Cloud Computing_Network World Whitepaper
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INSIDE
T H E C O N N E C T E D E N T E R P R I S E
COVER IMAGE TO GO HERE
S P E C I A L R E P O R T : : D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1
2 Cloud computing disrupts thevendor landscape
5 Mapping out the landscape
6 New Cisco cloud computing
framework pushes mgmt., col-laboration
8 EMC works to boost accep-tance of clouds
9 Cloud, consumerization, loss ofIT control in 2012
10 Preparing for real costs ofcloud computing
Cloud ComputiNgChaNges everythiNg
Non traditional vendors enter cloud market
lCloud computing
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The sheer number o cloud players - or
companies that claim to be cloud players -- is
staggering. By some estimates there are more
than 2,000 sotware as a service (SaaS) com-
panies alone. At this early point in the cloud
revolution, there are certainly ront runners,
but the eld is wide open.
For example, the marquee SaaS player,
Salesorce.com, owned a paltry 8.7% o the
total SaaS market, according to a 2010 IDC
report that tracked 84 vendors. Other big
names --Intuit, Cisco, Microsot, Google and
Symantec - were all below 5% each. Thatleaves scores o other competitors with tiny
market shares today, and no place to go but up.
Inrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has
more than 30 major players, both pure-play
outts that provide pay as you go, on-demand
compute services, and those rising into the
cloud rom the traditional managed services
realm. And Forrester research is watching at
least 40 platorm-as-a-service (PaaS) provid-
ers who say they can help developers build
cloud apps better, stronger, aster.
To urther muddy the waters, many ven-
dors are extending their cloud oerings
across the neat SaaS, PaaS and IaaS bound-
aries. Its true that most o the disruption
caused by cloud computing relates to enter-
prise [operations] and IT. But its also been
pretty disruptive to the vendor community as
well, says David Mitchell Smith, vice presi-
dent and ellow at the Gartner Group.
Smith believes that a tremendous shakeout
will occur over the next year or two. He pre-
dicts that by 2013 a small handul o vendors
will emerge as leaders delivering both enter-prise systems and cloud services.
So who are those vendors? The two names
on Smiths short list are Microsot and
VMware.
Smith argues that Microsot made a seismic
shit to a SaaS delivery model in 2008 and has
since delivered Microsot Oce365, Share-
Point Online, and Microsot Dynamics CRM
Online. In the PaaS arena, Microsot is push-
ing its Azure platorm o AppFabric, SQL
Azure and Windows Azure. And, Microsots
making headway in pushing Azure down
into the IaaS space as well.
VMwares vSphere hypervisor and
management sotware has long provided
trusted virtualization capabilities in the
enterprise. VMware is also making a strong
IaaS play by building a network o vendors
who use vCloud to deliver cloud compute
services.
And VMware has various PaaS irons in the
re. Theres its own vFabric PaaS platorm.
Plus, the company launched CloudFoundry,
an open PaaS platorm housed at www.CloudFoundry.org where developers can con-
tribute to collaborative open source projects.
And theres a hosted PaaS platorm operated
by VMware at www.CloudFoundry.com.
There are no guarantees in a market this
size, but we see [Microsot and VMware]
as the companies in the best position now,
Smith says.
SaaS is the most mature cloud layer and,
in act, existed well beore the term cloud
computing gained prevalence, says Robert
C cn n ncAmazon and Google shake things up, but Microsoft and VMware may get last laugh
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Mahowald, Research Vice President o SaaS
and Cloud Services at IDC.
Mahowald makes these two observationsabout the state o SaaS today: Most enter-
prises are looking to SaaS or net new appli-
cations, not as a replacement or existing apps.
And many sotware vendors are developing
their products to be consumed via the cloud
rst, and or on premise consumption sec-
ondarily, i at all.
IDC says the 2010 SaaS market rang in at
$16.6 billion, a gure that represents three-
quarters o all IT-based public cloud rev-
enue. IDC predicts that by 2015, worldwide
SaaS revenues will skyrocket to $53.6 billion
annually.
The SaaS market has solidied because it
just makes nancial sense or both the pro-
vider and the consumer. That combination
always drives adoptions, says Robert K.
West, ounder and CEO o Echelon One, an IT
security and risk management consultancy.
Vendors with an edge today tend to be those
that developed their products to run natively
in the cloud. They were built to take advan-
tage o the clouds elastic nature, to be sold on
a usage-based model, have multi-tenancy as
a basic tenet so that security is constructed
accordingly, and have worldwide reach and a
resilient inrastructure underneath the covers.
Companies held in high regard or their SaaS
oerings include Salesorce.com (CRM), Work-Day (HR and nancial management), Google
(desktop productivity), Oracle (business analyt-
ics), Concur Technologies (travel and expense
management) and NetSuite (ERP).
Thats not to say that the traditional enter-
prise sotware giants such as SAP and Oracle
are out o the race. But they are playing a bit
o catch-up. Some o the tension between
those two camps came to the ore in the recent
dustup between Salesorces Marc Benio
and Oracles Larry Ellison.
The SAPs and Oracles o the world are
trying to adapt their existing sotware to the
cloud, which is extremely dicult and timeconsuming, says Joe Coyle, CTO o Cap-
gemini North America, a consulting and out-
sourcing rm that helps enterprises deploy
cloud services. He argues that the process o
putting these applications in the cloud is not
dicult, but getting them to take advantage o
the elastic nature o the cloud, is.
Getting an SAP application to know there is
more compute power available when it needs
it, is the challenge, Coyle says. Until those
applications are reworked to understand what
is dynamically available to them, they will lag
behind the SaaS leaders, Coyle says.
On Saturday, SAP made a major cloudmove, spending $3.4 billion to buy Success-
Factors, which oers an increasingly popular
set o on-demand human resources applica-
tions. Analysts say the move by SAP could
bring its entire cloud sotware portolio into
a new ocus.
