Posted by Greg Arnette on Tue, Dec 20, 2011 @ 09:03
</cloud swagger on/>
This is a true story.
This is not a "Tortoise versus the Hare" parable. In that classic life lesson, the tortoise's "slow and steady" wins the race. In our retelling, the cloud, as the hare, wins the race. Not because it's "slow and steady" but rather quicker and more nimble. Enterprise companies want quick, nimble and less expensive.
So here’s the story as re-told to me (and verified for accuracy):
An email archiving prospect contacts our sales group seeking a quote for our cloud-powered SaaS email archiving service.
A sales engineer helps the prospect over the phone to assist the initial configuration for a free-trial proof of concept. Within 23 minutes the customer is searching, viewing and exporting their archived email.
But this true story gets even better. The [amazed] prospect contacts another email archiving vendor, a vendor that only sells installed software, and asks their sales engineer how long it would take to get a free-trial proof of concept up and running. Images of a stopwatch ticking down as a watermark to the conversation. The answer is a few weeks. Not 23 minutes, not even 23 hours, and maybe if the on-premise’s email archive vendor is lucky, less than 23 days.
The things is, the cloud-powered SaaS implementation has nearly the same feature set, costs 66% less than on-premises, and is the embodiment of simple sophistication.
Ohh.... and one more thing. There is a happy ending. The prospect is now a Sonian customer.
Just saying...
</cloud swagger off/>
Posted by Greg Arnette on Fri, Dec 16, 2011 @ 12:19 PM
In the past I have written about the secret to successful cloud deployments and how to architect for the cloud. Being successful requires a "designed-for-the-cloud" architecture, best operational practices and DevOps on steroids.A couple weeks ago Amazon notified a majority of their customers about an upcoming event that us early-to-the-cloud pioneers hadn't seen before; a forced reboot of the host operating system. On a massive scale. For Sonian, 72% of our currently running EC2 instances will need to be restarted before Amazon's deadline. There is no reprieve. There is no deferment. Welcome to Infrastructure as a Service!Our AWS business development contact gave us an early heads-up, and Twitter lit up when the first email notices started to arrive for the US-West region. Something big was afoot. And a lot of groans from the EC2 user community. First let me state flat out that Amazon did a pretty good job getting the word out and provided several methods to know which EC2 instances would need to be restarted. An email was sent with the list, the EC2 Management Console displays the information, and the EC2 API 'Ec2-describe-instancestatus' field has the information. Fortunately Joe Kinsella, Sonian's VP Engineering (@joekinsella,) enhanced our Cloud Control Viewer and provided a report showing the exact instances and their reboot schedule. 
Of the various reboot types, the most invasive is the one that moves the virtual host to new hardware. That will force a change in IP address and ephemeral storage is lost. This activity will certainly shake out any bugs in automated deployments, hard-coded settings, and sloppy shortcuts. We had to scramble in order to assess the impact. All we learned from the email notice was that a portion of our EC2 instances would need to be restarted. Actually there were two types of restarts. An operating system reboot, which would preserve the non-persistent ephemeral storage, and a more invasive full instance restart (meaning the hardware under the hypervisor would power-cycle) which would not preserve the ephemeral storage.One of the major mistakes cloud customers can make is to get complacent and treat the cloud like traditional co-located hosting. The cloud has different operating characteristics, what one could call the "cloud laws of physics," and this forced restart is a good example of this principle in action. It's also a wake-up call to not get lazy. A large-scale forced restart is like an earthquake drill. Practice makes perfect, and if this were an actual un-scheduled emergency, then we would be scrambling. Despite the headache, this event has some positive spins. First, it's encouraging there is an "EC2 fleet upgrade," which means newer underlying hardware. Perhaps faster NIC cards in the hosts. But for the companies like Sonian that started in the cloud circa 2007, some of our original instances that have been running for more than a year needed a "freshening." This event reminds us there is a “hardware” center to every amorphous cloud. Amazon just does a great job to allow us to not have to think about that too often, except for times like these. A stale part of the cloud gets a refresh. The second "benefit" is the forced fire drill. I know, there's never a good time for a fire drill. But this type of event has similar qualities to an unexpected outage. There is some luxury to pre-planning, but the shake-out will be the same. Something will be discovered in your architecture or deployment practices that will get improved by this reboot activity. Clusters may be too hard-coded. Config settings may be to restrictive. Reboot scripts may not work as you think. Sonian survives unscathed due to our maniacal focus on 100% automated deployments, 100% commitment to "infrastructure as code," and an investment in cloud control tools that allowed us to triage the situation and develop an action plan relatively quickly. We also employ the best darn DevOps team the cloud has seen.
