Earlier this week I wrote about how NTT Communications has been rolling out SDN at multiple data centers around the world, to automate network configurations and provide other benefits. I also learned about how Peer 1 Hosting has signed up for SDN vendor Embrane’s software to round out the Peer 1 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering, and I found out that SunGard has started using those same products to lower response times for its Recover2Cloud disaster-recovery enterprise cloud. The increased agility from SDN and other innovations lets SunGard promise response times that are 30 to 40 percent shorter, and the company expects to offer better service-level agreements to its own customers as a result.

Meanwhile, SDN company Nicira, which VMware acquired last year, has identified Rackspace, AT&T and DreamHost as customers. All three of those companies provide hosting services alongside other offerings.

In 1999 or thereabouts, service providers were quick to jump onto the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) bandwagon as a way to help information travel faster on a network, said Ram Shanmugam, SunGard’s senior director of product management. Now many of those same companies are standing up as early adopters of software-defined networking.

And as that happens, it’s only natural for enterprises to witness the benefits of SDN and decide to give it a try, Shanmugam said. And thanks to SunGard’s market position, the shift could happen soon: Over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SunGard for disaster recovery, Shanmugam said. Going forward, more SunGard clients could get exposed to the perks of SDN, as the company has been discussing the inclusion of SDN as well as software-defined storage for SunGard’s enterprise cloud.

More SDN products hitting the market will also speed up adoption of the technology, which virtualizes networks and enables users to automatically provision firewalls and load balancers in a few minutes — something that took an engineer hours or days to do with a hardware appliance. The vendors are ready for the demand increase, or getting closer to that point. Networking hardware vendor Juniper Networks, soon after acquiring startup Contrail Systems, announced plans to release products later this year and next year that will allow for consolidation of hardware and connect network services on multiple devices. Cisco said in November 2012 it would buy Cariden, a company that’s come up with SDN strategy. And just last week F5 Networks, another hardware vendor, acquired LineRate Systems, which is looking to help companies take on more web traffic with more easily scalable networks, as my colleague Derrick Harris wrote.

So far, the promise of better agility has been one of the best motivators for companies to try out Embrane’s SDN products, and cost savings have taken a back seat, said Dante Malagrinò, Embrane’s CEO. This is somewhat a contrast to the adoption of server virtualization, where costs savings drove adoption among enterprise customers and the benefits of agility were only perceived later.

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The timing couldn’t be any better to roll out the virtual desktop offering, as Gartner predicts a surge in adoption over the next couple years that coincides with measured decreases in PC sales. According to Chris Zagorski, director of enterprise product development at Rackspace, it looks as if companies that didn’t refresh their PCs during the recession might opt for virtual desktops when the next refresh cycle comes along, especially given the proliferation of tablets. A growing number of employees across sectors are using iPads and similar devices for work because they’re easily portable, and virtual desktops make it easier for companies to sanction such usage because all the data from those sessions is stored securely in the cloud, not locally. He tells of another Rackspace executive who travels with only his iPad and relies on a virtual desktop for accessing business applications.

Zagorski also shared the example of a pilot customer that was struggling with rolling out its own virtual desktop infrastructure. He said Rackspace got the customer up and running with 8,000 virtual desktops in about three weeks, and that the customer has plans to host 40,000 virtual desktops with Rackspace.

The HVD product uses Rackspace’s RackConnect feature, which lets customers host their virtual desktops in a hybrid environment of dedicated Rackspace servers and shared Rackspace Cloud servers. Via partnerships with Akamai and Riverbed, Zagorski says Rackspace solved the network latency issue that has a tendency to plague virtual desktop efforts, especially when users are far away from the host data center. Zsgorski added that Rackspace designed its storage system for hosted virtual desktops to overcome problems associated with “bootstorming,” which is when many users log into their desktops at once and overwhelm the disks that have to load those stored images.

Although Rackspace now only offers Citrix virtual-desktop software, Zagorski said VMware and Microsoft products could be options if customer demand is high enough. Customers handle the management and provisioning of their virtual desktops, and are billed monthly based on the specifications of their deployment.

With its managed hosting and cloud computing offerings, Rackspace has contributed to what many believe will be a sharp decline in server sales, so we’ll see if, as Zagorski says, “this is the beginning of the end of the traditional PC era,” too.

We’ll be learning a lot more about Rackspace’s $100-million-plus cloud business and vision at Structure 2011, coming up June 22-23 in San Francisco, where Rackspace Cloud President Lew Moorman will be on stage discussing his company’s role in this fast-evolving industry.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ChrisDag.

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The dedicated servers aren’t the most noteworthy about the GoGrid Hosted Private Cloud — the company already offers those as part of its hybrid cloud offering — the retention of the core IaaS features is. That means on-demand provisioning, pay-per-use billing, the same APIs and management portal, load balancing and the complete lineup of partner products in the GoGrid Exchange. Additionally, customers can choose from multiple data centers — GoGrid, Verizon and Digital Realty Trust in San Francisco, and Equinix in Washington, D.C. Ashburn, Va.– in which to host their private-cloud servers. According to GoGrid CEO John Keagy, infrastructure is already in place in the GoGrid and Verizon data centers, whereas customers choosing Digital Realty Trust or Equinix will have to rent their own private cages.