Paul Turner, senior product manager at
NetSuite which has 10,000 customers using
its SaaS-delivered ERP sotware, says there
are several tell-tale signs o a alse cloud
application. Turner says a native cloud appli-
cation is completely Web-based, rom the
user experience through to the administrator
experience. It needs to be as easy to access as
Gmail, argues Turner.
Secondly, the service must oer a custom-
ization layer that allows enterprise IT to make
the tweaks to suit its needs, and those changes
must migrate seamlessly with each upgrade
to the service. And inally, Turner argues
there must be a high level o transparencyabout any downtime and security issues.
SaaS begets PaaSMany o the leading SaaS players -- Salesorce.
com, Google, NetSuite, and WorkDay -- are
trying to solidiy their positions within their
market segments by developing PaaS envi-
ronments or third-party ISVs.
For example, Salesorce launched Force.
com, a PaaS oering built to support its SaaS
service; then bought Heroku in order to
provide a more open PaaS service. The com-
pany claims 200,000 apps built on the Force.
com platorm.Were adding developers daily, says Byron
Sebastian, executive vice president o platorms
at Salesorce. The hot area is mobile applica-
tions running in the public cloud, he says.
The hurdle Sebastian encounters when
pushing PaaS into the enterprise is inertia.
We get a lot o pushback rom olks who
are just used to doing business the old way,
Sebastian says.
A second segment o the PaaS market com-
prises general purpose development plat-
orms that support multiple languages and
cloud inrastructures, says Krishnan Sub-
ramanian, an independent industry analyst
and blogger at www.cloudave.com.
Microsots Azure and Googles App
Engine are leaders in this category, Subrama-
nian says. The hot start-ups are CloudBees
and Engine Yard, he adds.
And Subramanian believes VMwares
CloudFoundry shouldnt be counted out,
as the eld shakes out over the next 18 to 24
months, because it espouses the open source
approach popular with the developer set and
cash-strapped start-up sotware companies.
But its still very early in the game.
Forrester analysts John Rymer and Stean
Rein describe the PaaS market as sprawling,
ast-changing, and very immature. Thereslittle agreement on what comprises a PaaS in
the rst place, most PaaS vendors are small,
some o the bigger ones have relatively imma-
ture products, and other major vendors like
IBM, RedHat and Oracle have only recently
entered the market.
Forrester divides the PaaS world into our
categories, with some vendors competing in
multiple segments.
In the largest group, sotware develop-
ers are allowed to use their current tools o
choice locally and then push code out to the
cloud. Playing in this segment are ActiveState,
Appian, Force.com, Google, LongJump, MagicSotware, Microsot, NetSuit, OutSystems,
Servoy, TIBCO, Vaakya, VMware, Wave-
maker and WS02.
Then there are cloud development envi-
ronments where everything happens in the
cloud. These PaaS oerings are browser
based and developers build applications in
a remote data center cloud. The players here
are Appian, Cordys, Force.com, Inuit, Track-
via and WOLF Frameworks.
Some companies target business experts,
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not coders. Caspio, Cordys, IS Tools, Mendix,
Orange Scape, WorkXpress and Zoho provide
tools or creating applications without codingin order to speed up app delivery times.
The last category allows developers to
use whatever tool they want to build their
cloud applications and the platorm tackles
the deployment, scaling and management o
these apps in the cloud data center. The play-
ers here are Amazon, Appistry, Apprenda,
CloudBees, Cloudsot, Engine Yard, Gigas-
paces, Heroku, IBM, Joyent, Microsot, Red
Hat, Standing Cloud, TechCello and VMware.
Rymer notes that enterprise IT should act
cautiously when it comes to PaaS because
start-ups are risky and big vendors move slowly
and may use their PaaS oerings simply as call-ing cards to sell their current products.
Rymer says the two companies likely to
enjoy long-term success in the PaaS market
are Microsot and Salesorce. Every other
vendor is a long-term risk, he adds.
I enterprise sotware developers do want
to push orward, Rymer oers these tips.
Find out how well the vendor supports the
ilities: security, scalability, availability, reli-
ability and serviceability. Next, determine
how each PaaS service jibes with the enter-
prises existing application development tal-
ent. Finally, nail down what benets PaaS is
likely to provide. Cutting costs is a hard oneto obtain. Time to market is relatively easy to
obtain, Rymer says.
IaaS ree or allIaaS is currently the smallest market o the
three major cloud categories, but is expected
to have the astest growth rate over the next
three to ve years. Gartner says last years
total o just over $2 billion will grow by that
much or each o the next our years.
The 800-pound gorilla is Amazon. Com-
petitors see EC2 both as an ingenious use
o surplus compute power and a nemesis to
be deeated by the marketing mantra thatsays a mass-market retailer simply cannot
cater to the complicated needs o enterprise
customers.
But this market is evolving to be more com-
plicated than simply Amazon vs. the rest o
the IaaS world, says Lydia Leong, research
vice president at Gartner.
I your dierentiation is were not like
Amazon, were enterprise-class!, youre now
competing against dozens o other provid-
ers who also thought that would be a clever
market dierentiation. Not to mention that
Amazon already serves the enterprise, and
wants to deepen its inroads, wrote Leong ina recent blog post.
Leong is Gartners go-to author when it
comes to analyzing the IaaS market. Her
report last December on the cloud IaaS and
Web hosting provider market (encompass-
ing private, public and hybrid cloud services)
identiied AT&T, Rackspace, Savvis (pur-
chased by CenturyLink), Terremark (pur-
chased by Verizon) and Verizon as the mar-
ket leaders. Visionaries were Amazon, CSC,
GoGrid, IBM and Joyent.
A new report (which was not yet made
public at press time) analyzes a sub-category
o IaaS vendors that oer automated, multi-tenant services or scale-out cloud hosting,
virtual lab environments, sel-managed vir-
tual data centers, and turnkey virtual data
center services. Rackspace, AT&T, Savvis,
Terremark, Verizon (with its home-grown
Computing as a Service), and OpSource are
the big names in this market.
