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

Can there be no end to this status quo?
Can developing, testing and shipping software be made fun again?
Can that be done for lesser cost and in far less time than before?

We asked Dr. Becky Hammons, a renowned quality expert these questions. Her simple answer is, “Yes! Use the cloud”. Having worked in the software industry for 30 years and having built many cool new products, Dr. Hammons is no stranger to this stressful cycle. But she has broken out of the status quo. She shared her experience on Aug 19 with 70 other industry peers.

When asked to describe the typical challenges her team faced, she identified a few key ones:

• Availability of client, server and network configurations for complex test scenarios
• Baseline test configuration growth over time, with limited capital budget for new servers
• Cycle time needed to configure test environments, including localized operating systems
• Troubleshooting defect scenarios with offshore testers
• Sharing test resources with remote development teams

Dr. Hammons wanted to eliminate these challenges for her team. She looked at Cloud computing as a solution.  She felt the cloud model offered several distinct benefits:

• Cloud resources enable fast deployment of new test configurations upon demand
• Usage is scalable to meet virtual machine and storage needs
• Local physical test network can be integrated with cloud network via VPN
• Able to expand client and server test load beyond capabilities of our physical equipment
• Large variety of client and server operating systems in cloud enable teams to run more concurrent tests without additional capital investment
• Reduce cycle time from hours to minutes with cloud resources
• Cloud offers 24×7 test environment globally
• Local testers can work in same configuration with offshore testers
• Reduces need to recreate issues locally
• Cloud environment provides central test bed with standardized configurations & easily accessible

After an extensive analysis of market players, Dr. Hammons decided to try Skytap to break down the status quo. According to Dr. Hammons, the results “far exceeded my expectations”.

• While the typical physical test configuration takes about half a day, with Skytap, she cut it down to about 30 minutes. Testers saved 2 days per 2 week sprint cycle.
• Before Skytap, her team was often very constrained to execute load testing in our lab. Set-up took about 2 days per test run. With Skytap, her team can run multiple load tests concurrently with hundreds of clients and dozens servers. Reduce set-up time to an hour per test run.
• She was able to overcome the capital expense constraints and the impact of budget cuts. With she achieved 50% in realized savings.

She summed it up the best towards the end.

“The only way to find out if the Skytap model is right for you, is to try it out for yourself”.

Having heard her success, the Skytap product team agreed on another thing. Shipping the next cool new release to market faster, better and cheaper is really sweet. But, having customers use it and transform their business is even sweeter. Taking Skytap for a test drive is real easy. Contact us and ask for a free trial. Don’t wait too long and let your old dev/test lab Grinch steal your development cycles (as well as your Christmas). We will get you going immediately.  We are confident you will say, in Dr. Suess’ words again, “Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”

- Sundar Raghavan

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.

For full details of the announcement, click here.

Read the full release here.

1. We’ve officially launched and rebranded the company, coming out of ’stealth’ as a cloud-based virtualization solution provider;
2. We’ve announced availability for our first product Skytap Virtual Lab; and
3. We’ve launched our new website so folks can learn about what we have been doing.

The last few weeks have been busy for us. Not only have we been briefing a number of analysts and press, but we have also ramped up our interaction with a broader set of customers and have seen our enthusiastic beta users transition into paying customers. As we all know, leads and prospects always ooh and ahh about great technology but the rubber doesn’t meet the road until they are actually willing to part with cash to pay for the solution. Given how many of our beta customers are finding real value in our solution, I can’t help but be excited about both our very cool technology and the opportunity to build a great cloud-based virtualization business.

There is a lot of hype around cloud computing and even the analysts are trying to figure out which way the wind will blow next. Here at Skytap we are initially focusing on delivering not only cloud-based compute power, but more importantly a powerful on-demand application for the application development and test community. We’ve found that our customers have a few key characteristics: (1) they are smart – we like smart customers; (2) they are early adopters of technology; (3) they constantly try to be more efficient and do more with less: (4) they get virtualization; (5) they need machines in many configurations for projects and other transient needs; (6) they constantly make trade-offs between application quality and what they can achieve with the resources they have. Given customer feedback so far, we feel there is a strong demand for a ‘Virtual Lab as a Service’ offering. Go ahead and check out some of our online demo material and read about how we help development and test teams ship better products faster. What we are doing is very unique and we don’t think you’ve seen anything quite like it before. We’d love your feedback to help us deliver a better product -you can reach me at sroza@skytap.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Let me know what you think!

Scott