Ladies and gentlemen please be sure your tray tables and seat backs are in their upright and locked positions…we are going for a ride in the Skytap Cloud. It occurred to me today on a flight from Seattle to San Francisco to attend and exhibit at VMworld 2010, that we live in one of the most interesting times in human history. In the last twenty years we have seen the birth of the World Wide Web in 1989, to the founding of Yahoo and Google in 1994 and 1998 respectively, to MySpace in 2003, Facebook and Twitter in 2006, and the advent of the iPhone in 2007. Now we are living the age of the ever nebulous “Cloud”, which many people believe will be the source of technological innovation for the next decade. There is no question from a technology perspective we are living in one of the most if not the most fascinating times in human history.

To further illustrate my point I decided to use Alaska Airlines’s inflight wifi to launch Skytap Cloud as I sailed through the air on a Boeing 737 at 35,000 feet somewhere over the state of Oregon. In a matter of seconds through my web browser I was able to login to Skytap Cloud, launch and spin up 6 virtual machines in less than 30 seconds from my laptop.

To take my experiment further and make my point about how amazingly cool technology and specifically Skytap is, I suspended and relaunched the same configuration in Skytap Cloud from my iPhone. Now granted, an iPhone (or any mobile device) is hardly the most efficient way to configure, launch and administer a virtual datacenter. However, it can be done and quite quickly for that matter.

We now more than ever have the freedom and ability to create tremendous computing power from anywhere in the world within mere seconds. Assuming I was a training manager, I could have configured a robust training environment on a Sunday afternoon from an airplane, launched a training session from row 14 seat A and administered a training course with students in San Francisco, Sao Palo, Sienna, Singapore, or anywhere in the world. Likewise as a developer manager I could have just as easily created a development environment to test or migrate enterprise applications in the Skytap Cloud literally among the clouds. Or as an IT manager,  I could automate the provisioning, monitoring, resource management, user management and import/export of VM images.  I could have easily implemented my company’s IT policies and control services to ensure security, granular role based access control, audit usage, create reports, assign and track quota and maintain corporate compliance. This is powerful and amazing stuff.

When Google Enterprise Product Manager Rishi Chandra said at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference earlier this summer that “The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud”, there is no question Mr. Chandra was right and no denying that the next 20 years will be more amazing than the last.

- Nate Odell

- Nate Odell

However, from our experience talking with companies every day, we see enterprises are hot on the idea of private clouds, but not necessarily the reality. Specifically, they love the idea of:
(1) Self-service access for users
(2) Automation of manual processes to reduce operations overhead
(3) Ability to scale resources as needed and balance load between different business priorities
(4) Security and maintaining existing IT policies.

Usually, when it comes to actually implementing a private cloud, IT organizations realize:
(1) Building a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure is a major undertaking
(2) Ensuring performance, especially around managing storage, is very hard
(3) There are dramatic up-front capital costs for both hardware and management software
(4) There is no way to easily scale a private cloud on demand, resulting in the need for scheduling software or idle excess capacity

So can you ‘have your cake and eat it too’ with a private cloud (that is get all the benefits, without the risks and administration headaches)? Well, actually you can, it’s called a ‘virtual private cloud’.

Most IT professionals understand that an external cloud offers most of the benefits of a private cloud, but have concerns around security and ensuring IT policies are maintained. Virtual private networking now enables an organization to create their own private cloud using an external cloud service and utilize a secure IPsec tunnel to make this available on their corporate network.

IT administrators can then control policies, such as the allowable subnets a machine in their ‘virtual private cloud’ can utilize and common security controls (such as single-sign on and password policies).

Most organizations want to use private clouds for dynamic workloads, such as application development and test, IT sandboxes, and prototyping, so concerns over data security are typically not an issue (especially as best practice dictates these workloads should not be using production data).

The benefits of the ‘virtual private cloud’ model can be significant:
(1) The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a virtual private cloud is typically 60% lower than an internal implementation
(2) An IT organization can deploy a virtual private cloud in days vs. months for an internal effort
(3) A virtual private cloud can be scaled up or down at will according to business demand – something not easily attainable with an internal private cloud.

We have many customers that have proven out the virtual private cloud model. One customer, a major enterprise company, deployed their Skytap virtual private cloud within a week and now uses it for SAP release testing. Another customer, Bakbone, has been using Skytap as a VPC solution since last year. They’ve seen substantial cost savings and have scaled their Skytap cloud as demand has increased.

We’re strong advocates of the virtual private cloud model and believe it’s a lower risk and more cost effective approach than building an internal private cloud. It’s usually far better to try adopting a virtual private cloud first before making a large investment (that may fail). So, if you’re planning a private cloud strategy, feel free to contact one of our cloud specialists and we’ll get you started with a Skytap virtual private cloud so you can evaluate the benefits yourself.

Skytap is used for dynamic workloads such as application development and test, IT prototyping, virtual training, ERP migration, IT team collaboration and maps to three of the top scenarios above. If you’re mapping out your cloud adoption strategy, feel free to contact one of our cloud specialists and hopefully we can help.

For full details of the announcement, click here.

Read the full release here.

Surgient’s hosting business was built around a single-tenant, traditional hosting model. Given the huge industry momentum towards cloud computing, it indicates this type of hosting may not be as profitable (or appealing to customers) as it once was, especially for highly dynamic environments. Building hosted infrastructure for a specific customer requires a large capex hardware purchase, managed services, and a term contract for at least a year. Given there will still be issues around underutilization of a single customer’s hosted environment and lack of burst capacity for peak demand, it’s not surprising Surgient is looking to exit this business.

A multi-tenant cloud service, such as Skytap Virtual Lab, offers a number of advantages to customers over Surgient’s hosting business model. It offers:

- On-demand infrastructure

- Utility billing

- Month-to-month contracts

- SaaS delivery of virtual lab management application

- Pre-populated virtual machine library

- API for managing cloud infrastructure

- Global access from any browser

It also means we can keep our costs down to make virtual lab automation broadly available to all customers (not just the Fortune 500). Given the industry traction around cloud computing, it’s likely that many customers who want to transition from their current existing hosted lab environment or outsource their in-house lab will be looking for solutions such as Skytap in the future.

-Ian