The separation [o these segments] is
grounded in the act that some vendors provide
very good inrastructures without any services
and others get the managed services right, but
dont have very good clouds, Leong says.
The traditional, old-school telecom carriers
are sometimes seen as dinosaurs, but Coylesays they shouldnt be discounted. Just think
o who controls all the bandwidth, right? It
becomes a no brainer then, Capgeminis
Coyle says.
The carriers have another advantage over
cloud newbies: long-term relationships with
enterprise decision makers. When it comes
to the cloud sale into big enterprises, we
already have a seat at the planning table as a
trusted service provider, says Steve Caniano,
vice president o AT&Ts hosting and cloud
services.
AT&T, British Telecom and Verizon lead the
pack o carriers in the cloud to some degree, butin terms o building out reliable IaaS-ocused
data centers, Verizon is the most advanced,
Coyle says. He argues that the point o the Ter-
remark purchase was not the extra data center
ootprint, but the management services that
Terremark wraps around its IaaS.
Managed services are where the real money
lies or cloud vendors, says Coyle, adding that
the Amazons o the world are driving prices
down so low that the carriers will not be able
to compete on raw compute power alone.
IaaS companies are starting to realize they
have to oer these managed services - or at
least create APIs so you can have manage-ment sotware plug in and monitor these
clouds like you do your internal assets -- to
get into the enterprise and pull in their next
level o business, Coyle says.
Rackspace was so condent that custom-
ers would be willing to pay or these wrap
around services like application deployment,
deep system monitoring and unied hybrid
cloud management, that the company spear-
headed the OpenStack project to make basic
IaaS platorms interoperable.
As vendors try to hone their competitive
edges, customers are nding that theyre not
limited to one IaaS provider.Shelton Shugar, senior vice president
or SaaS at CA Technologies, oversees IaaS
vendor selection. You have to actor in each
IaaSs scale, global ootprint, quality, price
and the fexibility in which they can adapt
to your particular project. The answers to
those questions will vary with the scope o
each cloud project.
Having multiple (he advises not more than
three or management becomes a nightmare)
IaaS providers will become common place,
says Shugar, who divulged his company uses
Rackspace but declined to name the others in
CA Technologies multi-vendor IaaS strategy.Having multiple IaaS providers gives CA bet-
ter worldwide coverage and a bit o an edge in
negotiating avorable terms.
Its good to have a couple o IaaS provid-
ers working or you to share the load, says
Doug Harr, CIO or Splunk, a data mining and
indexing sotware developer in San Francisco,
which also runs all o its business operations
in the cloud via Netsuites SaaS oering.
Harr explains that Amazon is the compa-
nys deault IaaS provider because its service
is so wide and deep. But every project brings
a new evaluation, so the choice is wide open
based on the use case, Harr says.And that seems to be the prevailing wisdom
at this point. Enterprises looking or cloud
services should check out the big names, but
should also take a good hard look at the many
innovative cloud start-ups. n
Burns is a freelance writer and editor
based Carlisle, Pa., who has over 15
years experience covering the networking
industry. She can be reached at
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mn ncMeet the vendors in the cloud computing marketplace
Citrix targets virtualization,orchestration layers
Were they guilty o cloudwashing - slap-
ping the cloud label on existing products?
Were they ignoring the cloud and risking
getting let in the dust? Were they scram-
bling to re-invent themselves as cloud service
providers?
Turns out that companies like Cisco and
Juniper, CA and Citrix are sticking to their
core strengths and positioning themselves as
enablers o the cloud, providing the underly-
ing hardware and sotware just like theyve
been doing or enterprise and service pro-
vider customers or decades.I Citrixs XenServer virtualization plat-
orm is the body o what the company has
to oer to service providers and enterpriseslooking to build and tap into the public cloud,
then CloudStack is the brains behind the
operation.
CloudStack is the Java-based open source
cloud orchestration sotware Citrix picked up
with its recent acquisition o Cloud.com last
summer. It is designed to ease the adminis-
trative hassles associated with deploying and
managing large networks o virtual machines.
Even beore Citrix bought Cloud.com in
July, about 80% o Cloud.coms customers
were already using XenServer as their cloud
optimized hypervisor. So those two layers
have been working together or a very long
time, says Sameer Dholakia, group vice pres-
ident and general manager or the cloud plat-
orms group at Citrix. That said, CloudStack,
can also manage Linux KVM (kernel-based
virtual machine), VMwares VSphere and
Oracles Oracle VM as well as handle bare-
metal provisioning. Support or Microsots
Hyper-V is slated next year.
It is core to our strategy not to create [ven-
dor] lock-in at any layer in the stack, adds
Dholakia.
Over 70% o Citrixs cloud-building busi-ness is done with telcos (Korea Telecom, Brit-
ish Telecom and Telstra in Australia, to name
a ew) who see Amazons innovative way odoing business in the cloud as a big threat to
their traditional revenue stream.
Many o the service providers we are work-
ing with are building multiple cloud oerings
build on dierent virtual inrastructures or a
variety o timing and cost reasons and they are
using CloudStack to manage them all, Dhola-
kia says.
There are cost reasons or having multiple
virtualization platorms as a cloud provider,
but there really is no reason why youd want
to maintain two, separate orchestration layers
to manage them, Dholakia says.
One layer up in Critrixs cloud enablement
stack is CloudPortal (a property that came
into the Citrix old in part with the Cloud.com
buy, but also through the companys purchase
o EMS- Cortex in February), which is a suite
o tools that enables a service provider to set
up the business processes involved in run-
ning a public cloud. It provides things like on-
boarding, account management, billing andsel-service provisioning.