Posted by Greg Arnette on Thu, Dec 01, 2011 @ 09:09
SaaS beget Web 2.0, which quickly spawned Enterprise 2.0, which in turn paved the way for enterprise cloud computing adoption.“Enterprise software,” to some, sends shivers up the spine. The phrase conjures images of year-long sales cycles, complicated installations, and more hassles for IT departments. Many enterprise software projects are consumed by delays and miss their objectives. CxO types scratch their heads and look for a better way to spend their IT budget dollars. Cloud-powered enterprise software, in the form of SaaS, is defining a new form of “enterprise software” that takes a few plays from the consumer web playbook, but packaged and supported for a business audience. SaaS and the cloud are now married. The cloud got its start by initially supporting consumer web apps that managed our photos and our social networks. As 2012 approaches, the cloud is now playing a larger role supporting enterprise web apps. But each type of audience, business and consumer, needs very different company structures to support their respective needs. Enterprise audiences expect to pay for a service and in return, receive a level of customer support attention in the form of “around-the-clock” hand-holding...basically, having a real person to answer their inbound telephone plea for help. When a business has a problem, they expect their IT vendors (cloud or non-cloud) to step up and fix the problem ASAP. Consumer audiences, on the other hand, have been conditioned to expect a lesser support experience from their cloud app vendors. This is because most consumer cloud apps use a “freemium” monetization scheme to generate revenue. A consumer cloud app vendor can’t afford to staff a support organization based on the revenues of a freemium stream. Support is typically email only and there are no published phone numbers to call in an emergency.There has been much written in the technology industry pundit blogs about the “consumerization of IT.” The theme of these posts is that enterprises will eventually buy all their IT needs from companies that started in the consumer space. But consumer companies are ill-equipped to service the needs of a business. If I were a consumer and couldn't get to my photo sharing site for a few hours a year, no big deal. But if were a business executive and couldn't get to my online documents for a few hours out of the year, that’s a disruption to normal operating procedures that many will not tolerate. There is an axiom within our industry - that it’s easier for a technology company to sell to a consumer, perfect that consumer offering, and then transition to selling to an upgraded version to an enterprise audience. This is in comparison to an enterprise focused company trying to move to a consumer audience. It’s a panacea to think movement in either direction is easy, or should even be attempted in the first place. The negative attitudes of the past toward “enterprise software” are being turnned to positives by a new class of enterprise software cloud vendors. Sonian is an example of a new wave of enterprise cloud vendors that are changing the rules for the next decade of cloud penetration into enterprise IT. We’re focused on a “business class” audience, and catering to the needs of a demanding customer base that pay for a service and get superior value for their IT budget dollars. The 5 Pillars of the New Era in Enterprise Cloud Software1. Cloud Applications Designed for the CloudBeware of existing SaaS apps that suddenly re-appear with a “cloud theme.” Unless the software was written in the last few years to specifically work in a cloud environment, then the vendor is purporting a scam.The cloud needs “cloud orientated architectures” to simultaneously be cost efficient and reliable. The two goals go hand in hand. Striving for cost efficiencies does not mean sacrificing reliability.Ask your cloud app vendor how they “game the cloud” to lower their costs, and pass the savings to you.2. Easy to Buy, Easy to UseTrue cloud-powered SaaS applications should be easy to buy and have simple price structures. This means “pay as you go” with minimal up-front costs and a price list that a five year old could understand. 3. A Real Support Person to Answer Your QuestionsEnterprise-class cloud applications need to be supported by a professional technical support organization that goes beyond basic email-only assistance. What may work for the consumer cloud will not work for the enterprise cloud. 4. Better Data Security than your On-Premises Data CenterData security means protect privacy and ensure resiliency. The enterprise cloud can offer more data security than 99% of the on-premises data centers owned and managed by small to medium-sized enterprises. Cloud data centers are SAS-70 and ISO27001 certified. Cloud application vendors can use strong encryption to guarantee privacy, and at the same time, take advantage of cloud storage replication to deliver “eleven-nines” SLA of data integrity.
