Being a daily user of Hootsuite I was first alerted to the Amazon EC2 outage through a “Service Down” message strangely in Japanese on the Hootsuite website at 8am on Thursday 24/4. A quick Google later and the size of the outage became apparent. The impact and the sheer number of companies affected was a very prominent illustration on how popular cloud application hosting has become.
At the time of writing the root cause of the of issue hasn’t been posted, however it appears that there was a major network failure. The main problems to customers seemed to arise when the EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volume replication was disrupted and speculation is that a significant re-mirroring process potentially overloaded the EBS plane.
I am certainly not going to blog about the misfortune of Amazon and its customers, however I would be naive not the think that what has been termed a “plane crash” in cloud computing terms wouldn’t be playing heavily on the minds of our customers. Looking at the constructive comments to come out of the issue (in light of no root cause analysis), there are 2 main threads:
1) A need for improved communication.
A big part of the frustration against Amazon was the lack of information and poor communication flow following the outage. Although Quantix are a smaller company and during any issues lines of communication are through the account management team, I believe all service providers should be looking for improvements. I for one will be sitting down with my team and making suggestions for additional channels.
2) A need for customers to build their own resilience across multiple Amazon availability zones.
Amazon’s high levels of availability to date may have caused complacency in its customers leaving them unprepared our being caught out by an unforeseen failure scenario. I’m sure these latest issues will make a lot of Amazon customers bulk up their resilience across multiple availability zones.
Offering Managed Cloud Services, at Quantix we mitigate the risk to customers by taking on this responsibility for them. This means that every server running on the Quantix cloud has full failover capability from our primary to secondary DC, without any intervention from the customer. Please see this link for more information on our cloud topology http://www.quantix-uk.com/about-quantix/quantix-cloud-platform/cloud-technology-topology
The metaphor of the term cloud has been very useful to describe a way of consuming IT, however it lacks any clarity in terms of what goes on “under the bonnet”. Therefore, if your need any clarification on the way Quantix operate our managed cloud, please feel free to contact me directly and I’d be more than happy talk it through at length.
Friday 6 May 2011
Monday 21 March 2011
Information for RSA & Signify Customers
As a customer of Quantix, some of your users may be using SecurID keyfob tokens supplied by Quantix as part of your cloud service from us. These tokens are designed and manufactured by a company called RSA, the Security Division of EMC. RSA have been the market leader in two-factor authentication products for over 20 years with over 40 million tokens shipped worldwide.
We have been and are currently in regular contact with RSA as we are aware that some of RSA's systems have been subject to a sophisticated cyber attack, and that has resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems that relates to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products. At this point RSA have not confirmed what this information is, but they are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of their RSA SecurID customers, including Signify and our customers.
Currently Quantix are not aware of any compromise to the security of the RSA tokens as a result of this activity, and you can be assured that we are increasing our vigilance and will be working closely with RSA to ensure we take any appropriate steps to minimise any potential impact.
RSA have released an open letter to customers relating to this incident here http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3872
We will be keeping you informed as and when more information becomes available.
Friday 11 March 2011
The UK impact of Cloud by 2020
I have just received seen a headline from TechMarketView announcing:
"By the end of the decade, we expect that cloud-based packaged software will represent nearly 30% of all UK software spend, leaving the market for legacy ‘on-premise’ products in irreversible decline."
I have always followed and respected the analysts at TechMarketView and working at the coal face I would even go as far to say that this estimate is on the conservative side. If (or looking more like when) this shift happens the UK "channel" landscape will look very different.
Hardware Sales
If 30% of software is on cloud then at least a similar % of hardware will be powering the cloud. Although as a large percentage of the remaining 70% could be legacy software sales with revenue driven by term licences and subscriptions, new application deployments (which typically drives hardware sales) will be greater than 30%. This therefore means that the hardware channel will be condensed to a fewer number of customers, with the major cloud service providers being the biggest buyers. The economies for service providers will focus on enterprise end kit, greater discounts and a demand high levels of virtualisation. This will apply not only to server & storage, but also security appliances, switches, routers etc..