For enterprises who want on-premise
public-like cloud services behind their own
rewall, Citrixs strategy hinges on the pos-
sibility o hybrid management. Through a
combination o XenServer and CloudStack
deployments on premise and in the cloud,
customers could set up cloud zones within
the same management interace. These cloud
zones would have to be connected via another
Citrix product called Cloud Bridge, which
runs on top o companys line o NetScaler
VPN appliances.
This is still a very early use case o ourproducts. Most customers are really think-
ing about one side o the wire or the other,
Dohlakia says. But he contends the wind is
deinitely blowing public clouds into the
enterprise landscape.
Cisco sees UCS as keycloud building block
Were they guilty o cloudwashing - slap-
ping the cloud label on existing products?
Were they ignoring the cloud and risking
getting let in the dust? Were they scram-
bling to re-invent themselves as cloud service
providers?Turns out that companies like Cisco and
Juniper, CA and Citrix are sticking to their
core strengths and positioning themselves as
enablers o the cloud, providing the underly-
ing hardware and sotware just like theyve
been doing or enterprise and service pro-
vider customers or decades.
The only place Cisco plays directly in the
cloud is in the SaaS arena with its WebEx col-
laboration, video and telepresence services,
which account or about $1 billion o Ciscos
By Christine Burns, network world, deC. 5, 2011
With scores o new cloud companies pop-ping up and so many existing playersjumping on the cloud bandwagon, we
wondered where the traditional enterprise net-working vendors stood?
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New Cisco cloud computing framework pushes mgmt., collaboration
By Jim duffy, network world, de. 6, 2011
Cisco this week unveiled products and packaging options
or customers looking to implement public, private and
hybrid cloud computing.
Ciscos new CloudVerse ramework is designed to enable
organizations to build, manage and connect public, private and
hybrid clouds. It includes some existing Cisco products, such
as Unied Computing System servers,
Nexus switches and network manage-
mentapplications, as well as new
sotware or collaboration, improved
management and enhanced connectiv-
ity, and services to help customers
design and deploy their environments.
According to Cisco, more than 50%
o computing workloads in data centers
will be cloud-based by 2014. Also,
global cloud trac will grow more than
twelveold by 2015, to 1.6 Zettabytes per
year -- the equivalent o more than our
days o business class video or every
person on Earth, the company says.
This expected growth creates the need or tighter interac-
tion between data centers and networks to support end-to-end
cloud application and service delivery in a dynamic, on-
demand model, Cisco says.
Analysts say CloudVerse will ace competition rom Alcatel-
Lucents CloudBand and rom other cloud IT vendors that are
expected to soon announce their own comprehensive cloud
enablement oerings.
CloudVerse, and Alcatel-Lucents recent CloudBand
strategy, are the most comprehensive and ocused cloud
enablement oerings aimed at service providers, says Dana
Cooperson o Ovum. Both have the typical IT elements that
are part o any cloud story, but the new part or both Alcatel-
Lucent -- which partners with HP or the IT bits -- and Cisco is
the emphasis on combining the IT/data center piece with the
network/communication piece.
Others see CloudVerse as a way to overcome barriers to
cloud adoption -- but only i customers adopt a Cisco-only
solution.How do you solve some o the barriers out there that keep
people rom adopting cloud? asks Zeus Kerravala o ZK
Research in assessing the rationale or CloudVerse. Its solv-
ing the management and interoperability problems with the
cloud. This shows that Cisco is thinking about cloud service
and adoption. But multivendor [interoperability], youd think
that would come sometime down the road.
The new sotware Ciscos rolling out or CloudVerse includes
cloud-specic management applications or the UCS servers
and Nexus switches; or ASR edge routers; and or Ciscos
hosted collaboration platorm.
For management, Cisco unveiled Intelligent Automation or
the Cloud, which provides automated provisioning and control
o data center resources so IT services can be delivered within
and between data centers. Cisco also rolled out Network
Services Manager, which is designed to automatically create,
deploy and modiy physical and virtual networking resources
on demand.
For the ASR edge routers, Cisco has
added its Network Provisioning Sys-
tem (NPS) sotware to the ASR 1000
and 9000 models. NPS debuted with
the CRS-3 carrier core router last year-- it acts as a GPS or the network by
steering trac toward the most reach-
able source o compute and storage
resources, or content.
In the CloudVerse context, NPS
is the oundation or interconnect-
ing separate cloud networks -- what
Cisco calls Cloud-to-Cloud Connect
-- enabling dynamic resource identication, allocation and
optimization between data centers and clouds.
And on the hosted collaboration solution (HCS) platorm,
Cisco added Private Cloud HCS, which is intended to allow
enterprises to build their own collaboration cloud using Cisco
validated and tested designs. Cisco also added Mobile HCS,which allows mobile service providers to now oer collabora-
tion rom the cloud on mobile phones
This oering extends HCS to mobile devices rom xed
devices on desktops.
A third enhancement to HCS is Customer Collaboration,
which is a cloud-based contact center oering. Adding these to
the cloud is intended to make the services more aordable and
accessible to organizations implementing cloud.
Cisco is supporting CloudVerse with new cloud enablement
services, which combine Ciscos proessional services with
that o its partners to help organizations design, deploy and
optimize cloud computing or their business.
Cisco says early elements o CloudVerse are being used by
more than 70% o cloud providers, including ACS, a Xeroxcompany; Fujitsu; Orange Business Services; Silicon Valley
Bank; Telecom Italia; Telenica Spain; Telstra and Verizon
Terremark.
CloudVerse will be generally available in 2012, Cisco says.
Cisco also plans to extend its SecureXsecurity architecture to
CloudVerse. SecureX involves use o a tagging technology in
Cisco rewalls to identiy a wide range o inormation about a
users network usage, such as applications, devices, location
and time o day, so that security decisions can be made in a
context-aware ashion.
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$40 billion in annual revenue.
But where were really ocused on is
enabling people to build public clouds, says
Lew Tucker, Ciscos CTO o Cloud comput-
ing, using Ciscos networking know-how, its
reputation in both the enterprise and carrier
markets, and, o course, its gear.
