Elastic Server Now Serving Virtual Iron

Elastic Servers are now fortified with the recommended daily allowance of iron - Virtual Iron, that is! Today, we are happy to unveil a new virtualization format within our Elastic Server factory: Virtual Iron is immediately available as a download option.

Virtual Iron is a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization and virtual infrastructure management software. The company offers easy-to-use and cost-effective server virtualization software for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We have tasted Virtual Iron and can confirm that it is also delicious.

Virtual Iron is experiencing significant growth, with a 130% increase in revenues in the 3rd quarter of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007. That's impressive growth by any standard. We are big fans of growth which is why we encourage all of our Elastic Servers to grow up big and strong. If Virtual Iron is your deployment format of choice, come check out Elastic Server.

Get Started with Elastic Server
To deploy your custom-assembled virtual server to the Virtual Iron format, simply select the components you want and wrap them into your tidy stack. You can do this easily by visiting some of our most popular portals (e.g. Rails, Django, LAMP, etc.) or by adding one of our popular packages to your cart (MySQL 5, Apache 2 and PHP 5).

Once your stack is configured just the way you want it, select the "Virtual Iron" radio button from the "Ready to Build" screen pictured below. Give your server a descriptive name, choose whether to share your server and use a static password, and click the "Build Now" button. Voila. In a few short minutes, you'll receive an email with a link to your shiny new server. It's that easy.

Chris Barclay, director of product management at Virtual Iron, says "CohesiveFT has created a compelling platform that reduces the complexity of creating production-ready virtual servers comprised of multi-sourced components. Now, with the addition of Virtual Iron within Elastic Server, our customers can easily take advantage of existing Elastic Servers or create their own custom servers. CohesiveFT's create once, run anywhere platform simplifies deployments and gives customers choice of virtualization vendor. This is yet another way that Virtual Iron customers can do more with less." Read more about our partnership on the Virtual Iron blog.

Do you have more than a few servers to create? Contact our sales team to learn about our Enterprise-class offering for clusters of servers. You may also be interested in our cloud security offering, VPN-Cubed.

This holiday season, CohesiveFT advises you to assemble your virtual servers with care and get plenty of Virtual Iron.

Vive La Difference: Amazon EC2 Expands to Europe

In certain circles it is de rigeur to view the US market as more competitive than the European market. The cloud is no exception with the US market leading adoption of the cloud and seeing a proliferation of cloud providers such as Amazon AWS, GoGrid, Mosso, Engineyard, Joyent, Heroku and many more. (Incidentally a fun thing to do is click on all those links right now, and compare them. Plus ca change?)

Proliferation is nothing without competition. And competition is really the heart of the cloud value proposition. Competition means "cheaper". Why bother investing in yet another data center, staffing it, making it reliable, carbon-neutral, and so on, when you can rent resources ‘on demand’ from one that already fits the bill? Yeah ok ... but this argument does not carry much weight when there are only a few clouds to choose from, and hence little competition to drive innovation forward and prices down.

This is also the reason why people are already talking about interoperability and cloud standards. People like Simon Wardley in his already notorious “don’t get bitten in the aaS” call to action (aka "rant") at CloudCamp, and analysts such as Redmonk, have been calling for interoperability as the foundation for a competitive services market. By decoupling service from product (another cloud theme) we the users can force competition based on service quality and not API lock in. In other words: we want differentiation on value.

The excellent Cloud Summit in Tel Aviv last week saw an inaugural gathering of newly formed Cloud Interoperability Forum where a number of "cloud customers", e.g. MDs at major banks, called for more competition on ease of migration and price, so that clouds can be adopted for more systems and sooner. More value - faster.

In this context, it is easy to see why people are so excited about Amazon EC2 launching in Europe. At CohesiveFT we have been delighted to work to connect to the first European cloud entrants such as Flexiscale (with more to come). But customers want more and they want differentiation. Already many customers are using S3 to outsource simple storage needs in the European region. The differentiator is to couple this with Amazon EC2 and EBS in one go. With an integrated approach the customer will get more value faster.

