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Category Archives: Public Cloud

Five Key Steps Toward Innovation

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In my last blog post, I talked about shifting from infrastructure to innovation. Innovation has always been a key goal of IT, but the pathway to achieving it has never been easy. The cloud has made it easier, but you need a solid foundation on which to build innovation.

Here are five key steps toward building that pathway, best handled in sequence.

Focus on What’s Important. This goes back to the age-old idea of alignment; that is, how can IT best serve the business? Let’s assume you and your business colleagues have worked out the portfolio of services you need to deliver to help the business meet its objectives (of course, that’s a whole separate discussion in itself). The next question is, how should you deliver them? Is it with internal resources or through a third-party service provider? Most CIOs believe that their IT department can handle anything the business can throw at them. But even if it can, should it? Leave ego out of the equation. You should reserve the skills of your IT team for the most mission-critical needs, and outsource or co-source what’s less important.

Rely on Standardization. Standardization is king. Flexibility and choice are nice, but following the 80/20 rule will reduce costs while still delivering sufficient capability for the needs of the great majority of your business partners. Standardize and enable self-service for 80% of the common requests/requirements. Outsource them to the cloud if it makes sense (and not just financially – compliance and security are vital as well). Then leverage your team resources in shared services or infrastructure teams to do the heavy automation and lifting for the custom 20% of projects.

Calculate Your Baseline. To make informed sourcing decisions you have to develop a sound formula for calculating your service costs. Educated guesses and gut feel no longer cut it. You can achieve this through IT financial management tools that automate the capture of your costs (no more spreadsheets!) and allocate them to specific services. Next, compare your baseline to the competition – benchmarking shows how you stack up against your peers and cloud service providers (and how you’re improving over time).  These capabilities are all about confidently making the right sourcing and investment decisions for IT and the business.

It’s All About the Data. No matter where your information lives – on-premise or in the cloud – there’s got to be an easy way to send it back and forth. If you don’t make it easy, you’ll be creating your own bottlenecks. And make sure you develop a cast-iron governance strategy. Just because you don’t control the data in-house doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for it. The flexibility of the cloud bestows great power, and with great power comes great responsibility.

Strive for Visibility and Transparency. I talk to many CIOs who have a definitive mandate: reduce your budget either by real dollars or percentage costs. To do this you need transparency. Think about how you can create a “bill of IT” that clearly states not just what your services cost but who is consuming them. Leverage metering and reporting capabilities to empower a fact-based discussion with your business stakeholders, with showback or even chargeback. This will help you and your business counterparts make better decisions and drive down costs. Use transparency to prove your efficiency – remember, you must be able to show the payoff.

Here’s my recommendation: establish a small, greenfield private cloud deployment for a key line of business and expand from there. Track everything, from costs to ultimate benefits. Show how your investment paid off – that is, how your foundation for innovation enables you to invest limited funds wisely and generate the projected payoff.

Demonstrate that you’ve mastered your costs, targeted business problems, and delivered business value. You’ll have not only created the pathway to innovation, but ratcheted up your reputation within the company.

VMware Roars Into OpenStack Summit

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As we head out to Portland for the latest installment of the OpenStack Summit, we have an exciting agenda of speaking sessions and demos, and will be showcasing our latest virtualization wares on the show floor.  For a schedule of all the VMware sessions, we’ve created a show planner for you here. Here’s a snapshot of what you can expect (and experience) at the show.

Keynote Session – “Virtual Networking, A Vagabond’s Log”

On Wednesday, April 17 at 1:50 p.m., VMware’s Martin Casado takes you along on the network virtualization journey. While it’s still an evolving area, the industry now has a few years of virtual networking under its belt. In this talk, Martin will draw from his experience of hundreds of customers visited, hundreds of thousands of miles flown, and dozens of deployments to describe use cases, what works, what doesn’t, and where things seem to be going.

Panel: Network Virtualization and OpenStack Networking users

Want to hear from real world Quantum users at eBay and HP among others? This session is a panel discussion with OpenStack users that have hands-on experience deploying Quantum in production environments, backed by network virtualization technology.

