Archive for December, 2011

Redundancy in the Cloud

Posted: December 20, 2011, 2:56 pm

Somehow, a perception exists that a cloud provides a certain level of redundancy by default. However, make no mistake. Redundancy is not inherent.

Admittedly, individual hardware and software components have some redundancy built in. However, those capabilities do not eliminate the need for a redundant cloud any more than safe cars eliminate the need for speed limits, traffic lights, divided highways and the rules-of-the-road.

For many cloud providers, especially consumer cloud providers, the only redundancy offered is to make physical copies of the data—and many customers do not use even that minimal level of recovery.  These clouds were not built with redundancy in mind.  They lack the automation, monitoring and procedures to provide clients with an environment that can anticipate, react and recover from component failures.  Such clouds are cost effective only if your business, employees and/or customers can tolerate the occasional complete loss of service.

Redundant Redundancy

The hallmark of an enterprise clouds is the redundancy it offers.  Redundancy exists throughout between the infrastructure layers to ensure high-availability.  For example, a failover process detects application hangs and interruptions so corrective action takes place quicker.  Monitoring tools ensure no single points of failure develops, and specially-built automation handles error conditions when a problem does occurs, obviating the need for human intervention.  This type of automation is particularly important because human interaction comes only after some level of damage is evident.

Built-in Redundancy
It is cloud vendor’s responsibility to design and build redundancy into the cloud, and the expertise, staff, time and investment it requires is substantial. Patches and piecemeal solutions added over time do not render the same strong results as redundancy baked-in from the beginning.

Is recovery of stored data enough redundancy for your applications?

Download SunGard’s white paper, “The Real Value of Cloud Computing.”

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SunGard Managed Recovery Program Service Delivers Higher DR Value for Enterprise Organizations

Posted: December 19, 2011, 8:59 pm

SunGard Managed Recovery Program (MRP) service continues to gain momentum. Last week, another customer came through the MRP on-boarding test process. Their comments and findings provide a “before” and “after” picture of what organizations working with this exciting new service from SunGard can expect:

  • The organization reported “significant” improvements with “tremendous value” while also “reducing the number of people we must send in the event of a disaster”.
  • A cross-discipline approach now in place at SunGard was identified as speeding problem resolution during test.
  • Improved communication between the SunGard test team and the customer’s DR team was noted, including the practice of hosting a conference call that kept all members of the team in constant communication through the test exercise.
  • SunGard’s new role of Service Deliver Manager (SDM) was cited as being key in providing a single point of communication, resulting in the “smoothest test ever” from a communications and coordination standpoint.
  • Upcoming participation by SunGard in the organization’s weekly change control meetings is anticipated to be a “very positive” measure towards enabling SunGard to lead recovery for the organization. They note this as being critical because most of their technical team is located far from the SunGard Philadelphia recovery site location.
  • The organization’s goal is to eliminate all requirements for their team to come on site, either during test or recovery.

The experience reported by this organization mirrors similar experiences of other organizations coming through the SunGard MRP test process. Examples of these experiences were recently shared at the Gartner Data Center Conference during a panel discussion led by Kerwin Myers, Sr Director of Product Management for MRP service at SunGard. Also participating on the panel discussion, were two senior Service Delivery Managers (SDMs).

If you have questions about MRP service and how it can solve disaster recovery challenges for your DR team, submit your comments and questions. The team at SunGard will get back to you promptly.

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Is the Cloud for Everything?

Posted: December 15, 2011, 5:30 pm

Recently, Indu Kodukula, SunGard EVP and CTO, was interviewed by Smart Business Philadelphia.  Here are a few of his remarks.  – CM

The #1 reason companies want to use the cloud for their ap­plications is to align their spending with busi­ness value.  Companies don’t know up-front what business return they would receive from a capital investment in enterprise IT.  Without the cloud, they have to make the invest­ment anyway and hope it is profitable.

Using the cloud makes a fundamental difference, because you only pay for the compute resources you use or the data you store.  You don’t have hardware to buy or install and, in a man­aged environment, you don’t need internal re­sources to manage your IT.  The service provider takes responsibility for maintaining the software, servers and applications.

