The move shows that data center providers — companies like Equinix and Markley — see the need to add cloud services to their repertory. “Data center customers who buy cage space are all asking for additional services — it’s ‘bring me a cloud or I’m leaving’” said Carl Brooks, analyst at The 451 Group.

One of Markley’s aces in the hole is that it also owns and operates the carrier hotel — the largest telco and ISP interconnect site in the region — in the same building. And, as we all now know, proximity to those fiber pipes is gold for data center customers who want the fastest possible connections to their end users and partners.

Rooftop view of Markley’s Boston facility.

The initial Markley Cloud implementation builds on VMware technology, and Cisco Unified Compute Systems, NetApp storage, and Juniper routers but Markley is also “playing around with OpenStack,” said  Joshua Myles, product manager. “We polled 200 or so of our customers and 87 percent of them are VMware shops so we went with what they were comfortable with,” Myles said in a recent interview.

The new services mean that existing Markley business customers who want to try out a hybrid cloud model can “burst” workloads as needed from their own resources to Markley’s cloud.

The direct fiber links between Markley’s data center and the carrier hotel in the same building is a huge benefit to Markley and its customers, which include The New York Times, W.B. Mason, the Boston Red Sox, MIT, Harvard University, the Boston Internet Peering Exchange and other companies which prefer not to be named.

Initially, the new cloud services will be offered from this site, but will roll out at other Markley data centers across the country later, Myles said.  In total, Markley runs 13 data center sites in the U.S. and Europe.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

But even in the face of such challenges security remains a hot field and offers opportunities for startups. So-called endpoint security for consumers was a $4.9 billion market in 2012, according to IDC, and enterprise security software and hardware is roughly $31.4 billion worldwide. In the past two years there have been over $12 billion in security acquisitions, with many of the notable exits in 2011 and 2012 having hit north of $800 million.

It’s also a disruptive field. Security is constantly evolving to confront the mercurial world of hackers and cybercriminals. With the proliferation of professional financial cybercrime and high-profile state-sponsored hacking, modern adversaries for information security are incredibly sophisticated. The rise of this generation of hackers creates a demand for new and better security technologies, and two fields in particular are currently big areas of interest for Sand Hill VCs.

Cloud and next-gen infrastructure security

Cloud and infrastructure security refers to the hardware and software associated with protecting modern IT infrastructures. As more businesses move workloads to the cloud, critical financial and personal data becomes exposed to the public internet. Securing data in flight to the cloud and at rest off-site is mission critical.

VCs will be heavily investing in hardware and software in this field because it shares complementary demand with the success for cloud computing; as companies demand the flexibility and cost-savings of the cloud, they will also require next-generation security built to secure the infrastructure of public and hybrid-cloud environments.

This is a hard area for startups to play. Proving compliance with draconian and mercurial regulations like PCI-DSS or the Common Criteria is a difficult and frequently expensive endeavor. As a result of high barriers to entry, systems incumbents such as NetApp and Oracle have an advantage.

But several new startups in this space have navigated these issues through the engagement of established veterans and a focused but superior feature set. These include encryption-focused Ciphercloud and the back-end infrastructure-focused CloudPassage. (Note: I have no financial or professional relationship with these or any of the other companies mentioned in this article.) Both Ciphercloud and Cloudpassage augment the security of an existing IT infrastructure and uniquely target bringing compliance-grade security to hybrid cloud environments. Compliance is a serious and expensive issue for the enterprise, and these industry veteran-led startups are attractive to VCs because they provide an economic but well-monetized alternative to purely consulting-based solutions.

Intrusion detection and prevention systems

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) refer to software and hardware solutions that detect and halt attacks or attackers as they attempt to compromise a system in real time. The rocket science-esque fields of IDS and IPS aren’t new, but with the advent of this generation of sophisticated attackers and widespread interest in big data analysis, IDS and IPS are quickly becoming a hot topic for VCs.

A great example of IDS/IPS success can be seen in Silvertail Systems. Acquired late last year by EMC, Silvertail used complex algorithms to detect attacks from the outside and even internal attacks launched by compromised accounts. VCs liked that Silvertail’s tech was managed by a team of industry veterans and that from the beginning they closed deals with large enterprises.

Late-stage starlet FireEye seems poised for success by employing the same formula. Their late 2012 hire of ex-McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt and success in traditional security verticals like US DoD, US federal, and large financial have well prepared the company for their imminent IPO.

SF-based CloudFlare can also be considered an IDS/IPS company. CloudFlare intercepts and sifts traffic to a site through an analysis engine to improve performance and protect websites from modern attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF). CloudFlare protects a significant measure of the internet and remains on the watch list for nearly every VC on Sand Hill.