5. Accelerating Innovation
We’re witnessing something truly remarkable in terms of enterprise IT. The cloud is allowing application vendors to increase their innovation cadence and deliver new features faster than ever. Gone are the old installed software days of 24-month release cycles. Gone are the old SaaS days of quarterly updates. With the enterprise cloud, we are now seeing new functions released every few weeks. This means the cloud vendors can listen to their customer audiences and turn the feedback into new features in time-frames that were not possible to meet prior to the advent of the enterprise cloud.
Sonian is at the leading edge of technology and customer engagement for the new “business class” cloud.
Posted by Kayla Krause on Wed, Oct 19, 2011 @ 01:24 PM
A recent article from The Next Web (TNW) discusses the benefits from Amazon's S3 service internal usage. Sonian was mentioned as one of the heaviest users, contributing to the immense growth in Amazon's cloud scale - S3 now stores 566 billion objects!
Amazon's engineers capitalize on big data and big problems, which paves the road for the S3 service that now has the ability to store hundreds of billions of objects. Utilizing this service of Amazon's, Sonian currently has 2.4 billion objects under management. Now, as a "Big Data" company, Sonian only plans to increase this number, and given its help from S3 it can be done.
The S3 service allows the Sonian Archive to expand its bandwith, maximize its storage benefits and provide an increasingly secure environment for its users.
To read this article, click here: "Amazon Announces 566 billion objects stored on S3 Service"
Posted by Kayla Krause on Mon, Oct 17, 2011 @ 09:39
Beginning tomorrow, October 18th, Sonian will be participating in AWS's Gov Cloud event. As a gold sponsor, Sonian will also have a spot on the executive panel taking place in the afternoon. Greg Arnette, Sonian's CTO and Founder, will be speaking during this executive breakout session on the Technology Partner Panel.
Given Sonian's close partnership with AWS, Sonian is looking forward to sponsoring this event. We look to help promote the cloud computing platform AWS provides federal agencies with that can help meet the government's challenges in IT and related services.
The goal of the summit is to provide the most efficient cloud computing information you need to create a successful cloud service solving all of your business needs. Presenters include GSA CIO, Casey Coleman and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com. How-to sessions will be provided, displaying the product and platform features. There will also be breakout sessions designed specifically for technical audiences and managers/executives at the event.
Attendees will hear first-hand from federal agencies of how they successfully migrated to the cloud. They will also learn how to launch applications in the cloud and the services AWS provides that could help future agencies adopt cloud applications.
Sonian will be there to help educate and inform attendees the importance of cloud computing for government agencies. If you are attending please feel free to stop by our booth and ask us any questions! See you there!
Posted by Kayla Krause on Tue, Oct 04, 2011 @ 09:52
For this entire week, Sonian is one of the premiere sponsors for this week's OpenStack Essex Design Summit and Conference being held in Boston at the Intercontinental.
The 5 day event (October 3 - October 7) is targeted at the OpenStack community, including developers, architects, system administrators, users, among many others to come together and share/learn about OpenStack and how it works and why it matters.
As the pioneer in cloud-powered archiving and search, Sonian can archive and make any electronic document searchable, regardless of its format. Whether its a PST, RAW, TEXT, or PDF, you can import and export every format in the Sonian Archive.
Since Sonian was built from the ground up, we can leverage cloud computing and its capabilities to the fullest extent, much like OpenStack is being created to produce a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform.
In support for cloud computing technologies and the industry itself, Sonian will be sponsoring this OpenStack Conference. If you are attending, you can find our table right at the entrance, near the registration booth. We will also be hosting a cocktail hour on Thursday night and Sonian's CTO, Greg Arnette, will be speaking on the OpenStack Storage Panel on Friday.
Hope to see you there!
