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On July 19, 2010, Rackspace led the announcement of OpenStack, with a goal of creating an open source cloud software solution for use on industry-standard hardware.  The initial releases contemplate solutions for both cloud compute and object storage.  While these are the first two releases, they are separate offerings.  Remember, cloud storage is not just the storage target for cloud computing, it is one potential storage target for cloud computing, and is in and of itself a stand alone cloud offering of programmable storage.

Now, I have purposely used a term from the clothing industry, "off the rack", to spend a moment looking at a framework for evaluating the opportunities this may present.  With dress shirts, you can buy off the rack, semi custom, or custom, each with a unique value proposition based on fit, choice and cost.   Interestingly enough, this may be a good lens through which to consider the possibilities of OpenStack, and in particular, OpenStack Object Storage.

Rackspace has made no secret of its motivations for leading this initiative, and its desire to focus on "fanatical" service as it's key differentiator versus the fundamental technology on which the service is based.  Fair enough, and so the question becomes, is the rapidly emerging and immature cloud marketplace already "mature" enough to seek homeostasis?  (Homeostasis is the property of a system, either open or closed, that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition.)  Have enough models and innovations, from startups, academia, open source movements and large tech companies, been tested in the marketplace to the extent that we can already race to the common denominator?  Perhaps now is a good time to start, as long as you are willing to acknowledge that the desired results are a good ways off.

Before we jump off into "Off the Rack" software, a quick look back at open source is helpful.  For more reading on the open source software industry a good introduction is The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Six things are particularly interesting: 

1. An open source alternative can emerge as a follow on to a successful commercial technology and can become pervasive versus the commercial offerings it succeeded (LINUX versus UNIX is the reference case here).
   
2. A second result of this approach can also end up with a big success, although in more of a niche than a pervasive replace for the earlier commercial offerings (MySQL versus Oracle, IBM and Microsoft in the relational data base space).  
   
3. An open source effort can also emerge earlier in a technology cycle and come of age as a pervasive solution (Apache Web Server comes to mind here).
   
4. Open source generally requires very careful cultivation of the community of developers, with active interest by academia (and partnering with NASA is part of the formula here).  Commercially sponsored open source efforts are becoming more common, although it as of yet has not been proven as the typical "breeding ground" for most great open source successes.  Eucalyptus, with its roots at University of California Santa Barbara, seems to be a more traditional route.
   
5. Open source is not necessarily reflective of rapid commercial opportunities for success.  Eucalyptus is obviously beginning to maneuver towards a repeat of the commercialization model.  OpenStack is taking the approach most favored by other open source successes like Apache.  A couple of good reads here are this article from BusinessWeek and this. See also Derrick Harris' post over at GigaOm.
   
6. There are also hundreds of thousands of open source projects that had mixed success or languished altogether. A quick look at  SourceForge (an open source project hosting site) shows nearly a quarter million hosted projects. How many of these have languished or had little impact on the market.
   

So, the first issue is that there will exist for some time to come a real question as to the adoption potential of OpenStack.   I believe that adoption is driven by applicability to need.  In a moment we will address a serious issue which OpenStack Object Storage must overcome to be successful, at best, and at worst, will confine it to a niche market.  My views are very much directed at the Object Storage offering, versus the compute offering, which I believe exists in a different space and as a different type of solution.  With this backdrop, let's have a look at the cloud storage marketplace today, and use the analogy of off the rack, semi custom and custom:

• Off the Rack:  implement as is, one size fits all, each with unique approaches for performance, scalability, bit integrity, may or may not provide geo services.
• Semi Custom:  Select from storage types (DAS, SAN, NAS, JBOD), shared or distributed file systems and object systems, mix and match storage for different SLA and cost/usage patterns on the same infrastructure, multiple APIs, meta data and catalog abstracted from storage layer, geo services.
• Custom:  Generally a service only offering and not available as deployable infrastructure, specifics will vary widely based on service provider offering strategy.
  

Infrastructure	Type	Comments
Eucalyptus	Off the Rack	Limited S3 APIs
OpenStack	Off the Rack	CloudFiles APIs
Scality	Off the Rack	S3 APIs
Mezeo	Semi Custom	Mezeo ReST APIs and S3 APIs
NetApp	Off the Rack	Bycast APIs, NetApp storage
EMC Atmos	Off the Rack	Atmos ReST APIs, EMC storage
Service	Type	Comments
Amazon S3	Custom	S3 APIs
Microsoft Azure	Custom	Windows centric
Rackspace	Off the Rack	Is the basis for OpenStack
Nirvanix	Custom	SOAP APIs, multi node
Google	Custom	Offers S3 APIs
AT&T Synaptic	Off the Rack	Based on EMC Atmos
OpSource, SoftLayer, Layered Tech and others	Custom	Based on Mezeo

As you can see from the summary above, there exist as many views of what constitutes either a cloud storage service or a desirable cloud storage deployable infrastructure as there are service providers and vendors.  Note that a semi custom infrastructure results in a "custom" service as implemented.  "Off the rack" results in very similar services by those who utilize the same infrastructure unless they make their own major additions.  Any offering can be differentiated by service, and the degree and quality of service is critical to customer satisfaction and plays a strong role in value creation.

The OpenStack announcement as it regards Object Store and its approach to cloud storage seems to view cloud storage infrastructure as highly akin to an operating system (or at least a "hypervisor") and more similar to a selection of LINUX or Windows than that of an application or middleware layer.  While I agree that cloud compute is very close to this model, cloud storage is a service oriented architecture, with programmability for new applications that can tolerate Internet latency because of Web Services (like ReST APIs). The industry constantly overlooks this key point as it is consumed with the low cost, pay for use and thin provisioning capabilities of this storage tier.  Solutions for thin provisioning and low cost have been available far longer than cloud storage. Further, pay for use is more of a business decision than a technology. 

In the earliest days of cloud storage, there existed initial confusion that cloud storage was defined by cost, scalability, pay for use, and thin provisioning only and not programmable access (usually via ReST APIs).  ParaScale paid a huge price for not understanding that cloud storage requires Web services (like ReST API) access.  Now, with OpenStack Object Store, we see a follow on case of this same perspective, but with basic APIs for Put, Get and List.   Yes, it provides for Internet access via ReST APIs, but the focus continues to be primarily cost based versus new application enablement based.  It could be argued that the open source approach will provide for the appropriate additions of "advanced services" to be added.  However, even the use of the platform by NASA is more focused on cost of storage than on advanced functionality because NASA stores much more data than almost any institution or enterprise in the world.

I think Savio Rodrigues states this view very well in his post:

"Select products based on business needs, not license alone: It's also interesting to note that very few enterprises are in NASA's position with regards to size of IT investment and skills in-house. While NASA engineers were ready and willing to contribute new features into the Eucalyptus open source community, few companies have the skills or governance to consider allowing their developers to contribute to open source projects.  Summary trend number 7 from the 2010 Eclipse survey results highlighted this issue.

To suggest that NASA's buying or IT decision making patterns represents much more than the top 1 percent of IT buyers would be a stretch."