If you’re wondering how dedicated resources can scale on demand, here’s how Hosted Private Cloud works. Customers have their own pools of physical servers on which they can scale up and down VMs as need be. Keagy says that adding VMs is a truly a real-time experience, while adding new physical servers, which GoGrid calls “nodes,” is near real-time. This is because Hosted Private Cloud nodes are the same “super-large Intel boxes” atop which the GoGrid public cloud is built, meaning they’re already in place and ready to go when needed. Each node can house up to 250 VMs.

Cloud computing purists might deride efforts like Hosted Private Cloud as “fake clouds,” but that won’t likely make any difference on sales, and certainly doesn’t make it any worse an idea.  For cloud providers like GoGrid, which have their roots in managed hosting, it’s smart to make use of that expertise for differentiation instead of always trying to compete with AWS.Further, Keagy told me that GoGrid is doing a lot of business with service providers, including Orange, looking to resell GoGrid resources under their own banners, and Hosted Private Cloud is the result of their desires.

Keagy understands why AWS focuses on developers with efforts like Elastic Beanstalk, but says that GoGrid is focusing on “where the available market is” now. “We think the bulk of the 3 trillion IT economy is for production challenges, where you can’t just Greenfield new applications,” Keagy explained. “We’re not targeting developers so much as we’re targeting systems administrators.” However, he added that cloud watchers “don’t want to count us out” on the PaaS front, as GoGrid is working on its own flavor of platform services that will be tailored to its customer base.

CIOs appear interested in private clouds, so GoGrid’s challenge will be getting them to buy into its approach instead of building their own in-house clouds. It might come down to a matter of weighing cost savings against the peace of mind of knowing exactly what’s going on with their infrastructure and who’s tending to it. Also, GoGrid will have to compete against a number of competitors selling their own flavors of dedicated, physical cloud resources, including StrataScale. Peer1 Hosting and VMware vCloud Datacenter partners. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Rackspace get into this market too, as a complement to its dedicated-shared hybrid cloud offering.

Image courtesy of Flickr user midom.

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AWS certainly has a technology and feature edge over competitors like Rackspace, and it continually innovates on cloud pricing models, but it either can’t or isn’t willing to, compete on support. An apples-to-apples comparison is difficult, but Rackspace offers many basic support features for free, with the new managed service level costing only $100 a month (albeit with a 12-cent-per-server-per-hour fee that could cost about $90 a month for a server running continuously). I get that AWS’s cloud is all about self-service and automation, and that it hasn’t spent more than a decade, as Rackspace has, building a “fanatical” customer service team, but, even still, paying at least $400 a month to get someone on the phone (you need Gold support for phone service) seems a bit steep by comparison. Maybe AWS would rather just focus on technology and leave managed-hosting-style support to ecosystem partners, such as Datapipe. But if it works for AWS and its customers, then so be it.

Anyhow, when all IT is hosted in automated cloud data centers and platforms as a service make server configuration a thing of the past, there won’t be any need for technical support at all, right?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Vlima.com

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The mCloud series consists of two things: mCloud Controller and mCloud Server. The former is an appliance “used to convert commodity hardware into a cloud” for customers already running virtualized environments, while the latter is a holistic solution (which includes mCloud Controller) in the form of a preconfigured IBM BladeCenter S. The appliance-based approach is novel among cloud solutions, but according to MorphLabs CEO Winston Damarillo, it eases the transition into a cloud environment and, in this case, houses the solution’s hardware-based failover mechanism. In the same way that VMware partners can offer vCloud Express-branded offerings, MorphLabs customers can brand their cloud offerings as mCloud On Demand.

MorphLabs also hopes to capitalize on its compatibility with Amazon Web Services. Not only can end users port applications from a MorphLabs-powered offering to AWS, but smaller MSPs can complement AWS’s impersonal service with offerings such as personalized SLAs, server sizes and other such touches. For large enterprises that implement MorphLabs in-house, AWS compatibility means a smoother path to a hybrid-cloud environment. Letting its MSP customers work with AWS rather than necessarily against it aligns MorphLabs’ own experience as a cloud provider itself. Damarillo says it’s no use trying to compete with AWS when you can leverage its popularity to bolster your own offerings.

The company could face a tough road trying to sell against established vendors like 3Tera — which is now part of CA and which Damarillo says was a regular MorphLabs competitor in Japan — and cloud pundit Reuven Cohen’s company, Enomaly. Likewise, vendors such as Eucalyptus and VMOps have strong internal cloud products that could be part of MSP cloud transition efforts, too. What’s certain, however, is that small MSPs and traditional hosters won’t have to vanish when there are so many tools available to let them ride the cloud computing hype while continuing to sell personalized offerings that the big boys aren’t really equipped to sell.

For more on cloud computing, join the GigaOM Network at its annual Structure conference on June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.

Images courtesy of Morph Labs

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