IaaS vs. PaaS

Infrastructure as a service:
IaaS is the virtual delivery of computing resources in the form of hardware, networking, and storage services. It may also include the delivery of operating systems and virtualization technology to manage the resources. Rather than buying and installing the required resources in their own data center, companies rent these resources as needed. Infrastructure Discovery Automation

Usually IAAS is a cost effective mode of operation for organizations with a Hybrid environment with various IT resource challenges. For example during temporary projects some organizations may not have in house technical expertise to handle the upcoming projects, during such scenarios IAAS is a cost effective mode for operational continuance since IAAS services are provided on per use basis.

IAAS comprises of Key characteristics like Dynamic scaling, Agreed upon service levels, Renting, Licensing, Metering and Self-service. Both in Public and Private environments all these characteristics remain same.

SaaS
PaaS: Platform as a service

PaaS comes under the category of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a set of solutions to the consumer. Here the consumer can control the software deployments and configuration settings.

There are different types of PaaS Vendors depending upon the scalability and maintenance. However most of the vendors offer Application Hosting and deployment environment along with some integrated services.

Things to be taken care of while opting for PaaS:
1. Does it support multiple languages, frameworks and middle ware?
2. Is it extensible and flexible to better support developer needs?
3. Does it promote choice or lock-in?
4. Does it Auto scale?

What PaaS is not?
• Paas is not a cloud (as they say traditionally)
• PaaS is not an application.
We hope that this article was of use to you. Keep visiting our blog for more updates.

Private Cloud and SaaS: What Exactly Happens??

SAAS: How Organizations operate in software as a service business model.
Organizations which provide cloud services as service usually provide it as a service. (SaaS) application. Where the end users are provided with access to the software application and databases. The infrastructure and platforms that run the applications are managed by cloud providers. Organizations that run on SaaS believe that they can cut down on the Infrastructure complexities revolving around the costs and focus the shift on major projects with improved manageability and less maintenance. SaaS providers sometimes project their services as a “Pay on demand software” and services are charged usually on usage. Often they have a subscription fee. NOVA Based Cloud Automation

PRIVATE CLOUD: How is it useful?
These days most of the organizations are going the Private Cloud way. Wondering what exactly happens there??? Well here the use of private clouds has always been a bit of a controversial issue in the emerging world of cloud computing. We will try to give you a very simple understanding to break the jinx.

Common Myths about PRIVATE CLOUD: Revealed 
1. Private Cloud Is Not Always Going to Be Private
2. Private Cloud Is Not Only Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
3. Private Cloud Is Not Necessarily On-Premise
4. Private Cloud Is Not Just About Cost Reduction
5. Private Cloud Is Not Virtualization
References: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2157015

The wider availability of the OpenStack cloud platform has surely made a difference in the rise of private clouds. It’s helped plenty of companies build private clouds, including eBay, Intel and Yahoo. That trend could keep up, but so could the rise in the adoption of public clouds.
Lots of large companies in North America are expanding their data centers this year or next, and the desire to run internal private clouds is a major motivating factor, according to the results of a new survey of IT decision makers

A research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) sponsored by cisco revealed that most organizations wanted to opt for a private cloud in the following areas e-mail, CRM, VDI, custom applications, ERP, accounting, HR, telephony, and even older mainframe-based applications. Organizations believe that these areas can be incorporated in the cloud while the actual data bases exist in the corporate data centers. Thus Private cloud provides a mixture of Security and control.

Private cloud includes systems within a corporate data center that are able to perform some of the actions available in the public cloud. For e.g. software instances that run within a data center, such as the solutions from Eucalyptus, or versions of OpenStack and Cloud Stack are Private cloud. Sometimes versions of Private cloud can also exist in the Public cloud these are called as Virtual Private clouds – These have clear cut firewalls and back to back secured network connections to their enterprises. – E.g. Amazon’s VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

Hence Private clouds are internal systems.  Thus, unlike public clouds, organizations have to purchase, configure, and maintain the hardware and software. Sometimes Organizations may have to go to for Private clouds for some of their processes that may be the only best option available but one need to have a thorough check on how fast the organization can manage this change in terms of the technical expertise that they have in house.

 So the Option of choosing the Private cloud is largely business dependent and also in terms of value addition to the company it may not be same if the organization opted for a Public cloud.

We hope that this article was of use to you. Keep visiting our blog for more updates.