The overwhelming majority of enterprises would rather pay a vendor to deliver, maintain, support and enhance their private cloud software infrastructure than place that burden on internal IT staff. Whether the enterprise is paying for a closed source commercial product, a commercial product based on an open core product, or a subscription to an open source product, the product selection decision will be made based on business requirements much broader than 'is the product open source or not?' "

Keep in mind that cloud storage is a stand alone service associated with application delivery over the Internet and also associated with low cost, pay for use, scalable storage resources.  Social media applications and many Web based applications exploit these capabilities; for example publishing a file to a URL and significant tagging of files.

This view of cloud storage as nothing more than cost and volume-based ignores its extraordinary importance as a service-oriented architecture for new application enablement.  I believe both views are equally important and need to be equally served.  Will OpenStack, with its pervasive cost focus, be able to drive its community to this additional view of needed contributions of advanced services for cloud storage?  Lydia Leong of Gartner Group provides an interesting view of the open source community issues associated with this in her post:

"At the same time, open sourcing is not necessarily a way to software success. Rackspace has a whole host of new challenges that it will have to meet. First, it must ensure that the roadmap of the new project aligns sufficiently with its own needs, since it has decided that it will use the project's public codebase for its own service. Second, it now has to manage and just as importantly, lead, an open-source community, getting useful commits from outside contributors and managing the commit process. (Rackspace and NASA have formed a board for governance of the project, on which they have multiple seats but are in the minority.) Third, as with all such things, there are potential code-quality issues, the impact of which become significantly magnified when running operations at massive scale."

One last comment on this business of vendor lock in and cloud storage APIs (another focus of the OpenStack announcement).  I would submit that while a specific set of APIs has the potential to create vendor lock in, this is a much smaller problem than what is experienced in other technologies.  If you are really worried about it, you probably have never actually written a ReST API call.  It is written in many languages, and we have seen cases where applications that run on S3 run unchanged on Mezeo.  Others need very minor modifications, and still others are excited to take advantage of some of the unique Mezeo services.  It just is not a problem, and this is much more related to FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and marketing zealotry than it is associated with technological reality.  The APIs of choice will shake out, and it is far to early to say if it will be S3, OpenStack, CDMI or a combination of all of these, and others, as yet unforeseen.  (At Mezeo, we have never believed there will be one winner, and instead focused on architecture to enable easy and effective delivery of whichever APIs stand the test of time.)

The interesting view that seems to be missing here is that marketplace competition by service providers already serves to drive down the price of cloud storage, so a commoditized stack embraced by most is unlikely to yield extraordinary incremental savings.  At the same time, while the competitive market conspires to drive cloud storage costs ever lower, the need to differentiate, and deliver solutions as well as a programmable storage to enable multiple new and exciting types of applications will rapidly replace the pure cost and scale focus of current cloud storage offerings.  Sometimes, the "new" application is simply enabling it in the cloud, to produce the same result at a lower cost!  This requires significant cloud storage functionality in order to make this easy and productive.  Amazon continues to prove this with their many additions and capabilities which differentiate their service.  Mezeo sees much the same view on the part of our customers.  The focus is on what cloud storage can do, what problems will it solve, what business opportunities does it create, what new applications can it enable and all of these views assume it will be competitively priced.

Cloud storage represents significant opportunities for institutions, the enterprise (see my recent post on the business case for enterprise cloud storage) and for the IT service provider.  Cloud storage is substantially different from cloud compute, and requires that you understand this difference in order to effectively evaluate the impact of this announcement, as well as your next steps.

There is no doubt that every enterprise has devoted some time and energy to evaluating how cloud technologies can best be put to work in their ongoing pursuit of cost reduction and to a lesser extent for potential improved service levels particularly around rapid provisioning of compute and storage resources.  Mezeo has recently begun to work with various enterprises, and I want to share some of the opportunities that appear to align strongly with these two goals.

In terms of cost, most enterprises are experiencing continued and significant growth in unstructured data.  As they look at the cost of this growth, it is more than just physical storage, data center occupancy, bandwidth utilization and power and the accompanying management demands; it is also the backup and disaster recovery requirements and the ability to quickly satisfy users who need more storage in order to execute whatever tasks and jobs they have.  Against this backdrop, the drumbeat of Amazon S3 and other public storage clouds advertises storage at costs that are generally below the internal "advertised" cost of the typical Fortune 500 company.  What gives?

First, cents/GB/month is only the tip of the iceberg, and bandwidth along with access charges gives a more realistic cost appraisal.  Next, real and legitimate concerns about data security exist (will someone gain unauthorized access, by accident or via an attack, to company data stored in a multi-tenant public storage cloud?).  Also, data integrity concerns are well founded (will the bits I store be returned, and will they be backed up and appropriate DR measures taken?).  Finally, can I absolutely trust the service provider to execute to the extent deemed necessary, and if they do, can they really save me any real money versus the assumed risk profile?  Private cloud computing is an appropriate strategy for addressing these issues.  

Not all unstructured data is a candidate for the latency of cloud storage as delivered from an IT service provider via the Internet.  So, while some tiers of data may be appropriate for a cloud storage service, it is a subset of the enterprise unstructured data requirement and not a lower cost panacea.  Hopefully, CIOs can easily make this case with their peers in senior management, although it may sometimes seem like they are making an excuse for keeping control and not exploiting new technologies.

Question one surrounds the cost proposition, and our analysis suggests that, even at sub petabyte initial cloud sizes, the enterprise can deliver economics for in-house cloud storage that compare very favorably.  In fact, it may even be lower than what is available from a service provider.  The Mezeo team comes from both a hosting and a cloud storage background, and this just reinforces our view that the cost proposition for private cloud storage has favorable economics.  However, if you are being forced to allocate capital for data center build outs, or you are otherwise CAPEX constrained, the hosted public cloud economics can be quite appealing.  Since businesses require positive margins, this further drives up the cost of cloud storage as hosted at a public service provider.

The case for improved user satisfaction is similar, regardless of public versus private, because the cloud gives users the capabilities they want.  First, with rapid provisioning of pay-as-you-go low cost cloud storage, the end user gets what they need when they need it via a frictionless interface.   Second, several benefits drive end user demand for cloud storage; including: avoidance of workstation storage upgrades, one solution for file sharing and collaboration, new capabilities and applications that exploit file search, tagging and publishing to a public URL, and the ability to access your storage anytime, anywhere and on any device.  Third, the solution is also ideal for implementing a workstation backup solution with sync.  It is not hard to see why end users would find all of these capabilities appealing.

Cloud storage clients, gateways and edge devices are also beginning to appear, and can solve many different issues.  For example, a client gives the end user access to multiple cloud storage accounts at multiple providers.  Why not replace that tape backup operation at a remote location with an iSCSI interface directly to a storage cloud, for a scheduled backup without local user intervention (get rid of the tape backup of your local file server, forever)?  Speaking of file servers, multiple solutions for replacing or even displacing file servers are coming to the market.  The savings from removing an entire layer of infrastructure are quite compelling.

New applications, including use of social media, may require file publishing.  Cloud storage allows you to store training videos, and make them easily available at every end user in the company.  Tagging and search offers new application capabilities, and new opportunities to support existing compliance requirements.  Secure file sharing, versus file publishing, may be a significant requirement as you work with customers and business partners.  Partner, customer and employee portals can reach new levels of capability with API accessible cloud storage, as the availability and the management of information is delivered via the cloud.