CloudFlare’s frictionless sales model is also an interesting point for VCs. Bucking the traditional IT model of inside/outside sales teams, infrastructure companies like CloudFlare and New Relic allow customers to directly purchase through their sites. This decreases sales cycle time and increases margins – both key diligence metrics for VCs.  In a busy space like IPS/IDS (or IT in general), employing positive differences like a unique sales architecture help startups to distinguish themselves in the eyes of investors.

Finding an edge

As a security startup you can do a few things to improve your chances of closing your round. Make sure your team is led by veterans who know how to build and sell into your verticals (or actively recruit them). Also, align your company with sectors that have complementary demand with big tech trends.

And, as in any industry, attack big problems that people are willing to pay lots of money to solve.

Andrew “Andy” Manoske is an Associate at GGV Capital, a Sand Hill and Shanghai-based venture capital firm. Prior to GGV, he was a product manager at NetApp and managed the design of security features across the company’s entire product line. Follow him on Twitter @a2d2.

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 Photo courtesy alexmillos/Shutterstock.com.

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There’s some personnel shuffling going on over at the EMC-VMware-Pivotal Initiative axis. As reported here on Friday, star engineer Mark Lucovsky is now back at VMware, having handed the Cloud Foundry PaaS over to the Pivotal Initiative spin off. At VMware, he is working on an unspecified “mega” cloud project, according to a now-defunct Twitter profile. Since then we learned that Scott Lowe, virtualization expert at EMC, is now part of the Nicira virtual networking team at VMware, working with Martin Casado.

A lot of folks are watching who goes where from VMware, EMC since the two companies offloaded cloud-related IP and people to the Pivotal Initiative, more details of which will be disclosed this quarter. There has also been a flow of high-level VMware people leaving the fold — most recently CTO Steve Herrod is moving to VC firm General Catalyst.

NetApp and Cisco cinch ties

Cisco and NetApp are working on more FlexPod converged hardware designs for use in branch offices and in the public cloud settings, both companies said last week.  FlexPods incorporate Cisco servers and networking and NetApp storage. The companies are also working to incorporate fast flash storage into FlexPod designs.

Since Cisco is also part of the 3-year-old VCE alliance that combines its networking and server hardware with EMC storage and VMware virtualization into converged hardware, people watch developments on the Cisco-NetApp side carefully.  VMware’s purchase of Nicira and its software-defined networking prowess last summer, has further stressed a relationship that many say was already strained.

Here are some other quick hits from the week.

Beware 7 sins of cloud computing.

What happens if your PaaS  passes?  

Big data super powers: IBM, Cloudera, General Electric??

Big data and cloud computing take human jobs

Citing Superstorm Sandy, Xand adds disaster recovery space

IBM claims huge cloud growth off of unknown base

Cisco’s private cloud: pain and profit

Joyent fires up Hadoop as a Service

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Where the generic server market has been commodified with low-end x86 servers companies like Teradata and EMC  are doing their best to hold onto their hardware margins with specially designed systems. And it looks like IBM and Cisco have decided this is an opportunity not to be missed, and are taking it further. Cisco has released a unified computing system specifically designed to run SAP’s HANA database. Oracle is also heading down this path.

This is clearly aimed at enterprise customers who can afford the SAP licences as well as the Cisco gear, and the two companies worked with NetApp to pre-validate the box so customers can just plug it in without worrying about building their own Hadoop cluster or other technical feats that would require time and IT talent to get right.

IBM’s big box for big data.

IBM’s new PureData System, an addition to its older PureSystems converged hardware family, is an effort to cram security features for HIPPA and PCI compliance in at the chip level. Eweek coverage of the boxnotes that IBM is planning even more boxes:

IBM officials said the PureData System is the next step forward in the company’s overall strategy to deliver a family of systems with built-in expertise that leverages its decades of experience to reduce the cost and complexity associated with information technology. According to IBM, users can have the system up and running in 24 hours and handle more than 100 databases on a single system.

Both of these boxes are advertised as being specialized to tackle big data, but do big data workloads need such highly custom boxes? There are many who think that data processing will require something above and beyond a typical x86 set up, such as a box from SeaMicro or Calxeda machine with low-power cores that are networked to work in parallel to parse many bits of data in small chunks. Others are thinking farther ahead and envision new architectures that mimic the human brain.

Instead of these two boxes representing a new hardware for big data these really represent that capitulation by the major hardware vendors to a services model. Technically these boxes may have different chips when compared with commodity servers, but what these guys are actually selling is the plug and play aspect. Sure a customer can buy cheaper boxes and download a Hadoop or other open source software (or pay a licensing fee and have someone like Cloudera manage it for them) but they want something that works with little or no effort.