At CohesiveFT have been operating in Europe for two years and if one message has come through consistently it is: I want flexibility but I also want control - give me local resource that is consistent with local commercial constraints. Amazon EC2, and our support for this in Elastic Server, means more customers can have this today. With Elastic Server customers retain control - you can take your application and port it to any of the clouds we support and then move it between them safely.

Because of this pent up demand, Amazon are taking the European opportunity really seriously. It’s not just about EC2, S3 and EBS. Anyone who has been at any more or less any important (EU/UK) web conference this year cannot have missed Martin Buhr and Simone Brunozzi. These guys are the public face of the European Amazon team and have been outstanding in gathering and focussing developers, customers and community. Very often they have been backed up by Jeff Barr, who seems able to be everywhere at once, and the significant presence of Werner Vogels who is not just Amazon’s CTO but also a big driver of AWS.

So who do we think is going to use the cloud in Europe? Well there are still some tricky regulatory and privacy questions that everyone is still figuring out. But even with these concerns there is a big market from banks, telcos and big corporates to offload for example testing and QA to the cloud. "Testing" is a problem. It shows up a classic provisioning gotcha that we see in any big customer - “I cannot bring my service to market without testing it to destruction but I cannot get the machines set up fast enough”. Well, people of Europe, that’s about to change. The era of the machine-hugger is at an end!

It’s not just corporations. Amazon’s recent deal with CapGem sets the scene for what could be a stream of SIs looking to take advantage of shorter time to market using the cloud, around specific value propositions such as collaboration solutions. There are a lot of SIs in Europe - it’s the flip side of localised market fragmentation. Here I am excited about the prospects for our VPN-Cubed product for bridging from enterprise servers to one or more clouds securely, and without moving all your data because sometimes you can’t.

And returning to the theme, this is the week of LeWeb in Paris. (Being asinine, and not French I like to call this "The LeWeb"). It's the ultimate BOF. From around the world, software vendors and web start-ups have gathered to show their latest and greatest to a crowd of big buyers. This is community in action. At CohesiveFT we love community and open source - because they use the cloud too.

So. People like the cloud. Now more people can use the cloud. And - more clouds means more competition and at CohesiveFT we think this is what Europe wants. Vive la difference! Enjoyez-vous!

Elastic Server Now Deploying to Amazon EC2 in Europe

Today, Amazon announced the ability to launch Amazon EC2 instances in multiple geographically distinct regions, specifically in the USA or Europe. The CohesiveFT corps of engineers have been busy integrating this new feature into Elastic Server, our web-based "factory" for assembling custom virtual servers. We are happy to announce that the new EU region is available as a simple "point-and-click" deployment option.

EC2 availability zones
Each Amazon EC2 region is completely independent and contains Availability Zones for establishing fault tolerance within the region. This approach achieves the greatest possible failure independence and stability, and it makes the locality of each EC2 resource unambiguous. For users of CohesiveFT's Elastic Server platform, region selection is as simple as a drop-down menu. Read more about our support for Amazon EC2.

Individual developers and small teams
Elastic Server is the fastest way to put your stack in the cloud. Developers and small teams can launch instances in multiple geographically distinct regions including the U.S. and now Europe. Our Community Edition is free to use and is well-suited for quick development and testing. Elastic Server Personal Edition is great if you want to increase usage from development or QA to production. This edition supports multiple Amazon EC2 sizes (L, XL and high-CPU instances).

The most common workflow for assembling an Elastic Server is to navigate to one of our portal sites (e.g. Rails, Django, LAMP, etc.). Later in the workflow, you'll have the option to add more components using the Bundle Explorer.

You can maintain your own components in a private repository and package your own bundles using our Bring Your Own feature (e.g. add projects from Github or elsewhere.) Check out how Alan Williamson quickly built a portal for deploying Open BlueDragon to the cloud. Don't have time to assemble your own stack? Check out the growing library of popular community templates and servers for quick download. Sound cool? Get started now.

