Chris Kemp, the CEO of Nebula and co-founder of OpenStack, discussed the future of cloud technologies in the enterprise in Wednesday's first keynote. (Photo: Rich Miller).

The cloud computing action continued at the Cloud Connect conference on Wednesday and Thursday, as thousands of industry executives, vendors and end users gathered at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Focal points of the discussion included the challenges involved in enterprise implementation of cloud technology, and the role of data centers in supporting effective cloud applications. Check out More Scenes from Cloud Connect 2012 for the highlights of Wednesday’s sessions and exposition.

Private Edition Cloud

Rackspace and solution provider Redapt announced that the two companies have joined together to deliver Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition as a complete infrastructure and support solution. The solution is aimed at allowing companies that need the consumption model of cloud but the control of private hardware to scale their private cloud infrastructure in an open environment. Powered by OpenStack hardware, Redapt will deliver a fully configured solution that can plug-in to the customer’s data center of choice. Prior to delivery, Redapt will do integration, testing and configuration at Redapt MergeCenters in North America and Europe.

“Other companies and coalitions have solutions that lock in customers, but our complete infrastructure and support solution is open in every way possible making it easier for companies to grow and change their IT needs,” said Jim Curry, general manager of Rackspace Cloud Builders.  “The combination of Redapt and Rackspace enables a customer to have a fully packaged private cloud off the shelf and operationally managed/supported by OpenStack experts – anywhere they choose”

The solution is designed to give customers the benefit of public clouds, but on their terms, delivered anywhere and then operated, managed and supported by Rackspace.

SharePoint911 acquisition

On Thursday Rackspace announced its acquisition of SharePoint911, an industry leader in SharePoint consulting, training, and “JumpStart” services within SharePoint. The unification of both companies provides capabilities to deliver unparalleled SharePoint hosting solutions along with expert services to the enterprise market. Maineville Ohio based SharePoint911 is widely recognized in the Microsoft SharePoint community and its team includes six Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professional), and the authors of over ten SharePoint books.

“Rackspace’s acquisition of SharePoint911, a company dedicated to end-user SharePoint adoption, is a key strategic development, given that one of the primary barriers to broader SharePoint usage in businesses is the lack of comprehensive design, development, training, and end user support services to drive innovative SharePoint implementations,” said Melanie Posey, research vice president, hosting & managed network services at IDC. “We believe that Rackspace has uniquely positioned itself above its competitors by adding the thought leadership and expertise of SharePoint911. Going forward, Rackspace can help to further accelerate adoption of SharePoint, one of the fastest growing applications in the business productivity segment.”

Fusion-io selected by Webair.  Fusion-io (FIO) announced that web hosting and infrastructure services provider Webair has deployed Fusion ioMemory technology to overcome data constraints caused by traditional disk-based storage technologies for cloud environments. Webair has integrated ioMemory into its cloud hosting services to provide clients with I/O speeds in the cloud that could traditionally only be obtained with complex and expensive disk array scale out. New York based Webair has data centers worldwide and through deployments of ioMemory found significantly increased data transaction rates, which allowed it to decrease datacenter footprint while meeting customer demand for low-latency data performance. “One of the key factors in our decision was breaking through the speed barriers typically found in existing cloud environments,” said Sagi Brody, Chief Technical Officer, Webair. ”We have found that with Fusion-io, our cloud database servers are significantly outperforming traditional physical configurations. With Fusion ioMemory, we can now offer the benefits of the cloud to industries and applications that previously would have been challenging to support at peak performance in the cloud.”

Wyse and Microsoft power the classroom.  Wyse Technology announced  it’s working with Microsoft to market school IT labs and one-to-one computing solutions that allow a cost effective delivery of innovative IT enabled education. Solutions range from an entry level option that combines Wyse zero clients and Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2011, up to a scalable cloud PC solution with Wyse WSM software that provides schools with a centrally-managed, scalable one-to-one computing for students. These solutions are available through Wyse and Microsoft education channel partners to educational institutions worldwide.  “We’re extremely proud of how Wyse has worked with Microsoft to widen access to the benefits of digital classrooms for millions of students in places where school ICT was often unheard of,”  said Tarkan Maner, President & CEO at Wyse Technology.  ”This collaboration enables us and our partners to offer affordable solutions for educators who want to provide a fantastic online learning experience within tight budgets.”