So these boxes aren’t about the whiz-bang tech inside, they’re an admission that services wrapped in a box are the main opportunity ahead for larger vendors. The question is, how long will that be enough? Especially as the cloud, either public or private makes its continued advance.

Database image courtesy of Shutterstock / z0w.

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This is just the latest push by storage makers to reach out beyond their own islands of data center hardware to manage and administer third party products in a more holistic fashion.

The goal of this deal is to speed up application performance by converting server flash into “hot” data storage for important applications.

Flash Accel is part of NetApp’s Virtual Storage Tiering effort. A few weeks ago, NetApp announced a partnership with Fusion-io, the hot selling server cache company, and this is the first tangible detail to emerge from that relationship. NetApp will demonstrate Flash Accel next week at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco.

No doubt there is a flash feeding frenzy going on. In the last week alone Nimbus Data unveiled its new Gemini flash storage array; stealthy startup Skyera talked up its plans to bring flash storage costs down to a promised $3 per GB; IBM said it was buying flash pioneer Texas Memory Systems and  Pure Storage disclosed $40 million in brand new venture capital to fund its flash onslaught.

Both NetApp and arch-rival EMC, which bought flash player EXtremeIO earlier this year, are coming to terms with flash storage, which is faster but more expensive than hard drives. In that vein, look for more deals to come.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flicker user zmmrc

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For EtherCloud, Coraid  is using Yunteq orchestration technology acquired last October to make its storage more flexible and adaptable to changing needs.

Redwood City, CA.-based Coraid’s storage  takes advantage of the lower-level — and very efficient — ATA-over-Ethernet protocol. That means that Coraid customers don’t need to upgrade to the pricey switches and other gear required by the fancier iSCSI or Fibre Channel protocols and still get good performance, said Jim Bagley, senior analyst with Storage Strategies Now.

Coraid CEO Kevin Brown said the resulting software will let users build and manage pools of shared storage that can then be divvied up or consolidated as needed.  EtherCloud taps into customers’ existing LDAP or AD directories for authentication and will meter the use of compute, network and storage resources. The company said  admins will be able to deploy VMware ESXi VMs — and their associated storage allocation and network connections — in one click.

The company also announced programmable  EtherFlash Cache that uses solid-state drives (SSDs) to boost read performance in time-sensitive server virtualization, database and e-mail applications. That software will let customers “mix and match” drives as needed, Brown said. The use of solid-state or flash drives is another recurring theme this week as vendors prep for the Flash Summit Conference.

Coraid, which landed $50 million in Series C funding in November, is something of an up-and-comer in the a market where it faces much bigger competitors in EMC and NetApp.

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That could have big impact on non-aligned hardware players. BusinessWeek looked at the deal through the Dell lens — EMC and Dell had a long-time if uneasy partnership that started to unravel with Dell’s acquisition of storage player Equallogic five years ago. Per EMC’s positioning, the Lenovo-EMC servers will compete most directly with Dell at the low end, but HP stock also took a hit after the news.

Cisco is another party to watch in the fallout from all this. EMC and Cisco, the networking giant that entered the server market with the Unified Computing System in 2009, are parents (along with VMware) of the VCE Co. The VCE company offers Vblock bundles of EMC storage, Cisco UCS, and VMware virtualization. But there are signs that this alliance is stretched thin, especially since VMware, 80-percent-owned by EMC, decided to buy software-defined networking specialist  Nicira. Cisco also has a storage partnership with EMC competitor NetApp.

In a research note issued after the EMC/Lenovo news dropped,  Wells Fargo Senior Analyst Maynard Um wrote:

EMC’s answer to portions of the stack it did not own was to partner – namely Cisco for its networking and servers via its VCE [joint venture]. With the speculation the ties are loosening following VMW’s Nicira acquisition (software-defined networking), the Lenovo deal may be a backup plan on the server-side, given the major server vendors are also competitors. For Lenovo, the transition is logical given some scale benefits on components from its PC business, its enterprise relationships, and the need for expansion.

EMC execs pooh-poohed any notion that the Cisco relationship is imperiled by its new BFF. Under the agreement Lenovo will also sell EMC networked storage to its customers, first in China and then elsewhere, and the companies formed a joint venture to provide network-attached storage  systems to small and medium businesses and “distributed enterprise sites.”

Company CEO and chairman Joe Tucci told The Wall Street Journal he didn’t foresee the new partnership interfering with the Cisco alliance. “Cisco’s making these big heavy data centers, so the area where Cisco is in and Lenovo is are miles apart.”