As a result, companies utilizing the cloud for enterprise IT can make investments that are automatically in line with the business value.  Then, they can invest more capital into infrastructure and re­sources as the business becomes more successful.

Companies typically walk through several points when making the deci­sion to use the cloud.  First, the moment something moves outside your fire­wall, you don’t own it anymore.  So you have to decide what to keep in-house and what to move to the cloud.  Second, you must consider performance and availability of data in the cloud.  In the cloud, multisite availability is used for applications that (1) can tolerate only about four hours of downtime a year, (2) need geographic redundancy, or (3) are respon­sible for keeping the business up and running

How can businesses get started?

The first step toward moving applications to the cloud is to do a virtualization assess­ment.  Then, determine which applications to virtualize.  Next, take the virtualized applications and decide what to keep in house and what to move outside your firewall.

Look for a cloud service provider that will guide you through the process, helping you understand and decide which applications should stay in house—either because they are not ready to be virtualized or they are too tied into business—and which applications can be moved safely.  The goal is to create a roadmap for moving applications to the cloud data center.

Which applications are good fits for the cloud?

If you have an application that supports your business and has such strong growth that it will need 10 times more resources next year than it does today, the elasticity the cloud offers is a great option.  If the applica­tion also uses modern technology, which is easier to virtualize, that combination makes it compelling to move that application to cloud.  Obviously, the business argument for moving older technology, like ERP, to the cloud is much less strong.

Is your company taking steps to determine how it can benefit from the cost savings of an enterprise cloud?

 

Download SunGard’s white paper, The Real Value of Cloud Computing.

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Business Continuity in the Cloud

Posted: December 13, 2011, 12:58 pm

Business continuity focuses on the resiliency, restoration, disaster recovery and security needed to keep your system operating, performing, secure and, if an incident should occur, recoverable. Many cloud vendors have little experience with business continuity, preferring instead to offer consumer cloud services to clients that provide their own back-up procedures, intrusion protection, vulnerability alerts, firewalls, software upgrades and disaster recovery planning/testing.

Resiliency is the key

Without strong resiliency, redundancy and failover capabilities at each layer of the cloud stack, the failure of one component can cause the  failure, in short order, of many subsequent processes.   Some vendors have experienced such “cascading failures.” To be truly resilient, each component in the cloud must have failover logic and automation.

Enterprise Clouds are build for overall resiliency.  That means they have not only failover capabilities and integrated, multi-site, storage locations but also multiple points “baked-in” where the system can failover in and between layers automatically.  If a component fails, it needs to failover without human interaction, so the workload moves automatically to alternative hardware to maintain availability.

Ask the Tough Questions

If low-latency, high-performance, robust security and vigilant management are key requirements for your applications, it pays to drill your potential cloud provider about their procedures and automation related to resilience, redundancy, security, governance  and data recovery.  Ask for their Service Level Agreement early in your conversations, since it spells out the level of responsibility the provider expects to provide.

Does your current data center have automatic failover?

 

Read “Five Considerations When Evaluating Cloud Computing Architectures” for more information.

 

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Considerations for Choosing a Cloud Provider

Posted: December 6, 2011, 11:30 am

For many organizations, cloud computing is cost-effective for at least some applications.  Determining which applications are appropriate for the cloud takes careful evaluation.  The following checklist covers some of the factors you need to consider before selecting a cloud computing provider:

  1. Does the cloud you are considering meet your business availability needs?  What information can the provider give about historical and recent cloud availability?  What investment has the provider made in resilience and high availability?
  2. What service level agreements does the provider offer?  What compensation is available if the service is lost?
  3. Do you need the cloud provider to comply with certain regulatory requirements?  Where will your data reside, and is that location acceptable?  Does data archiving meet your regulatory requirements?
  4. o the cloud services meet and exceed your IT and data security policies, or do they fall short?  Will it be in a private or public cloud?  Will it be in a secure data center?
  5. Where is the data actually stored and who has access to the data?  What happens to the data when production tasks are completed?  How are archives accessed?  How is the data finally destroyed?
  6. What will costs be tomorrow?  What are your baseline costs?  Agility, flexibility, and strategy are part of the future costs, but you need a baseline for comparison.  How is the agreement structured?  Can the provider change the cost of the service to you?  If so, how much notice is required?
  7. How viable is the cloud provider?  It is important to select a provider with sufficient resources and services to provide the high levels of availability, resiliency, and security your business requires.  Is cloud computing part of the provider’s core business, or is it a new venture that could fail if it does not attract and retain sufficient customers?  Does the cloud offer multiple, highly resilient data centers with very strong network links between them?