Our observation is that the early adopters have begun the move to cloud storage.  Why?  Simply, enterprise private cloud storage allows you to gain many of the benefits and set aside the security and data integrity concerns of public cloud storage.  At the same time, data tiering and private and public could solutions will drive "hybrid" cloud approaches that will allow the enterprise to exploit the best of both worlds.  In an upcoming post, we will offer up some tools to examine the cost and the benefits of cloud storage for the enterprise. 

Cloud Storage Strategy interviewed Gladinet co-founder Jerry Huang on cloud desktops, cloud gateways, and his company's business model. 

[NOTE: Gladinet is a customer of Mezeo Software.]

Cloud Storage Strategy recently interviewed Layered Tech CEO Jack Finlayson on the economic benefits of cloud computing, the downturn, and virtual private data centers for the enterprise. 

NOTE: Layered Tech is a customer of Mezeo Software, the underwriter of this blog. 

Layered Tech has obviously focused on building a trusted infrastructure for customers.  How do you sustain that trust level?

As customer requirements and expectations continue to change, we've evolved in order to handle more detailed and complex requirements. We continually evaluate every aspect of our IT infrastructure and network to ensure we have the appropriate resiliencies and protections in place. We also take pride in our culture of continuous improvement in all aspects of customer service; it's the best way we can support our customers.

This is why we're here - to manage our customers' infrastructure so they can concentrate on their business.  From the beginning, it's all about providing superior levels of customer support. When we begin a new customer relationship, we learn the customer's specific business needs and provide counsel on the best infrastructure solution to best support those needs and meet overall business goals. 

This is how we've built our reputation as a trusted provider with our customers around the globe, and our customers know they can count on Layered Tech for the highest quality infrastructure solutions and service.  With seven top tier data centers on three continents, we deliver secure, scalable and ultra-reliable solutions for IT infrastructure that support even the most complex enterprise requirements. 

We also maintain relationships with leading technology partners and keep up with our extensive certifications to ensure that we have the resources and expertise to deliver the best in managed dedicated hosting, cloud computing services and cloud-based storage.

Has the economic downturn helped accelerate the migration to cloud based data centers? 

Absolutely. The economic downturn has forced almost everyone to do more with less, which is why more companies are turning to cloud computing. 

Increased scalability and flexibility and a pay-per-use model creates a more cost-effective and agile infrastructure solution.  Customers leveraging Layered Tech's cloud computing and virtualization solutions reduce capital and operating expenses while enabling IT staff to focus on higher priority business needs rather than their infrastructure. 

Customers can also choose from a range of support options from Layered Tech's tiered managed services, ranging from the highest root-level access down to the lowest self-managed option with varying levels in between.  It's all about helping them to be flexible and do more with less.

Can you explain what the Virtual Private Data Centers (VPDC) platform service is?  Is this a flavor of the cloud computing model that people have been talking about?

Sure. We pioneered Virtual Private Data Centers - or VPDCs - which offer enterprise-class security, choice and flexibility.  It's a hybrid approach that gives customers dedicated, unshared resources in their off-premise cloud infrastructure rather than placing their data into purely public clouds.  VPDC platforms and private clouds are becoming popular cloud computing approaches for enterprises because they provide more control and security than public cloud offerings.

Whether it's an "internal private cloud" created and maintained by the enterprise's IT staff and housed within its onsite data center, or it's an "external private cloud," where the enterprise engages with a third-party hosting provider like Layered Tech to develop and operate a private cloud within one or more of the hosting company's data centers, enterprises want to have their own cloud infrastructure.  In other words, we believe that enterprises will not want clouds with shared resources, like those that exist in purely public cloud environments.

So, with the VPDC, customers gain the on-demand scalability of the cloud with all the reliability and security of dedicated servers.  The integrated virtualization platform also offers levels of managed services, security and flexibility via a proprietary API that were previously unavailable in an integrated offering. 


We created a maturity model for cloud storage just a few weeks ago. Can you tell us if it matches with your experience in the industries you serve?

Yes, it does. We believe that 2010 will be the first meaningful stage of cloud computing's rocket-ride of growth and enterprise usage, and it's all fueled by the need for further operational and financial improvement.  We've found that enterprises are seeking cloud computing benefits such as lower costs, higher productivity, greater speed to market, and near-instantaneous scalability of computing resources. 

It's important to note that CIOs now have an easier time showing their CEOs and CFOs the value of migrating to cloud computing and virtualized environments, especially considering the competitive advantages they create. The investment required to migrate to the cloud alone generates immediate short-term value, while also delivering long-term upside.  

Like your cloud storage maturity model, we think that custom migration plans and hybrid approaches to cloud computing also will be an emerging trend in 2010.  Enterprises will evaluate business drivers and align technology solutions to their corporate needs more closely than ever before.  The result will be the growing adoption of a hybrid approach, where a portion of the IT infrastructure stays in the physical, dedicated server world, while the remainder migrates into the cloud.

Finally, can you tell our readers about LT Depot, your cloud storage solution?

As you know, we just launched our new cloud storage solution called LT Depot, which is powered by the Mezeo™ Cloud Storage Platform.

LT Depot allows you to create and select scalable, reliable, and secure storage for your application and service needs. If you need storage for images, videos or critical documents without significant capital expense, LT Depot is your answer.

Not only is LT Depot designed as a robust and reliable storage avenue, it provides customers the extended advantages of sharing and collaboration. This provides features such as access, create, manage, and edit documents and files no matter where your users reside -- even from their mobile devices. Whether your team exists in one office, or multi-site locations around the world, stay connected and work together seamlessly and efficiently.

Cloud storage is already showing signs of Phase Two (see our post on the cloud storage maturity model), as a new set of solutions arrive in the marketplace.  These solutions are referred to as cloud gateways, on ramps, cloud clients, edge devices and other exotic names. 

For ease of discussion, lets use "cloud client" to describe a solution that is on a single user device (workstation, PDA, Tablet) and "cloud gateway" or just "gateway" for a solution that is delivered on a server or router for many users.  Whether they are a client or a gateway, some store a "blob" of data, and some store "chunks" of data that are parts of the original object.  Others store the actual object.  What's the difference and is it important? Should you consider it in your cloud gateway use plans?

What is a blob?  A blob can start as either a single object or a collection of objects, for example, all of the files on a single server, or a VM image.  Then, you do something to it in the client/gateway device that requires it to be brought back through the original client/gateway to be returned to a useful state.  Examples include de-duplication and compression followed by encryption prior to transmission of the object to the cloud (I call this D/C/E).  The result is a "blob" of data, an object that is minimized in size, and must be retrieved by the application that created it in order to be useful again. 

A chunk is part of an object, and the original object must be re-assembled by the gateway that parsed it in the first place. Some gateways store blobs.  Some store the object in chunks.  Finally, some store the actual object with its original file type, intact.  These may be workstation clients, or interface solutions that allow for a CIFS or iSCSI (today, TwinStrata is an example of the iSCSI capability) attached device to store in the cloud.  There are trade-offs and advantages associated with each approach, and your cloud storage use case and objective must be carefully analyzed in order to determine the applicability of the gateway to your business requirement.