But we also know that its not easy to stand
up a cloud, says Tucker, who was hired 14
months ago to develop Ciscos cloud strategy.Beore coming to Cisco, Tucker was rst vice
president at Salesorce.com where he over-
saw the development o AppExchange. And
then he served as CTO at Sun where he was
responsible or building Sun Cloud, an early
IaaS platorm targeting Java developers.
While there are many dierent clouds out
there, there is an underlying cloud model that
we all adhere to. We want the cloud inra-
structure to have a pool o server, networking
and storage resources that we virtualize and
turn into a service or applications to take
advantage o, Tucker says.
At the center o Ciscos cloud enablementstrategy is its Uniied Computing System
(UCS), which is an enterprise class blade-
based platorm that tightly integrates server
and networking unctions. Cisco introduced
UCS in 2009. Tucker qualiies UCS sales
as very successul and
industry reports say that as
o August there were 7,400
UCS customers, 2,000 o
whom were added in the pre-
vious quarter .
Cisco is also attacking
cloud rom another angle
with its strategic partner-ship with EMC, VMware and
Intel in a joint venture called
the Virtual Computing Envi-
ronment (VCE) Company.
This is way to give cloud pro-
viders an integrated inra-
structure platorm that will
greatly speed up their time
to market. VCE is headquar-
tered in Dallas and sells its
products as pre-integrated
sets o Cisco switching and UCS servers,
EMC storage, and virtualization provided by
VMware.
Cisco is also throwing its weight behind
OpenStack, the open source cloud comput-
ing eort originally spurred by Rackspace.
Tucker says Cisco is working with 14 other
vendors to dene a virtualized networking
service called Quantum to help developers
write applications that can inherently takeadvantage o more interesting network topol-
ogies and embedded network services.
Essentially, we want developers to be able
to spin up isolated virtualized L2 networks
just as i they were spinning up virtual
machines, Tucker says.
Juniper ofers abric or high-perormance clouds
Were they guilty o cloudwashing - slap-
ping the cloud label on existing products?
Were they ignoring the cloud and risking
getting let in the dust? Were they scram-
bling to re-invent themselves as cloud serviceproviders?
Turns out that companies like Cisco and
Juniper, CA and Citrix are sticking to their
core strengths and positioning themselves as
enablers o the cloud, providing the underly-
ing hardware and sotware
just like theyve been doing
or enterprise and service
provider customers or
decades.
Jun ip er ha s a th re e-
pronged cloud strategy that
includes selling network-
ing gear in the data centerso most major IaaS players,
providing secure connec-
tions between virtual data
centers and cloud customers,
and orchestrating how virtu-
alized resources get allocated
to cloud application services.
The cornerstone o Juni-
pers cloud eort is QFabric,
says Mike Marcellin, vice
president o strategy and
marketing or Junipers Platorm Systems
Group. QFabric is a new switching architec-
ture announced in March that creates a singlelogical switch connecting the entire data center.
It replaces Spanning Tree which links access,
aggregation and core switches. By latten-
ing the three-tier network, QFabric reduces
latency in the data center, where most o the
networking communication happens between
servers or between servers and storage.
QFabric is also a product line that has been
available since September comprising the QF
Director management platorm; the QF Inter-
connect chassis, which is the logical switch
abric; and the QFX3500 node, a 10 gig top-
o-rack switch that supplies high-density
ingress and egress ports.
Juniper has made its mark in leading in
scale and perormance. Weve massively
rethought how high data center networking
happens and QFabric is how we are address-
ing perormance there, Marcellin says.
On the security ront, Juniper has a strong
presence in the data center with its line o
high-end SRX line o irewalls. Also, the
company - by way o the acquisition o Altor
Networks late in 2010 - now has a line o vir-
tual network rewalls, the Virtual Gateway
(vGW) series.
For our customers who are trying to build
out a cloud inrastructure, having a rewall
sitting inside the hypervisor helps our cus-tomers round out their security story, Mar-
cellin says.
One o the biggest issues acing IaaS ven-
dors, contends Marcellin, is how to eciently
orchestrate the delivery o inrastructure ser-
vices to the apps running in the cloud.
For all the elements o the virtual center
that Juniper provides, the company has tried
to make them manageable via JunOS Space,
an open sotware platorm that allows cus-
tomers, partners, and developers to build
and deploy apps that manage and analyze
Juniper-provided network inrastructure
and conduct operations management.Think about an application that will let you
congure many, many switches in an auto-
mated way. Or an application that lets you
congure hundreds o virtual rewalls in an
automated way, Marcellin says.
These tasks may sound pretty basic, Mar-
cellin says, but having a platorm that
enables this level o automated management
will help Juniper customers avoid congura-
tion errors in massive data centers support-
ing a public cloud.
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CA weighs in with Cloud 360Were they guilty o cloudwashing - slap-
ping the cloud label on existing products?Were they ignoring the cloud and risking get-
ting let in the dust? Were they scrambling
to re-invent themselves as cloud service
providers?
Turns out that companies like Cisco and
Juniper, CA and Citrix are sticking to their
core strengths and positioning themselves as
enablers o the cloud, providing the underly-
ing hardware and sotware just like theyve
been doing or enterprise and service pro-
vider customers or decades.
CA Technologies addresses the public
cloud in three ways: helping enterprises
understand how to use it; enabling service
providers to build it; and, managing cus-
tomers expectations about how operat-
ing in the cloud will change how they do
business.
Using the public cloud - whether you are
talking about IaaS, PaaS or SaaS -- requires
discipline, says Andi Mann, CA technolo-
gies vice president o enterprise and cloud
solutions.
You cant just throw mission critical appli-
cations with personally identiable inorma-
tion up there because you are going to run
into compliance, security, privacy, licensing
and perormance issues.
To help customers determine the right
applications and the right timing, CA wraps
consulting services around several o its
portolio, project and capacity planning, anddesign and modeling tools in a program called
Cloud 360.