VMware/Nicira NVP Deep Dive

On Monday, April 15 at 11:00 a.m., VMware will provide a “deep dive” into the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP). This session will provide a detailed overview of NVP, its components, how NVP operates, and how NVP integrates with OpenStack Quantum.

Case Study on Virtualizing Advanced Network & Security Services

On Wednesday, April 17 at 11:50am in room A106, VMware’s will present a technical session on the state of the art in advanced networking and security services implemented in software. The session will dive into the operational and technical elements of integrating services such as load balancers, firewalls and VPNs in your cloud via OpenStack Quantum’s REST APIs. The session will explore the benefits of using virtual appliances to deliver these services on top of standard x86 servers further decoupling network service feature delivery from hardware installs, procurement, and forklift upgrades.

OpenStack Networking Hands-on Lab

On Wednesday, April 17 at 3:40 p.m., users will get access to a live OpenStack + Quantum setup and be able to walk through key quantum deployment use cases, with members of the Quantum core development team available to provide guidance and answer questions.

We hope to see you there!

Shifting from Infrastructure to Innovation

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In my conversations with CIOs and other IT executives, I often hear how their teams are focused on maintaining a solid, reliable infrastructure. Their priorities are continuity of service, meeting SLAs, and minimizing disruptions and downtime. That’s an important, admirable goal, but as every IT exec now knows it’s not the whole picture.

If your teams spend too much energy on maintenance to ensure things don’t go wrong, they’re probably going to miss the opportunity for moving forward – and the threat of being left behind.  Consumerization of IT and the cloud have changed everything. As one customer exec pointed out to me recently, “Public cloud options can be the pink slip for IT infrastructure and operations teams.” Let’s face it, the monopoly is over.  Public cloud services, both consumer and business, have set a new standard for IT service delivery – ease of access, speed, reliability, etc. – as well as expectations on price, and IT teams are expected to match or better that standard if they want to stay in the game.

With so much available today on demand in the cloud there’s greater pressure than ever on IT to somehow reduce expense and shift Keeping the Lights On to new, innovative projects that drive business productivity and profit growth. You need to empower your teams to think and act differently, enabling them to be a world class IT organization.

Your teams can no longer focus on the infrastructure; they have to focus on taking advantage of the infrastructure to deliver new business value through innovation. In a world of options – private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, virtualized and physical infrastructures – the focus needs to be on making the right choice that’s right for your business.

The question is no longer “How do I make my infrastructure the best it can be?” but: “What’s the best infrastructure for what we want to do?”  IT has to decide the most logical place to provision and operate infrastructure and applications, based on criteria such as cost, risk, compliance, security, etc. That’s where the innovation comes in – what works best where? What capabilities can I start to deliver as services? What cloud services can I take advantage of to help drive what the business is trying to achieve?

That’s the shift we’re seeing in IT. Instead of providing a super reliable infrastructure to support your applications, you’ll be sourcing and providing services. As I mentioned in my previous post, IT will become a broker for services that the business needs, with a fact-based approach to identifying the best source of those services, internally or externally. Being a service broker will help your teams shift toward innovation, while matching or bettering the standard set by public cloud services.

Some of those services – the ones supporting your mission-critical activities – will stay on-premise for reasons of security and compliance. Some of them – the utility part – you’ll offload to a cloud infrastructure provider through IaaS. The rest of them – the part in the middle – you’ll offload to a SaaS or PaaS vendor (someday these may come back in house or they may stay in the cloud or even move back and forth depending on cost and changing business demand).

Being an innovative IT organization is about trying new things. About being daring. About making decisions faster, killing projects sooner, investing more in projects that warrant it. And about how the cloud – private, public, hybrid – can help you do that.

This is going to take a mind-shift on the part of your teams and a critical look at your processes. You’re going to have to be more customer-centric and deliver cost transparency to your stakeholders. You’re going to have to standardize the services you offer (think 80/20 rule) and enable self-service access to them. And you’re going to have to put the right governance processes in place – who gets access to what and where does your data live.

