Essential Technology: A GCS Blog

Your intrepid reporter recently went behind the scenes at a national cloud hosting provider.  Once I pulled back the curtain, would you believe I found:

1) Single points of failure at the firewall and switch level. Yep. For an organization that spent millions on infrastructure and management tools, why not configure your firewall and switches for High Availability. The devices they used all supported HA configurations.

2) No backup of static configurations. If one of the single-points did fail, surely they could recover quickly? Right? So where do they store the configuration backups of these devices? The staff I spoke to had no idea. Reconfiguring a shared firewall and switches from scratch would be no fun at all.

3) Lack of spare parts. Anyone would stock replacement gear if they designed in a single points of failure. Not this cloud provider. Though the staff asserted that spare switches and firewalls exist, we were unable to locate the equipment. No spare firewall. No spare switch. Supposing it does exist, the replacement process apparently starts like this:

"Step 1: Dig through mountain of parts hoping to find replacement gear."

I'm as optimistic about the cloud as anyone, but caveat emptor.

I've often called out Google and other cloud computing vendors that promise cost savings. The truth is that the SMB market makes better decisions with their IT dollars than larger businesses. The often touted savings just don't exist! Cloud computing is new-enough and its vendors proud-enough that most offerings have a very large margin priced in. Enter SoftLayer. SoftLayer delivers a range of managed hosting options as wells as CloudLayer. CloudLayer is a virtualized, highly available infrastructure priced to compete with on-premise solutions in the SMB space.

Unlike other cloud infrastructure providers, SoftLayer features technology frequently found in the SMB. They utilize Fortinet, Dell's Equallogic and Citrix's Xen Server. You'll also find SuperMicro servers and Array Networks load balancers. A powerful web interface enables rapid provisioning and easy management across SoftLayer's three data centers. Pricing for their Public Cloud option starts at only $99 per month for 1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB Storage. Bandwidth is included up to 2TB of outbound traffic while inbound and server-to-server is not metered.

SoftLayer data centers are SAS 70 Type II certified and feature bandwidth or peering with many of the top telecoms. They claim 20,000 servers and more than 5700 customers. In a market dominated by enterprise focused companies, it is exciting to see a cloud solution priced for the SMB. I'm planning a trip to Dallas for the tour shortly and an extensive evaluation. I'll fill in more details when available.

Moving large amounts of data offsite is a difficult thing to do. It is difficult to beat tape drives and an automobile for rapid data replication. Obviously this method has serious limitations. With the rise of Shared Storage, most replication today occurs at the Storage layer. Though application layer replication offers major advantages, it is usually pursued in addition to storage replication.

What is storage replication? Most SANs and many NAS devices offers licensed replication as a feature. GCS' two favorite devices, the HP Lefthand and Dell Equallogic, include these licenses at no cost. By placing a SAN in-office and one at a remote data center, then connecting the sites with sufficient bandwidth, the SANs will replicate data between the two at the block level. This is an efficient method. Unfortunately, the SANs cannot differentiate between legitimate data changes (ie, a saved Word doc) and temporary data changes such as SQL log files. Everything is pushed across the connection. This tends to require large amounts of bandwidth.

The HP Lefthand offers both asynchronous and synchronous replication options. With asynch replication changed data is pushed at scheduled intervals. With synchronous replication the devices attempt near real-time replication. The HP Lefthand only offers synchronous when there is less than 20ms of latency between the sites. The HP Lefthand also offers bandwidth management on the SAN to help restrict the amount of bandwidth consumed on your site-to-site connection.

A readily apparent benefit of SAN replication is virtual machine replication. If my VMs are stored on my SAN, they are replicated to my remote sites. This dramatically reduces recovery time in a variety of outages.

GCS also recommends Microsoft DFS-R for replication of file stores. Simple, reliable and efficient, this technology allows Windows NAS devices to replicate between sites and provide failover in the event of an outage.

