While many new technologies claim to revolutionize the practice of disaster recovery (DR) for IT environments, few have significantly altered the economics and logistics of building and maintaining a secondary IT site. For most organizations, a secondary site housing server and storage infrastructure has remained the only recovery path for their business from a primary site disaster, failure or outage.
While it might seem preferable to avoid the expenditure of a secondary IT site altogether, what drives investment in DR infrastructures is a set of recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) that respectively determine the maximum allowable downtime and data loss an organization is willing to sustain. While certain organizations may require both of these objectives to be near zero (i.e. instant recovery, no data loss), other organizations may be able to withstand minutes or even hours of downtime. Understanding these objectives is one of the fundamental tenets for DR planning and investment.
Load Balancing 101: Active-Active in the Cloud
Why active-active is not best practice in the data center, and shouldn’t be in the cloud either.
Last time we dove into a “Load Balancing 101” discussion we looked at the difference between architected for scale and architected for fail. The question that usually pops up after such a discussion is “why can’t I just provision an extra server and use it. If one fails, the other picks up the load”?
We call such a model N+1 – where N is the number of servers necessary to handle load plus one extra, just in case. The assumption is that all N+1 servers are active, so no resources are just hanging out idle and wasting money. This is also sometimes referred to as “active-active” when such architectures include a redundant pair of X (firewalls, load balancers, servers, etc… ) because both the primary and backup are active at the same time.
So it sounds good, this utilization of all resources and when everything is running rosy it can benefit in terms of improving performance, because utilization remains lower across all N+1 devices.
Interoute: Attainable SLAs and taking on AWS #AppsWorld
CloudTech caught up with Matthew Finnie, the CTO of IaaS cloud providers Interoute, who is exhibiting at Apps World.
According to Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie, a 100% service level agreement (SLA) is ‘nonsense’, although a lot depends on the sector your cloud company is trying to reach and the shape of your business model.
Interoute, who is currently exhibiting at Apps World in London, has a virtual data centre (VDC) which offers a 99.99% uptime rate and, while it doesn’t reach the magical ‘five nines’ in availability, Finnie inferred that it’s worth looking beyond the statistics.
“99.99% is an actual availability,” he said. “We’re coming at it from a world where we have enterprise customers and carriers who are building businesses on the back of us, and they don’t want a commercial SLA.
“If we gave them three, five hours’ service credits, it doesn …
LuxCloud Accelerates Resellers Business in the Cloud
This post is part of the Parallels Partner Series, featuring the insights of service providers who are growing by leveraging Parallels software, expertise and ecosystem to meet the cloud computing needs of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). View other posts here.
In 2010, LuxCloud saw the opportunity to create a platform to help IT resellers market cloud-based applications on a white-label basis. We knew two things would make this concept compelling to resellers: very low start-up costs – as a result of zero infrastructure investment – and the ability to sell services under one’s own brand. And this was how LuxCloud was born.
We were very clear from the beginning that we wanted to offer a platform which allowed resellers to focus on launching new services and thus growing their business. Addressing issues of incorporating automated business functions (like billing) was important to us, as was the ability to quickly and easily automate the provisioning of services. In addition, the platform needed to be able to scale as quickly as our reseller partners were able to grow their own businesses.
We found our solution in Parallels Automation, which provides a complete and customizable operational and business support system for delivering SaaS. Every aspect of the solution – from service delivery through management and billing – is automated. This enables us and our resellers to rapidly deploy new services while minimizing operational costs and maximizing revenues and profitability.
The scalability aspect of Parallels Automation is another draw. As resellers get comfortable with the business model, they can add new services quickly and easily. They can potentially scale up from a few hundred users to even a million from the same platform and without investing in any infrastructure.
After receiving training from Parallels, we set up an on-boarding process for our resellers, which enable us to get them up and running within a few days. For the reseller, this faster time-to-market means better return-on-investment.
Within weeks of our launch, we won ten reseller partners across Western Europe, earning very positive feedback for our new delivery platform. What also makes LuxCloud popular among resellers is the ease of use and speed of integration and deployment. And because we take care of all service maintenance and management using Parallels Automation, resellers can focus on their core business – selling and delivering cloud services to their customers.