Now, let's consider D/C/E.  This provides savings in addition to the savings associated with cloud storage.  D and C gives you a small object size, so your bandwidth cost is lower, and your overall storage cost is lower.  When there is a change to the stored objects, chunks allow you to send only the changed part of the object, reducing bandwidth and potentially improving performance.  Encrypting, or chunking, or both, may improve security and relieve you of the costs and management associated with other security approaches.

So, blobs and chunks sound pretty good, providing better security and lower costs.  What's the catch?  First, storage clouds are great places to provide anytime and anywhere access to your data, from multiple devices.  If you have to go back to a gateway to get the original version of the object, that flexibility may be very limited or non-existent.  Clouds are also a great place for sharing and collaboration, which is not in play if the object in the cloud is not in a useful form.  Finally, vendors are not giving gateway solutions away - we must ask what they cost, and are they worth it?

As usual, the answer is, it depends.  What services can I get from the cloud? And what services can I get from the gateway?

An example that is getting a lot of attention is file server replacement, or even better, file server displacement.  I get less excited about replacing a file server with another server that is a policy driven cache, because I still have this layer of technology in place.  However, if you can displace most of your file servers, then the potential for significant cost savings become obvious.  

I tend to look at single user clients as very interesting on ramps to the cloud.  A client, using some modest amount of workstation storage as a cache, can deliver most of the benefits of a file server.  Companies like Gladinet, SMEStorage, GoodReader, Mezeo and others have very interesting cloud clients.  You will still need a few file servers if you need to provide a place for very large files.  Interestingly enough, those very large files are often rich media (like training videos), and streaming them to a reader on the client from the cloud is often good enough.  Another cloud client capability we expect to see will allow the end-user to store files and move them across multiple storage providers - from private to public and vice-versa, for example.  This functionality could also be in a server-based gateway.

Another cloud client capability might include giving encryption capability to the end user, and let them decide if they want to encrypt the file themselves.   Or, use a cloud that provides user selectable encryption.  Give your end users or customers the power of choice, the freedom of access anytime and anywhere, the ability to get the amount of storage they need when they need it (what Gartner calls "reservationless", and kudos for them, great term).  Don't tie users to a "home base" gateway that does not store their object in it's original format, or at least give them a choice.  All that being said, we are seeing that some mix of clients for file server displacement, and file server replacement gateways may ultimately be the appropriate solution.  

Backup and archive is a different story, and here a gateway can make a lot of sense.  First, there is quite a bit of local housekeeping associated with these solutions, and the solution can decide if utilizing the cloud for some or all of the files makes sense. Speed of restore is a major consideration for a backup, and may drive local versus cloud based storage solutions.  Further, the need for a disaster recovery site, or to archive, can often be a cloud use case.  Companies like Zmanda and CommVault are very active in cloud based backup solutions.  What if you have applications that do not speak REST APIs, like a legacy backup solution?  There are gateways that can attach these legacy applications to the cloud, for example, TwinStrata.

Special purpose gateways can also solve an immediate problem.  Blue Thread offers a cloud storage interface for SharePoint.  The marketplace is rapidly developing a portfolio of cloud storage gateways and clients, as well as backup and archive solutions and all have their own unique perspective on cloud use.  Examples include StorSimple, Cirtas, Gladinet (who also makes clients), and EntropySoft.  Venture capital companies are deploying significant capital for these sorts of solutions.  Each of these solution providers sees a clear path to adding significant value to cloud storage solution delivery.

Cloud storage requires significant use case consideration to evaluate the functionality required, both in the cloud and in the gateway or client, and where the application or user can best exploit the functionality.  After all, cloud storage is also about empowering the end user with the storage they need, when they need it, at a favorable price, and providing advanced functionality, like publishing and sharing.

At Mezeo, we have both a deployable cloud infrastructure, and clients.  That causes us to look at where the best place to put the functionality is.  That creates a slightly different perspective, and we think it creates very useful products.  On the other hand, nothing gets us more excited than the thought of more solutions that drive cloud storage adoption and usefulness.  For this reason, we are rolling out a new marketing and certification program, Mezeo Ready™. 

With Mezeo Ready™, service provider public storage clouds can easily identify their offering as being "Ready" for use by Mezeo Ready™ clients or gateways, and backup and archive solutions.  Users of these products can pick one of many trusted service providers hosting Mezeo Ready™ cloud storage solutions.  This cloud storage on ramp and cloud storage provider "ecosystem" ultimately delivers valuable solutions to customers and is a big part of Mezeo's vision for the cloud storage market.

So, more to come on Mezeo Ready™, we are nearing the official announcement of the program, and will extend it to storage providers and file system providers who work with Mezeo to deliver storage clouds, both private and public.  Other solutions, like billing and provisioning systems will also be in the Mezeo Ready™ program.  The changes the cloud is delivering are new and useful, and deliver real value to the institutions and businesses that are embracing them.  The ecosystem is critical to the value delivery chain, and key to providing unique, desirable solutions.

We see a lot of coverage about cloud storage these days - and why it is or is not being adopted. One way to look at cloud storage adoption is to view it as an evolutionary process which changes over time, as both the organization matures and becomes adept at leveraging the new technology, and as the technology itself evolves to meet the real needs of the end-user.  The common name for this sort of thinking is a "maturity model."

With that in mind we developed this simple maturity model for cloud storage, based on the actual cloud storage adoption process we're witnessing in the industry. We'd like to hear your thoughts - are you seeing the same trends?


PHASE ONE: Public Cloud Storage

Description
There remains significant marketplace confusion about what constitutes cloud storage.  Cloud storage is a persistent storage for unstructured data accessed via Web services APIs over a network (LAN or WAN), with the additional  characteristics of rapid provisioning of both new accounts of any size as well as rapid provisioning of increases (or decreases) in account size, along with a pay for use model, Some believe that cloud storage is just the provisioning and pay for use model with access method being varied between older technologies (CIFS/NFS) and http (Web services API access).  Public, multi-tenant storage clouds as delivered by service providers clearly meet our definition, as traditional access methods like CIFS/NFS are not useful over the Internet.

Many technologists and almost all non technologists, make the initial mistake that cloud storage is simply the storage used when using cloud computing.  In fact, a cloud computing image (CCI) may very well be provisioned and stored when not in use on traditional iscsi type storage systems, and is often dependent on very high speed access associated with a locally attached device.  Many times, the data needed for the application supported by the CCI is often stored on shared storage devices within the same data center as the CCI, for application performance reasons.  The data for these CCIs may also be block, or data base data.  This is storage for cloud computing, but it is not "Cloud Storage"!  This confusion permeates the marketplace in Phase One.  Many vendors, particularly traditional storage vendors, have confused the marketplace by claiming to be cloud storage based on "thin provisioning" attributes with traditional data center access versus HTTP access. Cloud storage may also be accessed and utilized by CCI based applications, but that is not a defining attribute of cloud storage.  Cloud storage is accessed by applications on both CCIs and dedicated servers, as well as clients on PDA's and PC's, wherever they are and whenever they need access.  The use cases are very tolerant of the latency associated with the Internet. The thin provisioning and pay for use model of cloud storage does deliver the important cloud storage attribute of transferring storage costs from a CAPEX to an OPEX basis, if you are acquiring your cloud storage form a service provider on a pay for use basis.

