Category Archives: Private Cloud

News & Analysis, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Volkswagen

Volkswagen moves to OpenStack platform with start-up Mirantis

VWCar manufacturer Volkswagen Group has chosen OpenStack as its global standard for its next generation private cloud platform, as part of a worldwide standardization project to reduce IT costs and increase automation.

The company signed the deal with start-up Mirantis over the major players in the industry. While the move represents one of the biggest wins to date for the start-up, it would appear that Red Hat have lost out on a healthy deal in the process. Volkswagen is currently a customer of Red Hat, though it is not clear to what degree the relationship will continue.

“As the automotive industry shifts to the service economy, Volkswagen is poised for agile software innovation,” said Mario Müller, VP IT Infrastructure at Volkswagen. “The team at Mirantis gives us a robust, hardened distribution, deep technical expertise, a commitment to the OpenStack community, and the ability to drive cloud transformation at Volkswagen. Mirantis OpenStack is the engine that lets Volkswagen’s developers build and deliver software faster.”

Volkswagen highlighted the move to a private cloud platform will enable the business to better compete in an ever-more digitally enabled world. Müller said that four trends drove the company towards a more agile cloud computing platform, as the new platform enables greater levels of automation as well as a less consuming procurement process.

“Ubiquitous connectivity means we’ll have 50 billion smart sensors in end devices by 2030,” said Müller. “Cloud computing means data access everywhere. That means the amount of stored data doubles every two years. Third, social media. We have 1.3 billion Facebook users today, heading towards 7 billion. And big data. We can do real-time analysis of mass amounts of data.”

Initially Volkswagen will move its infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, ending with Platform-as-a-Service for the infrastructure model. On IaaS, Volkswagen will manage the middleware, runtime, data and applications, whereas Mirantis will manage the operating system, virtualization layer, servers, storage and networking, while on PaaS the company will only manage data and applications. The company aim to have PaaS up and running by July of this year. The transition to the IaaS model was completed at the end of 2015.

“First, it’s a service (the current IaaS platform) and not simply dedicated hardware,” said Müller. “The target VW internal audience is administrators and technical competence centres. It’s not designed for end users. The IaaS services provide virtualized hardware computer, networking and storage running on Linux with root access. Connectivity is via VW’s intranet. It’s not yet connected to the Internet. It doesn’t support legacy applications and we don’t yet offer central backups. It’s available to our teams in America, Europe and Asia.”

The deal represents a major win for Mirantis, which previously counted Red Hat as one of its investors. In two rounds of fund-raising in January and June 2013, Mirantis raised $10 million in growth capital funding from various venture capitalists, as well as a further $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP. The company then launched its own OpenStack distribution in October 2013, putting it in direct competition with Red Hat, though the technology still worked with Red Hat operating systems.

In recent years, the relationship between the two companies would appear to have soured as Red Hat announced in May 2014 that it would no longer provide support to Linux customers using non-Red Hat versions of OpenStack, contradicting the spirit of the open source community. Later that year in November the company also ordered all employees to stop working with Mirantis. The saga would not have appeared to have effected Mirantis’ perception in the market.

“OpenStack is the open source cloud standard offering companies a fast path to cloud innovation,” said Marque Teegardin, SVP at Mirantis. “It is our privilege to partner with Europe’s largest automaker and we are thrilled to support them as they use the software to out-innovate competitors and expand their business on a global scale.”

Enterprise IT, Korea, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Korean government prioritizes growth of cloud computing

Network ExpansionThe Korean government has announced a new policy to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in the country, according to Business Korea.

Speaking at a cloud computing conference in Korea, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning have announced that it will be running a number of initiatives to increase the adoption of cloud computing from 6.4% to 13%, seemingly over the next twelve months. Over the same period, the government also plans to increase the number of Korean cloud companies from 353 to 500, as well as growing private cloud adoption in public institutions to at least 3%.