The two main products are AppLogic,
which enables IT departments and service
providers to rapidly build and deploy cloud
applications and Automation Suite or Cloud,
a cloud management suite that oers applica-
tion deployment and workload management
and provides a single interace or control-
ling both private-cloud and public-cloud
resources.
This gives service providers the turnkey
underpinning they need to build out a public
cloud service that can compete with the Ama-
zons and the Rackspaces, but with the secu-
rity, auditing and reliability in place to attract
the more conservative enterprise customers,Mann says.
On a more general level, Mann argues
that all o CAs inrastructure, application
and security management tools can be used
to allow an enterprise to closely monitor its
activity in the cloud and the data collected can
be used to help them transorm how they do
business there.
I a business unit is now responsible or
allocating its own IT consumption, they had
better have a good handle on what they are
paying or, Mann says. n
EMC works to boost acceptance of cloudsBy tim Greene, network world, deC. 16, 2011
EMC has tied its ortunes to the uture o cloud computing
and is working hard to change the hearts and minds o IT
executives so they will embrace the same vision, accord-
ing to the rms chie marketing ocer.
To that end the company is promoting college degree pro-
grams or data scientists, helping service providers developcloud services and trying to lessen the perception that cloud
adoption threatens traditional IT jobs, says Jeremy Burton,
EMCs CMO.
In the new year, EMC will push cloud curriculum into colleges
to prepare a workorce that can support Big Data, Burton says.
EMC proposes creating data science as a major in select col-
leges that will lead to a degree similar to the computer science
degree. This will help respond to a need and develop advocacy
or EMCs vision in the corporate world, he says.
The company also has been working with service providers to
develop cloud inrastructure that is compatible with the same
types o inrastructures being built privately. That way the pro-
viders can oer up services that businesses can buy to create
hybrid clouds that oer better costs and fexibility, he says.
EMC already promotes cloud administrator and cloud architect
certications or current IT workers. There are 1,200 certied
cloud architects now who bring knowledge about the inrastruc-
ture to their workplaces. As IT departments become more cloud
savvy, adoption o cloud services will increase, he says.
Once IT sta is amiliar with the practicalities o cloud and
views it as a career opportunity, their ears that it threatens
their jobs will ade. It will become an unemotional economic
decision, and use o cloud will be managed to a service level.
There wont be tur wars over who will build it and whether
jobs will be lost, he says.
IT departments will be run as service providers with a
catalog o services needed or applications to run. They will be
able to set a price or the cost o each application because IT
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will be more transparent. This would
support chargeback to business
units or services they consume. And
i a service provider oers the same
service or a set price, IT will be able
to say whether that is a good deal,
Burton says.
As IT looks at its application port-
olio and manages or costs versus
business value, the line between
what can be trusted to the public
cloud will move, with more applica-
tions being trusted to public clouds,
he says.
EMC and its virtualization partner,
VMware, are working with 30 to 40
reputable providers including AT&T,
Rackspace, SingTel and Verizon to
develop cloud services, Burton says.
I businesses and service providers
use similar architectures, it becomes
easier or businesses to move appli-
cations between private and public
clouds as needed.
With this type o transparency,
it becomes possible to manage
or cost, he says. Large service
providers are working with EMC to
do workload classication and deter-
mine which applications should be
handled in public vs. private clouds.Big Data poses other challenges.
Analytics is important, and EMC is
talking to service providers to deliver
analytics as a service.
For example, in conjunction with
VMware, EMC has built a high-
perormance nancial services cloud
or the New York Stock Exchange
that includes storage or low-latency
trading applications. The network was
relatively idle ater the trading day so
it is being used to do backup at night
or nancial customers and crunch
data about the days trading andpush it to traders so they can use it
to prepare or the next day. Number
crunching is table stakes that every-
one in the eld does, but this enables
doing it or less, Burton says.
Other similar niche cases will
result in other unlikely service pro-
viders emerging to support unlikely
use cases, he says.
C, cnzn, f it cn n 2012
By Ann BednArz, network world,
deC. 2, 2011
IT budgets and responsibilities are
moving out o the control o IT
departments and into the hands o
others, thanks to trends such as con-
sumerization and cloud computing,
Gartner says in its vision or 2012 and the
coming years.
That means, to be successul, IT organiza-
tions will have to excel at relationship man-
agement and be adept at coordinating more
widely distributed activities, according to
Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and
Gartner ellow.
As users take more control o the devices
they will use, business managers are taking
more control o the budgets IT organizations
have watched shit over the last ew years,
Plummer said in a statement. The IT orga-
nization o the uture must coordinate those
who have the money, those who deliver the
services, those who secure the data, and those
consumers who demand to set their own pace
or use o IT.IT departments need to adapt now or be
swept aside, Plummer warned.
With that in mind, here are Gartners top 11
predictions or 2012:
1. Low-cost cloud services will canni-balize up to 15% o top outsourcingplayers revenue by 2015.
Just as low-cost airlines disrupted the
transportation industry, the projected $1
trillion IT services market is acing urther
disruption rom industrialized low-cost IT
services (ILCS), which Gartner describes as
an emerging market orce that will alter thecommon perceptions o pricing and value o
IT services. Vendors will need to invest in
and adopt a new cloud-based, industrialized
services strategy, the research rm says.
2. The investment bubble will burstor consumer social networks in 2013,and or enterprise social sotwarecompanies in 2014.
In the consumer social network space,
theres a large crop o vendors with
overlapping eatures competing or a nite
audience. In the enterprise market, small
vendors are struggling to grow, consolida-
tion is imminent, and big players such as
Microsot, IBM, Oracle, Google and VMware
are muscling in on the action, Gartner says.
While substantial excitement will be raised
by private rms going public, valuations o
smaller independent vendors will diminish
as recognition sets in that the opportunities
or market dierentiation and ast growth
has eroded.