Smart Organizations - Smart Moves in the Cloud

In the increasing cloud data center space, corporations have realized the urge to invest and make themselves strong to cope up in the highly competitive data center Industry. In this Article we have identified some major giants and their strategic moves in entering the Cloud Space. NOVA based Cloud Automation

This week's article features Corporations like Microsoft, Accenture and Nuage Networks and their strategies in the cloud.

Cloud Data Center

Accenture:

Accenture plans to make a strategic move into the cloud in all forms public, private and hybrid.

 "Accenture will invest more than $400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015".

Accenture global senior managing director (cloud) Jack Sepple stated.

Accenture entered the cloud services with a Cloud Platform to help organizations integrate and manage cloud services across multiple vendors. Unlike other cloud service providers Accenture operates on a pay-per-use model, helping companies cut costs as they do not have to invest heavily on infrastructure. Well we heard of Pay per Click Ads.. PPU (Pay Per use) in the cloud?? Well Time has to prove how successful this approach is. Will this be as hit as PPC of Google??

The platform is already being used in more than 200 projects as per Accenture.

Nuage - Alcatel Lucent

Nuage Networks, an Alcatel-Lucent owned developer of software defined networking solutions, released an open software platform to automate networks in data center environments. It’s called Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) .This is based on Service Router Operating system software by Alcatel Lucent.

By using this platform (VSP) Nuage scales to support large datacenters with thousands of customers, each with thousands of users, making it suitable for public, private and hybrid cloud services. With this move we believe that Alcatel Lucent has launched itself to the highly competitive cloud.

Nuage's VSP solution works with OpenStack, CloudStack and VMware cloud environments and any data center network switches. This solution will enhance the network connectivity inside the data centers. Apart from this VSP provides data center to enterprise virtual private network (VPN) connectivity.

Well last but not the least the kingpin in the Industry - Microsoft.

Microsoft has well lot of things that need to be managed. Unlike other organizations working on project launches.. Microsoft has a cycle of launching new products or services on a regular basis. How to they maintain the service levels? How are they maintaining SLA's with their vendors? Be it small or Large. We believe that Microsoft's Intuition has been very impressive here in understanding the need for maintaining the largest cloud being a big player itself.

Site up, costs down approach:

Microsoft uses a very niche approach for putting their operational costs down. How do they do it. Well it’s quite simple. They add a new data center only when they see consumer demand. However since Microsoft has a well planned Human resource and technical talent to meet such kind of approach with its operational design? Practically for any other organization of not of size of Microsoft (Mid sized or SME'S) this approach might prove costly.

While software has taken a central role in helping maintain service availability and keeping cloud up and running, Accenture anticipates and prepares itself for issues that may occur. This preparation is a smart move by the company in maintaining the quality of services rendered.

Incident Management Model Approach by Microsoft:

Using an incident management model, staff in the Microsoft data centers can quickly identify issues and resolutions, while also driving engagement for higher severity issues. The model establishes clear account abilities and describes parameters for handling incidents and outages.

Microsoft's vision of maintaining its service delivery levels high with the above unique approaches and thereby cutting down their operational expenses is indeed a smart move.

And that's where Microsoft stands smart.

We hope this article was of help to you.

WHITE PAPER - Continuous Compliance of PCI DSS with NOVATM

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard

Every time you swipe your VISA, American Express, MasterCard or others, your personal, financial information ravels over thousands of network routers and switches to complete the transaction. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requires that certain control objectives be met whenever a Primary Account Number (PAN) is stored, processed or transmitted.

http://www.cavirin.com/images/resources/white%20paper%20PCI%20DSS_2013.pdf

SPACE MANAGEMENT IN CLOUD SERVERS – How crucial is it for your business?

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. ----- Charles Darwin

Remembering one of the legendary quotes of Charles Darwin about change seems like organizations especially in the Cloud are very keen on managing change whether be it with processes internal or related to customer centric approaches. Today’s business are much more customer/client oriented and they have been striving hard to adapt to innovating new ways of client services.

This week we have identified one firm that has formulated a solution for an issue that is very critical among organizations and their approach especially in the cloud.

Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider Profit Bricks recently formulated a solution to deal with huge data handled by their clients and enhance better performance of their service by providing larger virtual server instance sizes to assist customers and partners with maximizing their instances for various workloads.

When inquire about this feat and how this is profitable to clients -CEO Bob Rizika claims that    managing a data center requires teams of people and even more stakeholders. These stakeholders demand greater responsiveness and productivity, even as applications grow in complexity and system demands increase exponentially. This is why automation and integration is critical to maintain high service levels and a good user experience.  Profit Bricks believes that Performance and speeds get affected when running more instances in cloud and as a service provider it’s a key factor that needs to be addressed. As a result the company has come up with this unique idea. Currently their organization is the largest virtual server instance  provider (in terms of size) in cloud and this gives a competitive edge in terms of customer service organization.Infiniband-based core infrastructure (a switch-based, point-to-point interconnect architecture) made it possible for the company to offer such large virtual server sizes.  