The Korean government has estimated that should the new initiatives be successful the domestic cloud market could be worth in excess of 1.1 trillion won, roughly £670 million. To support the growth of the industry, the government will also build a cloud computing support centre in Daegu City, which will provide guidance for public institutions who are making the transition.

While the government has laid bare its intentions for the industry in the country, it has not been stated how cloud computing is currently perceived by enterprise. The government has estimated that 6.4% of businesses in Korea currently utilize the cloud, whereas in the UK the figure is viewed as generally much higher. It has been estimated recently that 93% of enterprise in the UK have adopted the cloud.

In what could be seen as a move to encourage enterprise appetite for the cloud, the government has invited enterprises in need of cloud computing in various industries to join the deregulation task force currently led by IT firms in the private sector.

Alongside this announcement, the government has also prioritized the growth of SME’s through the adoption of cloud. In what appears to be a move to emulate companies such as Uber and AirBnB, Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning will work in collaboration with the Center for Creative Economy & Innovation to provide cloud software and infrastructure to smaller organizations who could otherwise not afford the technology.

In terms of international expansion of the Korean cloud computing industry, the government will once again provide assistance highlighting the Software-as-a-Service market. It believes the SaaS market is where the country has the greatest opportunity to compete on the international scale, as there is not an outright market leader for the moment. It also believes that the country is a good position to capitalize on the growing Infrastructure-as-a-Service market in South East Asia.

The success of all cloud initiatives could partly depend on the success of the government in engaging enterprise in the country and building the appetite for the technology, which is at a low adoption rate in comparison to other nations.

hybrid cloud, natural resources wales, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Trustmarque

Natural Resources Wales extends cloud ERP relationship with Trustmarque

CloudSystem integrator Trustmarque has announced it will continue it work with Natural Resources Wales, focusing on disaster recovery, and application and infrastructure support.

The agreement, which has now been in place for two years, was initially launched to help Natural Resources Wales simplify its IT estate following the merger of the three different bodies. Natural Resources Wales was brought about through the merger of Countryside Council for Wales, Environment Agency Wales, and the Forestry Commission Wales, all of which operated on different ERP systems.

“The creation of Natural Resources Wales resulted in a complex and disparate IT estate, and over the past two years Trustmarque has helped us effectively simplify it,” said Paul Subacchi, Head of Business Support Services at Natural Resources Wales. “Our ERP system is absolutely critical to the organisation, enabling us to become more efficient and offer greater self-service functionality to our employees.  Cloud is a significant part of our IT strategy, so we need a platform that is available, resilient, flexible and secure to deliver our ERP system.”

Initially projects focused on consolidating all ERP systems it was using for finance and HR onto a single platform, delivered through a combination of cloud, on premise and managed services. Trustmarque will now deliver Natural Resources Wales’ sole ERP system as a private cloud service, as well as creating a self-service portal, MyNRW, for the organizations 2000 employees.

Security was an important consideration for Natural Resources Wales, as Trustmarque has to continually demonstrate that it meets minimum security requirements set forward by G-Cloud. The requirements range from encryption to protect consumer data transiting networks, Trustmarque staff security screening and consumer separation, as well as ensuring that its own supply chain meets the same standards.

“The work we have done with NRW throughout our collaboration is testament to Trustmarque’s end-to-end IT service capabilities and our expertise in delivering cloud services,” said Mike Henson, Cloud and Managed Services Director at Trustmarque. “By selecting the Trustmarque Cloud, Natural Resources Wales is now able to realise the benefits of its Unit 4 ERP system via a secure and robust platform.

“We’ve also removed the potential ‘headache’ that software licensing can cause, allowing Natural Resources Wales to focus on its core business without any compliance concerns. We see our continuing partnership with Natural Resources Wales as an important and valuable digital transformation programme, and look forward to our future work together.”

AWS, DropBox, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

Dropbox drops Amazon Web Services for in-house system

Hand Touching A Cloud Secured By Electronic LockDropbox has announced that it will no longer be utilizing Amazon Web Service’s cloud infrastructure, favouring its own in-house solution.

