According to the RedisToGo blog:

“2012 has been a rocky year for AWS-East. We’ve seen several outages from freak storms to gremlins in the servers, making it hard for anyone wanting to achieve 99.999% uptime. We’ve been planning multi-zones for a while, but as Hurricane Sandy approached AWS-East, we were ready for the worst. We sent a mail to our customers and opened up our multi-zone to all customers as a manual process.”

After Superstorm Sandy — which did not impact US-East after all but wreaked havoc on other data centers in New York and New Jersey — RedisToGo offered the US-West zone to all its customers.

As reported before, there are reasons that many companies relied so heavily on US-East. Some Amazon services debut there first and cost less than in other regions where higher labor and utility costs are passed along to customers. But, given the downtimes suffered by these AWS customers, you have to wonder if all of them are considering a similar move or even a move of some of their workloads to a second cloud provider.

Rackspace goal: Converting tire kickers to buyers

Rackspace, which would very much like to displace Amazon in large accounts, is happy with the interest it’s gotten so far in its 3-month-old OpenStack-based cloud compute offering. Now it needs to convert that interest into actual deals, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier told me in an interview after the company’s q3 earnings call on Tuesday night.

San Antonio-based Rackspace is the godfather of the OpenStack open-source cloud which is now managed by the OpenStack Foundation and in the past few months it’s rolled out more pieces of that private- and public-cloud puzzle.

On the public cloud side, Rackspace will take on Amazon, at least in service conscious shops that want and need support and service. But it will also face off against a growing number of its OpenStack brethren — Hewlett-Packard, Cloudscaling, Internap, Red Hat and others. But the field is even more crowded than that with more established open-source cloud technologies from Eucalyptus, CloudStack and OpenNebula also in the mix.

Centurylink – Savvis goes big on IaaS

When Centurylink bought Savvis two years ago, the game plan was to combine Centurylink’s telecom expertise with Savvis’s data center know-how to provide cloud infrastructure — which it’s been doing for enterprise customers in a custom one-off manner. Now, the company’s SavvisDirect service, in beta since last month, provides on-demand, self-provisioning infrastructure by the hour, according to InformationWeek.

While AWS remains the dominant player in public cloud infrastructure, it’s still early yet in the world of cloud migration. The latest Gartner Magic Quadrant ratings shows that dominance — Gartner gives Amazon its due:

“AWS has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes it one of the few infrastructures suitable for batch computing, especially those workloads that require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time. AWS also offers specialized infrastructure options for high-performance computing and big data applications, along with a “spot pricing” market for compute capacity.”

But AWS is not invulnerable. Critics, including Gartner, say its narrowly-defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) leave much to be desired by enterprise customers and that the bewildering array of separately priced cloud services is confusing.

Probably most important, there is an array of savvy IaaS competitors coming down the pike including Terremark,  CSC, Joyent, Tier3 Networks, Virtustream and others, Gartner said. Not mentioned is Google, which launched the Google Compute Engine in June. I would be willing to bet that Amazon has its eyes on that effort as well.

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• There were sporadic issues with undersea cable Atlantic Crossing-2 (or AC-2), sources said. These cables are the main data lifelines between continents.
•  Telx reported that most of its New York and New Jersey data centers were on generator power as of 9:30 a.m. EDT.
• As feared, 75 Broad Street, which houses several data centers in the low-lying Zone A of Manhattan, was severely impacted, affecting Internap, Peer 1 and other providers.
• INIT7, a Swiss provider of IPv6 infrastructure, was affected by a storm-related power outage at Equinix’ 8th Avenue facility in Manhattan.  The company also reported connectivity issues to Miami and Los Angeles that have since been resolved.
• Equinix reported widespread issues with its data centers in the areas around NYC, but said they all have 48 hours of fuel
•  A Navisite data center in Manhattan’s Zone A is also running on generators. It has refueled and has enough to last 72 hours and will refuel as needed.

Lobby at Verizon office at 140 West Street, New York.

The specter of trouble with the undersea cables could be a huge deal, although experts said that there is so much redundancy that much of the risk is mitigated.  There were some reports attributed to cable operators who said they had experienced power issues but back-up generators prevented service disruption.

