Author Archives: Reza Malekzadeh

A New Chapter, Nimbula Joins OpenStack

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At Nimbula, we’ve been focused on bringing our customers the best possible cloud infrastructure. Nimbula Director delivers all the elasticity and self-service of modern cloud but with all the security, and operational readiness expected of enterprise software. In the last year and a half, we’ve released Nimbula Director 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. We’ve been deployed all over the world to help with development and test, SaaS hosting, and batch processing. Our customers are in enterprise, internet, and government. Now, we are proud to announce the next step in our journey. As of today, Nimbula joins the OpenStack Foundation and the Openstack development community.

Why is Nimbula making this move?
Over the last year, a number of our customers and prospects have been asking us if we can provide them our enterprise ready cloud platform on top of an open core model and we are responding to that demand. The requirement for an open core model comes down to the following four value propositions.

  • Open source: An open source base guarantees no vendor with a great idea is prevented from quickly getting started and competing on level footing.
  • Community: The community model and massive vendor and developer participation guarantee fast introduction of new functionality.
  • Extensibility: API-driven extensibility guarantees that the cloud can be extended to any network or storage system and can be well managed by any external software. A customer’s cloud will not stall waiting on one vendor to release a particular feature or integration.
  • Choice: Most importantly, the proliferation of compliant distributions gives the customers what they most need, choice of the right provider with the future ability to replace that provider at any time – delivering them the right infrastructure at the right price over the long term.

With multiple open source cloud offerings, we chose OpenStack because we have been very impressed with the continued rate of growth of the project and community. The developer base, vendor commitment, product features, and most importantly customer traction have grown remarkably well in only a short time. Furthermore, as we have spoken with key OpenStack participants in the last few months, we have found significant mutual interest. While we are looking to meet the open core demand, many in the OpenStack community has shown interest in our capabilities and differentiators and have wanted to see that technology work to advance OpenStack.

Product Strategy
Nimbula’s product strategy is four-fold

  • Nimbula Director becomes an OpenStack cloud: Nimbula will continue to build, deliver, and support Nimbula Director as a complete packaged cloud platform solution. In the short term, we will be adding OpenStack APIs over Nimbula Director so that we meet the customer demand of OpenStack compatibility and so that our customers can leverage the OpenStack solutions ecosystem. While there are a growing number of OpenStack distributions, Nimbula Director will continue to distinguish itself in scale, reliability, operational excellence, a modern cloud networking model, and an authorization system that models real business practices.
  • Contribute: Nimbula has strong IP developed over the past few years that can be of use by the OpenStack project. We will start working right away with the OpenStack development community to identify and contribute code to improve OpenStack’s scalability, reliability, and security.
  • Merge: Over time, Nimbula Director will move from just having OpenStack APIs to ultimately sharing much of the core code. This will prevent duplication of efforts and will ensure quicker pickup of new OpenStack functionality into Nimbula Director as it releases.
  • Componentize: To the extent that Nimbula has functionality that we and the community decide is not part of the core of the cloud, Nimbula will separate out that functionality into modules for delivery both as part of Nimbula Director, but also as stand alone software that can work with other OpenStack distributions.

Customer Impact
While Nimbula will work as aggressively as possible to be a part of  OpenStack, our strongest commitment is to our existing customers. There will at no point be a regression in functionality or a let down on producing an enterprise ready cloud product. Nimbula Director continues to be Nimbula’s only product and we will make sure that the introduction of OpenStack APIs, functionality, and eventually code is non-disruptive and dealt with as just a part of the product upgrade process.

Closing
In closing, we at Nimbula would like to thank our customers for getting us where we are today and the OpenStack community for their warm and gracious welcome. We are proud to have had the support we’ve had from individuals, vendors, and the OpenStack Foundation itself. We are extremely excited about this new chapter and look forward to being a major contributor to OpenStack and its continued technology growth and market success.

Implementation Matters

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At the recent Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara, a new theme for debate emerged: Open. From the tone of the conversations, it feels that “Cloud” has been talked about enough and the new buzzword for conversations is “Open”. While it is certainly a good point to discuss, I want to reflect on what seems to matter most to our customers: software that works out of the box as advertised, implementation and delivery of the promised features! We want to provide our customers with an Amazon EC2-like infrastructure cloud and believe we are delivering on it!

We have worked with a number of customers over the past few months and as they have purchased and deployed our software, here are the points they mentioned as important to them.

