Mind the Gap, Next Stop the Cabinet Office

CohesiveFT is part of the UK Government Procurement Service’s innovative approach to IT procurement - G-Cloud CloudStore.  What does this mean?  We’re excited for the opportunity to
offer our products and services to the UK public sector.

CohesiveFT has been awarded the Framework Agreement for inclusion in the G-Cloud’s CloudStore.  Meaning our Cloud Container products and services for migration, networking, and orchestration are available on ‘CloudStore,’ an e-marketplace where public sector organizations can procure services to leverage the “IT equivalent of a Boris Bike.”  More information on the Boris Bike for you non-Londoners.

In December, Francis Maude, Minister for the UK Cabinet Office likened Cloud Computing to a Boris Bike “pay for what you need when you need it, and forget about costly on-going maintenance that you can live without”.  A nice simple analogy and a goal which the Government hopes will result in better IP procurement process and better value for the UK Tax payer.  By allowing the UK Government to engage more with SME tech suppliers, buyers will benefit from greater flexibility and better price options than the bigger boys

We are eagerly awaiting the reaction to the CloudStore from the public sector IT buyers.  Less than half of the bidders in the G-Cloud process where successful and none offer the unique combination of image automation, topology automation and network virtualization that help organizations consume cloud services in a secure controlled manner. 

One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is increased agility and with that comes the ability to fail fast and fail small.   Could the CloudStore be beginning of the end of the huge failures in Government IT?  Or is that just wishful thinking....

White Paper: Disaster Readiness and Recovery Best Practices

Now, for the first time, cloud computing offers a cost effective disaster management option. What CohesiveFT calls, Disaster Readiness is a cloud-based solution for staging a remote facility ready in the case of a disaster. This low cost repository is then operated on stand-by mode, and can even be configured with miniaturized clones of the server topologies running in your production datacenter. Instead of big iron running on idle, you can stage your digital assets, and run the smallest possible topology of virtual servers for each of your priority work loads. Each repository and topology packaged into a virtual Cloud Container similar the the idea of shipping containers filled with server racks.

The process involves five steps to reach Disaster Readiness, and another 3 steps to have a working Disaster Recovery facility operational. The steps are:

Step 1: Choose Your Cloud

Select a public cloud(s) to meet your scaling, geographic, technology, and vendor diversification needs.

Step 2: Build a Secure Environment You Control

Create a controllable and secure virtual overlay network on top of the cloud provider's physical network.

Step 3: Test Scaling and Failure Modes

Even before any IP or data is moved to the cloud, you have reduced your application's recovery time objective (RTO).

Step 4: Migrate Your Application Repository

Deploying copies of the digital assets needed for recovery.

Step 5: Commence Data Synchronization

Implement a the simplest workable method for synchronizing production data to the repository.

Disaster Readiness Accomplished!

You have narrowed your RTO by staging what you need to bring up the application in the cloud providers' facilities. And, you have establish a process for moving data to the cloud facility, which means your RPO is a a much more known and fixed down-time risk. Hold here until disaster strikes or to further tighten the recovery window, continue:

Step 6: Define & Deploy the Application Topology

Decide on an aspirational topology and deploying a scaled down version of your production systems.

Step 7: Process Live Data

Run select transactions through the Disaster Recovery facility as an extension of production.

Step 8: Conduct Periodic Disaster Drills

At this step the Disaster Recovery facility is fully operational, now your attention can turn to preparedness.

Read the WhitePaper to learn more about Disaster Readiness and Recovery made simpler and cost effective via IaaS cloud computing.

White Paper: NATO-G8 Summit - IT Readiness ALERT

As part of the Chicago IT community, CohesiveFT is especially tuned to the discussions and planning for the NATO-G8 Summit which will be held May 19th and 20th.  Protesting, demonstrations, and marches are part of Chicago's springtime.  However,  post 9/11, we must be concerned that terrorists will infiltrate and use peaceful activities as cover for much more sinister plots.  At the national, state, and city level extensive preparedness measures are already being put in place, and counter measures are being taken to foil the exploratory attacks now being made on critical digital infrastructure.

Now, for the first time, cloud computing offers a cost effective disaster management option.  What CohesiveFT calls, Disaster Readiness is a cloud-based solution employing miniaturized clones of the servers running in your production datacenter.  Instead of big iron running on idle, you can run the smallest possible topology of virtual servers for each of your priority work loads.  Each topology packaged into a virtual Cloud Container similar the the idea of shipping containers filled with server racks.  Each Cloud Container secures an exact replica of a server topology running in production.  Each one is scaled down and running on inexpensive virtual machines in an IaaS hybrid cloud.