In my next post I’ll walk through how you can tackle these challenges.

Care to comment on this blog post? Share your thoughts your thoughts with us in comment section.  

vCloud Connector 2.0 now available

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I’m pleased to announce that vCloud Connector 2.0 is now available for download! vCloud Connector (vCC) allows you to view, copy and manage VMs across vSphere, vCloud Director and any of the 180+ vCloud Powered and vCloud Datacenter IaaS cloud providers listed at vcloud.vmware.com. For more details on what’s in 2.0, see my earlier blog post.

There are two versions: vCloud Connector Core is a free download for anyone with vSphere, and vCloud Connector Advanced is free for anyone with the vCloud Suite. Here’s a summary of the differences:

vCloud Connector 2.0 Features Core Advanced
View, copy, move VMs and templates Yes Yes
User interface improvements Yes Yes
Transfer speed and reliability improvements Yes Yes
Cross-cloud search for VM or template by name Yes Yes
Automatic catalog synchronization across clouds No Yes
Migrate VM while maintaining IP and MAC addresses No Yes

vCloud Connector supports vSphere and vCloud Director 4.x and 5.x. It’s available from the “Drivers And Tools” tab of vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Director 5.1, or by following this link: vmware.com/go/downloadvcc

[This blog post was edited on Jan 9 2013 to correct an error -- VXLAN is not required to migrate a VM while maintaining IP and MAC addresses.]

Try your own vCloud in minutes

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Today, we’re announcing that we’re introducing a new service that allows you to get your own vCloud IaaS service in minutes, called vCloud Service Evaluation. We heard from many customers that they came to vmware.com to learn more about vCloud services, but that it wasn’t easy to sign up with a credit card, kick the tires, and learn by doing. vCloud Service Evaluation will provide a quick, easy and low-cost way for you to learn about the advantages of a vCloud through hands-on testing and experimentation.

You can sign up for the beta here: http://vmware.com/go/vcloudbeta. We’ll be sending out invites to those who sign up the week of August 27th, and those of you who are going to VMworld in San Francisco can see and try the service at the cloud services pod within the VMware booth.

You’ll need a credit card to use the service. It makes the service self-funding, and we can keep things simple, avoiding complex “service quotas” and other artificial restrictions – and also offer Windows VMs. We learned that customers have widely differing requirements for tests and proofs of concept. So, instead of annoying restrictions, you pay a small amount for what you use – a 1Gb Linux VM with one vCPU is $0.04/hour – and you are free to run the VMs you need until you are done. Once you have entered your card details, you’ll get your credentials within 15 minutes. If we need to verify anything, you’ll get a call.

To keep costs down, we commissioned a VMware vCloud service provider to build and operate the service on our behalf. We’re giving you a vanilla example of how a vCloud Powered service – delivered by a VMware vCloud service provider – would work. It’s worth pointing out that vCloud service providers offer significantly more in terms of cloud functionality. vCloud Service Evaluation has all the basics like a catalog of useful VM templates, virtual networking, persistent storage, external IP addresses, firewalls, load balancers, the vCloud API etc., but you’ll get a lot more in a production vCloud service.

To find that production vCloud service, head to vcloud.vmware.com: the gateway to the world’s largest network of certified compatible public cloud services, including more than 145 vClouds in 28 countries.

To get you started quickly, vCloud Service Evaluation offers a variety of pre-built content templates (at no charge) including WordPress, Joomla!, Sugar CRM, LAMP stack, Windows Server and a mix of web and application stacks and OSes. You can also Bring Your Own VM (BYOVM). That’s right, you can BYOVM and put it into your own private catalog for deployment. You can do that either by uploading it directly into vCloud Director, or you can run the vCloud Connector VMs into your account (they’re in the public catalog) and use that to transfer your VMs from vSphere or any other vCloud.

Here’s what the main console looks like:

Vc-se-console

The service evaluation also allows you to run the VMware vCloud Director® interface.