Update: (5:30 p.m. EDT) Level 3 Communications, just emailed a statement about the status of the AC-2 cable:

“We made extensive preparations in advance of the storm and have experienced no major service disruptions. All of our subsea cable systems are operating normally. We have experienced a minor fiber cut to one of our diversely routed, secondary backhaul lines which provides connectivity to our AC2 Cable Landing Station, and our technicians are currently working to repair it as quickly as possible. Few customers were affected because most traffic was rerouted through redundant lines. And again, the AC2 subsea cable itself is operating normally.”

Carriers and ISPs use the cables to pump data across the Atlantic. Two of the major gateways are in Brookhaven, N.Y., (on Long Island) and in northern New Jersey, where the cables come ashore. “Given the duration and strength of this storm, you have to worry about the cables getting disrupted,” said an executive with a data center company who did not want to be named. He said problems with the cables is “ the kind of thing companies will keep close to the vest. If  either AC-1 or AC-2 were to go out there would be major, major issues.”

As already reported, data center facilities in lower Manhattan suffered a string of outages after flooding and Con Ed cut electrical power. Datagram, the web hosting company that serves the Huffington Post, Gawker, Gizmodo and BuzzFeed, went down Monday evening after flooding caused those sites to go dark. Data centers at Google-owned Carrier Hotel on 8th Avenue, including Equinix, XO Communications and others were also reportedly affected by power outages, though it appears some are back up and running. And Atlantic Metro Communications also reported disruptions due to flooding at a New York data center.

Ryan Kim contributed to this post.

Cable map courtesy of Telegeography; flood photo courtesy of Verizon.

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This week at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego, new flavors of the open-source cloud will be unveiled by Cloudscaling, Dreamhost and Metacloud, among others. Here’s a roundup of some of the noteworthy news:

Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System 2.0: An early proponent of OpenStack, Cloudscaling made waves with news that it’s new private cloud will facilitate deployment of modern applications and also allow those applications to “scale up” to both Amazon and Google Compute Engine public clouds as needed. Open Cloud System will support Amazon S3 and EC2 and relevant GCE APIs to support that, Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant told me. The product is slated to come online by year’s end.

The GCE support raised eyebrows, but to Grant it was a no brainer. “We actually see customers wanting choice [in public cloud] and also see in Google Compute Engine a real commitment to public cloud, [it is] as a serious offering by Google,” he said. (Check out Cloudscaling CTO Randy Bias’ blog about why Google Compute Engine is a “game changer.”)

Cloudscaling co-founder and CTO Randy Bias

Open Cloud 2.0 targets modern, “dynamic” applications — software as a service, big data, media-intensive and mobile apps as opposed to legacy applications that now run in data centers, Grant said. Bias left the door open to supporting other leading public cloud infrastructure, including Rackspace, down the line.

Metacloud: This Pasadena, Calif.-based startup emerged from stealth just in time to tout its own private cloud solution at the summit. Backed by Storm Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures — the venture capital firm headed by former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang — Metacloud said its cloud is already in use by at least one (unnamed) Fortune 100 company.

The year-old company has impressive DNA in scale-out computing. CEO and co-founder Steve Curry formerly managed Yahoo’s global storage operations. Co-founder and CTO Sean Lynch was SVP of technology operations at Ticketmaster Entertainment, and Rafi Khardalian, Metacloud’s VP of operations, was director of systems architecture at Ticketmaster Entertainment.

Dreamhost’s DreamCompute: Web-hosting veteran Dreamhost is launching its take on the OpenStack public cloud with DreamCompute. This public cloud is one of first services to use Ceph as its storage subsystem, hardly surprising since Los Angeles-based Dreamhost spun off Inktank as a company to back Ceph as an alternative to the Swift storage used by other OpenStack implementations.

Prospective users can sign up for a private beta of the service this week. “This is a production-grade public cloud service launching on OpenStack but with Ceph in the box,” said Dreamhost CEO Simon Anderson. “It delivers live migration and operating efficiency from a storage perspective, which is a good next step for OpenStack.”

