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ProfitBricks says it can out-Amazon Amazon’s cloud

Barb Darrow — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:00:49 +0000

ProfitBricks is nothing if not ambitious: It plans to take on Amazon in massively scalable cloud infrastructure. That’s no mean feat, but Bob Rizika, CEO of ProfitBricks USA, says the company — which launches cloud services in the U.S. this week — is attacking it from a position of strength.

Robert Rizika CEO of ProfitBricks, USA

The company was co-founded by Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger, the duo who built the global hosting company 1 & 1 and sold it to United Internet for $3 billion a few years ago. That gives them financial resources to devote to this project, Rizika said.

ProfitBrick pushes scale-up cloud

One thing that distinguishes ProfitBricks from Amazon is its different take on scale. While Amazon’s cloud epitomizes massive scale-out architecture, ProfitBricks’ focuses on vertical scale. Customers can elect to use 1 to 48 processor cores and 1 GB to 196 GB of RAM which they can consume and pay for by the minute — not by the hour. (Amazon EC2 instances come with 1 to 16 virtual cores and from 1 to 60 GB RAM.)

Unlike its rivals, the company also offers an all-Infiniband backend and a graphical deployment tool that lets users design their cloud infrastructure by dragging-and-dropping their servers, load balancers on screen, avoiding the input-intensive spreadsheets that people use to plan resources to be deployed in other clouds.

Target users include e-commerce and media companies that typically see very spiky workloads and need to scale up or down quickly. For those companies, the difference between paying for an hour of AWS when only 15 minutes are used and paying for ProfitBricks by the minute, could be a big cost saver, he said. ProfitBricks has been up and running in Europe for six months or so, is running 70,000 servers. Now it’s entering the US market where cloud adoption has been faster. (The disparity between US and European cloud adoption rates will doubtless be a topic of discussion at GigaOM’s Structure: Europe 2012 conference in Amsterdam in October.)

Visibility will be tough

One-upping Amazon, Rackspace et al in technology is one thing. Stealing the spotlight from them is another. Melanie Posey, research VP for market research firm IDC, finds the ProfitBricks proposition intriguing but said getting its message heard above the noise will be tough. ”It all comes down to marketing. If no one knows now unique your cloud is, and that it’s faster, better whatever, it won’t matter,” she said.

It’s certainly not too late to gain a toehold in what is still a very young market. But, as most companies still mull their cloud decisions, more options are coming on line seemingly by the day. In the past few months alone, Rackspace, SUSE, Piston, (see disclosure) and HP have launched OpenStack-based clouds, with Red Hat, Nebula and others on deck. The OpenStack crowd is fighting it out with Eucalyptus and CloudStack open-source aficionados, and Amazon churns out new features every month, ProfitBricks will have to fight to get its message heard.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud

David Strom — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 06:55:34 +0000

While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The issue has gotten more complex, as Amazon and others have dozens of different cloud services available. In this research note, we look at some of the current challenges of calculating cloud costs when using services from the major Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vendors, some of the more important pricing issues to understand, noteworthy third-party vendors to watch, and our predictions for the future.

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Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:55:38 +0000

In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. This quarterly wrap-up discusses these milestones, and provides a near-term outlook for trends, technologies and companies to watch in the next 18 to 24 months.

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Amazon outages — lessons learned

Barb Darrow — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:03:56 +0000

Two recent Amazon outages over the past month certainly got everyone’s attention. One, in late June, was sparked by a violent thunderstorm which cut power, setting up a chain of events that put many Amazon customers offline for hours. That came just two weeks after another significant outage in the same U.S. East data center.

Newvem, a company that studies Amazon EC2 usage based on its customers’ Amazon deployments, said there were signs hours before the outage that provide helpful information on how companies can mitigate the impact of future snafus.

A look at Newvem customers — which run more than 15,000 Amazon EBS volumes in U.S. East — showed that 12 hours before the initial June 28 storm-induced outage, there was a 200 percent to 300 percent latency spike. That meant it took three times as long to load a page, according to Newvem CEO Zev Laderman. When the outage struck, more than 2,000 of those user volumes — or 15 percent of the total — became unavailable. From there, it took about 15 hours to get those users back to their usual capacity. Worse, about 7 percent of those 15,000 volumes may be gone for good, he said.

To be sure, Newvem, an Israeli startup, has a vested interest in publicizing this: It wants to sign up more customers and if it can show that its service can predict problems and recommend palliative actions, it’s good for business.