Vcd-console

We also learned that while we had some great information on vmware.com, but that it was hard to find stuff relevant to vCloud – and it wasn’t clear where to ask questions. So we put all the “how to” guides in one place, added some new ones, and also provided a Community site (message boards) where you can ask questions and get answers from experts at VMware and our partners.

How-to

Community

Finally, email, chat and telephone support is available Monday through Friday for billing enquiries and to report any technical problems. “How do I…?” questions are best asked (and answered) on the Communities site.

We hope you find vCloud Service Evaluation a simple, low-cost way to learn about VMware vCloud, and look forward to getting your feedback on the service.

Delivering Business Innovation with Application Management A presentation at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference

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A few weeks ago at the O’Reilly Velocity conference, Komal Mangtani, who heads up engineering for our Application Management business, and I co-presented VMware’s point-of-view on how applications need to be managed in the cloud era and how you can leverage the cloud to drive business agility and operational efficiency for your IT organization. Our presentation can be viewed here.

Velocity attracts many cutting edge, “New Age” companies as well as big, established players. Attendees are mainly system administrators but there’s also a large contingent of developers and operation teams.

Komal and I kicked off our presentation by walking through a number of examples of how business and IT innovation have been accelerating over the past few decades. We made the following case to the audience:  not only is the speed of innovation accelerating, but it’s fundamentally changing the way applications need to be built, deployed and managed.

As we analyzed these examples, it was clear to everyone that software is the key element driving innovation today. Marc Andreessen made this very point last year when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that every company is a software company. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in – Manufacturing, Telecom, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals – what you’re doing is powered by software.

Just a few short years ago, IT was a business enabler; today, IT is the business. While most business and IT executives recognize this truism, many of them are unsatisfied with their innovation performance. The key reason is that the innovation delivery chain suffers from a split personality disorder:  developers want to innovate with abandon, while operations teams want a very stable environment with tight control. For ages developers have been seeking ways to improve their software development lifecycle, moving from waterfall to agile and scrum methodologies in order to get their latest and greatest code rolled into production as quickly as possible. Operations teams, however, have put in strict rules to slow down that process in order to maintain control and avoid outages. With these two forces pulling in opposite directions, innovation can’t thrive and IT developers and operations teams – and, more importantly, the business – suffer.

One of the latest trends that is closely tied to rapid innovation and execution is the adoption of Platform as a Service (PaaS). Admittedly, PaaS is an over-hyped concept, but in general PaaS does indeed simplify the development process and enable ongoing innovation. However, it’s still a maturing approach and many solutions in the market lack significant enterprise features while threatening to create vendor lock-in.  In fact, one of the core distinctions VMware’s “Cloud Foundry” has delivered is openness with respect to where the application can get deployed, in recognition to the lock-in challenge.

In our talk, Komal and I differentiated between various types of PaaS. Although we use the word PaaS very commonly now, the industry has recognized that there is more than one PaaS. There is aPaaS  (Application PaaS)– where solutions like Google AppEngine, force.com, Intuit serve as examples and there is iPaas (Integration PaaS) –  examples include IBM CastIron and Informatica Cloud Services.

Some PaaS solutions are built exclusively to users for a specific SaaS application like NetSuite BOS while others are independent like LongJump or Relational Networks. And so, we highlighted that when talking / exploring PaaS, make sure you understand the full context and extensibility of each of these offerings.

The reality, however, is that it’s still early days for PaaS adoption and most business applications do not, and will not run on PaaS in the near future. The industry generally agrees that PaaS will be the application platform of the cloud era and a very different developer experience, one where they can focus on core development and not environmental details. Hence, the driver for PaaS, the ability to deliver applications faster to market, needs to be balanced and tackled per project as it is still not a one size fits all.

The $64,000 Question (for those of you who remember that iconic game show) is, what is? The answer lies in understanding the nature of the challenge.