Anderson said DreamCompute will give Amazon a run for its money on pricing. For the company’s existing Dreamhost dedicated server, virtual private server and dedicated hosting services, for example, inbound and outbound data transfer is always free. For DreamObjects block storage, inbound data transfer is free, outbound transfers cost $0.07 per GB. While DreamCompute pricing won’t be announced for a few weeks, Anderson said simplicity and cost savings is paramount for developers and entrepreneurs wary of Amazon’s confusing price matrix.

Rackspace updates tools: OpenStack pioneer Rackspace will announce software development kits (SDKs) for PHP and Java to help developers write for its public OpenStack cloud in their language of choice. “We want to lift all boats, this will make it easier for developers to consume the cloud,” Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace’s Private Cloud business said last week.

In addition, Curry said 25 percent of the Fortune 100 companies have downloaded that private cloud implementation since it became available on Aug. 15.

Cisco Edition for OpenStack: This week the community will be able to download Cisco Edition for OpenStack which combines reference architectures, documentation and automation scripts to make it easier for service providers and private cloud customers to deploy OpenStack in production, said Cisco CTO (and OpenStack vice chairman) Lew Tucker.

Cisco, as it has discussed, is also baking in OpenStack support into its networking gear. The goal is to unify physical and virtual networking through programmable interfaces and make all of that available through OpenStack’s Quantum networking service, the company said.

Now bring on the customers

So there’s no dearth of available or soon-to-be-available OpenStack distributions coming on line. And there is no shortage of customers testing these clouds. The big question is when significant numbers of customers actually start using these clouds in production and as options or adjuncts to Amazon’s public cloud or their own VMware-based private infrastructure. That’s why last week’s news that Comcast is aboard OpenStack was newsworthy. With its broadband reach to consumers and small businesses, Comcast could drive real OpenStack user adoption. When and if these businesses are ready to make the move, there will be plenty of OpenStack iterations to chose from.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user JoeInSouthernCA

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OpenStack co-founder Rackspace made its OpenStack cloud generally available May 1, as planned. Internap has fielded OpenStack-based services since last fall. Other industry giants, including IBM and Red Hat, are also backing the open-source cloud stack as a hedge against the growing power of Amazon Web Services.

Hewlett-Packard’s offerings include HP Cloud Compute, HP Cloud Object Storage and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network, with pay-as-you-go pricing here.

And to position its cloud as a welcoming ecosystem, HP lined up an array of partners including TwinStrata, Panzura, StorSimple and Zmanda in storage. ActiveState, CloudBees, CumuLogic, Engine Yard, and GigaSpaces are aboard as platform as a service (PaaS) providers.

As Amazon keeps adding more cloud services and as VMware continues to push its own cloud vision powered by vSphere virtualization, the raging debate is whether OpenStack is too late to the party. Backers say cloud adoption is still early and many businesses don’t want to entrust their workloads to Amazon’s public cloud. A variety of other companies, including Tier 3, have launched their own enterprise-grade cloud services.

As for HP itself, the company’s had more than its share of issues of late — burning through three CEOs in as many years — but it’s still a formidable power. It could make a dent in the cloud services market if it plays its cards right, and Zorawar “Biri” Singh, SVP of HP Cloud Services,  has been nothing if not aggressive in his cloud plans.

One thing is certain: This battle’s going to get more interesting before it’s over.

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The rationale is that small businesses, in aggregate, represent a huge opportunity for cloud providers and hosting companies that can make such IT services easy for them to deploy and consume. And there is outside data to support Internap’s bet that small businesses equal big upside. A new Microsoft-funded survey shows that SMB spending on cloud deployment could double in the next five years.  And Internap points  to research from The 451 Group  projecting that the overall market for dedicated hosting and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) could hit the $3.8 billion mark by the end of 2012, with a 14 percent compound annual growth rate.

Wanted: More of the IT spending from small businesses

The new Internap services build on Voxel’s orchestration technology to let small companies — typically those that spend less than a few thousand dollars a month on IT — deploy servers instantly, said Paul Carmody, SVP of product management and business development for Atlanta-based Internap.