 The IT service provider space is the earliest adopter of cloud storage, for both offensive and defensive purposes.  Many service providers are hosting workloads on dedicated or virtual servers (CCIs), and the workloads are new applications that utilize cloud storage from companies like Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, Nirvanix, and SoftLayer CloudLayer. Since the amount of data can be very large, it is difficult to move without downtime. And since the processing is relatively easy to move, IT service providers recognize the need for their own cloud storage service in order to provide a complete offering to their customers and to promote retention.  Without the associated cloud storage, the application server workload can easily move, usually to the provider who provides the storage cloud.  This is the defensive argument for service providers to offer their own storage cloud.  On the offensive side, cloud storage is growing rapidly in terms of adoption, provides a new revenue stream, can attract new hosted workloads (cloud or otherwise), and drives increased (and very profitable) bandwidth use.

The web hosting industry also saw the initial development activities associated with adoption of Web services APIs, which provide many programming capabilities that are now resident in the storage, and easily enabled new applications that are delivered via the Web.  These services, including tagging, searching and filtering, sharing, publishing, and collaboration, all exist within the APIs of a storage cloud, and are easily implemented within the application.  While the enterprise has not yet adopted this new functionality, it has become quite pervasive within social networking apps, enabling new apps on mobile devices, file sharing services, and online file services, and backup and archive services.

Cloud storage is currently offered by only a few service providers including Amazon (S3); SoftLayer (CloudLayer); Rackspace (CloudFiles), Nirvanix, and is only available as a service.  Enterprise adoption is limited to development only, primarily testing, and enterprise adoption has not yet occurred, primarily because of security concerns.

Key attributes

Adoption Drivers:
Business drivers: low cost, rapid scalability and on-demand capacity
Technology enablers: New programming capabilities

Adopters:
- SMBs/ SMEs
- Developers
- Consumers

Use Cases:  
- Testing and application development
- SaaS (Consumer & SME/SMB users: Backup, file sharing, additional device storage, rich media)

Differentiators:  
- SLA variability
- Pricing elements

PHASE TWO: Public & Private Cloud Storage

Description: As large enterprises start to fully comprehend the benefits of cloud storage, their interest grows.  While security concerns keep them from adopting the public cloud, they begin building private clouds behind their firewall. A private cloud provides them with the level of control and security that they are comfortable with and improves the utilization rates of their existing storage infrastructure, because of thin provisioning and potential for technology reuse. Enterprises start to roll out advanced capabilities such as file sharing and collaboration to their employees and their partners. The initial use of storage cloud services allow the enterprise to begin initial development of storage cloud based applications.  They also start to move backup and archives into their  own clouds. Since these applications do not require the highest performing storage, enterprises are able to reuse decommissioned hardware. This effectively starts the process of "tiered storage." 

At the same time, the public cloud storage offerings continue to grow.  The availability of deployable solutions to create your own storage cloud begin to arrive in the market, enabling IT service providers to quickly implement storage clouds versus being faced with a roll your own development effort.  Public storage cloud service offerings become more pervasive and better accepted as security and awareness increases.

Key attributes (Private Cloud Storage)

Adoption Drivers:
Business drivers: low cost, rapid scalability, high security and control
Technology enablers: new programming capabilities, cloud gateways (such as Blue Thread, Entropy)

Adopters:
- Enterprises

Use Cases: 
- Application Development
- Testing
- Backup
- Archiving
- File Sharing and Collaboration

Key attributes (Public Cloud Storage)

Adoption Drivers:
Business drivers: Low cost, rapid scalability, on-demand capacity
Technology enablers: new programming capabilities, cloud gateways generating multi-cloud usage

Adopters:
- SMBs/SMEs
- Developers
- Consumers
- Enterprise Evaluators

Use Cases: 
- Testing and application development
- Backup
- SaaS (Consumer & SME/SMB users: Backup, file sharing, additional device storage, rich media)
- Personal cloud storage with access clients
- Backup and archiving using cloud gateway
- Special use cases enabled by cloud gateway
- File server replacement
- Availability of CIFS/NFS access within the data center

Differentiators: 
- SLA variability
- Pricing
- Scalability and performance
- Access options

PHASE THREE: Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud Storage

Description: The maturity of the cloud (both private and public) has enabled many new applications which now require all the advanced services of a storage cloud (Web services API access, tagging, search, sharing, collaboration, etc).  Capabilities such as Geo Access (accessing files from a repository closest to the requester) and Geo Replication (policy driven replication across geographies to facilitate disaster recovery) are realized.  As Internet latency is constantly improving, more and more applications become "cloudy" in terms of storage, and cloud location becomes slightly less important as associated with performance.  Cloud storage is now a requirement of developers and development platforms.  Most SaaS applications also expect the availability of cloud storage.  Everyone is storing everything!  Most importantly, the improved security in public storage cloud offerings begins to blur the distinction of importance of security as being where data is stored (in public or private clouds).  Instead, applications utilize both public and private clouds, for reasons associated with location of data, disaster recovery and backup, and CAPEX versus OPEX.   Only the most sensitive data still retains a private cloud requirement.  Performance is a more salient driver of where the data is stored, does it need to be on a LAN in the same data center as the application?

This use of both public and private clouds as solutions for storage, often by the same application, becomes what we refer to as the Hybrid Cloud.

Key attributes (Private Cloud Storage)

Adoption Drivers:
Business drivers: Low cost, high security and control, rapid scalability, compliance and forensics
Technology enablers: New programming capabilities, cloud gateways
 
Adopters:
- Enterprises

Use Cases:  
- Application development
- Backup
- Archiving
- File sharing and collaboration
- Geo access

Key attributes (Public Cloud Storage)

Adoption Drivers:
Business drivers: low cost, rapid scalability, on-demand capacity, clouds become more pervasive
Technology enablers: new programming capabilities, cloud gateways generating multi-cloud usage

Adopters:
- SMBs/ SMEs
- Developers
- Consumers
- Enterprise evaluators

Use Cases:  
- Testing and application development
- SaaS (Consumer & SME/SMB users: Backup, file sharing, additional device storage, rich media)
- Personal cloud storage with access clients
- Backup and archiving using cloud gateway
- Special use cases enabled by cloud gateway
- File server replacement
- Availability of CIFS/NFS access within the data center

Differentiators:
- SLA variability
- Pricing elements
- Scalability and performance
- Access options
- Multiple clouds vs. single cloud

Key attributes (Hybrid Cloud Storage - a mix of Public and Private Cloud Storage)

Adoption Drivers:
Business drivers: lowered average cost obtained via a mix of public/private cloud, reduction of DR/BC costs, optimized mix of capex and opex
Technology enablers: improved security

Adopters:
- Enterprises

Use Cases:  
-  Incorporates use cases for private and public clouds

Differentiators:
-  SLA variability
-  Pricing elements
-  Scalability and performance
-  Access options
-  Multiple cloud vs. single cloud

PHASE FOUR: Federated Cloud Storage

Description: With the advent of greater security, flexibility and interactivity, users will demand applications that provide real time dynamic interaction within their supply chain. Regardless of where their data may reside, partners, customers, employees and consumers will want a seamless, transparent access capability. Enter the Federated Cloud. Through a common management layer, Federated cloud will connect private and public clouds exposing all storage as a single name space. Through federated identity management and creation of trust relationships amongst various vendors and enterprises, authorized users (human or programmatic) will be able to authenticate to their cloud and be able to access information that resides anywhere across the globe. Excess capacity will be easily pushed over a grid and be sold and consumed as a true utility. Ultra-high utilization rates will be achieved, and within the trust circle security and compliance requirements will be defined and met. Interoperability will be ensured by continued maturity and standardization of APIs and applications.