In order to enable innovation today and to make an impact on your business, you need to be able to set up new environments quickly. You need to be able to service millions of users around the clock. You need to be able to develop new capabilities in an agile manner and apply these changes on an ongoing basis. The evolution of IaaS has made getting infrastructure up and running in minutes a reality. At the same time, agile development has had a huge impact on making newly developed software available much more quickly. The challenge today is to get that newly developed software up and running on the instantly available infrastructure in a controlled manner while maintaining agreed service levels.

In my next post, I’ll walk you through how the VMware Application Management Suite addresses this challenge, and how you can deliver innovation for your business by bridging your development and operations teams to achieve agile operations.

VMware vFabric Application Director is Now Available to Simplify and Automate Releasing Applications to the Cloud

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At VMworld Copenhagen last October, we unveiled three new suites to help customers transform how they manage infrastructure, applications and the business of IT in virtual and cloud environments.  Our vFabric Application Management Suite is comprised of two new solutions that streamline the processes of packaging, deploying, monitoring and optimizing applications on hybrid cloud infrastructures. Last November, we announced the general availability of the first of these two solutions – vFabric Application Performance Manager Today, I’m pleased to report the general availability of the second – vFabric Application Director. 

vFabric Application Director is the result of more than two years of intense development to deliver a completely new approach to provisioning and managing applications. As IT organizations accelerate their virtualization adoption and form their cloud strategies, there is an emerging opportunity to revolutionize how applications are being built, deployed and managed to better serve business needs. Together with vFabric Application Performance Manager, vFabric Application Director provides a complete solution for the challenge of meeting the business’s growing appetite for new applications and upgrades to existing applications.

There are a lot of solutions in the marketplace attempting to address the challenge of simplifying and accelerating the build and release of applications onto cloud infrastructure. Most do so with a bottom-up, script- (or orchestration-) heavy approach that grew out of the traditional world of physical IT:  provision a server, layer an OS on top, stick some software on top of that and then move on to the next server. This approach is too rigid and inflexible to take advantage of the choices cloud provides: where to run your application (private, public, hybrid cloud), what scale to run it at, and what middleware or web services you wish to leverage.

So if the traditional approach doesn’t work, what’s the answer? 

Purpose-built for the cloud era, vFabric Application Director empowers IT organizations that subscribe to the cloud journey, enabling them to adopt an efficient, agile approach to the deployment process. Leveraging the concept of an application blueprint as well as templated application components, vFabric Application Director allows you to “declare” the application and service structure while assuming that the underlying cloud infrastructure will deliver on the compute, network and storage as required.

Out of the box optimized for the vFabric product family, vFabric Application Director significantly automates and streamlines your build and release efforts. We found some of our beta customers and early adopters were able to cut setup time from more than four days to just 2.5 hours for a typical multi-tier application. And since you only have to create an application blueprint once, you avoid the need for multiple, tedious setups across development, test, staging and production.

Once built (it takes just minutes using drag and drop capabilities) these blueprints can be deployed on any VMware vSphere-based private or public cloud, delivering on the cloud promise of choice. This approach frees developers and application administrators from dealing with infrastructure, OS and middleware configuration issues, allowing them to focus on delivering business value with their applications.

ApplicationBluePrint

However, managing an application doesn’t end with its deployment. Just as critical is the operations team’s ability to monitor it in production. vFabric Application Director enables you to set up monitoring of your application as part of the deployment process. And that’s where our other solution, vFabric Application Performance Manager, kicks in.

As with any great product, vFabric Application Director wouldn’t have been possible without a great team, and I’d like to thank and congratulate all those involved in its development. We’ve learned a lot over the past 24 months, not just about the product itself, but also about how to develop, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. And we’re applying that insight to shape the next generation of our application management solutions.

To find out more about vFabric Application Director and download a trial copy today, please visit: http://www.vmware.com/products/application-platform/vfabric-appdirector/overview.html

vCloud Integration Manager and more clouds in more countries

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Today, VMware is announcing new software designed specifically for our service provider partners called vCloud Integration Manager. We developed Integration Manager to provide a simple and standardized way for service providers to provision vCloud Director, vShield and vSphere in order to more quickly get new customers up and running on a cloud service. Until now, service providers either had to do these tasks manually, or redirect valuable software development resources to writing undifferentiated "glue code" and/or automation scripts.