This move in the cloud by Profit Bricks in terms of providing enhanced responsiveness to the increasing needs of clients marks a new beginning in improving customer service levels in the cloud.

We shall keep you updated on the latest happenings in Cloud. We believe that this blog was of help to you.

Nova Based Cloud Automation – Manage Change in Virtual Environment

Organizations And Their Innovations in Cloud

Is there a definition for innovation???? Well we might search for one, but in the Data Center space, it is so flexible that every organization has its own way of defining Innovation…when it comes to offering their services and developing their products.

Innovation is - Able to access your cloud servers without an Internet connection
Would you believe that …yes that’s the latest innovation according to Cloudsigma a pure-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider.

CloudSigma, an international, customer-centric, pure-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, on APRIL 1ST 2013 announced that its users will be able to benefit from fax access to their cloud servers. Adding to their existing SSH and VNC access, 'remote desktop via fax' provides users without internet connection the ability to view their cloud servers.


Customers can now remotely view their screens from anywhere in the world via fax.

Customers after booting a VM will have to provide a fax number and have their cloud server screen faxed to them every thirty seconds.

Beta testing has provided positive results and Version 2.0 of the service is already planned for launch in Q3 2013 as per the company’s PR.

Innovation means - Developing mobile apps without any programming.
How is that possible? Have a look below.. Cloud Automation

Interneer, Inc., is a leading provider of SaaS Business Process Management (BPM) software for process automation applications and smart mobile apps.

Their new software Interneer Intellect 7 Platform is an upgrade to its BPM software platform designed for automating business-critical processes such as those associated with cloud applications and mobile apps. This sounds really amazing but will these features really have any impact in creating the value to its customers? We will hope to see the reviews soon.

Intellect 7 is designed in view for mobility, connectivity, and agility. This platform enables the business user to develop mobile apps without any programming.
End business users can easily automate their tasks such as
1. Expense report submission
2. Proposal and contract creation
3. Vacation request submission

And all tasks can be performed using I pad also. Applications using Intellect 7 and Intellect MobileApps need zero programming from initial design to deployment.
End business Users using Intellect 7 can also perform the below.
• Create templates
• Collaborate on documents
• Integrate forms and databases
• Create reports

This week we have found the above organizations have provided their customers enhanced value preposition by their products or services that may have significant impact on their operational efficiencies in the long run and thereby increasing revenues.

We shall keep you updated on the latest happenings in Cloud. We believe that this blog was of help to you.

What are the things we should look for, when we accept a data center? is there any check list?

Here is a link from the DOE ( Dept. of Energy) for data center checklist. There are other list available for data center installations that are generic. 

Click here - Data Center Checklist

Data Center Automation – What It Needs and what It Lacks

Change is the key and change is inevitable.. Corporations have been identifying these future trends and so they are aligning themselves to more of data center automation  Managing the change doesn't only provide a competitive edge over others but it also allows you to stay ahead of the Industry.

But are organization’s really able to capture the needs of their clients with relation to services offered and upon what measure are the Products matching the business needs.

There is an intense need of responsiveness in the virtualization services that are offered for other companies by their IT departments. Data Center Automation has gained much popularity in the recent past with many organizations having automated the movement of servers and their associated data through the use of VMware's vMotion and Storage vMotion. These tools provide continuous application availability during routine server maintenance activities and an improved business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) posture. But network automation lags. According to Mark Fabbi of Gartner, "Automated application provisioning allows applications to be rapidly deployed, but the 'human middleware' of network operations can delay deployment for days or weeks.1"

According to Forrester, "The amount of innovation that has transpired within the data center LAN over the last four years almost equals the last 15 years of the campus LAN, branch WAN/LAN, and wireless LAN innovation, and the rapid innovation will continue.2"

The Data Center is changing, and so are expectations/requirements for data center networks. The move toward a, cloud-style approach to IT service delivery that enterprises now expect means that the data center network must join server and storage environments under a unified management/automation umbrella. Because data flows in the next generation data center are primarily server-to-server and server-to-storage, a logical starting point in the move to new network architecture is within the data center itself.
 Few of the SME‘s in the US have been identified where such need has been recognized and their products have proven successful with their small scale client businesses.

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