This truly will culminate in a meaningful internet of knowledge and commerce.  The "Semantic Web" has arrived!  Note that, for matters of very high security, agencies and enterprises will continue to use private clouds.

Key attributes (Federated Cloud Storage)

Adoption Drivers:
Business drivers: need for real time dynamic interaction with partners/customers on different clouds, ability to sell excess capacity within the trust circle, optimized infrastructure utilization, establishment of trust relationships
Technology drivers: federated authentication and provisioning across clouds, streamlined cross-cloud management, standardized APIs  
'
Adopters:
- Service providers
- SMEs/SMBs
- Consumers
- Enterprises

Use Cases:  
- Supply chain management
- Ad-hoc capacity capacity enhancement
- Non-sensitive and sensitive data hosting

Differentiators:
- SLA variability
- Pricing elements
- Scalability and performance
- Access options
- Security
- Governance and regulation compliance

Based upon our experience in the marketplace, a large majority of the organizations are still in the first two phases. There is an undeniable appetite by the early adopters to be at the forefront, however, unlike many other emergent technologies, cloud storage comes equipped with a very compelling economic model and that is really helping justify the move into the cloud.

There are relatively few options for early adopters to implement private clouds that deliver the appropriate capabilities.  This is why Mezeo focused on a deployable platform versus only offering cloud storage as a service.  With the deployable platform, enterprises can implement their own in house cloud, and also take advantage of a "private" cloud hosted on their behalf at a service provider.  See my discussion of this topic in my post: Cloud Storage for the Enterprise - Part 2: The Hybrid Cloud

In summary, those of us who hail from the IT service provider industry are very comfortable with cloud storage.  We see the adoption as proceeding, and the issues are being knocked off as they arise.  We are in an early technology cycle but with innovative early adopters we see a bright future.

According to a recent Gartner press release, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets by 2012:

Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.

The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.

This is a bold statement. If we believe Gartner, it means that we are at the beginning of an explosion in cloud-based services managed by trusted providers on behalf of the enterprise. Of course not all businesses will choose this path, but a substantial number of industries can and will. As I blogged about earlier, the message from the CFO office is clear. We will see adoption rates rise dramatically as the benefits of cloud services become more obvious to business leaders.

A second point of interest is the prediction that by 2012, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20 percent of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through cloud service offerings).

Here’s the take-away:

Gartner is seeing India-centric IT services companies leveraging established market positions and levels of trust to explore nonlinear revenue growth models (which are not directly correlated to labor-based growth) and working on interesting research and development (R&D) efforts, especially in the area of cloud computing. The collective work from India-centric vendors represents an important segment of the market’s cloud aggregators, which will offer cloud-enabled outsourcing options (also known as cloud services).

We are witnessing examples of what GE innovation consultant Vijay Govindarajan calls reverse innovation in IT. Natarajan Chandrasekaran, the CEO of Tata Consultancy Services notes:

I’ve seen the new cloud-based computing models for applications and processes gaining currency in emerging markets. Rural cooperative banks and small and medium businesses in India are actually far ahead of their western counterparts in adopting these models. In fact, companies from emerging markets, buoyed by strong domestic revenues and revival in growth, have been making adjustments to their global strategies and fine-tuning their investments in order to be part of the recovery process in the west and build on their global expansion plans.

As the enterprise embraces the cloud, they’ll need a maturity model to help them on their journey. My next post will explore what the maturity model for cloud storage looks like. 

A recent report by Forrester's Andrew Reichman titled Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage: Current And Planned Adoption Of Storage-As-A-Service Is Minimal For Now paints a picture for cloud storage adoption, that at first blush, is not encouraging.

He states:

In Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009 survey, we asked businesses about their interest in "hosted storage capacity" offerings. Interest was minimal at best. Forty-three percent of all respondents said that they were simply not interested, and another 43% said that they were interested but had no plans to move forward.

While it could be argued that as a cloud storage supplier, I am necessarily bullish about the ultimate prospects, I believe the data is actually quite good and clearly represents what we are experiencing in the marketplace.  Now, Mezeo is engaged with many service providers, as well as the early adopters in the enterprise space as they begin their evaluations.

When I look at enterprise cloud-storage adoption based on Everett Rogers' diffusion curve I see a pretty clear view of the typical market place approach to adoption of disruptive technologies:    

For new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies, we should look for what the next practices are, i.e. the practices of the innovators and early adopters. The survey reflects the typical technology adoption cycle and re enforces what we are experiencing in the market place.

11% of companies are taking the plunge - these are the early adopters and innovators.  The early majority (43%) is interested, and watching.  The late majority is not in the game, yet.

So we are on track. And to prove it, let's look at one of these enterprise-level innovators: General Electric.

According to IBM storage expert Tony Pearson, GE has implemented cloud-based backups and archive for GE Corp, NBC Universal and GE Asset Management divisions running at only 32 cents per GB/month, representing a 40-60 percent savings over their previous methods. This includes backups of their external Web sites, archives of their digital and production assets, RMAN backups including development/staging databases. They plan to add out-of-region compliance archive in 2010. They also plan to monetize their intellectual property by offering "CloudStorage Manager" as a software offering for others.

As we enter 2010, I am going to focus on a series of articles to define the cloud storage opportunity and the business issues for the enterprise.  First, there are some "universal truths" that we need to better understand and define. 

The growth in unstructured data will continue, unabated.  We all know and understand that.  The issue is how to manage this phenomenon, while operating with the assumption that the growth will likely accelerate.  Since the growth is driving increased costs, the enterprise is on a continuous search to improve the way they can cost-effectively manage this growing data.  

Data may exist on removable media, on PCs and PDAs, on various servers within the organization, at data centers, at remote facilities, and potentially at various outsourced service providers.  The data may range from employee personal information (and even personal information from the employees associates) that is not associated with the needs of the business to non-confidential and confidential business information, some of which may be highly critical.  Disparate policies will need to be applied to the data ranging from no control to extreme control.   Of course, there will be the existence of  multiple versions of files adding to the total storage and further exacerbating the challenges of management.

There are many potential solutions to the problem as stated above, and most of them involve some sort of additional controls, policies and restrictions that control the proliferation of data and make it more orderly and secure.  These solutions are then combined with additional focus on reducing storage costs by staying aligned with new storage technology (which continues to reduce costs of storage), and the cycle repeats, endlessly.  In each cycle, trade-offs associated with costs, availability, security, access, restrictions occur, and rarely is there a "perfect" solution.