One rationale for the Voxel buy was that it would give Internap address a bigger chunk of the addressable market for hosted or cloud-based IT services. Internap customers typically spent tens of thousands of dollars per month on IT infrastructure, while Voxel targeted those that spent maybe $1,000 per month, Carmody said.

With this new offering, Internap can go even further down into small businesses — the tens of thousands of companies that spend maybe a few hundred dollars per month on IT.”That’s a sign-up sort of market. We don’t have a sales rep walk into your office or call you, instead we put an order configurator on the Voxel.net web site, you click to order your servers and get a range of options. You can choose servers that are instantly deployed, you can sign up for bare-metal servers and within a few minutes you can have it all provisioned,” Carmody said.

The services are now running at Internap’s Singapore, Amsterdam, New York City,  Santa Clara and Dallas data centers. Internap has also tied Voxel into its high-performance IP network which aims to reduce network latency.

Internap-Voxel integration work continues

Internap, which was first out of the chute last fall with an OpenStack-based compute cloud, is working to put that OpenStack cloud management layer atop Voxel’s Xen-based public cloud offerings, Carmody said.

It will be interesting to see how many of these very small companies do opt for Voxel’s Agile Hosting or similar servcies. Not many small companies have IT staffs. That means they don’t want to run a lot of their own server room gear themselves but at the same time, it’s unclear how many would be confident enough to use an online configurator to deploy hosted services. My guess is that many will turn to a VAR or integrator or other trusted advisor that would either configure these systems on their behalf or — more likely — take on the hosting duties themselves.

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The OpenStack open-source cloud project was launched in 2010 by Rackspace and NASA and gained steam as tech powers including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Internap and most recently IBM and Red Hat joined the effort. These companies are contributing resources and code to the project they see as a counterweight to the Amazon public cloud juggernaut, which they all view as a threat. Many also see it as a way to keep VMware from parlaying its virtualization prowess from the server room to the cloud.

The foundation of Rackspace’s existing cloud is the Slicehost technology acquired a few years ago, but it is moving all its private, public and hybrid cloud implementations to OpenStack, Engates said.  Monday’s Rackspace news is pegged to the opening of this week’s OpenStack Spring Conference in San Francisco.

Rackspace “Powered by OpenStack”

On Monday, Rackspace is also introducing these “Powered by OpenStack” services:

• Cloud Block Storage: Rackspace’s analog to Amazon Elastic Block Storage, but with a choice of high-performance solid-state disks (SSDs) or cheaper standard spinning disk storage. This service is in beta.
• Cloud Databases: MySQL-based cloud database services, available in early access form, are based on scalable SAN-based storage.
• Cloud Control Panel: A graphical interface, available in early access form, for customers who want something more intuitive than a command line to  manage their workloads from a centralized place.
• Cloud Monitoring: This technology, also in early access availability, builds upon Rackspace’s CloudKick purchase to allow customers to watch their infrastructure and applications from a single dashboard.
• Cloud Networking: Technology built on contributions from Nicira, Cisco and others will bring the benefits of software-defined networks to the Rackspace OpenStack implementation. This technology is coming soon.

Engates said he did not want to pre-announce other database options but acknowledged that current Rackspace cloud customers use other databases, including Microsoft SQL Server.

OpenStack alliance — partners and competitors

Rackspace CTO John Engates

As more of the OpenStack community bring their implementations to the fore – HP unveiled more of its OpenStack plans last week — these vendor partners will compete in earnest, not only with Amazon but with each other.

If OpenStack becomes the “Linux of the cloud,” Rackspace hopes to replicate the success Red Hat has had in the Enterprise Linux world.  Red Hat is the leading enterprise Linux player (it recently saw its annual revenues pass the $1 billion mark, the first time an open-source oriented company has hit that mark.)

Of course HP, Internap, IBM, Suse and Red Hat itself will also be vying for that honor.

Engates said the world of coopetition should be fine with all the players.  OpenStack, he said, provides key cloud underpinnings atop which OpenStack proponents can build their own value and compete based on that.

“When we donate code, there’s a tradeoff. Do we keep it to ourselves or donate it and risk competition? We think it’s better to be part of a winning ecosystem as opposed to sitting on our own island all by ourselves.”