The project, named “Magic Pocket” has been in the works for over two and a half years, and will store and serve over 90% of users’ data on the company’s own custom-built infrastructure. Dropbox was one of Amazon’s first customers to utilize its S3 service to store bulk data eight years ago, but has commented that the relationship will continue in certain areas.

“As the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system,” said Akhil Gupta, Dropbox VP of Engineering. While the company has traditionally stored file content on Amazon, the hosting of metadata and Dropbox web servers has always been in data centres managed by Dropbox itself.

“There were a couple reasons behind this decision. First, one of our key product differentiators is performance. Bringing storage in-house allows us to customize the entire stack end-to-end and improve performance for our particular use case,” said Gupta. “Second, as one of the world’s leading providers of cloud services, our use case for block storage is unique. We can leverage our scale and particular use case to customize both the hardware and software, resulting in better unit economics.”

The company has witnessed healthy growth over recent years, recently passing the milestone of 500 million users and 500 petabytes of user data, prompting the in-house move. Back in 2012, the company only had around 40 petabytes of user data, demonstrating 12-fold growth in the last four years. Dropbox initially began building its own storage infrastructure in 2013, with the company first storing user files in house in February 2015. The team hit its goal of storing 90% of its data in-house on 7 October 2015.

“Magic Pocket became a major initiative in the summer of 2013. We’d built a small prototype as a proof of concept prior to this to get a sense of our workloads and file distributions. Software was a big part of the project, and we iterated on how to build this in production while validating rigorously at every stage,” said Gupta “We knew we’d be building one of only a handful of exabyte-scale storage systems in the world. It was clear to us from the beginning that we’d have to build everything from scratch, since there’s nothing in the open source community that’s proven to work reliably at our scale.”

The move highlights the transition through to private cloud as a business benefit once enterprise reaches a certain level. Zynga is another company who have a similar story, moving between private and public cloud in recent years. Zynga is now in the process of shifting its data back onto in-house infrastructure. Dropbox’s move highlights the potential for overhead reductions when effectively moving onto private cloud, though if the company fails to scale as planned, the move could become a financial burden.

While the move does result in AWS losing a substantial amount of business, it is not the end of the relationship. The team will continue to partner with Amazon for new projects, but will also offer its European customers the opportunity to store data on AWS infrastructure in Germany, should they request it.

News & Analysis, Open Source, Private Cloud, Suse

SUSE targets simplification with OpenStack Cloud 6 release

Public privateGerman open source vendor SUSE claims its new OpenStack Cloud 6 is designed to overcome the fear of commitment that is putting IT buyers off engagement with the cloud. SUSE claims its new private cloud offering is a solution to the buying objections that potential customers have outlined.

According to SUSE’s own feedback, many companies want the cloud but think it’s too much hassle to install applications and can’t risk the disruption to their business. A recent study commissioned by SUSE found that more than 90% of large companies say they’ve already got at least one private cloud within their business, can see the advantages and would, in theory, use cloud computing for more business-critical workloads. But in practise they are not going to. Their worst fears are over installation challenges, possible vendor lock-in and a lack of OpenStack skills in the market.

SUSE claims it can address these fears and aims to convince potential clients that they won’t be subject to IT project creep. In response it is offering non-disruptive upgrades and a more business-friendly release cycle with longer support duration. This combination, it claims, will compensate for the limited skilled resources by requiring fewer upgrades and minimising disruption to production environments.

In addition, SUSE aims to offer more training to boost the available skills base with a new OpenStack training and certification scheme. SUSE is introducing the SUSE Certified Administrator-OpenStack  (SCA-OpenStack) certification along with a new training course on how to install and administer SUSE OpenStack Cloud. This is intended as a complement to, not a replacement for, existing SUSE OpenStack Cloud training. The training was developed in collaboration with the OpenStack Foundation exam development team.

A new course will specifically prepare students to take both the OpenStack Foundation Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam as well as the SCA-OpenStack exam. The new course will be held unveiled at an OpenStack Summit in Texas on April the 25th.