Is cloud storage a possible solution to the issues as surfaced above?  Is it a discontinuity, a departure, from the "business as usual" cycles associated with ongoing, incremental and continuous storage improvements when new technologies are introduced as they can be accommodated?  

Let's start with discussing cloud storage and its various capabilities.  Note that we are talking about a storage cloud that is housed at the enterprise data center, not a storage service provider.

(1) First, centralize the storage problem:

Cloud Storage addresses the necessary size and scale of unstructured data growth in the enterprise.  Generally, highly scalable file systems, including newer object based systems, provide the ability to manage incredibly large numbers of objects (objects of all sizes) in an efficient fashion.  This is combined with low cost commodity storage devices and servers.  Then a centralized storage pool is ready for use.  It is generally easy to add additional storage to this pool, and both backup and disaster recovery schemes are in place.  So, the first well known method of problem solving that cloud storage utilizes is "centralization."  Let's get a solution in place that we know can scale to the size of the data needs of the enterprise.
 
(2) Second, make it easy to use:

You can't use it if you can't get it, and this is where the topic of "thin provisioning" emerges.  Thin provisioning just means that it is easy to get a storage account (whether I am an individual user or an application / server) and I can get it quickly, no matter how much I need (in theory).  Further, as my storage needs increase, it is easy to get more - quickly.  There are issues like accounting for storage; managing growth and billing for it that also surround the notion of thin provisioning. 

Access is another big topic that surrounds ease of use. The enterprise has multiple needs here.  Legacy applications, utilizing file access methods like CIFS or NFS, will want to utilize the storage cloud.  New applications, written to REST Web services APIs, will also want to coexist.   Finally, individual users will want access from all their device types, including PCs (Windows and Mac, Linux), the Web, and PDAs.  All of this access manifests itself in interesting ways, including identity management of the credentials associated with using the service, bandwidth requirements for accessing the service from many diverse locations, and geo location of data (i.e., if you have several locations where the cloud data is kept, how do you decide which location to use?).

(3) Third, sync your files to the cloud:

Now that you have cloud storage, you ought to think about backup and sync to the cloud.  These two applications are different but somewhat linked.  Sync to the cloud can be used for both cloud loading (getting the data from the device to the cloud, in a background way so that the latency will not be a problem) as well as keeping a current copy in the cloud, but using the local copy on your device (the best of both worlds).  Since your most current copy is in the cloud, it is your backup copy.  Sync is also a solution for keeping files "sychronized" between devices and the cloud, so you always have an authoritative source of your file stored in the cloud.  Of course, all this is based on having cloud access from any device, anywhere (see number two, above).

(4) Fourth, create new, higher impact applications with programmable storage:

Programmable (using http, SOAP or REST APIs) access to storage is the next big revolution in storage.  Tagging, sharing, collaboration, easy search, easy and secure access and multiple views make creating new, high impact applications easier than before.  Take advantage of new functionality that is easily delivered.  Create applications that rely on your data and data that is external to the enterprise.  Develop these applications quickly and at lower cost.  If all you want is cheaper storage, you may be able to get by without a cloud, but without this capability you are missing the revolution that is upon us.

(5) Fifth, secure your cloud:

In my own survey of the industry, security is the major issue on the minds of the IT department evaluating cloud storage for the enterprise.  Several different aspects of security come into play.  Many of these issues are most often associated with using a multi-tenant storage cloud from a storage service provider. Nevertheless, four major security issues prevail before we even begin to consider the issues of going to the cloud at a service provider.

The four issues are:  physical security, unauthorized access, data loss (disaster or device failure related) and bit rot (a subset of data loss, granted).   All of these issues are no different than what you face with your traditional shared storage solutions and most of the solutions are similar.  Your current IT physical security solutions apply to an enterprise hosted cloud.   The identity management policies and practices associated with creating and maintaining account credentials address unauthorized access, just as they do with your current data management practices. Encryption can provide additional protection from unauthorized access. As a matter of fact, the security issues are already in play with your current storage methodology, so nothing new here, unless you move to a service provider hosted cloud (more on this later).

(6) Sixth, lower the cost of storage:

Cloud storage delivers the benefits as discussed in items one through four above, while requiring similar security to current storage activities.  How does it address costs?  First, cloud storage solutions generally allow for using commodity hardware, very scalable file systems, and highly automated provisioning and management solutions.  So, the hardware price equation of differentiation and premium pricing is disrupted.  True, the software doesn't come cheap, but remember that the public cloud storage services are "making the market" and the combination of commodity hardware, environmentals, and enabling software (file system, management and middleware from one or more suppliers) is meeting the external marketplace pricing.  Here is a simple model you should use (all figures expressed in cents/GB/Mo):

Commodity Hardware depreciation                                      $  .02
Environmentals  (data center, power and cooling)                     .02
Management (primarily people resources)                                .02
Enabling Software                                                                  .03 
Other                                                                                    .01                           

Total costs:                                                                      $  .10 (10 cents/GB/Month)

This represents a significant saving for a solution that provides all the capabilities that cloud storage delivers.  What's the catch?  Well, not every type of application and use case for unstructured data is ideally served by cloud storage.  However, many are, and the exceptions should be dealt with as one offs.  The real catch is not taking advantage of this new technology, and all the opportunities it offers, for lowering cost while delivering improved capabilities to end users and applications around the enterprise.

My next post will discuss hybrid, private and public cloud storage offerings, and where savings and security can drive significant benefits for enterprises who take advantage of the cloud storage offerings of service providers.

CloudStorageStrategy.com welcomes OpSource CEO Treb Ryan for an in-depth interview on cloud computing, from the perspective of the service provider.

NOTE: OpSource is a customer of Mezeo Software, the underwriter of this blog.

What are the opportunities you see in the cloud computing space, both for OpSource and your customers, and what impact has the downturn had on this?

It's interesting, but when people talk about cloud computing, they immediately go to the downturn and pricing - and cost being the big driver.  There's no question that cloud computing is cost effective, and it's accelerating adoption many times over, but what we're really seeing is something much more fundamental - a generation of users who are entering the workforce who've been using cloud computing all along; they've grown up on the Internet, and their interface to technology has always been through the Internet. 

As a result, this "Cloud Generation" has clear expectations of how technology should work:

1) it should be immediately available,
2) you do a search and get going,
3) it should be very flexible,
4) you should have ubiquitous access - anytime, anywhere,
5) sharing and collaboration - the expectation to collaborate and share anything they are working on.

This is not a generation which distinguishes between work data and home data - like my generation did. They've grown up with the concept of APIs and communities that grow around them; for instance, we see programmers who have grown up with Google and Facebook APIs, and now they expect that kind of thing in their work applications as well. So they're coming into the workforce and driving change in the workplace. They see technologies like client-server applications or hard-coded storage arrays pretty much the same way my generation saw green screens, mainframes, and mini-computers - as dated, inflexible, technology - hard to use, without nearly the power of cloud-based systems. So they have the day-to-day experience of the "consumer cloud" which they're now driving into business applications as well. 