“One customer — a startup with a few hundred servers– put up a Web site that week … and they lost all their data because they didn’t back it up,” Laderman said.

No company should put itself in that position and Amazon recommends actions to prevent such loss. The fact that many Amazon customers are startups that have little or no traditional IT experience, means they’re susceptible to such issues. Cloud providers just like non-cloud entities, rely on data centers, hardware, software and power — all of which are susceptible to failure. The glory of the cloud is that workloads can be spread around to lessen risk but even that is not foolproof as we have learned.

Here are Newvem’s common sense recommendations to mitigate Amazon cloud risk:

1: Configure Amazon ELBs correctly. That means spreading these elastic load balancers not only across availability zones (AZs) within one data center but across geographies. Pumping data between geographies gets pricey, but it might be the cost of doing business. Some 20 percent of Newvem customers did not do this prior to the June 28 event.

2: Take snapshots of ALL volumes. This, too, is something Amazon already recommends. A service like Newvem’s will check to make sure all volumes have fresh snapshots on hand.

3: Distribute snapshots across regions, not just AZs. Again, that means not only across AZs but geographies. If this is done properly, the business can rollback to a recent snapshot as soon as service is restored with minimal data loss or associated damage.

The bigger, strategic, cloud question

While people get hysterical about Amazon outages because it is the biggest and most high-profile public cloud, snafus like this happen often but on a smaller scale. The big ones get covered, the little ones do not. That’s why cloud users need to bone up on corrective action. Laderman said other than the early-warning latency spikes Newvem customers also experienced “aftershocks” 24, 38 and 40 hours after the big event.

The bigger issue is that just as companies need to spread risk among AZs and regions, they will need to do the same thing with the clouds themselves. The pressure to evaluate multi-cloud deployments was ramping up already but these latest failures add fuel to the fire. No software developer or IT person wants to be the one to explain to the CEO why the website or retail site is offline becuase of a single company’s cloud failure.

As more companies go to multi-cloud deployments, beneficiaries could include the OpenStack gang including Rackspace and Hewlett-Packard as well as GoGrid, SoftLayer and other cloud purveyors. No one expects Amazon to stand still for that. Laderman expects the cloud giant will fight back by making it less expensive for companies to distribute their data and data snapshots across regions in hopes of stemming defections.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user theogeo

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Public, private or hybrid? How to move to the cloud

Barb Darrow — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:09:40 +0000

As is often discussed at GigaOM Pro, beleaguered IT pros are the ones often left to figure out which applications and data should move first and to which type of cloud. But with more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Let’s take a look.

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Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:55:04 +0000

With enterprises now open to hybrid clouds, Amazon Web Services finally relaxed its rigid public-cloud-only stance and launched services to support hybrid-cloud deployments in the first quarter of 2012. On the big data front, the Hadoop players realized very few companies have teams of systems engineers to learn MapReduce. This has meant adding support for SQL and integrating Hadoop with existing data-management tools and systems. In other words, Hadoop has grown up and is now being taken seriously by companies like Oracle and Microsoft. This quarterly report examines these trends as well the exciting M&A and IPO news in this arena. It also includes a near-term outlook for the next 12–18 months.

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Hadoop cloud services don’t go far enough

Jo Maitland — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:00:03 +0000

GoGrid and Sungard join a long list of service providers offering Hadoop in the cloud, but these services are missing a key ingredient at the top of the stack that will appeal to the mainstream.

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Nimbula, Citrix clouds vow Amazon-style computing

Barb Darrow — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:31:12 +0000

If you don’t think that Amazon Web Services is the king of cloud, just look at what other cloud companies are announcing this week. Even paragons of the private cloud world are trying to cloak themselves in the glow cast by Amazon, which is squarely in public cloud realm.

On Monday, Citrix Systems said its new Citrix CloudStack 3 will let customers of all sizes build their own “Amazon style clouds.” The offering is actually the next release of Cloud.com, a private-cloud provider (and service) that Citrix purchased last July.

The new CloudStack, the first to come out under the Citrix brand, adds new support for Swift, the OpenStack object storage technology. And CloudStack 3 includes a “cloud-optimized version of Citrix XenServer as a core-integrated feature,” according to Citrix. Public cloud powers Amazon. Rackspace, GoGrid and SoftLayer all use XenServer or Xen virtualization. Having said that, CloudStack 3 will also support rival KVM, OVM, vSphere and Xen virtualization, Citrix said. CloudStack 3 is now in beta and will be broadly available later this quarter. The product also adds support for Swift, the OpenStack object storage technology.