The Cloud 6 is based on the OpenStack release Liberty, has Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support designed to make it easier to move applications and data to the cloud. Cloud 6 also supports Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware hypervisor options and the OpenStack Manila shared file system service.

News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Rackspace, Red Hat

Rackspace launches Red Hat driven Private Cloud

Cloud computingHosting company Rackspace has launched Private Cloud which (as the name suggests) is a private cloud ‘as a service’ built on the foundation of OpenStack technology.

The new offering is an addition to its portfolio of Rackspace OpenStack-as-a-Service offerings, as part of the hosting company’s strategy to simplify and popularise OpenStack private and hybrid clouds.

The service is to be fully managed by OpenStack and Red Hat experts at Rackspace and backed by the company’s ‘Fanatical Support’ team. The offering is backed by a guarantee of 99.99% OpenStack API uptime. Rackspace contributes to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform by testing and certifying hardware and software compatibility and benchmarking its performance and availability. Rackspace manages and maintains the Red Hat environment including the underlying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

It’s all about making the customer’s infrastructure problems go away, according to Darrin Hanson, vice president and general manager of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. “We help make OpenStack simple by eliminating the complexity and delivering it as a service to customers in their data centre, a Rackspace data centre or in a colocation facility,” said Hanson.

bloomreach, Funding, investment, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Investors stake $56 million on BloomReach’s private cloud personalisation

bloomreach logoA new system of e-commerce personalisation has broken all records for attracting investment in a private cloud start up. Now the inventors intend to use the money to expand beyond e-commerce into all areas.

Private cloud personalisation specialist Bloomreach has announced a recent award of $56 million of venture capital. Investors contributing to the Series D round of funding included Bain Capital, Battery Ventures, Lightspeed, New Enterprise Associates and Salesforce Ventures. As part of the same initiative Guidewire Software CEO Marcus Ryu was appointed to the BloomReach board.

BloomReach offers an alternative to companies who cannot afford to buy their way to the top of Amazon’s search listings. Since Amazon captures half of the first product searches made by consumers this leaves digital businesses with a massive financial barrier to marketability. Meanwhile the marketing technology sector has fragmented into 2,000 companies offering 2,500 products. Bloomreach claims it can demystify and simplify the choices with omnichannel intelligence and a single personalization platform.

It has two main applications, BloomReach Commerce and BloomReach Compass. The former uses BloomReach’s Organic Search and SNAP applications to boost online sales up to 40% by algorithmically optimizing user’s site experience, it claims.

Compass uses role-specific analytics providing machine-intelligence insights, key performance indicator management and action-tracking for marketers and merchandisers. It claims it can create an average $8,000 in revenue a month for clients on every action taken. The development of BloomReach Compass made it possible for BloomReach to expand beyond e-commerce, it claims, but it needs venture funding to bankroll that growth.

BloomReach said it plans to use the money to strengthen its big-data technology and expand globally into all digital business markets.

E-commerce is a $3.5 trillion market driven by marketing technology with personalization at the core, according to investor Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures. “We are just in the fourth inning of the marketing-tech revolution,” said Agrawal. Instead of relying on outdated methods of personalisation with demographic or geographic data, BloomReach will provide workflow and transactional-oriented technologies to create one-to-one personalization at scale, it claims.

“There’s a ten billion dollar opportunity in marketing tech, and BloomReach has the expertise to understand, learn and apply big data to make every experience personal for all digital businesses,” said BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta.

hybrid cloud, Opinion, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Simplivity

Deciding between private and public cloud

cloud computing machine learning autonomousInnovation and technological agility is now at the heart of an organization’s ability to compete.  Companies that rapidly onboard new products and delivery models gain competitive advantage, not by eliminating the risk of business unknowns, but by learning quickly, and fine-tuning based on the experience gathered.

Yet traditional IT infrastructure models hamper an organizations’ ability to deliver the innovation and agility they need to compete. Enter the cloud.

