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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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Just because companies want to offload some compute tasks to third-party providers, doesn’t mean they don’t want precise management of those jobs or a way to track and monitor them. The race is on among the cloud service providers to offer the granularity of control enterprise customers need.

“Right now it’s very hard to manage server sprawl and to manage and maintain permissions across servers and roles,” said Jared Wray, CTO and founder of Bellevue, WA.-based Tier 3. That’s a problem every cloud provider from Amazon on down is hearing about from customers. Amazon just announced new cost tracking options to help customers better monitor their Amazon compute and storage workloads.

With Tier 3′s new Cloud Server Group Management features, IT can set up and run batch maintenance and software installation jobs. And, they can make sure that permissions allocated to a group do, in fact, get rolled out to all group members.

Wray said customers can also set default settings on their preferred machine sizes to keep a lid on over-provisioning. Service providers using Tier 3′s resources to support their customers can also set up groups for each customer then monitor and manage them all from a single monitor.

Tier 3, which has made a bit of a splash offering enterprise-class cloud infrastructure and platform as a service to enterprise accounts. exemplifies what Carl Brooks called a new breed of IT infrastructure provider.

“They started with the premise of cloud/infrastructure as a service and delivered services all the way up the stack,” said Brooks, who is the IT infrastructure and cloud analyst for Tier1 Research (no relation).  More mature competitors like Savvis and Terremark, on the other hand, started out as more old-school data center service providers that then added IaaS/PaaS capabilities to the mix.

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No cloud is perfect. And after some very public cloud outages, business customers are looking harder at divvying up their workloads among multiple clouds to mitigate risk.

The latest glitch was a 19-minute Elastic Compute Cloud connectivity issue at Amazon’s U.S. East region early Thursday morning. (More on this here and here.) Earlier this month, a 12-hour Leap Day Azure outage afflicted Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud.

With these snafus, business customers are starting to realize that, while cloud computing can cut costs, it is no panacea: Clouds run on data centers and data centers go down.

To hedge their bets, businesses are looking into multi-cloud solutions. That means companies that used to default to Amazon Web Services (AWS) might take a harder look at enterprise-class clouds fielded by Joyent, Terremark  or Savvis.

Special clouds for special workloads

Ty Amell, CEO of StackMob, a company that runs his mobile software development business on several clouds, says he sees the same trend emerging among customers.

“There are many advantages to the cloud, however it takes a different type of thinking when running cloud infrastructure. When architecting your system, you have to plan for any piece of it to be down at any time. This includes an entire availability zone or cloud service,” Amell said via email.

Bigger companies, at least, are divvying up their workloads, putting specific pieces in the cloud that makes the most sense. “If you have your data replicated, it is fairly trivial to spin up new servers somewhere else, or turn on idle ones. Having a multi-cloud strategy doesn’t mean you won’t have downtime, but you shouldn’t have the massive downtime we’ve seen with some companies when AWS has problems with their EBS volumes or Azure goes down,” Amell said.

Charlie Robbins, founder of Nodejitsu, agreed that multi-cloud deployments are driven by the desire to boost fault tolerance, to reduce latency between parts of their applications and to take advantage of specific features offered by a particular infrastructure-as-a-service vendor.

Of course, it’ s easier just to forkload a given application onto a single cloud and deal with one provider, but the fact that we’re well along into the cloud-computing era means that businesses are getting more sophisticated about what they can do to optimize their workloads and mitigate failures.

Greg Arnette, founder and CTO of Sonian, who has blogged on this topic, said cloud computing is succumbing to the traditional IT buying cycle. Customers start buying everything from one vendor, then move to best-of-breed services for different parts of their solution. He doesn’t see many Sonian customers deploying to multiple clouds now, but they’re headed in that direction.

Coming: Name-brand clouds

“They’re not mixing use cases, but over time, they will want a cloud based on brand name, the same way they choose internal IT. Every major vendor will provide a branded cloud; we’re just at the beginning of that curve,” Arnette said. That process is already underway with IBM SmartCloud, Microsoft Azure and Fujitsu Cloud.

And the fact is, some clouds are better suited for some tasks than others. Companies running the popular Node.js server-side framework for data-intensive-real-time (or DIRT) applications may run out of gas on generic public clouds once the workload scales up.  At that point, it makes sense to put at least those intensive workloads on Joyent or another cloud that handles low-latency disk and network I/O loads better than a vanilla public cloud, Robbins said.

Roger Jennings, CEO of software consultancy OakLeaf Systems, said his customers think about multiple clouds but typically end up rejecting the multi-cloud option. “DevOps issues with failover times and/or content sync cause them to stick with their original [single cloud] choice,” he said via email. DevOps refers to the software building process in which developers work with the operations side of the house to make sure goals are aligned.

Still, as companies get more sophisticated in their understanding of what clouds can and can’t do, look for more of them to split their computing loads among the clouds that suit each piece best.

Photo courtesy of by -JvL-.

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AT&T has been offering cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service for years under the Synaptic Hosting moniker, but those services largely targeted enterprise customers. With the new service, called Cloud Architect, AT&T is targeting small businesses and individual developers, presumably the same audience AT&T expects to use the spate of mobile-app-development tools it also announced today.

Steve Caniano, AT&T’s VP of hosting, application and cloud services, told me Cloud Architect will most likely be available within the next two weeks and “[I]t’s fair to say you’ll see the elements of [Cloud Architect] move in [the OpenStack] direction over time.” Such a move would let Cloud Architect users leverage the open APIs and shared core architecture that make OpenStack so appealing from an interoperability standpoint.

Additionally, Caniano said, AT&T is building its own OpenStack-based private cloud to run the company’s new API Platform, and there will be some synergy between that platform and Cloud Architect as well. AT&T acknowledged it was building an OpenStack private cloud back in May.

However, AT&T faces two big challenges as it tries to expand its cloud computing business: effectively distinguishing its enterprise offerings from its developer offerings, and convincing developers to choose AT&T over Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft, Heroku, Joyent or any of a number of other cloud providers. The latter challenge might be the hardest, as these providers have been courting developers for years and have reputable cloud services. IT giants HP and Dell also are planning developer-focused cloud services, both based atop OpenStack. AT&T, for its part, comes into the game with the notoriety of being everyone’s (including, no doubt, some iPhone-toting developers’) least-favorite wireless provider.

On the other hand, when AT&T competitor Verizon wanted to get serious about cloud computing, it bought Terremark and CloudSwitch. CenturyLink bought Savvis. These acquisitions suggest the buyers understood two important things: their strengths are not in building and delivering cloud infrastructure services, and enterprise customers are their bread and butter.

As for differentiating its multiple cloud offerings, even Caniano acknowledges there are some areas of overlap in terms of what services are being offered and how they’re procured. However, he explained, AT&T’s Synaptic services are far more complementary to the company’s virtual private network and other enterprise-centric offerings, whereas Cloud Architect will be a truer commodity-style, credit-card cloud like AWS or Rackspace Cloud Servers. Perhaps this distinction will be clearer when Cloud Architect becomes available.

AT&T has undertaken a risky strategy, one that keeps it competitive with Verizon and CenturyLink, but also with a whole world of IaaS and PaaS offerings targeting web and mobile developers. AT&T has the resources to pull it off if it can get its technology, business model and messaging right, but it won’t be easy.

Image courtesy of AT&T.

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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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