Enterprise IT professionals
CohesiveFT offers services for deploying clusters of servers to the cloud. Our support for Amazon EC2 in Europe addresses common requests including reduced latency, geographic control, local billing, and local compliance. Our "Cubed" family of packaged services includes VPN-Cubed, the customer-controlled overlay network that enhances security and data encryption by bridging EC2 Europe and EC2 USA back to your Enterprise data center. These services help reduce the risk of exposing data assets to the cloud.

Another capability VPN-Cubed boasts is cross-cloud failover between different clouds (e.g. Amazon and Flexiscale). Our combination of software and services can be customized for an Enterprise's unique topology, providing redundancy, failover and scalability during critical transitions or seasonal spikes. Now, with our support for Amazon EC2 in multiple regions, we can help our Enterprise customers create one logical network between their EC2 instances running in the Amazon regions. Customers can enforce static addressing, encrypted communications and even multicast protocols.

Visit our website for more detailed information about VPN-Cubed including a technical overview explaining the difference between a regular VPN or tunnel and our cloud VPN solution. Questions? Please contact us directly at sales(at)cohesiveft.com.

Server Tech Predictions by Patrick Kerpan

I was recently asked by a trade magazine to prognosticate on the future of server technology from the CohesiveFT perspective. As the end of the year draws near, I thought I'd share the fruits of that labor with all of you. Enjoy! In addition to server market predictions, I also dabble in numerology and tarot cards in my spare time.

What will server tech look like in 10 years?

1. Server market size is going to grow dramatically faster than predicted.
   Over the last several years the data center server market grew about 6% per year in unit volumes. With the advent of virtualization and cloud computing some analysts are now predicting contraction in the server market; this as a result of people using virtualization for server consolidation projects. I don't agree. Maybe there will be a slight hiccup given the global economy - BUT - I actually think it is possible for the server market (volume sales) to more than double in the next decade.
   
   Here is why, enterprises are not limited in the number of problems they want to solve in order to manage and grow their businesses. They are not even necessarily limited by the money they are willing to spend to solve their problems. Enterprises are bound by their inability to manage the complexity of the IT infrastructure needed. Unchained from the complexities of IT management - enterprises are almost unbounded in their desire to bring IT resources to bear on their business challenges.
   
   As most of the significant challenges of data center management are offloaded to cloud and utility computing providers - businesses will be more than willing to buy massive amounts of computing, communication and storage resources to eliminate business growth obstacles.
   
   
2. "Grey market" / "Off brand" servers will present challenges to leading assembler/integrators.
   Cloud computing centers will be of such massive scale that the trend will be for them to move to cheap energy locations; which means away from traditional hosting centers - and potentially many of them in emerging economies, rather than in the US or Western Europe, where energy prices are high. As such - the suppliers to these computing centers may not be the traditional leading server vendors. As the millions of server units move "out of sight - out of mind" the faceplate and branding of the devices become less relevant; creating opportunity for emerging market hardware manufacturers to overcome the big brands. Fast, cheap, no frills, OK-energy efficiency will be the driving characteristics. Service contracts aren't the issue - plug them in and at some point, if it is dead, pull it out of the rack and throw away (like Google does).
   
   
3. Virtual Servers become the "Server" that matters - and there will be 250,000,000 new ones every year.
   As utility computing and cloud data centers become the dominant location for physical hardware servers, and as enterprises have a decreasing number of servers in their on-premise computing facilities, the Virtual Server (Virtual Machine Server) becomes the new focus of attention. It will be an enterprise's proprietary code and data processing embodied in these virtualized containers that is their source of business capability. Where those virtualized devices will run becomes a function of cost, reliability and latency; attributes of the cloud vendor, not attributes of the server hardware provider.
   