LayeredTech guarantees compliance.  Layered Technologies announced that it is adding a service-level agreement (SLA) so that all Layered Tech compliance services, including support of Payment Card Industry-Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), are guaranteed to pass 100 percent of every audit or assessment sanctioned by the relevant industry or regulatory entity. To deliver the promise of 24/7 compliance Layered Tech proactively monitors the full system security of customers’ compliant system environments, employs rigorous change management controls, and has extensive experience in ensuring that customers meet the third-party audit requirements. Layered Tech utilizes a combination of over 10 advanced security tools, robust system log management, and rigorous ITIL-based processes to support the hundreds of compliance controls required by the payment card and healthcare markets. As part of its compliance services, Layered Tech handles 83 percent of the HIPAA and 100 percent of the PCI-DSS IT controls. “A huge differentiator for Layered Tech is that we leverage our security and compliance expertise to fully manage all of customers’ IT-related security and compliance requirements managed by Layered Tech, so they do not have to spend their time worrying about meeting the very complex industry standards like PCI or regulatory requirements like HIPAA,” said Jeff Reich, chief risk officer at Layered Tech.

CSC’s Trusted Cloud Services include three models that meet enterprise class requirements: off premises public and virtual private, on premises private and hybrid cloud. All cloud models share the same cloud fabric, the Vblock from the VCE Company, a standard rate card and service level agreements. All models are based on the pay-as-you-go pricing model and feature bronze, silver, gold and platinum support tiers.

“CoreSite provides industry-leading data center services that are validated by professional accreditations and exceed availability targets,” said Nick Wilkinson, president, Market and Product Strategy for CSC Managed Services Sector. “Its ability to quickly tailor solutions specific to our requirements has enabled us to create adaptive extensions to our data center portfolio and deliver data center environments capable of supporting the ever-changing, high-density demands of today’s computing equipment.”

“We’re pleased to be able to continue to serve as a scalable platform for CSC as it grows its data center footprint to support its successful product launches and new business acquisition,” said Tom Ray, CoreSite president and chief executive officer. “CSC’s selection of CoreSite for the CSC Cloud and its ongoing commitment to CoreSite represents the type of relationship we strive to develop with every CoreSite customer.”

Author and technology executive Geva Perry speaks to the audience at the Cloud Connect keynotes on Tuesday morning. (Photo: Rich Miller).

If you want to learn about a company’s adoption of cloud computing, don’t ask the CIO. He might be the last to know.

That’s why surveys of CIOs tend to show meaningfully lower cloud adoption than similar surveys of developers, according to Geva Perry, an industry veteran and author of Thinking Out Cloud. Perry was one of the keynoters this week at the Cloud Connect conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

“The way adoption of cloud computing has worked is that it happens from the bottom up,” said Perry. “With Amazon, it was a developer-driven adoption. Amazon understood this, and built its service so it was optimized for developers.”

A similar phenomenon was seen with Salesforce.com, as the early adopters were sales teams frustrated with enterprise offerings for customer relationship management (CRM), rather than IT executives.

“This pattern isn’t new,” said Perry. “We have seen this before in open source software. The developers are the ones making the decision, whether management knows it or not.”

The emergence of Amazon Web Services and instant provisioning of IT capacity with only a credit card has been a game changer for developers. It’s part of the larger “consumerization” of enterprise IT, as employees uses to innovative mobile devices and web applications grow frustrated with the software they use at work.

“Why does the software we use in the enterprise suck so much compared to the software you use at home?” Perry asked. “To the enterprise, my advice is this: don’t fight it. Find ways to make it work for your people.”

Bill Gillis, the Director of eHealth Technologies at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, speaks Tuesday at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, Calif. (Photo: Rich Miller).

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center didn’t set out to build a healthcare cloud. When the Boston hospital adopted electronic health records (EHR)in 2007, it needed to find a way to include its physicians in the effort. That was a substantial challenge, since this meant creating a system that could work for 1,500 doctors in 300 offices in eastern Massachusetts. And it was critical that they get it right.

“The challenge was how to get this system out of them in a way that was secure and reliable,” said Bill Gillis, Director of eHealth Technologies at Beth Israel Deaconess. “Adopting EHR means they won’t have paper charts. If they don’t have paper charts and the system doesn’t work, then they may not be able to see patients that day.”

Gillis shared his experience Tuesday in  one of the keynotes at Cloud Connect, which brought together 3,500 cloud technologists at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Gillis said that the new system needed to be flexible, since the hospital couldn’t be certain how many of the physicians would agree to convert to EHR and participate in the project.

“The solution was to build a cloud,” he sad. “We really wanted to find tools that would work. It wasn’t really until after we built it that people said ‘hey, you built a private cloud.’ For us, the idea to deploy this scalable product to our physician practices was really what we needed.”

Getting Security Right

There were challenges. One of the biggest was security, given the paramount importance of patient privacy and the substantial regulatory requirements for hospitals. Gillis said working with VMware and third-party security specialists on vulnerabiity assessments and penetration testing was  key to building confidence that the system would be secure. “a big part of the security piece was testing,” he said.

The initial system was built as a private cloud, with the equipment and applications hosted and maintained in the Beth Israel Deaconess data center. But Gillis says his long-term hope is to move further into the cloud.

“We’re hosting all this infrastructure,” he said. “All I want to do is host the application. We really are looking towards going to a public/private cloud. Our long-term goal is to just provide a URL to our physicians.”