3. At least 50% o enterprise emailusers will rely primarily on a browser,tablet or mobile client instead o adesktop client by 2016.
As the options or email clients continue
to grow, the need or mobile device manage-
ment platorms will soar and suppliers will
be pressured to support more collaboration
services, including instant messaging, Web
conerencing, social networking and shared
workspaces, Gartner predicts.
4. Mobile application developmentprojects targeting smartphones andtablets will outnumber native PC proj-ects by a ratio o 4-to-1 by 2015.
Smartphones and tablets represent more
than 90 percent o the new net growth in
device adoption or the coming our years,
and increasing application platorm capabil-
ity across all classes o mobile phones is spur-
ring a new rontier o innovation, particularly
where mobile capabilities can be integrated
with location, presence and social inorma-
tion to enhance the useulness, Gartner says.
5. 40% o enterprises will make prooo independent security testing a pre-condition or using any type o cloudservice by 2016.
Third-party testers wont be the only way
or enterprises to evaluate cloud services or
their security capabilities. Inspectors certi-
cations will become a viable alternative or
complement to third-party testing, Gartner
says. This means that instead o request-
ing that a third-party security vendor con-
duct testing on the enterprises behal, the
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enterprise will be satised by a cloud provid-
ers certicate stating that a reputable third-
party security vendor has already tested itsapplications.
6. More than 50% o Global 1000companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud byyear-end 2016.
Under pressure to reduce costs and oper-
ate more eciently, more than 20% o orga-
nizations are already selectively storing
customer-sensitive data in a hybrid cloud
environment, Gartner says.
7. 35% o enterprise IT expendituresor most organizations will be man-aged outside the IT departmentsbudget by 2015.
Business managers and individual employ-
ees are demanding more control over the IT
expenditures related to their jobs. CIOs will
see some o their current budget simply real-
located to other areas o the business. In other
cases, IT projects will be redened as busi-
ness projects with line-o-business managers
in control, Gartner predicts.
8. 20% o Asia-sourced inishedgoods and assemblies consumed in
the U.S. will shit to the Americas by2015.
Many companies that serve the U.S. market
will shit their sources o supply rom Asia
to the Americas, including Latin America,
Canada and the U.S., thanks to political, envi-
ronmental, economic and supply chain risks,
Gartner says. Except in cases where there is
a unique manuacturing process or product
intellectual property, most products are can-
didates to be relocated.
9. The fnancial impact o cybercrimewill grow 10% per year through 2016,
due to the continuing discovery onew vulnerabilities.
Growth in consumerization and cloud com-
puting will lead to the introduction o new
sotware vulnerabilities and attack methods
by inancially motivated hackers, Gartner
warns. The combination o new vulnerabili-
ties and more targeted attacks will lead to con-
tinued growth in bottom-line nancial impact
because o successul cyber attacks.
10. The prices or 80% o cloud services
will include a global energy surcharge by
2015.
Some cloud data center operators alreadyinclude an energy surcharge in their pricing
package, and Gartner expects to see more
providers ollow suit. Business and IT leaders
should be prepared to see it included in uture
cloud service contracts.
11. More than 85% o Fortune 500 organiza-
tions will ail to eectively exploit big data or
competitive advantage through 2015.
Most organizations are in no shape to
handle the technical and management chal-
lenges posed by big data, Gartner says. Col-lecting and analyzing the data is not enough
-- it must be presented in a timely ashion so
that decisions are made as a direct conse-
quence that have a material impact on the
productivity, proitability or eiciency o
the organization. As a result, most wont be
able to exploit available data or competitive
advantage. n
pn f c
f c cnBy BoB Violino, Computerworld,
deC. 5, 2011
Most experts agree: The cloud
is moving past the hype
stage and starting to deliver
tangible benets, primar-
ily increased fexibility and
agility.
But moving to the cloud can also mean
added costs, some o which are unexpected,
according to IT executives whose organiza-
tions have implemented or are consideringcloud services.
While these costs wouldnt necessarily
prevent companies rom getting real business
value out o cloud computing, they could have
an impact on the overall cost-benet analysis
o cloud services.
Moving and Storing Data
It can cost tens o thousands o dollars per
year to move large volumes o data to public
cloud services and to store that data or long
periods o time. Many companies might not be
aware o the expenses involved.
A one-time move can [cost] thousands odollars, says Hernan Alvarez, senior direc-
tor o IT and operations at WhitePages Inc., a
Seattle-based company that provides online
contact inormation or more than 200 mil-
lion people and 15 million businesses.
Network bandwidth accounts or much
o the cost o moving data: Cloud providers
might charge upload and download ees.
And even though data and systems are being
hosted o-site, there are internal labor costs.
People think there are no labor costs [with
the cloud], but as you scale up [to] handle
workload, theres a complexity with manag-
ing large numbers o cloud instances, just like
managing a large number o servers, Alva-
rez says. Another big cost is or long-term data
storage in the cloud. When you consider the
data growth rates over the next three years,
the lie-cycle cost o data can be really high,
Alvarez says. You continue to pay or that
every month when data is stored in the cloud.
But these costs are only unexpected i you
dont ully comprehend the cloud model, he
says. I you think about CPUs, capacity andstorage [needs] and chart that over time, you
can get a pretty good handle on what the costs
are and i you can do it more cost-eectively
internally.
WhitePages considered using the cloud or
data backup, but ater extensively evaluat-
ing eight vendors, the company determined
it would be too expensive -- as much as three
to our times what it would cost to keep data
internally, Alvarez says. So the company
opted to handle long-term data storage on-
site, in its private cloud.
In general, though, using public cloud
computing or purposes other than storageeliminates the need to deploy and maintain
applications internally. WhitePages has been
using public cloud services or about two
years and now uses 11 cloud-based applica-
tions rom Salesorce.com, SuccessFactors,
ADP, WebEx, Yammer and other providers.
This has led to savings that greatly outweigh
any o the unexpected costs, Alvarez says.