Jeremy Burton, CMO and EVP of EMC, reiterated that stance via mail.

The Cisco UCS business is at the high-end (as is Vblock).  This is the complete opposite end of the market (think high volume commodity x86 servers).  At that end of the market we often fight “server-storage affinity” i.e. The server vendor is able to sell the storage because they can bundle and offer a deal.  Lenovo plans to enter the server business from the bottom up …  they also have a big brand in China… a place where we’ll prove out the partnership and hopefully provide some upside to our business there.  In addition, Lenovo servers will start to be embedded in our appliances, replacing DELL.

Still, EMC is nothing if not a survivor, and its willingness to shed partners that are no longer useful is just part of that package. Analysts privately say they are amazed that this old-line storage hardware company has managed to stay relevant and powerful by virtue of canny acquisitions and sheer competitiveness.  If Cisco and EMC interests are no longer aligned, look out.

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Within the Apache Software Foundation, HDFS is always improving in terms of performance and availability. Honestly, it’s probably fine for the majority of Hadoop workloads that are running in pilot projects, skunkworks projects or generally non-demanding environments. And technologies such as HBase that are built atop HDFS speak to its versatility as storage system even for non-MapReduce applications.

But if the growing number of options for replacing HDFS signifies anything, it’s that HDFS isn’t quite where it needs to be. Some Hadoop users have strict demands around performance, availability and enterprise-grade features, while others aren’t keen of its direct-attached storage (DAS) architecture. Concerns around availability might be especially valid for anyone (read “almost everyone”) who’s using an older version of Hadoop without the High Availability NameNode. Here are eight products and projects whose proprietors argue can deliver what HDFS can’t:

Cassandra (DataStax)

Not a file system at all but an open source, NoSQL key-value store, Cassandra has become a viable alternative to HDFS for web applications that rely on fast data access. DataStax, a startup commercializing the Cassandra database, has fused Hadoop atop Cassandra to provide web applications fast access to data processed by Hadoop, and Hadoop fast access to data streaming into Cassandra from web users.

Ceph

Ceph is an open source, multi-pronged storage system that was recently  commercialized by a startup called Inktank. Among its features is a high-performance parallel file system that some think makes it a candidate for replacing HDFS (and then some) in Hadoop environments. Indeed, some researchers started looking at this possibility as far back as 2010.

Dispersed Storage Network (Cleversafe)

Cleversafe got into the HDFS-replacement business on Monday, announcing a product that will fuse Hadoop MapReduce with the company’s Dispersed Storage Network system. By fully distributing metadata across the cluster (instead of relying on a single NameNode) and not relying on replication, Cleversafe says it’s much faster, more reliable and scalable than HDFS.

GPFS (IBM)

IBM has been selling its General Parallel File System to high-performance computing customers for years (including within some of the world’s fastest supercomputers), and in 2010 it tuned GPFS for Hadoop. IBM claims the GPFS-SNC (Shared Nothing Cluster) edition is so much faster than Hadoop in part because it runs at the kernel level as opposed to atop the OS like HDFS.

Isilon (EMC)

EMC has offered its own Hadoop distributions for more than a year, but in January 2012 it unveiled a new method for making HDFS enterprise-class — replace it with EMC Isilon’s OneFS file system. Technically, as EMC’s Chuck Hollis explained at the time, because Isilon can read NFS, CIFS and HDFS protocols, a single Isilon NAS system can serve to intake, process and analyze data.

Lustre

Lustre is a an open source high-performance file system that some claim can make for an HDFS alternative where performance is a major concern. Truth be told, I haven’t heard of this combination running anywhere in the wild, but HPC storage provider Xyratex wrote a paper on the combination in 2011, claiming a Lustre-based cluster (even with InfiniBand) will be faster and cheaper than an HDFS-based cluster.

MapR File System

The MapR File System is probably the best-known HDFS alternative, as it’s the basis of MapR’s increasingly popular — and well-funded — Hadoop distribution. Not only does MapR claim its file system is two to five times faster than HDFS on average (although, really, up to 20 times faster), but it has features such as mirroring, snapshots and high availability that enterprise customers love.

NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop

OK, the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop isn’t so much an HDFS replacement as it is an HDFS improvement, according to NetApp and early partner Cloudera. The offering still relies on HDFS, but it reenvisions the physical Hadoop architecture by putting HDFS on a RAID array. This, NetApp claims, means faster, more reliable and more secure Hadoop jobs.