Posted by Kayla Krause on Wed, Sep 28, 2011 @ 01:46 PM
The rate at which customers are purchasing cloud solutions has grown exponentially over the past few years. By and large, this growth has come at the expense of vendors with legacy on-premise systems. Faced with eroding market share, legacy vendors find themselves in a difficult position. They already have a successful legacy product but in order to stay ahead of the competition they must create a compelling cloud solution. Rather than risk losing its branding and competitive edge in the marketplace, the legacy vendor often resorts to a service that includes some but not all cloud features and is expensive but not overly priced. The legacy vendor then takes this service and slaps a “cloud” label on it.
While we at Sonian are encouraged that so many legacy vendors are as excited about the cloud as we are, we believe this trend is bad for not only customers but the cloud computing industry in general, and we think that it should stop.
Symantec’s recent launch of Enterprise Vault.cloud provides a great example of the negative aspects of this “cloud” labeling trend.
- Step 1 - An on-premise vendor - For almost 30 years, Symantec has been providing over 30,000 customers with an archiving solution using Enterprise Vault.
- Step 2 - Competition within the cloud archiving market is significantly increasing - Symantec is depressed with eroding market share and mind share due to competition from cloud archiving vendors, such as Sonian.
- Step 3 - Due to limited resources, mind share and market share, legacy vendors cannot create a cloud solution - Symantec cannibalizes its cash cow by not providing a cloud solution and in order to develop a service such as the cloud, it requires the right skills, enough time and money - all of which Symantec lacks.
- Step 4 - The next step is to leverage an existing service that provides some cloud features, and is a little pricey but also very successful - Symantec leveraged LiveOffice for its hosted archiving solution and became an OEM partner.
- Step 5 - Slap a "cloud" label on it - Symantec rebranded LiveOffice's hosted archiving solution with its own name, "Enterprise Vault.cloud."
“Longtime service providers are also onboard, expanding their offerings to include cloud-based services. Industry giants like Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) (BPOS and Office 365), Google (NSDQ:GOOG) (Google Apps) and Symantec (Enterprise Vault.cloud) have all introduced cloud offerings in the past two years as well as third party providers like Intermedia (Hosted Exchange,)” Nick Mehta, LiveOffice’s CEO. When prominent people in the marketplace make statements such as this it can be misleading to customers since Enterprise Vault.cloud is not a true cloud-based solution. He is also categorizing Enterprise Vault.cloud with big industry players like Microsoft and Google, which eludes that Enterprise Vault.cloud is also a big name in the clouding industry.
Statements like Mehta’s, deceive the potential cloud customer and as a result, the customer invests in a “cloud” archiving service and expects to receive infinite scalability, elasticity and a cost effective pricing model. Instead, this “cloud” service is the opposite – it’s a complex infrastructure that is prone to failures and expensive.
From a true cloud vendor’s standpoint, such as Sonian, we believe this hinders the fact that there are true cloud solutions, such as Sonian. For example, we were built from the ground up using advanced cloud computing technologies. This allows us to provide unlimited storage, elasticity, and streamlined compliance and eDiscovery needs - beneficial features that aren’t possible in a hosted and on-premise solution.
With a cloud solution, there is a level of resiliency and redundancy that is not feasible within a hosted service. For instance, Enterprise Vault.cloud is constrained by the fact that it was built to operate on dedicated physical infrastructure, making it vulnerable to service outages and network issues. On the contrary, the Sonian Archive provides 11 9’s of redundancy and automatically replicates each archived piece of data into several copies to geographically dispersed data centers.
The cloud is also much cheaper than on-premise or hosted solutions due to the fact the cloud can bundle services like; eDiscovery features, encryption features, WORM storage, etc. Sonian’s cloud-powered solution offers a complete package of all these features at one low monthly cost, while Enterprise Vault.cloud requires the purchase of individual add-ons to provide a fully compliant solution. For instance, one of their add-on services is WORM storage. This is a critical requirement for compliance and eDiscovery. Sonian’s Archive solution provides this by default, allowing our customers to be SEC, FINRA, HIPAA, etc. compliant and address eDiscovery requests at no extra cost.
As you can see, slapping a “cloud” label on an existing product can be detrimental to potential cloud customers and can leave them wondering how dependable and true the cloud claims to be…for the sake of cloud customers and the industry, Sonian hopes this trend stops.