To the Cloud Generation of programmers this means anything they can interact with on the Cloud they can program to through APIs. The idea of infrastructure being an item that can be addressed as part of the application, instead of something the application lays on top of, is a radical concept.  It has allowed not only for innovative applications, but also for true elastic computing making the Cloud environment even more flexible.



Great Cloud offerings have great communities around them. This is the aspect of Cloud computing that is so often missed - and even scoffed at - by the IT folks who think it's all about virtualization. One of the biggest gripes about Cloud computing is that support is done by the Community and not the vendor. While most will agree that far more proactive vendor support is necessary for Cloud computing, Community support is just as critical. For questions of configuration and usage tricks, the Community is a far better source of information than some call center employee with limited access. Often the Community devises more innovative solutions than the vendor ever could. And in addition to support, the Community can create third-party add-ins that make the Cloud even more useful.

The downturn has accelerated adoption from the top down as well.

We're seeing executives who have become enamored with this idea of the cloud - because of the ability to turn capital expenditures into operational expenses - and are pushing cloud computing into their organizations.  The CEO of one of our customers went so far as to tell his technical people - "now can you finally start using the cloud so I can get the board off my back?"

So, for different reasons, we have both top-down and grass-roots support for cloud-based applications, which makes this very interesting to say the least.

Which customer segments do you see leading the way in adoption?

Obviously, our traditional focus has been on ISVs and start-ups coming into Software-as-a-Service, business applications in the cloud, and we're seeing continued adoption of cloud infrastructure by those segments, but what has been interesting is that now that we offer the ability for any company to buy and use cloud infrastructure for any type of application, we're seeing a much broader spread of usage and adoption. Beyond the enterprise we also see widespread adoption by systems integrators, consultants, and VARs - upto 40% of our customer base - all without us targeting that segment at all.

How does OpSource differentiate its cloud offerings from other service providers?

We offer the best of the public cloud, combined with enterpise security and compliance, performance guarantees, and enterprise controls.

For instance, we offer:

• easy online sign-up & purchase with infrastructure provisioning in minutes
• pay by the hour and only for what you use, with no commitment (or purchase a monthly plan for a discount)
• a rich online community to share and collaborate with peers; get third party add-ins, images and configurations
• a web interface plus complete set of APIs

On the straight cloud, we provide a lot of the more robust, enterprise tools than you see from more consumer-based providers like Amazon, for example.

We focus on three different areas:

1) Security and Compliance: we provide a much more secure environment, because Opsource provides every customer with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public Cloud, allowing them to determine their own degree of public Internet connectivity. We also provide:

• Unique customizable security for firewalls
• VPN administration of all servers
• Unique username/password for each administrator
• Audit logs of all environmental changes
• SAS 70 audited
• 100% uptime SLA

2) Performance: we offer a multi-tier architecture with guaranteed latency in-between systems, sub-millisecond access time, industry standard technology, like VMware, instead of open-source, because that's where enterprise is comfortable.  Our 24/7 suppot also makes a diffence.

3) Control: today's cloud environment are single user environments, one user name and password, which is fine for individuals, but not so useful for the enterprise. We offer the ability to provision multiple users, do things like cross departmental billing, execute policy based control - which user can do what - and finally link all that back though an API to your existing management systems. So you can control how your users use the cloud same as you do your corporate datacenter.

So do you see any links into these large companies where they need to use ITIL for systems management?

Absolutely. OpSource has always focused on compliance as a major issue for our SaaS customers, eveything from SAS 70, PCI to European Safe Harbor, and even industry-specific ones like HIPAA, or government-specific certification, but in the cloud, we think about sophisticated  management techniques like federated authority and single sign-ons, and things like ITIL - while it's still in its infancy, it's shocking that most providers don't even have the ability to give their customers the critical capability to have more than one person manage the cloud for them - because they have a single user accounts. So while you can institute more sophisticated IT governance regimes like ITIL with the OpSource cloud, we give IT the capability to manage who does what, and track who did what, even if they aren't ready for something like ITIL.

So IT gets to do their own provisioning?   
  
Yes. So you want to know who provisioned what, how much it costs, and we give them that visibility instantly across their entire user community.  That way there are no surprises or charges they aren't aware of. It sort of reminds me of the controls I had to put in to alert me to my daughter's texting costs - so I'm aware of the charges before they get out of hand! I just blogged about this issue.

That's why you say that OpSource is what Amazon wants to be when it grows up... 

Absolutely.

And that's how you respond to cloud critics - the ones that say that the Cloud is not yet ready for the enterprise.

There are large parts of the cloud that are not yet ready for the enterprise. The cloud is still young, and it would be like asking that first 286 PC to run all of your corporate financials. However, a lot of these issues around enterprise adoption like security and compliance have been addressed, and are being taken care of, so as the cloud becomes more robust, we'll see increased adoption. We're seeing enterprise-level capabilities come to market that did not even exist six months ago.

We have just signed a partnership agreement under which OpSource will resell Gomez's Web performance management solution to our enterprise customers as well as use it to validate and monitor our own cloud performance service level agreements (SLAs). Through this partnership, we'll bring powerful performance monitoring to cloud computing, making it easier and more compelling than ever for enterprises to justify bringing their applications to the cloud.

Do you see infrastructure elements like storage growing now?

For true, full use of the cloud, we have to have the ability to access storage, go though the APIs to get to it, and give our customers a range of storage solutions, including cloud storage based on the specific application or need. We're giving our customers the widest range of choices.

What about agile programming? I heard you use agile methods to improve the customer experience.

Agile programming methods have helped us with not only development, but compliance and security as well. We talk to our customers to see how they are using our cloud offerings though our community, and we learn what's important to them.

We also test our offerings by having two programmers work on the same keyboard - literally  - one with the user story - so they can make sure that the customer is getting the exact functionality they need.

It's agile customer service.

Can you tell us a bit about your enthusiasm for composite applications (corporate mashups) and how they help your platform?

Of all the phenomenon in the cloud, we see the need for anytime-anywhere access and the idea that anything I can interact with I should also be able to program to.  So when Facebook enthusiasts start working in the enteprise, they bring their enthusiasm for integration as well.

So we see things in the cloud like direct access to the infrastructure as part of the application, which allows for all sorts of flexibility and robust usage.

We see real-time reporting applications of every kind you can imagine.  I myself am addicted to checking on everything that's coming out of our billing and customer systems tied into our Salesforce tabs.  So I'm always checking on the business in real-time via my iPhone.

I say this a lot, but integrating SaaS is a huge issue for today's enterprise. OpSource Connect can help SaaS companies -- of any size -- overcome integration hurdles and break out of the SaaS-only box. This speeds up adoption of SaaS in larger enterprise environments, opening the door for on-demand companies to cultivate business with large systems integrators. Plus, I'd say we're the only company providing Web operations from the ground up, addressing operational infrastructure, application management, and business operations. Today, integrations are expensive and one-to-one. For instance, while you can currently integrate your application with Google Maps as a composite application, OpSource Connect lets you integrate your app with many others, using just one platform. You can integrate your application with, for example, SAP, salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks, NetSuite, and a host of other SaaS and legacy applications. 

Everything is much more dynamic today, and programmers expect that.