  • Easy infrastructure cloud deployment: visit the nimbula.com website, download software, load it and it works! No need to speak with someone in sales or go through a gatekeeper. Some of our customers came out to us when they were ready to place their order and only had a few questions left. They ran the evaluation and bake-off against other platforms on their own, referring to our extensive technical documentation! Who else gives you such an easy and direct access with a complete high quality set of documentation?
  • Complete end-to-end automation, right from installation to deployment: Nimbula Director’s API has enabled our customers to automate a great number of things and gain precious time. We decided early on to put more effort in a complete API than a shiny UI. Our customers have valued that choice and it has been great hearing from them: one of them, using their Nimbula Director private cloud for development and testing of new applications claims close to 90% time savings for one test suite alone.
  • Solid security model: Nimbula Director delivers a security model that allows for very secure collaboration between tenants. A recent project in the Government space with a very security conscious customer helped us validate our model and demonstrate our claims.
  • No hardware shopping list: Nimbula Director works on commodity hardware and you do not need to purchase specific equipment to get a good experience and be able to deploy it. We harden the operating system and hypervisor (shipped as part of our software) to bring out the best possible performance and security on any hardware platform. As a matter of fact, one of our customers shared the hardware they had bought and I could not recognize any of the names: pure commodity white box vendors.

Now back to the debate: Open is clearly important and I believe that means more than just Open Source. Open is also about platforms which have openness to extensibility and manageability. It is about giving a choice to the customer: use our software as long as we provide you with a great product and customer service. If you are unsatisfied or think another platform is better, you should be free to migrate and not be locked into our software. I do not think the debate is about open source or not. It is about value to customers in the long run.

But let’s not dwell on it because while debates are good and generate noise and buzz, there is much work to do. We want to keep our head down and focus on what we do best: innovate and deliver a great software experience that works out of the box. We are focused on strong core guiding principles for our development, our co-founder speaks best of them.

So don’t take my word on our software quality, give it a spin!

Taking Advantage of Public and Private Clouds Requires the Right Cloud Management Software

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Cloud computing is just a few years old, but already has given rise to two separate approaches and architectures; one public, like Amazon’s Web services, the other private, usually inside a corporate data center. Computer users assigned to business units are attracted to the direct access and easy provisioning of the public cloud, since servers can be up and running in a few minutes. IT organizations, on the other hand, value the security and control they associate with private clouds, and worry about the proliferation of public cloud instances and its potential impact on corporate data and security policies. It’s a familiar tug-of-war.

Successful businesses have lately come to realize that both public and private clouds have advantages, and want to make able to use both of them when appropriate. Consider Intuit, the software company does the load testing for its online TurboTax program on servers at Amazon; because real customer data is not being used, there are no regulatory or privacy issues. However, once the software is made available to the public it runs on Intuit’s on-premises machines, as one would expect for information of such a sensitive nature.

Being able to move between public and private clouds in this manner requires the right kind of cloud management software, a true “Cloud Operating System” that doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to cloud architecture. Instead, it must make use of, when appropriate, the growing number of cloud technologies the marketplace is accepting.

In a properly designed Cloud Operating System, an application runs in either the public or the private cloud depending on the application itself, in connection with company policies. These policies might involve, for example, the kinds of data the application uses, or the extent to which the application is mission-critical to the organization.

The actual placement of an individual application’s workload in either the public or private cloud should occur automatically and transparently to end users. Be they in IT or in business units, users should concern themselves only with choosing the proper policy for the workload. Cloud management software should then take over, determining where precisely in the public-private cloud ecosystem the program will run.

This means that to be effective a Cloud Operating System software needs to shield users from the multitude of different command systems they currently need to master to move between public and private clouds. Instead the software must present a unified user experience, with the same authorization, the access control and interfaces regardless of the workload’s final destination. Users can focus on their workload needs using credentials set up centrally by IT. That protects the enterprise from employees disclosing their credentials to others, or worse, taking them with them when they leave the organization.

A Cloud Operating System must also give users a painless way to move data and applications back and forth between public and private clouds. That’s a seemingly straightforward task, but one whose current complexity routinely leads to lengthy and unexpected delays in what IT workers had assumed was going to be a straightforward migration process.

So how might this hybrid public-private blend architectures play out in an enterprise? Traditional mission-critical ERP programs are less likely to migrate to new cloud infrastructures, just yet. That’s because these programs have strict requirements for stability and fault tolerance and their data is subject to stringent regulatory and compliance regimes. In addition, the programs themselves do not require the constant changing and updating that can occur so easily in a cloud environment. ERP customers are much more concerned about keeping the programs running stably than they are with making daily adjustments to the underlying infrastructure. While mission-critical workloads won’t be the first ones that IT will move to cloud infrastructures, they will clearly be candidates for the private cloud in the second phase of cloud adoption.

By contrast, programs built on new generations of Web-based development environments, such as Ruby on Rails, are perfect candidates for internal clouds right away. Whether you are in a development and test environment or beginning work with a new Platform as a Service or Software as a Service offering, a Cloud Operating System technologies will make possible a new level of agility and flexibility into your organization. You can scale your infrastructure as fast as you can stack racks of hardware without having to bother with the lengthy server provisioning cycles once associated with IT deployment.

