think that IT should own the cloud strategy, but that more business-oriented thinkers should be in IT!
What’s the best way for enterprises to measure cloud ROI?
Lots of perspectives popped up on these topics. I don’t think the group stood behind a single answer. Here are some of the interesting responses for measuring ROI of cloud:
- IT staff reduction
- Business revenue divided by IT operations expense
- Improving time to market for new applications
Measuring the value of IT services is, excuse the pun, tricky business. I think cloud adoption will undoubtedly accelerate once there is a set of meaningful metrics that is applicable across industries. Measuring ROI of a virtualization effort was fairly easy math – reduction in servers, networking, datacenter floor space, etc. Measuring ROI of cloud is much more difficult, but the prize is up for grabs!
What are the top 3 factors enterprises should consider before moving to a cloud model?
This goes back to the Boy Scout model of proper preparation, which I wrote about a few months ago. I saw a few responses that were especially interesting, and yet unsolved:
- Repatriation, or portability of applications
- Organizational change (shouldn’t cloud be transparent?)
- Investments in legacy technology, goes to timing and WHEN to consider cloud
- Security, location of data, etc.
At GreenPages, we think of cloud computing more as a management paradigm, and as a New Supply Chain for IT. Considering that perspective, the points above are less of an issue. GreenPages Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) offering was designed specifically for this – to view cloud computing as the New Supply Chain for IT. In a world of consumers (enterprises) and providers (the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, and Terremark), where competition drives prices down, cloud computing, like other supply chains, can be thought of as the way to take advantage of market forces to benefit the business.
Thanks to Cloud Commons for another great conversation…looking forward to the next one!
The Efficiency of Cloud Computing
“The industry has already achieved significant headway on lowering costs for cloud-based services in 2012,” said Dale Wang, Senior Product Manager at XO Communications, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “However,” Wang noted, “trust is probably an area that will require further work as we continue to hear in the news about outages and data breaches.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Dale Wang: Agree
Cloud Computing Journal: How should organizations tackle their regulatory and compliance concerns in the cloud? Who should they be asking / trusting for advice?
Why Apple, Not Dropbox, Amazon or Google Drive, is Dominating Cloud Storage
Apple is dominating the cloud storage wars, followed by Dropbox, Amazon and Google according to Strategy Analytics ‘Cloud Media Services’ survey. Cloud storage is overwhelmingly dominated by music; around 90% of Apple, Amazon and Google’s cloud users store music. Even Dropbox – which has no associated content ecosystem – sees around 45% of its users storing music files. Dropbox’s recent acquisition of Audiogalaxy will add a much needed native music player to the platform in the coming months.
In a recent study of almost 2,300 connected Americans, Strategy Analytics found that 27% have used Apple’s iCloud followed by 17% for Dropbox, 15% for Amazon Cloud Drive and 10% for Google Play (see chart).
Usage of cloud storage is heavily skewed towards younger people, in particular 20-24 year olds, whilst Apple’s service is the only one with more female than male users. Amongst the big four, Google’s is the one most heavily skewed towards males.
“Music is currently the key battleground in the war for cloud domination. Google is tempting users by giving away free storage for 20,000 songs which can be streamed to any Android device, a feature both Amazon and Apple charge annual subscriptions for,” observes Ed Barton, Strategy Analytics’ Director of Digital Media. “However, the growth of video streaming and the desire to access content via a growing range of devices will see services such as the Hollywood-backed digital movie initiative Ultraviolet – currently used by 4% of Americans – increase market share.”
Barton continues, “The cloud’s role in the race to win over consumers’ digital media libraries has evolved from a value added service for digital content purchases to a feature-rich and increasingly device agnostic digital locker for music and movies. Dropbox being used by 1 in 6 Americans shows that an integrated content storefront isn’t essential to build a large user base, however we expect competition to intensify sharply over the coming years.”
Strategy Analytics found that, the big four cloud storage services aside, recognition of other brands was uniformly low. Furthermore 55% of connected Americans have never used a cloud storage service – although, amongst consumers who have used one, one third (33%) had done so in the last week.
“There needs to be considerable investment in evangelizing these services to a potentially willing yet largely oblivious audience,” suggests Barton. “Given the size of bet Hollywood is making with Ultraviolet, this will be essential to their success given a crowded market and widespread apathy. However, more fundamental questions remain – is the use of more than one cloud service going to be too much for consumers to handle and will consolidation in such a fragmented market become inevitable?”
Barton concludes, “Although cloud storage is fast becoming a key pillar of digital platform strategies for the world’s leading device manufacturers and digital content distributors, there’s still a lot of work to do in educating consumers – particularly those over 45. With over half of consumers yet to use any consumer cloud based service, 2013 predictions for the ‘year of the cloud’ seem unrealistic. However given the market influence of the leading players pushing the concept, in particular Apple, Amazon, Google and Ultraviolet, I won’t be surprised to see mainstream adoption and usage spike within the next two to three years in the key US market.”