Integration Manager reduces operational costs by automatically stepping through the configuration process for vCloud Director to set up Virtual Data Centers, virtual networks, administrator accounts and other cloud resources that the customer has ordered. By completing this in a matter of minutes, it decreases time to revenue (the time between receiving an order for service and fulfilling it, and therefore being able to bill for service).

Integration Manager includes a full set of REST APIs and a web GUI. The GUI provides an administrator interface to define the service building blocks that make up a full cloud service for a customer. Administrators can also configure reseller accounts, and provision and de-provision customers.

The web GUI invokes the Integration Manager API to accomplish these tasks. In production at service providers, Integration Manager will mostly be driven through API calls from the service provider’s customer portal or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. These are typically the “systems of record” for customer data and product orders, with Integration Manager doing the detailed provisioning work.

Vcim

Integration Manager is also important for VMware's reseller partners, many of whom are looking to add cloud services to their portfolios in order to be able to sell complete hybrid clouds (combinations of public and private clouds).  To make it simple for resellers to package, price and sell vCloud Powered or vCloud Datacenter services, Integration Manager includes the notion of a cloud reseller. This capability allows a service provider to securely delegate provisioning to resellers. In turn, the resellers can directly and immediately provision and de-provision their own customers (via the API or web GUI), without having to open tickets, send emails or make phone calls.

We developed Integration Manager in response to demand from our growing vCloud service provider ecosystem.  There are now 94 clouds in 19 countries world-wide that qualify for the vCloud Datacenter or vCloud Powered status. vCloud Datacenter is a globally consistent IaaS service that's audited and certified by VMware; vCloud Powered providers offer a basic level of workload and data compatibility by using vCloud Director, the vCloud API and the OVF file format.

VMware's service provider business grew more than 200% in 2011, a testament to the momentum and rapid growth those service providers are seeing in their VMware-based clouds. With vCloud Integration Manager, we hope to further accelerate their growth and profitability by reducing operational costs and opening up new routes to market.

 

 

 

VMware vCenter Operations Suite 5.0 is Now Available…and Can Accelerate Your Private Cloud & Virtualization of Business Critical Apps

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The more we talk to our customers the more we hear that they are focused on two major tasks in 2012. The first is to extend their virtualization footprint by virtualizing more of their business critical applications (e.g., Exchange, CRM, etc.). The second is to accelerate their implementation of a private cloud, and extend it from their dev/test environments into production. For the success of both these initiatives, they recognize that their ability to ensure the performance and health of their virtual infrastructure is critical.

That’s why we’re very pleased to announce the general availability of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. This release delivers on the vision of a new approach to virtual and cloud infrastructure management announced at VMworld Copenhagen last October. On main stage we publicly rolled out the largest IT Management launch in our company’s history announcing three new Management Suites:  VMware  vCenter Operations Management Suite, VMware vFabric Application Management Suite, and VMware IT Business Management Suite. These solutions allow our customers to remove the complexity of managing IT not just at the infrastructure layer, where VMware has traditionally focused, but across all layers of IT. Together, the three management suites deliver on our mission to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era and achieve the vision of IT as a Service.

As our customers virtualize their business critical applications and move to the cloud, the limitations of traditional management approaches are becoming increasingly apparent, as is the need for a new approach.  At VMware, we’re re-thinking infrastructure management. Our approach recognizes that key operations management disciplines—performance, capacity and configuration management—have become inseparable in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. The ability to ensure infrastructure performance and health is impacted by fluidly changing configurations and the sharing of capacity from a myriad of sources. The answer to this challenge isn’t more monitoring – most enterprises have more than enough monitoring solutions. The answer is more intelligence in the form of analytics to make sense of the millions of performance, capacity and configuration metrics these systems generate.