The Google booth featured plush toys in the image of Google App Engine logo. (Photo: Rich Miller).

The Cloud Connect conference this week in Santa Clara, Calif. brought together an estimated 3,500 cloud technologists for four days of seminars, presentations and panels that examined virtually all aspects of cloud computing. Leading experts in the field were on hand to discuss the latest cloud computing innovations and best practices. Check out highlights of Tuesday’s activity in our photo feature, Scenes from Cloud Connect 2012.

The move by Rackspace reflects the importance of electricity in building massive cloud computing platforms. The power-intensive nature of data centers has already altered the way leases are priced (see Data Center Leasing: It’s All About the Megawatts), which is a focus for providers like Rackspace that lease, rather than build, their data center space.

“As a result of our strategy to continue leasing data centers, beginning in the first quarter of 2012, we will begin disclosing our Megawatts under contract, Megawatts available for use and Megawatts utilized as of period end,” Rackspace said in its earnings announcement. “We will no longer provide technical square footage as we believe that power is a better metric for evaluating our capacity.”

The disclosure is consistent wiih Rackspace’s policy of publishing detailed data to provide investors with insight into the profitability of its operations – a practice not shared by Amazon, which publishes little information about its huge cloud infrastructure. Many of the largest data center operators don’t disclose their power usage, a practice which has prompted criticism from the environmental group Greenpeace, which last year called on major cloud builders to disclose more information about the energy used to support their operations.

Rackspace has plenty of headroom for growth, as it has 30.7 megawatts of power available, leaving a current cushion of 8.8 megawatts of power. The company has 48.2 megawatts of power under contract, including future expansion phases in its data centers in Chicago and Virginia.

In 2011, Rackspace’s power usage grew by 4.1 megawatts, reflecting the additional servers and data center capacity as it added more than 42,000 customers to its managed hosting and cloud computing operations.

The data from Rackspace illustrates how the heightened focus on efficiency by the data center industry’s largest players is translating into bottom-line gains. At the end of 2011, Rackspace had revenue of $54.06 million for every megawatt of power used, up from $52.03 million a year earlier – an improvement of about 4 percent.

As more industries shift key business processes onto the Internet, the volume of power used by data centers has risen sharply. But it can be argued that this change is shifting large chunks of Americans’ power usage from inefficient environments into energy-optimized facilities operated by companies with a powerful incentive to slash their power bills.

That kind of growth can strain a startup’s infrastructure, and Tumblr has had its share of outages, to the point where one of its users created a mascot for the site’s downtime error screens.

“Tumblr started as a fairly typical large LAMP application,” High Scalability writes. “The direction they are moving in now is towards a distributed services model built around Scala, HBase, Redis, Kafka, Finagle,  and an intriguing cell based architecture for powering their Dashboard. Effort is now going into fixing short term problems in their PHP application, pulling things out, and doing it right using services.”

An interesting data point: Tumblr currently runs its entire operation out of a single colocation facility. Read more at High Scalability.

“Cloudscaling OCS is our answer to customers who are telling us that they want public and private cloud infrastructure that’s specifically designed to support the cloud-ready applications they’re building,” said Michael Grant, CEO of Cloudscaling. “They want the freedom that comes with an open infrastructure architecture, and that’s what Cloudscaling OCS delivers.

“Enterprise clouds and open clouds are on completely different tracks, servicing completely different needs,” writes Randy Bias, Cloudscaling’s founder and CTO, in a blog post describing the new focus. “Businesses need not only an enterprise cloud strategy, but an open cloud strategy. While there’s going to be a big market for enterprise clouds into the foreseeable future, our product strategy anticipates an accelerating adoption curve for infrastructure that’s flexible, scalable and economical: open cloud infrastructure.

Cloudscaling also announced that it is teaming with  Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP) to provided a package of infrastructure and consulting on cloud implementation and migration.

The Cloudscaling team includes veterans who have designed and deployed large-scale clouds for industry pioneers such as AWS, GoGrid, RightScale and eBay. Based in Boston, Cloud Technology Partners provides strategic consulting on application implementation and migration of business processes, applications and customer data to private, public or hybrid clouds.

The companies’ projects will feature a combination of cloudTP’s assessment, architecture, integration, migration and program management offerings in conjunction with Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System (OCS), which is based on the OpenStack cloud project.

“The partnership with Cloudscaling is a meeting of the minds,” said Chris Greendale, Founder and CEO, cloudTP. “The Cloudscaling Open Cloud System delivers on how we think OpenStack clouds should be deployed for production environments. By combining Cloudscaling’s products and services, together with cloudTP’s assessment, architecture, integration, migration and program management offerings, clients gain access to highly flexible, scalable and cost effective solutions that support a new generation of workloads.”

“The cloud production and application migration capabilities cloudTP brings to the table help us deliver a complete solution,” said Bias.