   As chips get even faster, more physical servers get sold, hypervisors get better, and enterprises become fully comfortable with virtualization it is easy to imagine 250,000,000 new virtual servers per year being assembled and deployed to physical servers. These become the new unit of enterprise productivity and the nexus of competition for customers by cloud computing centers and other value added service providers to this approach to computing.
   

Most promising brand new server technology?

1. Next wave server hardware refresh cycle makes virtualization the default deployment option; physical hardware deployments become the exception.
   With the next wave of hypervisors from Vmware, Citrix, Microsoft, Open Source Xen and KVM - combined with support for virtualized memory maps, virtualized IO channels (file and network) from Intel and AMD, the latencies introduced by virtualization will be under 1%. Given the advantages of virtualized infrastructure this new hardware will make virtualization the default. Today organizations use physical hardware by default, and virtulization is done after due consideration. With this next wave of hardware (subsequent generations to processors like the 16-core Intel® Xeon® Processor 7300 series processor and Intel Xeon Processor 5400 series), virtualization will be the default and physical hardware installs will only be done by extreme use-case exception.
   
   
2. Multi-core processors will grow in density (Intel/AMD) and in dedicated purpose cores (IBM/Toshiba Cell Processors)
   In the 5 year window more multi-core devices will become available. In many ways this will come as a form of "consumerization" where the unit volumes of home video game units will drive lower prices and more capabilities out of the multi-core market. These unit volume gains will allow for grey market server vendors to create cheap, powerful servers for utility computing.
   
   
3. Memristors will be part of controlling energy costs and capacity management in utility computing.
   The 7/8/08 edition of EETimes states, "In April, Hewlett Packard Laboratories researchers claimed to have 'discovered' memristors, which joined resistors, capacitors and inductors as the fourth passive circuit postulated by University of California at Berkeley professor Leon Chua in a 1971 paper." Commercialization of these devices will happen in this 10-year period as well leading to new forms of non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) and potentially processor chip design as well. If only the NVRAM advances happen servers will be able to be for all intents "instant on and instant off" allowing fine grained power control across computing resource in utility computing centers.
   

What are the problems that need to be solved in server tech in the next 10 years?
Most of my thoughts on this is the mirror image of my comments above; many of the challenges are organizational and software-related including:

• Management of increased server units in the data center
• Reorganization of roles and processes to fully leverage the use of utility computing centers
• Migration of physical devices to cheap energy locations; installation of necessary bandwidth to cheap energy locations
• Need for instant-on, instant off devices
• Management of as many as 2.5 times one order of magnitude increase in the number of servers in the form of virtual servers
• Strategies for distributed a businesses computing infrastructure across multiple centers in order to avoid a catastrophic geographic failure
• New programming languages and frameworks may come into vogue to take advantage of mutli-core architectures; ERLANG (Ericsson's language for telephone switching devices is coming into fashion already today for these purposes)

VPN-Cubed: Technical Overview

People sometimes ask us, "How is VPN-Cubed different from a regular VPN or tunnel?" It is not an easy question to answer because there are many variables to consider. This blog post will examine the different feature requirements for a VPN, and help to explain how our VPN-Cubed offering goes well beyond these typical features and use-cases to provide security and control of your infrastructure in the clouds. Please visit the VPN-Cubed web page for general information about our cloud VPN. If you have questions, leave them in the comments, or drop us an email at marketing(at)cohesiveft.com.

In a nutshell, what is VPN-Cubed?
VPN-Cubed is a customer-controlled solution for use within a cloud, across clouds or to connect private infrastructure to clouds. It is a novel implementation of VPN concepts but extended for use in cloud computing (and other 3rd party controlled computing environments). VPNs have the typical use cases of connecting 2 LANs together or desktop clients to a LAN over the Internet. VPN-Cubed builds on these core VPN concepts, but can be thought of as a customer controlled "overlay network." An overlay network is "a computer network built on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network." VPN-Cubed provides this function, putting it in customer control across multiple locations, allowing the customer to control their topology, their network addressing, their encrypted communication, and their desired network protocols, all in a scalable, highly redundant form.