The vCenter Operations Management Suite is built around VMware’s conviction that today’s complex and highly dynamic infrastructures demand an integrated, converged approach to performance, capacity and configuration management. Rather than generating more monitoring data, it collects and analyzes performance data from across the entire IT stack. Its patented analytics correlate abnormalities to generate actionable intelligence that identifies the root cause of building performance problems[m2] .

1_dashboard_3The vCenter Operations Management Suite builds on many of the unique capabilities introduced with the launch of vCenter Operations 1.0 last year, while delivering a number of new innovations. Chief among these is a new Operations Management dashboard that provides an at-a-glance view of the overall status of your virtual and cloud environments with three “supermetrics”:  health (current behavior and problems); risk (potential for future problems); and efficiency (how well your resources are being utilized).  If there’s a problem, our new smart alerts will give you a pro-active warning, so you can drill all the way down to the individual VM or underlying infrastructure if necessary to resolve it before your end users are impacted.

The vCenter Operations Management Suite is ultimately about providing you with greater visibility to better manage your infrastructure and the applications that run on it.  For example, we’ve significantly extended the integration of configuration and capacity management. You can now see change events that occur inside your VMs, not just at the host level. And you can model your capacity to see its impact on future performance. With this greater visibility you can better maintain compliance and eliminate sprawl and configuration drift, while increasing your resource utilization efficiency. Today’s release also includes a new application discovery and dependency capability that provides application-awareness for users of vCenter Operations Management Suite to help with impact analysis, disaster recovery planning and datacenter and application migration projects.

If you, like so many of our other customers, are thinking about virtualizing one or more of your most critical business applications, or if you’re ready to make the move to the cloud, I encourage you to learn more about the vCenter Operations Management Suite.  A great place to start is today’s blog posting by Martin Klaus, Senior Product Marketing Manager for vCenter Operations, which provides a more detailed overview of the Suite’s new features and capabilities.

A Cloud For Europe: Colt Expands vCloud Datacenter Service

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Yesterday at VMworld in Copenhagen, Colt announced further expansion of its vCloud Datacenter Services into four new European countries – France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. But doesn’t the cloud mean you don’t care where your computing is done, so long as it’s secure and cost effective? Why does it matter that there’s now a local vCloud Datacenter Service in all these countries?

All vCloud Datacenter Services offer a globally-consistent infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) service definition that is audited and certified by VMware. The goal is to allow VMware customers to deploy to the cloud in any geography with no changes to the application. IaaS is a highly competitive market and each service provider delivers additional value around that core IaaS offering. Colt’s announcement is good example of their differentiation, and also underlines the importance of intimate local market knowledge for cloud.

At the core of this expansion is that the three most important issues in cloud computing for European organizations are location, location and location. Data privacy and security legislation varies significantly from country to country, which means that knowing where your data is located and who has jurisdiction and access are vital to a cloud for Europe. If you’re an organization operating in Switzerland and have Swiss customer data, you have to comply with that country’s strict information privacy and data retention laws. Putting your data in (say) Ireland doesn’t cut it.

European organizations are also leery of a variety of US laws and its law enforcement approaches, notably the Patriot Act and the FBI’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs) to enforce it. NSLs allow the FBI to order any service provider in its jurisdiction to hand over electronic communications or data without review or demonstration of probable cause, and to retain that data indefinitely. The FBI can also simultaneously gag the recipient, who cannot disclose that the request has been made. The American Civil Liberties Union estimated that more than 40,000 NSLs are issued each year. As a result, there’s a growing market for cloud service providers that are not subject to US jurisdiction.

The net? Working with a cloud service provider like Colt that stays on top of the shifting sands of EU and individual country regulations, and who offers very specific data locality and security in its cloud services is an important differentiator. Colt is able to make the decision simple – with its vCloud Datacenter Service you can co-locate your computing with your data inside country boundaries. Need to comply with Swiss privacy regulations? Deploy your application and keep its data in Switzerland, with a back-up site in the same country.

Read more about Colt’s expansion here.