Cloud-based infrastructure is an appealing prospect to address the IT business agility gap, characterized by the following:

  1. Self-service provisioning. Aimed at reducing the time to solution delivery, cloud allows users to choose and deploy resources from a defined menu of options.
  2. Elasticity to match demand.  Pay for what you use, when you use it, and with flexible capacity.
  3. Service-driven business model.  Transparent support, billing, provisioning, etc., allows consumers to focus on the workloads rather than service delivery.

There are many benefits to this approach – often times, cloud or “infrastructure as a service” providers allow users to pay for only what they consume, when they consume it, as well as fast, flexible infrastructure deployment, and low risks related to trial and error for new solutions.

Public cloud or private cloud – which is the right option?

A cloud model can exist either on-premises, as a private cloud, or via public cloud providers.

In fact, the most common model is a mix of private and public clouds.  According to a study published in the RightScale 2015 State of the Cloud Report, enterprises are increasingly adopting a portfolio of clouds, with 82 percent reporting a multi-cloud strategy as compared to 74 percent in 2014.

With that in mind, each workload you deploy (e.g. tier-1 apps, test/dev, etc.) needs to be evaluated to see if it should stay on-premises or be moved offsite.

So what are the tradeoffs to consider when deciding between private and public cloud?  First, let’s take a look at the considerations for keeping data on-premises.

  1. Predictable performance.  When consistent performance is needed to support key business applications, on-premises IT can deliver performance and reliability within tight tolerances.
  2. Data privacy.  It’s certainly possible to lose data from a private environment, but for the most part, on-premises IT is seen as a better choice for controlling highly confidential data.
  3. Governance and control.  The private cloud can be built to guarantee compliance – country restrictions, chain of custody support, or security clearance issues.

Despite these tradeoffs, there are instances in which a public cloud model is ideal, particularly cloud bursting, where an organization experiences temporary demand spikes (seasonal influxes).  The public cloud can also offer an affordable alternative to disaster recovery and backup/archiving.

Is your “private cloud” really a cloud at all?

There are many examples of the same old legacy IT dressed up with a thin veneer of cloud paint.  The fact is, traditional IT’s complexity and inefficiency makes it unsuitable to deliver a true private cloud.

Today, hyperconverged infrastructure is one of the fastest growing segments in the $107B IT infrastructure market, in part because of its ability to enable organizations to deliver a cloud-operating model with on-premises infrastructure.

Hyperconvergence surpasses the traditional IT model by incorporating IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor onto commodity x86 “building blocks”.  For example, SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure is designed to work with any hypervi­sor on any industry-standard x86 server platform. The combined solution provides a single, shared resource pool across the entire IT stack, including built-in data efficiency and data protection, eliminating point products and inefficient siloed IT architectures.

Some of the key characteristics of this approach are:

  • Single vendor for deploying and supporting infrastructure.  Traditional IT requires users to integrate more than a dozen disparate components just to support their virtualized workloads.  This causes slow deployments, finger pointing, performance bottlenecks, and limits how it can be reused for changing workloads. Alternatively, hyperconvergence is architected as a single atomic building block, ready to be deployed when the customer unpacks the solution.
  • The ability to start small and scale out without penalty.  Hyperconvergence eliminates the need for resource allocation guesswork.  Simply start with the resources needed now, then add more, repurpose, or shut down resources with demand—all with minimal effort and cost, and no performance degradation.
  • Designed for self-service provisioning. Hyperconvergence offers the ability to create policies, provision resources, and move workloads, all at the VM-level, without worrying about the underlying physical infrastructure.  Because they are software defined, hyperconverged solutions can also integrate with orchestration and automation tools like VMware vRealize Automation and Cisco UCS Director.
  • Economics of public cloud. By converging all IT infrastructure components below the hypervisor and reducing operating expenses through simplified, VM-centric management, hyperconverged offerings deliver a cost model that closely rivals the public cloud. SimpliVity, for example, is able to deliver a cost-per-VM that is comparable to AWS, including associated operating expenses and labour costs.

