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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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Verizon’s Terremark unit went on high alert last week as Sandy approached Terremark’s Miami-area sites. Then it replicated the process for its major facilities in Culpepper, Va., and the New York area, said spokesman Xavier Gonzalez.

Sandy is bringing wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour in New Jersey, and the related storm surge could reach record levels of between 6 and 11 feet.

“From our perspective, this is part of doing business — we build data centers with these situations in mind. And from the cloud computing perspective, people have to remember that the cloud lives in data centers,” said Gonzalez. (Verizon is posting regular Sandy updates here.)

Update: Internap likewise started ticking off checklist items early, initiating its Emergency Action Plan for New York and Boston data centers late last week.

These plans — which are customized for each data center — call for testing out emergency systems, topping off fuel supplies and ensuring food and water availability for on-site personnel for the storm’s duration, said Bill Brown, VP of data center operations via email.

In addition:

“Each facility has enough fuel to run on generators for multiple days and we have already engaged our fuel suppliers for on-call assistance, if needed. We also added more engineers and technical support staff at each data center for the duration of the storm to monitor and ensure infrastructure availability and provide ‘remote hands service’ for customers so they do not have to travel to the data center.” 

Keeping an eye on Amazon US-East

Given several highly publicized Amazon outages over the past year, many will be watching Amazon Web Services’ US-East data center complex in Ashburn, Va. Last June, severe thunderstorms kicked off a chain reaction that led to a major outage there, ultimately impacting Netflix and other large AWS customers. Amazon US-1 suffered a non-weather-related event last week, as well.

Update: Heroku is keeping a watchful eye on AWS US-East, according to a post to its status page late Monday night.

Cloud storage provider Nirvanix said Monday it will enable customers using its New Jersey Node 4 data center to move their data to other locations in its cloud storage network — either temporarily or permanently — at no charge.

The key to data centers surviving a major natural event is not to wait until the last minute to prepare, said Shannon Snowden, a data center professional who is now senior technical marketing architect for Zerto, a company with technology that helps companies move and failover their mission critical applications.

Word to the wise: prepare, prepare, prepare

“You can’t wait ’til folks’ hair is on fire to plan these things,” he said. “What you should be doing from the data center perspective is [always] make sure the power has been tested, that you can fail over to generators, that those those generators are tested to make sure they’re functional and that they have enough fuel,” he said.

And, it’s critical to make sure that disaster recovery and secondary sites are able to ramp up when needed. “These places are typically sleepy little sites, quiet and dark most of the time with skeleton crews. You need a staffing plan to go from sleepy to all hands on deck,” he said.

The real worry with hurricane type events is not so much the wind, which any self-respecting data center can withstand, but flooding, which can cause huge problems. For that reason, drainage and landscaping are critical.

Hurricane Sandy photo courtesy of Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

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Industry players who talked to GigaOM, clearly hope for the best but are prepping for less.  Of the EU’s effort to rationalize all these conflicting dictates, a top executive of one of Europe’s leading cloud providers quipped:  ”They say they’re moving but glaciers move too.”

The problem is that while the EU has set policy around data protection, the regulations are not uniform across its 27 countries,with Germany often cited for its tough data privacy laws that mandate that personally identifiable information (PII) of consumers remain on German soil. Switzerland, a non EU country has similarly strict laws. Clearly, that geographic requirement flies in the face of the notion that cloud computing is a borderless, frictionless world where consumers transact with merchants not necessarily knowing where that transaction takes place.

Cloud confusion reigns in Europe

Cloud computing players on both sides of the pond bemoan this lack of clarity.

“The reality is although the EC addressed data privacy issues it was a directive not a law and the net result is that EU member states have adopted a patchwork quilt of data protection laws that vary in penalties and enforcement,” said David Canellos, CEO of Perspecsys, a cloud security company.

No kidding.  ”We’ve managed to confuse the hell out of customers,” said  Jim Darragh, the newly installed CEO of Abiquo, a provider of cloud technologies.  ”There are 160 different elements of European legislation pertaining to cloud.”

But pragmatists have to forge ahead. Verizon’s Terremark unit is proceeding with the assumption that it will need to have presence in all the relevant countries, said Chris Drumgoole, SVP of global operations for the big enterprise cloud provider.