If it's more than a VPN, why did you call it a VPN?
Virtualization and cloud computing are creating new junctures in how systems are assembled, deployed and managed. We call it VPN because it is like a VPN for the clouds, but extends the concepts to provide an overlay network that can be configured and run by IT staff who are familiar with configuration and management of a traditional VPN. We call it "-Cubed" because it is more than a VPN (as in raised to the 3rd power) and because we think of a Cube as the thing that holds your infrastructure, in your control, in the clouds. When we talk about putting a customer topology into a cloud computing center like EC2 or FlexiScale we say we are "putting it into a Cube."

Does VPN-Cubed support multiple server operating systems?
When we set out to create the offering, we had to address the growing challenge of multiple server operating systems. It is increasingly the norm to find more than one operating system in any given IT environment. To that end, VPN-Cubed supports Windows Server 2008, Debian (Etch, Lenny), Ubuntu (8.04LTS), Fedora 9, CentOS 4, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, openSuse, Novell SLES, and others. Note: While "client" machines can be a part of a Cube, the focus of VPN-Cubed is to support the server infrastructure in a cloud, across clouds, or connected from private infrastructure to the clouds.

What about firewall and the NAT protocol?
In a cloud environment, VPNs need to play well with firewalls and protocols. That means, they should not require large ranges of ports to open and they should accept clients from behind NAT. VPN-Cubed Managers accept client connections on a single TCP or UDP port and seamlessly support clients behind NAT.

Is kernel modification a common requirement?
Whereas some solutions require clients to modify their kernel on Linux and Unix systems, VPN-Cubed is a user-space solution. That means kernel patching or modification is not typically required on most modern operating systems.

Do you require more than two active-active gateways?
Typical VPN solutions do not scale beyond two active-active gateways. We configured VPN-Cubed to address this need. VPN-Cubed supports synchronized "N-active" VPN-Cubed Managers. This means each VPN-Cubed manager has the same view of the topology as all of its peers, allowing it to support any of the servers in your cloud infrastructure, in the event of a failure of one of the managers. It also means the servers in the VPN-Cubed can keep their same network address, regardless of the manager they communicate through.

How are static IP addresses managed in the cloud?
VPN-Cubed "clients" (usually servers deployed to a cloud or virtual infrastructure) get the same IP address no matter which VPN-Cubed Manager they are connected to.

Do your clients require communication via different gateways?
VPN-Cubed Managers use routing tables to pass traffic between servers connected to different managers. A device only needs to know its VPN-Cubed Manager and it can communicate with any device in the VPN-Cubed topology, regardless of its actual location.

Does your solution allow multiple clouds or a hybrid infrastructure between co-location sites, clouds and your data center?
VPN-Cubed Managers are virtual servers that act like traditional VPN gateways *and* clients as well. They form an N-active, multi-directional overlay network between your various computing centers. This enables your servers in the VPN-Cubed to run in Amazon EC2, Flexiscale, Mosso, etc., as well as in your co-location site or data center.

Is your current VPN solution tethered to a single LAN/subnet?
VPN-Cubed Managers can be located anywhere, including all over the Internet, inside a single cloud, or across multiple clouds. VPN-Cubed Managers maintain a synchronized and encrypted channel of communications between each manager in a specific VPN-Cubed topology. The drawings below demonstrate this freedom.

OpenBlueDragon Dens at Elastic Server Factory

We are very excited to introduce you to Alan Williamson, a member of the steering committee at OpenBD and co-founder of AW2.0 Ltd. Alan launched an OpenBlueDragon Elastic Server site today.


He uploaded the OpenBD packages, bundled them, and created an Elastic Server Site on his own in less than a day. Check out Alan's blog post where he explains the process.

Interested in doing the same for your software component or project? All you need is an Elastic Server Personal Account and you will have all the tools necessary to provide your users with a quick and easy deployment solution - The Elastic Server Factory.

If you have any questions or would like some help getting started please reach out to us via our support forums.