As a service provider we are already seeing hardware vendors recognise this and they actually help to market our services (rather than their product) because the knock on effect of us taking on more customers means we need more of their kit.
The dominance of the service provider
The demand for SaaS from users is forcing ISVs to do or die and I truly haven't spoken to a software vendor who doesn't have a plan to adopt an element of cloud in the last 6 months. The main problem is that ISVs typically don't have the skills to build and maintain the infrastructure and frankly still just want to concentrate on their application. Therefore the majority of SaaS deployments are based on an established cloud providers infrastructure. Which sets the scene for cloud service providers to become a dominant force as Cloud eats into the UK software market. This is a real worry for the smaller traditional IT resellers, whose revenues rely on product sales, consultancy and post sales support because the market they are addressing is a diminishing one, the full effects of which is a ticking bomb.
Environmental benefits
One natural benefit of software moving to a cloud model is that cloud service providers, driven by virtualisation are going to be very efficient against a large number of independent end user deployments. The cost of power and space will have a big role to play and the service provider will be driven to find efficiencies in this area.If you look at the benefits of virtualisation for just 50 servers, the efficiencies just get better as the magnitude increases.
The above are a few initial thoughts but the effects of a simple headline announcing "a market change" will be profound and will touch the way we use applications, accountancy processes and the IT channel as we know it today. One major hardware vendor said to me recently (in all seriousness) that they can see a place in the future where 90% of their business is condensed to a handfull of major cloud service providers...food for thought.
"By the end of the decade, we expect that cloud-based packaged software will represent nearly 30% of all UK software spend, leaving the market for legacy ‘on-premise’ products in irreversible decline."
I have always followed and respected the analysts at TechMarketView and working at the coal face I would even go as far to say that this estimate is on the conservative side. If (or looking more like when) this shift happens the UK "channel" landscape will look very different.
Hardware Sales
If 30% of software is on cloud then at least a similar % of hardware will be powering the cloud. Although as a large percentage of the remaining 70% could be legacy software sales with revenue driven by term licences and subscriptions, new application deployments (which typically drives hardware sales) will be greater than 30%. This therefore means that the hardware channel will be condensed to a fewer number of customers, with the major cloud service providers being the biggest buyers. The economies for service providers will focus on enterprise end kit, greater discounts and a demand high levels of virtualisation. This will apply not only to server & storage, but also security appliances, switches, routers etc..
As a service provider we are already seeing hardware vendors recognise this and they actually help to market our services (rather than their product) because the knock on effect of us taking on more customers means we need more of their kit.
The dominance of the service provider
The demand for SaaS from users is forcing ISVs to do or die and I truly haven't spoken to a software vendor who doesn't have a plan to adopt an element of cloud in the last 6 months. The main problem is that ISVs typically don't have the skills to build and maintain the infrastructure and frankly still just want to concentrate on their application. Therefore the majority of SaaS deployments are based on an established cloud providers infrastructure. Which sets the scene for cloud service providers to become a dominant force as Cloud eats into the UK software market. This is a real worry for the smaller traditional IT resellers, whose revenues rely on product sales, consultancy and post sales support because the market they are addressing is a diminishing one, the full effects of which is a ticking bomb.
Environmental benefits
One natural benefit of software moving to a cloud model is that cloud service providers, driven by virtualisation are going to be very efficient against a large number of independent end user deployments. The cost of power and space will have a big role to play and the service provider will be driven to find efficiencies in this area.If you look at the benefits of virtualisation for just 50 servers, the efficiencies just get better as the magnitude increases.
The above are a few initial thoughts but the effects of a simple headline announcing "a market change" will be profound and will touch the way we use applications, accountancy processes and the IT channel as we know it today. One major hardware vendor said to me recently (in all seriousness) that they can see a place in the future where 90% of their business is condensed to a handfull of major cloud service providers...food for thought.
Thursday 24 February 2011
The future of VMware public clouds
For those of you who run cloud infrastructures or operate hosted virtual servers there's a good chance you are using VMware. In fact if you read the latest "Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting" Gartner Magic Quadrant, there is criticism for providers who aren't using VMware.