By exploiting the 'pay only for what you use' cloud model, your miniaturized clone data center is a manageable operating expense not a major capital expenditure.  Disaster Readiness the right DR insurance plan for IT outages localized to a city's IT infrastructure, where multiple companies are effected concurrently.

It is not too late to be prepared for the NATO-G8 Summit.  Protect your high priority and at-risk IT resources by implementing a Disaster Readiness strategy to fit your unique needs.  Do-it-yourself, or like so many other enterprise IT shops, use CohesiveFT's Cloud Container products and services.  CohesiveFT provides actionable IT  contingency solutions for minor to catastrophic IT continuity risk.

The Cloud Container product set makes it possible to extend your data center into one or more IaaS provider's clouds while retaining complete securely & control.  Security & control accomplished by literally extending your enterprise firewall to enclose, isolate, and control each of the servers running in the public cloud, and all of the data in motion as well as when at rest.

Read the white paper,or for more information contact CohesiveFT's disaster readiness task force by emailing DRTaskForce@CohesiveFT.com.

Building a Smart Elastic Server

Today we opened up public beta access to our newest Elastic Server factory site, Smart.ElasticServer, that exclusively serves the IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise (IBM SCE) environment. The timing couldn't be better as it coincides with IBM's SCE announcement activities at their Innovation Centers around the globe. Many of the IBM Business Partner success stories being told are a result of the use of CohesiveFT products and services like the Smart.ElasticServer site.

Smart.ElasticServer.com is an IBM SCE-tuned implementation of our ElasticServer.com factory that has been providing multi-cloud image assembly automation since 2008. Our partnership with IBM is focused on providing enterprise application migration to the SCE. So aside from bringing the style sheet inline with Big Blue's color palette, we have tailored this factory site to allow virtual server import features and functions not currently available on IBM SCE. It allows IBM customers to start their application migration paths from datacenter to cloud, cloud segment to cloud segment, or cloud to cloud.


SmartImport
IBM SCE users can import Linux-based Smart Elastic Servers to their account in SCE using the Smart.ElasticServer factory. Imported Elastic Servers can either be built from scratch or using imported VMware images provided by the user. Users log into Smart.ElasticServer.com and link their Smart.ElasticServer account with their IBM SCE account. This association allows SCE customers to use "SmartImport" capabilities. IBM is enabling its SCE customers access to the Smart.ElasticServer image factory as part of the SCE public beta program. For more information visit Smart.ElasticServer.com or contact CohesiveFT.

Download our SmartImport PDF and start moving virtual workloads to IBM SCE today.

Slick.

Meet cft_smartcloud Ruby gem...

More and more of the CohesiveFT solution set is up and running in the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise on a daily basis. Our image automation folks, dyed in the wool Ruby-ists, came up with this Ruby language binding for the SmartCloud REST API.

For those of you who are object-oriented types, Ruby fans, SmartCloud users, or the curious - it is a neat interactive experience. It follows the naming convention of the REST API pretty faithfully but adds the "display_*" methods as convenience function to the "describe_*" calls.

My favorite is: smartcloud "display_instances(:order => 'Location')"

Check out the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/cohesiveft#p/u/0/-WdSHP2iwDM

If you have Ruby and the gems system installed, it should work using "gem install cft_smartcloud" and then "smartcloud help" from your command line.

Enjoy!



*on a Debian/Ubuntu variant you might need to say "PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin" or call "/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/smartcloud"

Open letter to Microsoft Partners (sort of): Don't retrain today.

OK. I hate open letters. I hate the faux header, footer, salutation, etc..

But, if I were of the wont to create such a thing, this is the closest I have come. I saw a tweet which pointed me to this article headlined:

Microsoft's Ballmer: 'Come on in, the cloud's lovely - just don't forget to retrain'


THIS MAKES ME CRAZY!
This is how Cloud Computing can fail in the enterprise (which is where Microsoft lives these days, they are not a darling of the Web 2.0 crowd).

I run into this "meme" plenty enough in the cloud circles - so it isn't Steve Ballmer alone.

And it isn't his fault I am limit up on this concept, but the message of "Hi, we are new, we are different, and in order to use us you have to re-architect, re-configure, re-learn everything!" is a pretty rotten message AND IT IS NOT TRUE!

One of the things that is so great about cloud is that super smart people have spent hundreds of millions of $$$ (billions?) at this point (thanks AWS, IBM, et. al.) so that I can un-learn a lot of things.

That is much better then re-training. I would love to have more things to forget. But so far I am happy forgetting how to manage datacenter hardware for one big category of cost savings.

Another great thing about cloud is that it runs x86 workloads. And you know what? My enterprise is full of those darn x86 workloads. And to make it even better, those x86 workloads don't need to be infinitely scalable, they don't need to run as formalized SaaS, they don't need to run as PaaS. They are "POA" - plain old applications. And I just need them to run somewhere. Hey - cloud is somewhere. Can't I use that?