Whether the combined resources of these OpenStack frenemies can overcome Amazon’s public cloud dominance remains perhaps the bigger question.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Public Domain Photos

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Nearly everyone agrees that smaller, capable cloud services providers — companies like Bluelock, Cloud Sigma, and Virtustream, make attractive acquisition targets as legacy IT companies, larger cloud service providers, and even IT channel companies look to bulk up their offerings.

“There’s tons of consolidation coming because this is a big boy’s game,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni, a cloud storage management company. “Look at the storage piece, it’s like the hard drive business. How many hard drive makers are there? Not many. For the same reason, those [few companies] with economies of scale survive.”  (Nasuni works with all the cloud storage providers so he’s pretty agnostic on this point.)

Companies like Rackspace or Internap, are in the traditional hosting business have lots of server capacity but may need more of the software intelligence that a smaller player can bring them. We’ve already witnessed traditional tech players — Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, IBM and others — buy their way into more cloud services. Now watch for some of their channel partners to jump in as well.

That means companies that distribute or resell high-tech gear — companies like CDW and Staples — will enter the bidding war if they haven’t already, said Marty Wolf, president and founder of Martin Wolf M&A Advisors, a company that consults on M&A strategies.

Wolf agreed that cloud services represent “the ultimate game of scale” and that more traditional IT players will keep investing to up their ability to compete in that arena. But there’s another trend at work here as more small and medium businesses (SMBs) decide there’s no reason to keep buying servers and storage when they can outsource all that to the cloud. Many IT incumbents remain ill-equipped to deal with this class of business customers.

“It’s one thing for EDS to outsource stuff for Kraft. They get that. But these big [IT] service companies aren’t good dealing with smaller businesses,” Wolf said. (EDS or Electronic Data Systems was the giant services company HP bought a few years back.)

That means that the tech resellers — or anyone with customer relationships with these SMBs — will buy up cloud services so they can keep those customers in the fold, Wolf said.

There is a potential dark side to all this action, Rodriguez warned. The cloud services companies that don’t get acquired and don’t scale “could be in a death spiral,” he said.

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The deal, which closed on Dec. 30, 2011, could be an early sign that cloud-service consolidation will continue as service providers scramble to gain competitive advantage and heft.

This acquisition specifically should give Internap, which already offers colocation, content delivery network, public cloud, hybrid cloud and managed IP services, a stronger presence in managed hosting, enterprise cloud, dedicated hosting and public cloud services. And, it could give the company better access to smaller business customers. Internap will also get Voxel’s service locations in Amsterdam and Singapore, boosting Atlanta-based Internap’s global presence.

That Voxel presence in Asia and Europe will help Internap jumpstart its public cloud efforts in both regions, said Paul Carmody, Internap’s SVP of product management and product development. Internap had focused its public cloud efforts at the back-office, management layer, using OpenStack to build out those capabilities. Voxel, meanwhile, had concentrated more on the higher level customer-facing portal capabilities of cloud and the hybridization layer. Those two pieces of the puzzle fit together nicely, Carmody said.

Voxel launched its SilverLining cloud computing product to compete with offerings including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Rackspace Cloud Servers. That gave the upstart company, which already offered managed hosting services, the same sort of hybrid services that companies like Rackspace offer: dedicated servers combined with cloud computing to handle spikes in traffic or one-off projects, as GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham reported at the time.

New York–based Voxel claims 1,000 customers, and Internap, which was the first company out of the chute with an OpenStack Compute–based public cloud offering this fall, claims 2,700.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, Internap said:

Voxel’s dedicated hosting offering provides customers with a robust online interface and comprehensive API that enables them to provision and activate services in minutes, gaining cloud-like flexibility from dedicated physical servers. Moreover, customers can also seamlessly integrate physical servers and cloud instances in the same environment, overcoming a typical barrier to enterprise cloud adoption for use with legacy or complex custom application stacks.

In 2011, there was a lot of M&A activity in the cloud services and hosting space, with Verizon’s buying Terremark for $1.4 billion. And CenturyLink barely took a breath after buying Qwest before buying Savvis. With Internap leading the way, it looks like 2012 will be active as well.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user theaucitron

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