Of course, you can also use third party cloud resources like Amazon to complement your own infrastructure when doing so makes sense. Intuit used the cloud for testing; some companies move to the cloud to meet seasonal demands, or to run one of the many commercial SaaS offering becoming available. Cloud management software can transform the public cloud from a rogue resource snuck in the back door by business units trying to circumvent IT and make it instead a viable business tool, properly integrated into an enterprise’s systems.

There are a few more things that IT managers need to be aware of when choosing cloud management software besides its ability to handle both public and private clouds. Has the software been designed from the ground up to deal with the complexities of today’s computing environments or are those features bolted-on as an afterthought to software initially designed simply to set up virtual machines? How much does it automate the time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks often associated with creating and configuring virtual machines? And can it scale up as effortlessly as modern IT operations are discovering they need to?

IT managers will need to deal with those issues, too, as they make a decision about cloud management software. But at the very least, they need to make sure that when they ask a cloud management vendor if they are public or private, the answer they hear back is “Yes.”

2011 Prediction – Clearer Skies Ahead as Vendors Deliver on the Promise of Cloud Computing

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The word cloud was everywhere in the high tech industry in 2010. The incredible rise of Amazon’s public cloud offering and their success stories drew record interest from customers and technology providers alike. We saw everyone in the latter group start to “cloudify” their marketing. If you did not have a cloud strategy, you had the risk of falling behind. The race to “cloud” created a lot of confusion and there were very few, if any true cloud computing deployments beyond Amazon’s success stories.

As enterprise early adopters wanted to bring these benefits to their infrastructure, they started looking under the covers of the generally available private cloud offerings on the market from startups and the established virtualization and management leaders and found that those vendors couldn’t deliver on the promise of cloud computing because their solutions were not designed and built for cloud requirements and scale.

In 2011, I believe we’ll see new innovative vendors deliver private cloud solutions built from the ground up to deliver cloud benefits to enterprise customers. This will help “clear” the skies and what were just trends, ideas or initiatives this year, will start becoming real and tangible in 2011. As a result, we’ll see an acceleration of cloud computing deployment and usage beyond the current Web 2.0 world in traditional enterprise and service provider data centers.

This will be a perfect opportunity for IT to turn the tables and become an engine of innovation again. Cloud computing technologies will help with the management of data center infrastructure, which has become one of the top challenges in the enterprise, and in turn allow IT to focus on delivering new applications to the line of business. While virtualization has already brought a lot of efficiency gains to IT, there are still a number of missing pieces needed in order for IT be more agile and on the side of building competitive advantage rather than a cost center. 

One of the first major steps in that direction will come from automation. Current virtualization implementations still require numerous manual steps and that is neither efficient nor scalable. Automation is the next logical step and eliminates human errors. Automation should start from the moment you start installing the infrastructure and allow it to scale up as fast as you can stack equipment. A few minutes of manual interaction per machine results in loss of efficiency and an increase in the potential for human errors as your infrastructure grows.

But automating the build up of infrastructure should only be the first step. As you manage the infrastructure and build applications on top of it, automation will keep gaining foothold so that tedious, error-prone but well understood processes can be achieved with the maximum efficiency possible.

And this efficiency will increasingly be achieved on commodity hardware and software. In 2006, Alessandro Perilli covered the launch of Amazon’s Xen-powered virtual data center on demand, Amazon’s public cloud offering, and highlighted that he had expected VMware to be the first to launch such a service and not Amazon. But Amazon innovated with a new approach and they were not the only ones doing so. Over the past years, giants like Google, Facebook and others have demonstrated that you can build and deliver world-class applications and services at very large scale without brand name hardware or expensive hypervisors.

This movement has started entering the enterprise world and I expect it to pick up momentum in 2011. As the price of the base hypervisor is rapidly declining with some being free all together, customers are more and more comfortable running various offerings in their data centers. One size does not fit all and one should use the hypervisor most suited to the use and application being built on top of it.

As organizations start using the same building blocks as the major public cloud providers, the move towards true hybrid clouds will become a greater reality in 2011. Public clouds have demonstrated the business benefits of cloud computing in terms of efficiency, scalability and agility. Those benefits can be achieved in great part on private infrastructure using private cloud offerings. IT can look to bring greater amounts of flexibility and agility behind their firewall and empower their internal business customers. But not every application will be required to run on the IT infrastructure and in some cases, the use of public cloud infrastructure will make more sense from an economic or architecture perspective.

This will create a co-existence model where IT can pick and chose which applications should run on their traditional core systems, which should run on a new breed of cloud enabled infrastructure behind the firewall and which should be moved to the public cloud. This hybrid model will allow an unprecedented level of elasticity.

Although initial interest in the cloud was primarily driven by cost savings, other aspects of the cloud promise have been picking up steam and I expect them to dominate the reasons for adoption and deployment through 2011. The level of innovation enabled by private and hybrid cloud technologies will allow IT to build and deliver better applications with virtually unlimited capacity, using third party resources when required. Moving beyond association with cost, IT will be associated with innovation again, bringing more competitive advantages to their organization.