It’s clear that the cloud presents a compelling vision of improved IT infrastructure, offering the agility required to support innovation, experimentation and competitive advantage.  For many enterprises, public cloud models are non-starters due to the regulatory, security, performance, and control drawbacks, for others, the public cloud or infrastructure as a service is an ideal way to quickly increase resources.

Hyperconvergence is also helping enterprises increase their business agility by offering all the cloud benefits, without added risks or uncertainty. Today technology underpins competitive advantage and organizations must choose what works best for their business and their applications, making an approach combining public cloud and private cloud built on hyperconverged infrastructure an even more viable solution.

Written by Rich Kucharski, VP Solutions Architecture, SimpliVity.

Enterprise IT, HP, News & Analysis, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

HP Helion Public Cloud to end, buyers told to go to Amazon

HPHP has revealed that the OpenStack-driven HP Helion Public Cloud will close on January 31 2016 as it looks to focus on private and managed cloud offerings, which is says it will now ramp up.

HP announced the news via its blog in which it also revealed that would invest more in the Helion OpenStack platform which, it said, has more realistic prospects for strong customer adoption. The Helion Openstack system is the foundation of its private cloud offering.

Bill Hilf, HP Cloud’s general manager, explained the logic behind the decision. “The market for hybrid infrastructure is evolving quickly. Today, our customers are consistently telling us they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud,” said Hilf. They only want access to software as a service (SaaS) applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads, he added.

With customers pushing for private cloud to be delivered faster than ever before, the company has had to prioritise, he said.

“We will continue to innovate and grow in our areas of strength, we will continue to help our partners and to help develop the broader open cloud ecosystem, and we will continue to listen to our customers to understand how we can help them with their entire end-to-end IT strategies,” said Hilf.

HP will support its new model by expanding its partner base and integrating different public cloud environments, Hilf said. Customers who want public cloud should go to Amazon, Hilf said.

“For customers who want access to existing large-scale public cloud providers, we have already added greater support for Amazon Web Services as part of our hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus,” said Hilf.

Azure, Capgemini, Consulting, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, Private Cloud

Capgemini recruits Microsoft Azure in cloud service expansion push

CloudCapgemini has added Microsoft to its cloud services programme as it seeks to give a broader range of cloud services to more clients. Microsoft is the first in a number of vendors that CapGemini is seeking to add to its cloud service portfolio, it said.

Under the new Capgemini Cloud Choice with Microsoft scheme it will offer cloud advice, managed platforms and ‘applied integrated innovation’ services. Initiatives include OneShare, which speeds the testing and development of Microsoft Azure systems and offers to control costs through usage monitoring and resource scheduling.

A second mooted offering is SkySight, which is described as an ‘Azure-like’ private cloud which aims to help enterprises to speed up the installation of new applications. Capemini says it will help clients get value for money on managed services and fine-tune the configuration process.

A third scheme will create industry-focused IP offerings, such as a system tailored to the specific needs of the banking sector, based on the experiences of Capgemini’s own in house banking specialists. The domain expertise will be offered in all major industries, including pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and the health sector.

The cloud offering will cover all solutions encompassed within hybrid, public, hosted and private cloud services using Azure.

As part of the offering, Capgemini will align activities with independent software vendors and start-ups to create new ways of delivering integrated solutions. New ventures and start-ups will also benefit from the offering, Capgemini says, as partners will become a focal point for integrating new innovations into the Capgemini solutions portfolio.

The expansion comes after Capgemini subsidiary Sogeti reported that it managed to cut the costs of one client, Dutch postal service PostNL, by 20 per cent by migrating its IT services onto the cloud with Microsoft Azure.

“Capgemini helped us to define our roadmap to migrate more than 40 applications and now operates its Cloud Platform for us,” said Marcel Krom, CIO at PostNL. “We have reduced costs and gained flexibility in handling volume variances.”