HP's Proliant G6 maxes out at 144GB of RAM. 16 core processors are due out in 2012. How many VMs can you cram in a quad, 16-core box with a 144GB of RAM? Enough. Arthur Cole describes trends toward both mainframe-style aggregration and grids of smaller systems. Which is right your for you? One factor in determing the best strategy is:

Additional servers reduce the overhead for virtulization failover. Much like RAID configurations, with 2 servers you must allocate 50% overhead for failover capacity on each server. Three servers only need 33% overhead and so on.

Back in August, I introduced the various components of the System Center family. I also pointed out that the cost would of licensing each product, or even licensing a single product for multiple virtual machines, would be prohibitive for most smaller organizations. However, Microsoft has responded with the Systems Center Management Suite license that includes the licenses to manage multiple virtual machines using the full System Center family for a far more approachable price.  Here is what is included:

·         A license to run the Virtual Machine Manager server.

·         Management license for:

o   Data Protection Manager (DPM)

o   Operations Manager

o   Configuration Manager

o   Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)

This license is sold in two flavors:

·         The Enterprise flavor is licensed per physical server and allows you to manage 4 virtualized operating systems on that server. 

·         The Datacenter flavor is licensed per CPU (a minimum of 2 processors) but allows you to manage an UNLIMITED number of virtualized operating systems on a physical server.  When licensed for two CPU’s the Datacenter license is only about 25% more than Enterprise, and most likely if you have more than 4 VM’s you’ll have two CPU’s and will save money by going with the Datacenter edition.

But for small environments the biggest value of the license comes when using DPM for backup. But to explain the benefit let’s use a small virtual environment example. 

We have a Hyper-V server with 4 virtual machines:

·          A domain controller/file server

·         An Exchange 2007 server

·         A SQL server

·         A SharePoint server

The DPM protection agent also comes in two flavors:

·         Standard Data Protection which allows you to perform basic file level protection of a server.

·         Enterprise Data Protection which is required to provide protection for advanced applications like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Hyper-V

One of the benefits that drove this small organization was the ability to backup an entire virtual machine, which means we would need an enterprise DPM license for the Hyper-V server. When a Hyper-V server is protected with the enterprise license you are also permitted to deploy a standard DPM license inside any of its virtual machines. This allows us to backup the domain controller and file server, but the other servers would each require their own Enterprise protection license. So we would need 4 enterprise licenses.  Similarly, to properly protect all these servers with alternate backup products would require a special Hyper-V agent, SQL Agent, SharePoint Agent and Exchange Agent.

But, if this company was to purchase the Enterprise Server Management Suite they would be entitled to all the Enterprise DPM licenses they needed. And because of the new pricing, they would pay less.  Just 3 enterprise DPM licenses would cost more than the enterprise suite license. And on top of that you get management licenses for all the other System Center products.

There are two gotchas with this management suite:

·         The only System Center Server license included is the VMM server license. So you still need to purchase the server licenses for DPM, Operations Manager and Configuration Manager to take advantage of the management licenses included in the suite.

·         Despite all being part of the same product family, the System Center server product cannot all run on the same server.  Only VMM and DPM can coexist.

Because of these limitations it is likely that smaller environments will only take advantage of the VMM and DPM components of the suite, but it still offers a compelling value to consider.

In today's post on the CIO.com blog, Michael Hugos raises several interesting points about transitioning IT asset costs from fixed costs to variable costs. He boldly predicts that doing so will herald a rapid economic expansion. Though I'm not willing to go so far as he is, I am a big proponent of emphasizing variable costs. The justification is simple dollars and cents.

Even in small organizations IT asset acquisition is well into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.  Dollar for dollar it is hard to beat rolling your own virtualized environment.  Do-it-yourself, if you're able, is the cheapest method. There are several mitigating factors to this:

1) The competition for those budgeted dollars is diverse. Instead of spending $100,000 this year on assets, what if you spent $35,000 on cloud-based offers and moved $65k into a marketing program, new sales reps or other projects that increase top line revenues.

2) The opportunity cost of building and maintaining that system interferes with other IT projects. By migrating routine and time-consuming tasks into optimized environments that are designed for those tasks IT departments can focus on projects that require highly specialized knowledge.