Posted by Alec Phillips on Tue, Sep 28, 2010 @ 01:04 PM
Hosted by Cloud Computing expert David Linthicum, this podcast is a no-hype look at the world of Cloud Computing, focusing on how to prepare the traditional enterprise to leverage resources outside of their firewalls. This podcast talks about what's new, what's working, and has expert guests, including Sonian CTO Greg Arnette, who will provide you with the advice you need to be successful in the clouds.
Posted by Alec Phillips on Wed, Sep 22, 2010 @ 12:34 PM
Cloud computing and virtualization are two of the major IT trends of this decade. They are the reason this blog, and many others like it, was started. With that in mind, Zenoss released The 2010 Virtualization and Cloud Computing Survey results. The survey was designed to collect information on the use of virtualization and cloud computing technologies among enterprise users.
Over 200 IT professionals were surveyed during the 2nd quarter of 2010. Highlights from the survey include:
- 40.7% indicated that they preferred to deploy servers virtually, 29.3% indicated they used virtualization whenever possible
- The leading virtualization technology used by respondents was VMware that was in use by 79.3% of survey respondents who were using virtualization
- 43.3% of participants indicated flexibility as the reason for using virtualization while 33.3% indicated hardware savings as a reason for using the technology
- The number one stated goal with regards to virtual infrastructure was Cost Savings (64.7%) followed by Deployment Control specifically controlling virtual sprawl
- Security was the number one concern for cloud computing followed by management and monitoring
View the full report at Zenoss.com.
Posted by Alec Phillips on Thu, Sep 16, 2010 @ 11:27
As a precursor to the beginning of another school year, Network World’s John Cox posted Back to School IT projects reshape campus life a few weeks back. This article looked at 6 major IT initiatives currently being seen at college campuses around the country. One that was of particular interest to us here at Sonian has to do with the increase in cloud deployments in higher ed.
Network World -- 8/20/10 -- In tandem with such virtualization is growing use of cloud-based services. Dartmouth has just adopted the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), which are online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office and other Microsoft applications. The school chose Microsoft over Google's comparable product because it plans to integrate the on-campus Exchange Server with the cloud offering. Dartmouth is also evaluating cloud offerings via Amazon and Rackspace.
Brandeis this fall will complete the transition of its campus e-mail and calendar services to Google's online equivalents.
"Google can do it way better than Brandeis," Turner says. One key factor in Brandeis' decision: Google's excellent support for mobile users. "To keep up with them, we'd have to make sure we were always updating all our software," Turner says. "Just the new iPad puts us behind the eight-ball right away."
Dartmouth's Waite-Franzen says she expects more education software vendors to create cloud offerings. SunGard Higher Education, for example, announced earlier this year it will offer as a hosted service the federal methodology for calculating student financial aid eligibility base on the latest government rules.
This got us thinking: What drivers are sending universities into a cloud-based ecosystem?
- Cost savings - Cloud services present an enormous opportunity for schools to save on IT infrastructure. With the right strategy, schools that move to an off premise cloud-based infrastructure can significantly lower capital costs, maintenance costs, and IT personnel costs.
- System downtime - So much of today's coursework is digital. Textbooks that used to come with software on CDs now simply offer unique passwords that let you access online software, teachers assign work via email, class discussions are held via online forum, Facebook.com has replaced the physical facebook (I went to look for a picture of an actual, paper, binded school facebook that I could link to and the closest thing I could find was a "crumpled paper facebook icon"), and "the school email servers were down" is the new "the dog ate my homework." With so much of today's learning taking place online, when a school's server is down, the learning can come to a halt. Moving infrastructure to the cloud removes the burden of server maintenance off of an on-site IT staff and puts it in the hands of a much larger entity that can offer 99.99% SLA.
- Ease of use - with a cloud-based infrastructure, school IT staff can easily implement, monitor, and maintain systems from literally anywhere. Students and faculty as well are able to access documents and collaborate on projects from their dorms and homes easier than if they were working through an internal server system.
If you can think of other reasons for (or against) a cloud-based IT infrastructure for schools, send me an email or comment below!
Webinar on Cloud Security
Hosted by Steve Riley, Cloud Computing Strategist for Amazon Web Services, and Greg Arnette, Founder and CTO of Sonian.