Having said that, Drumgoole said much of the concern over European regs is overblown.  ”EU data privacy laws are the new trendy reason not to like the cloud.  Basically, the rule is you must have command and control over data and know where it lies, you must be able to delete it, and provide audit records of what happens with it. These are fundamental things you should do whether you’re in the cloud or your own data center. You can’t put your data to bed in Germany and have it wake up in France.”

Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of OnApp, a UK-based company that facilitates the federation of clouds, agreed that paranoia is counterproductive. “People have this notion that because things are in the cloud, that stuff is just flying around. That’s not true,” he said. At least not if cloud is set up right.

Still, the issue remains that given these laws, businesses are loath to put a ton of loads in public clouds — especially those with a limited number of  data centers. Amazon, the 800-lb gorilla, hosts its European cloud operations in Dublin. It has no presence in Germany, the region’s biggest economy.

Public cloud loss is private cloud gain

Smart cloud implementors are proceeding but cautiously. Private and hybrid cloud adoption is often preached as a solution to the data protection issue. The right implementations keep PII data under the control of the business and within the required geography. As IDC analyst Mette Ohorlu put it recently,  Europeans are “mad about private cloud.” Her most recent data showed nearly three quarters (73 percent) of European companies surveyed are considering a move to the cloud and of those, 55 percent want to go the private cloud route, up from 36 percent last year.

The net takeaway from all my conversations is one of cautious fortitude. The feeling seems to be Europe — despite its economic woes — is a huge opportunity for cloud computing. And the upside of all this is that confusion is so bad now, it’s bound to get better with this week’s EU report and beyond. There will be more — much more — discussion of the European cloud computing picture at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam next month.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user compujeramey

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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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Racemi, which specializes in moving business computing workloads onto and between clouds, snagged $7 million in B Round funding led by Paladin Capital Group and Harbert Venture Partners. The money will fund the expansion of sales, service and engineering efforts for Racemi’s cloud broker service. That brings total funding for the company to $19.3 million.

As more companies evaluate cloud deployments — especially multi-cloud deployments — the need for easy and safe ways to put workloads to the cloud to begin with, and then move them between clouds as needed, will grow. That’s the problem services like Racemi’s DynaCenter and competitors like CloudSwitch, now owned by Verizon and run out of its Terremark unit, are taking on. Other offerings in this space include Scalent, acquired by Dell in 2010, Altirus, now part of Symantec and Platespin, bought by Novell in 2008.

The growing realization that cloud computing is a great way to consolidate workloads, alleviate IT headaches, and mitigate risk is now tempered with the realization that no cloud provider — just like no internal data center — is perfect. Recent Amazon outages drove that point home hard. That’s one reason market researchers predict robust growth for cloud brokers. The 451 Group, for example, estimates that the sector will log a 62 percent compound annual growth rate over the next two years.

Atlanta-based Racemi said its software supports most cloud platforms including Amazon EC2, CloudStack, GoGrid, OpenStack, Rackspace and Terremark.

Photo courtesy of Flickr userMoyan_Brenn

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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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As more companies virtualize their workloads to get the best use of their hardware, concern remains about a lack of enterprise-worthy tools to protect those applications and data.

This product, which integrates with VMware vCloud Director, takes aim at applications that run “in and between private, public and hybrid clouds,” according to the company. Zerto’s goal, as reported by GigaOM last summer, was to make backup in virtualized environments as easy as it is with Apple’s Time Machine in the consumer realm.

While the product is just emerging publicly, it’s already in use by Terremark, the big cloud-hosting provider now owned by Verizon. Zerto’s target market is large cloud services providers (like Terremark) and enterprises that want to virtualize but demand a high level of protection for those bread-and-butter workloads.

“Cloud is becoming a key part of enterprise IT plans, and BC/DR [business continuity and disaster recovery] is an integral part of that,” Ziv Kedem, Zerto’s CEO said in a statement.

Among Zerto Virtual Replication 2.0′s key features is its ability to replicate between multiple sites so that cloud providers can support many customers, and enterprises can protect more than one data center as well as remote offices, the company said. The software is also storage-array-agnostic. The product supports VMware only at present, but given VMware’s penetration in enterprise accounts, that’s not a huge drawback.

Zerto was a LaunchPad Finalist last year at GigaOM’s Structure Conference.

The company is backed  by U.S. Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Greylock Partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Anonymous Account.

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