3) New cloud offerings from Terremark, Amazon and 3Tera (among others) are radically altering the scale at which IT exists in small and mid-sized businesses. The cost savings that come from purchasing a small piece of a big pie are significant when compared to your home baked pie.

Many organizations would do well to investigate methods that take IT assets off the books and put those capital dollars into more revenue generating tasks. In any economy that is just good sense.

I needed to find a home for seven wayward servers. The prospective owner had decided to stop owning hardware just as the project to deploy these severs was underway. My job seemed easy enough - replicate a basic Microsoft stack (Exchange, MOSS, SQL, Dynamics GP) for a fixed monthly fee in a land far, far away. I've been closely following the development of hosted/managed/cloud systems for years, have built numerous virtualized environments and I have a very health monthly data center bill. Still the last few days has opened my eyes to the breadth of the cloud's offers. In the end this dynamic market, with a vast pool of options, won over a skeptic like me.

I want to put that last statement into the proper context. I own a value-added-reseller business that has generated millions of dollars in revenue selling hardware and licenses. Last year almost 40% of our revenue was equipment resold from vendors such as HP, Dell, Cisco, Sonicwall and more. I suspect that in the next few years that number will dwindle substantially.

After extensive deliberation I have come up with one singular reason to embrace the 'cloud' that applies to IT departments as well as VARs. We all have better things to do. The time spent procuring, installing and supporting hardware and software detracts from time spent integrating, training and customizing. What if a typical IT project directed a bigger part of the budget at these services? Businesses will derive more value from the technology. The employees will use more of the functionality. The system will work better with the other technology around it. It will more closely match business processes.

Far from competing against the services offered by most IT departments and VARs, cloud computing offers the opportunity to expand these organizations. Those that successfully transition their skill sets can expect to see revenues and budgets increase as businesses receive more consistent performance from existing systems and lower costs to add new systems. This transition will not occur overnight, but in next decade we will see fewer and fewer servers in offices, more servers in the clouds. Think hard about investments in on-premise equipment. There are compelling options out there.

A recent project has forced me to analyze two cloud computing providers - Terremark and Rackspace. In this post I'll discuss my analysis of the two services and use a recently completed Private Cloud project to provide cost comparison.

Terremark's Enterprise Cloud service fit the needs of my client best. This is a fully virtualized environment that completely divorces the client from hardware concerns. The Enterprise Cloud enables rapid deployment of Virtual Machines. All management services from the OS up and managed by the client.  It consists of HP ProLiant servers with a 3Par SAN. Redundant firewalls and load balancers are included in every package. All equipment is shared. Virtualization is performed using VMWare ESX 3.5. Server management occurs through a web application and includes many tasks that you would find in VMWare's management tools. Terremark offers packages at fixed Ghz and GB or RAM (entry is 5Ghz and 10GB RAM). You then add storage, backup and bandwidth. There is no incremental charge per VM, only for the resources it consumes.

Rackspace's Platform Hosting takes a different approach. They supply a mix of dedicated and shared resources to create a similar environment. Firewalls, load balancers and servers are dedicated. SAN resources are shared. Rackspace allows access to the VMware infrastructure tools so all functionality is exposed. Rackspace's price plans vary based on hardware redundancy and resources required.

Some interesting points:

• Terremark offers technical support 12 hours per day. Rackspace's support is 24/7/365.
• Terremark is hardened to withstand a CAT 5 hurricane. Good thing since they are based in Miami.
• Pricing favored Terremark by 25-30% when comparing environments with similar features.
• Network configuration is limited at Terremark. There is a maximum of 4 VLANs.
• Both solutions offer use of existing licenses or their hosted licenses
• Neither were excited about voice applications due to QoS concerns.
• Rackspace does not offer a backup service in the Platform Hosting option. Backup will require a dedicated server and regular offsite downloads.
• Rackspace included 6 TB of download and unlimited upload in their base plan. They claim it was the equivalent of 20Mbps sustained for the entire month.

Honestly I'm afraid I have to end this blog post by changing the name to a braindump. I am beginning a 30 day demo with Terremark immediately. I will continue to assess the two providers and post the information here. Look for follow up posts soon.