Back to "plain old apps". If I have to re-learn, re-train on everything what is the point? First of all, why would I re-learn, retrain to use MSFT technologies in the cloud? If I am going to re-learn, re-train why don't I learn Linux, or the Oracle stack, or SalesForce and Force.com, or Google AppEngine for that matter.

However, if I just want my x86 Windows workloads to run - do I have to re-train to use the cloud? If I am a Microsoft Partner do I really need to re-learn and re-train just to move my products or services to the cloud? Blechh.

Questions:
1) Can't I just move my Windows servers in some relatively easy way shape or form to "the cloud" and get going?

2) Do I have to boil the ocean and move whole datacenters at a time?

3) Can't I get value and ROI on my investment one business application at a time, with only incremental training activities (say maybe way less training investment then understanding migrating from Windows Server 2008 R1 SP2 to Windows Server 2008 R2)?

Answers:
1) YES
2) NO
3) YES

if the cloud you use is the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise or Amazon EC2 (along with others).

This is what is so confounding about the re-learn, re-train, re-do everything mantra. Amazon EC2 runs Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 quite nicely. IBM SmartCloud runs Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 quite nicely.

So let's recap.

- I have zillion dollar data centers with more guards, guns, gas (halon), glass and metal than I can imagine, run by dedicated teams monitoring 24x7 at the hardware and virtual infrastructure layer.

- I have a web portal that allows me to, oh gosh, "START" and "STOP" and "REBOOT" Windows Servers. Degree of difficulty about that of learning how to check out books at your library.

- I have cheap and cheerful ways of connecting those cloud images to my data center as if they were just another LAN, using common industry equipment that my network admins use every day.

- At this point, (without learning anything about the almost immediate ROI I get out of quite simple yet powerful offerings from the likes of CohesiveFT, RightScale or Enstratus), I have Windows Servers up and running in the cloud but behaving as if "on my network", ready to use whatever automation, monitoring, naming, identity, authentication that I use in my datacenter today.

Where was the re-learning in that?

Re-learning, Re-training, Re-Doing means RE-SPENDING!!!
Do
not
do
that.

Are there things to learn? Of course there are. Cloud automation solutions for image automation, topology automation, network virtualization, backup, recovery, IDS, etc. are all available at TOPOLOGY PRICING not enterprise pricing.

This is super. Migrate. Evolve. Learn (not re-learn). Get quick ROI on simple, clear and immediate wins. Scale as appropriate over the next decade.

You are in the midst of the largest IT migration since the Y2k, but there is no forced end date.

From early 2007 to today, cloud quality and reliability has skyrocketed, prices have dropped, vendors have shaken out, investment has grown, 10s of thousands of successes have been had. This path and pace will continue and you get to decide what to move, and when.

The hoopla of "Infrastructure as a Service" (the part of Cloud CohesiveFT focuses on) is deserved:

- improved time to market
- improved automation
- ROI at the application level
- incremental value
- etc..

But at the end of the day these are x86 computers that we collectively install software on and run. Broadly the same, whilst rewardingly different in subtle, incremental ways.

Please try to learn that first.

(Cheers - Pat K)

VPN-Cubed® vpcPLUS Available Today

Just a quick note, we don't want to steal any of our partner's thunder.

The long awaited update to Amazon Web Services™ Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) beta is finally here. The update opens up the once closed and limited VPC offering to include such features as public access to VPC deployments, control of network ACLs, use of Elastic IPs inside VPC deployments, and controllable connections to S3. All these things make the VPC offering more valuable to users looking to do more with the offering than was previously possible. We applaud AWS for moving forward to offer their customers more connectivity options at the virtualization layer (see Welcome to the User-Cloud Part 1 and Part 2).

As an innovator in the cloud network and connectivity market we have collaborated with many cloud providers on how best to provide networking options to their users. Through our partnership with AWS, we have developed a unique Edition of our VPN-Cubed Virtual Networking Product specifically designed for use with the new VPC offering. We call it VPN-Cubed vpcPLUS. VPN-Cubed vpcPLUS was developed to address the lingering issue that public clouds are 3rd party controlled environments. No matter how many control and security features cloud providers make available to their user base, the virtual workloads are still running in 3rd party network environments (to which the customer has no insight, visibility or control). Since its launch in 2008 VPN-Cubed has been providing our enterprise customers with unmatched cloud networking security and control. By working with AWS to create our vpcPLUS Edition, enterprise users can migrate to the cloud with confidence and control. Check out our VPN-Cubed vpcPLUS page for more information on the use-cases or contact sales to move forward with your vpcPLUS deployment.

teamwork.