In a business environment where information availability is critical, it makes sense to proceed cautiously, using a deliberate and systematic approach to mitigate risk.  A sensible first step is to testing a cloud provider with a non-critical process.  This lets you gain hands-on experience without risking major problems with day-to-day operations.

Does your organization have a business impact analysis (BIA) that audit all your business processes and defines the availability, resiliency and security each needs?

 

For more information, visit our Cloud microsite

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Seven Ways Enterprise Cloud is Transforming the IT Market – Part II

Posted: December 2, 2011, 11:16 am

In Part I, we recapped four of seven roles cloud computing plays today or will play in the near future, as discussed by Indu Kodukula, CTO of SunGard Availability Services, in an interview with Sramana Mitra  for Mitra’s  blog series,  “Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing.”  Here we complete the discussion with the final three roles Kodukula foresees.    – CM

 

Cloud as CPU and Storage Provider

We are also going to see independent computing components available on demand.  That is, compute on demand, storage on demand and, hopefully soon, network on demand.   Most likely, a relatively small number of providers will exist, and mid-size companies will use such services.  This means their investment in infrastructure is definitely going to go down.

Enterprise Cloud as Services Provider for SaaS

SaaS  vendors who run their cloud application on a commodity cloud will need more sophisticated capabilities for load balancing, monitoring, availability capabilities, etc., as the size and complexity of their businesses grow.  We have a great deal of intellectual property in our services that other providers do not have.  We see a time when SaaS vendors might manage their cloud applications on top of SunGard’s services in a commodity cloud.

That scenario would let SaaS vendors take advantage of both enterprise-grade cloud and the economies of a commodity cloud, if we do not happen to offer the lowest priced infrastructure.   As a result, we could end up with many customers who use our services as part of an SaaS application without our being the cloud provider and, possibly, without the commodity cloud vender knowing—or caring.

Enterprise Cloud as Services Provider to Commodity Clouds

We see down the road that some commodity clouds will buy services from us to use with their clients.   Just like SaaS vendors, as their size and complexity grows, they, too, may need the enterprise-class production services as their businesses grow.

In fact, one company using a commodity cloud has already arranged for recovery services to be delivered from our data center.   Their application is set-up to replicate over to us, because of the sophisticated intellectual property we have in our availability services.

Similarly, one can easily see the entire recovery process—the setup of the replication on an ongoing basis, the migration of the application and the failover of the application—going from, say, Amazon over to our data center.  Or, perhaps, all those availability services will be provided on Amazon’s infrastructure from someone like us—which would open up a price point that could be lower than what we offer today.

To summarize, the cloud is going to transform the industry.  Some people think that is hype, but it is not for  one simple reason: the utility model of cloud computing is amazingly compelling.  It is not just about cost.  The fundamental value of the utility model is you can tie the investment success to the business success.   Beyond that, the cloud lets you combine the applications, the resource management services and the infrastructure in ways that not only minimize costs but also raise the level of expertise available to you.

What applications would you move to a production-ready cloud to lower costs and decrease distractions?

Download SunGard’s white paper, The Real Value of Cloud Computing.