Cloud.com has seen some good traction as a private cloud platform, with customers including Zynga, Tata Communications and Edmunds.com.

Also on Monday, Nimbula said its new Nimbula Director 2.0 private-cloud software adds support for VMware, which Nimbula will deliver Amazon EC2-like functionality to VMware ESX users. That’s an interesting claim since the company’s co-founders, Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljion, led development of EC2 at Amazon.

The ESXi support means Nimbula can layer its EC2-like management function directly atop the VMware hypervisor. In a full VMware stack, the customer would use vSphere, vCenter and vCloud Director. In this case, Nimbula Director running atop the hypervisor brings Nimbula’s “developer friendly” functionality and management right to the hypervisor itself. According to a Nimbula spokeswoman, classic enterprise applications run great on VMware, but newer apps built to run on Amazon EC2, don’t necessarily run properly on the full VMware stack.

The Director 2.0 software, which will also support VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as as service, is in beta now and should be generally available in March, the company said at the Cloud Connect Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.,. on Monday.

Carl Brooks, cloud analyst for Tier1 Research, a division of The 451 Group said Nimbula has “better technological bona fides than almost any other cloud platform, thanks to the pedigree from Pinkham and Van Biljion.”

He did note that Nimbula’s reference customers, VirtualScale and Solers, are a systems integrator and a solution provider, respectively. “That’s not the creme de la creme enterprise win everyone wants, but the fact that [Nimbula] developed this capability for VMware shows you that the technology is filtering into enterprises via the channel, and no matter how much noise anybody makes about enterprise wins, the majority of cloud platforms are getting sold to service providers and the channel. That’s a fact,” Brooks said.

In general, these private cloud infrastructure providers are pretty much in the same boat. They have customers, but many of them are third-party channel partners as opposed to the enterprise end-user accounts these vendors crave. But, Brooks said, they should embrace that.

“Everyone is chasing Amazon like it’s the gold standard when [what Amazon does] is just one way to do cloud and hardly the way enterprises care to think about it,” Brooks said. “Tell an IT guy at a big shop you can give him a platform to spin up servers in minutes, and he’ll look at you like you’re yesterday’s catch — he’s been able to do that technically since forever. It’s just not the point for enterprise IT; it is the point for IT infrastructure providers.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user theaucitron.

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Startup takes on cloud overprovisioning

Barb Darrow — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:10:17 +0000

Cloudyn, an Israeli startup, says its new SaaS service can help businesses stop buying more public cloud services than they need.

As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud infrastructure, many pay for more than they need because it’s hard to track how many instances are deployed and compare scenarios that might be cheaper.

Now a raft of companies like Cloudability and UptimeCloud have sprung up to monitor cloud services. Some — like Cloudyn — say they go beyond monitoring to showing users how to provision cloud workloads in the most efficient way possible.

“We’ll tell you how to change your provisioning to achieve your results at the lowest possible cost. We look at your use patterns and we look at the pricing of the vendor and bring you a cloud configuration map showing you how to save more,” said Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner in a phone interview.

The customer — Cloudyn has more than 60 beta testers now — registers its cloud services with the company, which in turn gives them a dashboard showing all their instances, databases, and storage. “Then we monitor the environment and provide web analytics dashboard — the user logs onto our SaaS and the system provides them insights into inefficiencies.”

The system provides a list of possible actions — maybe the company should combine all of its small instances into a specific geography, for example. Or, if the customer is running several instances on the same service, it should consolidate them in one box to get better performance at lower cost, Wagner said.

Cloudyn’s service goes live Monday and will be available free till April 30, 2012. Cloudyn now supports AWS but says it will add Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and GoGrid soon.

Customers can look at their cloud dashboards and get some analytics and notification of usage spikes for free. After April 30, when they use the service for cloud optimization, predictive analysis and “proactive projection” of cloud scenarios, charges will range from $80 per month to $700 per month depending on the total amount the company spends on cloud services.

The need for such services will grow with cloud workloads, but so will the number of vendors offering them. All of these companies also have to keep an eye on Amazon, which is adding more of its own monitoring and management services as well, although third-party offerings can look at multiple public clouds to provide more of a comparison shopping experience.

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Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:53:22 +0000

Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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