This might be a good place to say rest in peace to two other HDFS alternatives that are effectively no longer with us — KosmosFS (aka CloudStore) and Appistry CloudIQ Storage. The former was created by Kosmix (since bought by @WalmartLabs) and released to the open source world in 2007, but no longer has an active community. The latter was an attempt by Appistry in 2010 to get a piece of the Hadoop pie with its computational storage technology, but the company has since switched its focus from selling the technology to providing high-performance computing services based on it.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Panos Karapanagiotis.

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XtremIO's all-flash storage array

Strategically, the move makes sense for EMC. For one, it has promised an all-flash storage array codenamed “Project Thunder,” and XtremIO is building just such a system right now. Talk about good timing. But there’s more, namely the major focus EMC (which is the majority shareholder in VMware) has put on virtualization and big data going forward.

An all-flash array means faster performance across both virtualized and big data environments. Combined with EMC’s server-side PCI flash product called Project Lightning, which keeps hot data in an SSD cache sitting alongside the processor, that’s one powerful hardware platform for tomorrow’s applications.

Keeping up with EMC means going flash

If EMC does pull the trigger, it wouldn’t be surprising to see other flash dominoes fall in a hurry. NetApp, which is allegedly trying to steal XtremIO out from under EMC, would almost certainly have to answer with an acquisition of its own. HP, Dell, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems — everyone, really — would have to kick their flash plans into gear, too.

The reason is this: flash technology is getting cheaper by the day, and new lower prices points — especially when presented in terms of price/performance — are letting flash-storage startups score a lot of customer wins. But flash for primary storage is kind of like open source software, in that until large vendors pin their futures to a technology, it’s difficult for truly big IT buyers to justify investing too much in it. If that technology goes away tomorrow, the CIO who bought it is out of a job.

EMC dropping half a billion on XtremIO and starting to sell all-flash storage arrays makes justifying a flash purchase a lot easier. But if EMC is the only game in town selling flash arrays, then EMC is the only major storage vendor making money off it. And that can’t happen.

Who’ll get bought

Who’s likely on storage heavyweights’ shopping lists if the EMC-XtremIO deal goes through? I’d say Violin Memory is on the top of that list, with Fusion-io not too far behind. They do different things — Violin is flash arrays whereas Fusion-io does primarily flash cache — but they have both have the mindshare and the tech to pay dividends. Other options — which might come at a lower cost than the highly valued Violin and Fusion-io — are Kaminario, which sells some serious systems chock full of flash and DRAM, and Virident, which competes with Fusion-io on the cache front.

After that, a slew of startups that includes Pure Storage, Nimbus Data Systems, Tintri and Nimble Storage have to look appealing. All of these companies have accumulated impressive customer wins and piles of investor cash, and it’s because they can deliver price-performance gains that, presently, most major storage vendors cannot.

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The news — which should come next week or the week after at the OpenStack Spring Conference — is a big boost to OpenStack, which was battered this week by Citrix’s plans to position CloudStack as an OpenStack competitor.

No one from IBM, Red Hat or OpenStack would comment, but sources say this is a done deal. In fact, IBM kind of joined OpenStack in February – at least it appeared on a list of OpenStack contributors. But no announcement was made.

Jonathan Bryce, an OpenStack Project Policy Board member, has been out talking about the new OpenStack release code-named Essex, and said to expect new members to be announced soon but did not provide details.

However, he did say Red Hat worked “a lot on packaging” for Essex so that it will be easier for the software to be bundled with Linux distributions. OpenStack, for example, will be bundled in the Ubuntu Linux long-term support release and Fedora. Will it be in Red Hat Enterprise Linux? “We have nothing to announce,” said Bryce, who is also co-founder of Rackspace Cloud.

Red Hat gets over qualms

Red Hat, which fields the OpenShift platform as a service, has been ambivalent about OpenStack, contributing to some projects, but staying mum about whether it would officially join the effort. Many said Rackspace’s decision last fall to cede control of the effort to an OpenStack Foundation might change that. Rackspace promised the board would be set up in 2012. And there have been other signs that Red Hat is warming up to OpenStack (as well as Amazon) on the public cloud front, as The Register reported earlier this week.

The Citrix news was seen as a setback to the OpenStack process (Citrix was a member) but the effort still includes other big names including Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and others. HP is expected to talk up its cloud projects next week and Biri Singh, HP’s SVP of cloud services, will speak at the OpenStack conference in San Francisco.  Bryce also noted that Citrix, the CloudStack news notwithstanding, continues to work on aspects of OpenStack.

While a lot of these industry alliances are more marketing than substance, Red Hat and IBM are forces both in the open source world and in cloud computing so it’s hard to argue that their sign off doesn’t give OpenStack more credibility.

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