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Seven Ways Enterprise Cloud is Transforming the IT Market – Part I

Posted: December 1, 2011, 11:31 am

As part of his blog series, “Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing,”  Sramana Mitra recently interviewed Indu Kodukula, CTO of SunGard Availability Services, about the many roles he sees cloud computing fulfilling today and in the future.   Today, we recap four of the cloud computing roles they discussed.  In our next blog, we’ll recap three more roles cloud competing could play in the future.    – CM

For nearly 30 years, SunGard Availability Services focused on two specific businesses: disaster recovery (DR)—helping clients recover their applications after a service disruption,  and managed services—running production applications on behalf of our clients.   Today, we have over 10,000 clients, mostly mid-sized companies between $100 million to $1billion in annual revenues.  We have 50 data centers, over 3500 employees and $1.5B in annual revenues, and we have expanded our services to include the cloud computing environment our clients need—enterprise-level and  production-ready.

Our businesses give us a unique perspective on the IT requirements of mid-sized companies.  When cloud computing emerged in 2009, we recognized the opportunity immediately.  But, because of our background and market, we saw the best uses for cloud computing  quite differently.

Cloud as Development Environment.

The first use cases of cloud computing revolved around SaaS software companies making use of the pay-as-you-go pricing model for cloud computing.  This model enabled software companies  to buy  resources as needed, which is a tremendous advantage over laying out a huge CapEx (capital expenditures) upfront—before  you even know if the product is going to make money.   Today, using a commodity cloud, like Amazon, for the development and testing of new products is widely accepted.

However, among our clients, we didn’t (and still do not) see much development of entirely new software applications, so we knew a commodity cloud was not the best choice for our clients.   While we, too, see constraints around CapEx among our clients, what we see more often is overstretched IT staffs.  With this insight in mind, we took a different approach to cloud computing.   We made the decision and, subsequently, the investment to build a production-ready enterprise cloud.

 

Enterprise Cloud Computing.

Many mid-sized enterprises run heterogeneous environments, have special performance requirements or are in a highly regulated industry.   They want to take advantage of the cost-saving cloud computing offers, but their applications are not cloud-ready.

Further, they do not see rewriting applications in which critical business logic –logic that has developed over the last 25 or 30 years—to meet a cloud stack as a compelling business need.   Consequently, they will need a place to house that application for the foreseeable future.   We think the ability to deliver these types of applications over the Web and from the utility of the cloud model is definitely going to be the default model for delivering enterprise IT services five years from now.

The trends has already begun.  We are seeing more and more mainstream departmental applications and new applications moving to the enterprise cloud not for development but, rather, for production.   Even we at SunGard are “eating our own dog food,” so to speak, and converting our internal applications to our enterprise cloud over the next 18 months to take advantage of cloud economies.  That is a pretty compelling message to our clients.

Recovery in the Cloud

From the beginning, our DR business model encompassed a shared inventory that matched the customer’s infrastructure.  Now, by adding production-ready cloud services to our DR services, recovery becomes more about providing a “continuum of availability,” rather than recovering everything at one point when a catastrophe happens.  We call this new approach “recovery in the cloud.”  With cloud computing and DR services together, a client can decide the level of availability it wants for a particular application.   For a tier one applications, it may be no more than 15 minutes of down time; for tier two, no more than four hours; for tier three, 24 hour, and maybe for the rest, a couple days.

Our cloud services let us run tier one applications for our clients or, alternatively, provide a recovery platform where they can run the applications themselves.    These capabilities were deliberate design goals for our cloud strategy, coming directly from an understanding of client needs.

Enterprise Cloud as a Consultant

Many of our clients face challenges involving an IT staff under press to be more efficient, as well as issues around consolidation, new service roll-outs and new revenue opportunities.   We, too, have faced many of these issues and found solutions.

For example, we have significant experience with decision support and analysis using data warehousing and large-scale data volumes.  Similarly, we have production experience with many common departmental applications, and we have a great deal of knowledge about how clouds manage applications and resources.  In addition, we have specialized availability knowledge that even a Fortune 50 company would value.

We  find many of the next generation application service providers need help building applications for the cloud.   So, we are building up a team of solution architects who can sit down with entrepreneurs and help them design their applications.

Cloud application consulting is but one of the new services we expect to offer.  As the cloud environment matures, we expect to see the need for. . . (to be continued)

 

Are you writing your application to make the best use of cloud resources?

Download SunGard’s white paper, The Real Value of Cloud Computing.

 

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