We are making plans to expand our business and services offerings using the Parallels Automation platform to include Microsoft Windows-based shared hosting and other Microsoft hosted applications. We are also planning to expand the business globally, adding additional services and applications according to market needs and demands.
We are using our ‘first-mover advantage’ based on Parallels Automation to create a market niche. While other service providers may recognize the opportunity, our deep understanding of the motivations of resellers, our long-standing relationships with the stakeholders in our ecosystem, and the proven success of our white-label distribution platform, puts us in a leadership position in a burgeoning cloud services distribution market.
Marco Houwen
CEO and Founder
LuxCloud
Non-Function Junction: API Automation for Enterprise Operations
Recently, I’ve been working closely with a number of large enterprise clients who have already gone or will soon go live with Layer 7 solutions at the core of mission-critical infrastructure. I’ve observed that, in the API Management space, proof of concept and initial projects often focus on functional needs but the emphasis shifts to non-functional requirements as environments mature and sharing increases. There’s a clear, three-phase progression for large enterprises.
API Operations AutomationIn Phase 3, it’s all about performance, scalability, operability, security, availability and consumability. The problems are very complex but the goal is to make the resulting solution as usable and simple as possible, given the wide range of users, developers, testers and operators that will be involved in its execution. As technology vendors, we are often guilty of focusing inwardly on bells and whistles, rather than outwardly on interoperability. This works well for phases 1 and 2 but brings a reckoning in the third phase. Fortunately, at Layer 7, we’ve spent the past decade working with enterprise clients and have evolved our products to meet their adaptability, reliability and automation needs.
Why SaaS Vendors Must Offer Automated Sign-On to All Business Customers
Typically, automated sign-on is regarded to be something troublesome and costly, which slows down rollouts, adds complexity and requires involvement from customer IT organizations, something that SaaS vendors often want to avoid at any cost. However, automated sign-on can be one of the most important tools in meeting some of the most important business objectives for a SaaS business:
Engaging customers and keeping them
Minimizing unit costs
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Scaling in the Cloud
As your datacenter needs more capacity, you’re thinking about going to the cloud. What are the key considerations to help plan for the needed capacity over time? And how can the cloud best work with your existing applications?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Brian Jawalka, Principal Solutions Architect, Cloud Strategy at Rackspace Advisory Services, will show how a hybrid approach can add agility, flexibility and speed-to-market for your organization.
Case Study: Cloud-Based Sales & Operations Planning in the Cloud
Cloud computing has changed the way we work. People and businesses can now access services, applications and infrastructure over the Internet, with lower costs, higher productivity and an enhanced user experience.
While cloud computing has revolutionized many aspects of business, its effects have been quite dramatic across supply and demand management. Cloud-based Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is particularly powerful, connecting disparate demand, supply and financial data from a wide swath of packaged and home-grown enterprise information systems as well as a forest of spreadsheets, harmonizing everything into a single, meaningful plan. Delivering this supply chain “Big Data,” analytics and reporting in the cloud means that it can be deployed, scaled, and interconnected quickly, enabling truly collaborative supply and demand planning.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Goldilocks and The Three SSDs
No one disputes cloud computing as a viable resource delivery model. Now the challenge? Deliver the best solution in a world where processor power follows Moore’s Law, storage is bound by the physics of spinning media, and cloud providers need to deliver optimized system level performance at a reasonable cost. Solid State Storage combined with dynamic, intelligent caching software to “learn” data “hot spots” and move them transparently onto flash memory fills the gap.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Scott Cleland, Worldwide Product Channel Marketing Manager at LSI, will describe three flash-based application acceleration alternatives for providers looking to move ahead of the crowd.
Seizing Control of Data Delivery
The “consumerization of IT” is a topic we’ve heard a lot about recently – especially when it comes to “Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).” One area that is less talked about, yet a growing trend under the “consumerization” umbrella, is the use of free, consumer-type file transfer services in the workplace.
A tough economy has forced IT departments to do more with less – especially within small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Working with limited resources and budget, SMB IT professionals are still expected to manage everything from network infrastructure to cloud services to security and compliance issues, all while keeping the business running smoothly. Sometimes this results in long “wait” times for employees.