When it comes down to licencing, because VMWare end user licencing agreements do not allow for products to be used in hosting environments, service providers have to enter into a VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP).
The reason for me asking about the future of VMWare public clouds is that the current VSPP which is based on charging per active virtual machine will be defunct by March 2012. The replacement VSPP agreement will be charged on the amount of virtual memory allocated to each virtual machine. This isn't a major issue until you start creating VMs that are allocated over 3GB RAM, for example the cost for a 32GB VM will work out over 13 times more expensive than under the previous scheme (to the provider).
My question though is how this will impact the big public cloud providers such as Navisite, Rackspace & Opsource who run on VMware and charge by actual RAM usage. Surely this will be impossible to maintain as if a user creates a 32GB RAM VM but only draws 2GB RAM, then the provider will be in a position of having to pay VMware for a 32GB VM licence and only receiving customer revenues for 2GB of actual usage.
I'm sure it will come out in the wash, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some major pricing structure changes from the big providers over the next 12 months.
When it comes down to licencing, because VMWare end user licencing agreements do not allow for products to be used in hosting environments, service providers have to enter into a VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP).
The reason for me asking about the future of VMWare public clouds is that the current VSPP which is based on charging per active virtual machine will be defunct by March 2012. The replacement VSPP agreement will be charged on the amount of virtual memory allocated to each virtual machine. This isn't a major issue until you start creating VMs that are allocated over 3GB RAM, for example the cost for a 32GB VM will work out over 13 times more expensive than under the previous scheme (to the provider).
My question though is how this will impact the big public cloud providers such as Navisite, Rackspace & Opsource who run on VMware and charge by actual RAM usage. Surely this will be impossible to maintain as if a user creates a 32GB RAM VM but only draws 2GB RAM, then the provider will be in a position of having to pay VMware for a 32GB VM licence and only receiving customer revenues for 2GB of actual usage.
I'm sure it will come out in the wash, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some major pricing structure changes from the big providers over the next 12 months.
Wednesday 23 February 2011
Back in the saddle
Firstly apologies for not updating this blog. The fact that I haven't had the time to update it is that our Cloud business has been going bananas and it's ironic that I should be blogging about the "future" of Cloud yet it is so busy at the moment. A very good sign I hope..
For those of you who follow Quantix, you will know that circa 3 years ago we started to build an cloud infrastructure across 2 DCs in the UK. We are getting a lot of pressure to expand into the US, however, I have been pleasantly surprised how important a UK presence has been to customers. As many companies need data to reside in the UK, 2 local DCs are a must for disaster recovery.
We now have 50 plus customers running on the infrastructure and on the whole, most of these clients have moved major applications onto the platform. The main usage being database heavy e-commerce apps, Hosted Exchange 2010 & Business Continuity.
The combination of a scalable cost effective platform, with our managed service team overlay has found us in a great spot whereby customers want Quantix to take full responsibility for management up to a DB or App level.
I still think public clouds like Amazon are a great fit for companies wanting a DIY approach however, when you are trusting a business critical app to the cloud, you need the provider to take responsibility.
For those of you who follow Quantix, you will know that circa 3 years ago we started to build an cloud infrastructure across 2 DCs in the UK. We are getting a lot of pressure to expand into the US, however, I have been pleasantly surprised how important a UK presence has been to customers. As many companies need data to reside in the UK, 2 local DCs are a must for disaster recovery.
We now have 50 plus customers running on the infrastructure and on the whole, most of these clients have moved major applications onto the platform. The main usage being database heavy e-commerce apps, Hosted Exchange 2010 & Business Continuity.
The combination of a scalable cost effective platform, with our managed service team overlay has found us in a great spot whereby customers want Quantix to take full responsibility for management up to a DB or App level.
I still think public clouds like Amazon are a great fit for companies wanting a DIY approach however, when you are trusting a business critical app to the cloud, you need the provider to take responsibility.
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