Integrating Apps From Multiple Vendors
Pacic Coast Building Products wants to
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start using cloud computing in a big way and
has evaluated services rom several vendors.
But the Rancho Cordova, Cali.-based pro-vider o goods and services to the construc-
tion industry has limited its cloud usage so
ar because the economics are not quite there
yet, says CIO Mike ODell.
Two reasons or this are the diculty o
integrating sotware rom disparate vendors
in the cloud, and the act that Pacic Coast
would incur added costs i it tried to handle
the integration on its own.
For example, the company uses Microsot
Exchange or email and Ciscos Unity Unied
Messaging or voice mail, and its interested
in using both o those applications as cloud
services. Integration between [Exchange
and Unity] in the cloud, at least the last time
we looked, wasnt there, ODell says.
Without integration, users wouldnt have
some o the capabilities they have now, such
as automatic deletion o voice-mail messages
on their phones when they receive the mes-
sages via email.
The same sorts o integration challenges
exist with larger and more complex applica-
tions, such as ERP, ODell says.
For example, or us to put [SAP] in the
cloud means wed have to give up eatures or
spend a lot o money on integration, he says.
Maybe its just a matter o immature tech-
nology, but the integration side is where thehidden costs are. I you dont look at this right
out o the gate, you might not be as happy with
the economics at the end as you thought you
would be.
Testing Software
The need to test sotware beore migrat-
ing to the cloud can also result in unoreseen
costs.
We bumped into some expense that we
did not expect or testing and debugging a
vendor app that had not been run in a cloud
conguration beore, says Bill Thirsk, vice
president o IT and CIO at Marist College inPoughkeepsie, N.Y.
The college was moving a large-scale ERP
system onto a private cloud, using servers that
the vendor hadnt yet approved. Marist uses
its private cloud to provide online services
such as registration, billing inquiries and
payments to students, aculty and research
organizations.
Thirsk says 99% o the colleges ERP
migration activities went very smoothly,
and overall we saved hundreds o thousands
o dollars by using a cloud conguration. But,
he adds, stabilizing the system within a cloud
that already supported 900 virtualized serv-ers gave us quite a challenge.
The added expense was to untangle the
maze o what versions [o] the operating
systems and databases would work, Thirsk
says. It was [a] matter o changing some
code. It took some time and eort to gure out
exactly what lines needed to be changed.
Free Cloud Pilots Can Be Costly
Be aware that ree pilot programs or cloud
services can quickly turn into expenses.
Many providers oer ree pilots, with vari-
ous approaches about when these ree pilots
turn -- automatically -- into paid services,
says Frank Ridder, an analyst at research rm
Gartner. Some pilot schemes are very short.
Beore undertaking any pilot program,
organizations should negotiate all contract
terms and discounts that are due i the pilot is
successul, Ridder says.
Setup costs are another area to look out or.
Clients oten get attracted by cheap ongoing
[service] prices, and do not see the sometimes
high [transition and integration costs], Rid-
der says. For a service like email, he cautions,
these costs can easily be $10 to $30 per seat.
Hidden costs can also crop up i applica-
tions arent primed to take ull advantage o
the capabilities o cloud computing.We made the assumption that the ERP
programming was sophisticated enough to
take advantage o all the processors, memory,
caches, storage devices and network connec-
tions that the cloud conguration oered,
Thirsk says. But it wasnt, and revising the
sotware code required a considerable
amount o application developer and sys-
tems programmer time. We have seen a 30%
increase in perormance, but it wasnt ree,
he says.
Rent and Utilities
IT executives who move systems to thecloud might encounter another unexpected
cost i they suddenly nd themselves pay-
ing expenses that wouldnt normally be their
responsibility.
There are, o course, many costs associ-
ated with hosting a system internally, but not
all o them, like power and rent, are paid out
o my IT budget, says Jonathan Alboum, CIO
at the U.S. Department o Agricultures Food
and Nutrition Service (FNS). With the cloud,
these basic inrastructure charges are baked
into the overall cost, so Im now paying or
some things that previously didnt come out
o my IT budget.Since the summer o 2010, the FNS has
been using an Amazon.com cloud service to
host an application thats oered through the
agencys Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program (SNAP), which provides the benets
that used to be known as ood stamps.
The tool, called the SNAP Retailer Loca-
tor, provides an online map that helps people
nd retailers that accept SNAP debit cards.
The FNS decided to put the application in the
cloud because that setup allowed or a quick
launch and was highly scalable, among other
reasons.
Since hes using a cloud-based service,
Alboum has to pay new monthly costs and
take a new approach to budgeting. Overall,
[the cloud] is very manageable and likely
results in overall lower costs or the govern-
ment, he says. But it is dierent rom what
weve traditionally experienced.
Its not a matter o the cloud service cost-
ing more than in-house hosting. I think o
this as a cash-fow issue, Alboum explains.
I Im going to pay monthly costs, I need to
have available budget to cover those costs at
the time I incur them. In the more traditional
model, I would purchase hardware and asso-
ciated services in a lump sum. The new model
is likely less expensive, but requires a changeto budgeting practices.
Much about the cloud is still relatively new,
and experts say organizations evaluating
cloud services need to look at both the costs
and potential benets. In a report on cloud
services in April 2011, Gartner noted that
IT executives should take steps to manage
inherent risks and unexpected costs during
the cloud services revolution.
The cloud model is immature and raught
with potential hazards, says Gartner analyst
Frank Ridder. Cloud computing is driving
discontinuity that introduces exciting oppor-
tunities and costly challenges. Organiza-tions need to understand these changes and
develop realistic cloud sourcing strategies
and contracts that can reduce risk.
The cloud sourcing lie cycle includes our
main elements: sourcing strategy, vendor
selection, contracting, and management and
governance, says Ridder, adding, The lie
cycle is a critical area to plan and manage,
regardless o whether organizations source
their IT services through internal or external
resources. n