July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

A week ago Roadrunner, the world’s first petaflop supercomputer and still capable of a staggering one quadrillion floating point operations per second, was tossed aside like an old shoe, or the PC you bought in 2007. Five years ago it was the fastest computer on the planet, running nuclear warhead degradation simulations for Los Alamos National Laboratory, today it’s yesterday’s news.

But speed wasn’t the only issue.

Rather, the race for better, smaller, faster supercomputers now includes an adjective that wasn’t nearly as common five years ago: greener. In other words, more energy efficient. And, not incidentally, cheaper.

“I’ve been to Los Alamos,” Rob Clyde says. “In many cases it’s not just the cost of the electricity, it’s the fact that you just can’t get more.”

Clyde is the CEO of Adaptive Computing, which produces workload management software to make supercomputers and company’s private clouds more efficient — more green. I talked to him about what it takes to make super-computing super-efficient.

It’s a big problem.

One supercomputer that was the fastest in the world from 2010 to 2011, TH1, reached 2.566 petaflops. But to do so, it consumes over four megawatts of power, which at $0.10 per kilowatt/hour is $3.5 million a year. And four megawatts is about the electricity needed to power perhaps 3500 homes, which now need alternative energy sources.

So, how do you fix it?

Increased efficiency is, of course, key. But that increased efficiency can’t come at the cost of performance — not when supercomputers or major private clouds are running mission-critical applications for governments or companies. Clyde says Adaptive helps with both.

“We run on the fastest supercomputer in the world,” he told me. “And we run on the greenest supercomputer in the world.”

There are essentially three ways to improve efficiency.

The first is to minimize waste by consolidating workloads. In most private clouds and data centers, the average server utilization rate is a pitiful 8.5 percent. Supercomputers, which are intensively used by scientists, are better utilized, but some are still only in operation half the time. If you can drive the utilization rate up by consolidating workloads and scheduling computing jobs, you can achieve 3-4X energy savings alone, Clyde says. Especially when paired with the second strategy: green policies. When workloads are scheduled, there are times when the data center or supercomputer is not being used.

In those cases, Adaptive’s software, MOAB, simply powers down.

The third is to use more efficient processors, which is not so much about buying one particular type of processor as it is using the right kind of processor for the right kind of job. GPUs, or graphical processing units, are hyper-efficient at certain types of mathematical calculations. Intel’s Xeon chip is better at other operations. Using the right chips for the right job can yield another impressive slice of planet-friendly power.

All together, the changes add up. Bigtime.

“Today’s Beacon supercomputer is the top green system in the world,” Clyde told me. “It has the best gigaflops per watt rating at 2.5 gigaflops per watt, which is six times more efficient than RoadRunner.”

That’s impressive, considering that five years ago, RoadRunner was considered one of the most efficient supercomputers. And needed, as energy not only gets more expensive, but we get more aware of conserving and efficiently using the energy we produce.

That same approach works with what is currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, Titan, a hybrid machine that uses both GPUS and traditional CPUs to achieve more than 10 petaflops. And it also works with company’s internal clouds or data centers, which are growing at startling rates — and using massive amounts of energy.

“We run one of the largest private clouds in the world at a global bank,” Clyde told me. “They have 30-50,000 servers right now, and they tell us that by the end of the year, that will be close to 100,000. For a typical data center, we can provide 2-2.5X power savings, and for supercomputers, we can often come close to saving them half their energy costs.”

That’s green, clean … and fast.

photo credit: Argonne National Laboratory via photopin cc, Los Alamos National Laboratory via photopin cc, carrierdetect via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist at Newvem

I believe that this is the year when the enterprise will find its way to the cloud.

The mega Internet sites and applications are the new era enterprises. These will become the role models for the traditional enterprise. IT needs remain the same with regards to scale, security, SLA, etc. However, the traditional enterprise CIO has already set the goal for next year: 100% efficiency.

The traditional CIO understands that in order to achieve that goal, IT will need to start and do cloud, make sure that IT resources are utilized right, and that his teams move fast.

1. Enterprise will move to the public cloud

The enterprise has already moved and started its proof-of-concept.

Those who have realized the option to reduce cost, increase agility, and enjoy the real benefits of the cloud will continue migrating the resources of their non-critical services. Internalizing the public cloud (specifically AWS cloud) will inspire the enterprise to learn how to maintain a robust, highly available and secured service on the public cloud. That will put the hybrid environment in the front, supporting bursting and load migrations.

The traditional enterprise follows the new era one, making sure to transition and acquire only online and mobile services. The SaaS market will continue to grow and be the premier source for the enterprise new online services.

2. Slow adoption of Openstack

OpenStack is one of the candidates to compete with AWS.

This open source platform is being led by heavy traditional industry, such as HP. These traditional vendors don’t have the Internet company culture of moving fast, supported by fast cycles of refinement. In 2012 Amazon released a huge number of new features to support the enterprise cloud, following great agile product management. By contrast HP, which leads the OpenStack community, is still dragging its feet while trying to copy the AWS base offering.

However, it is important to mention that a new trend is emerging in which enterprises are moving to deploy OpenStack instead of renewing VMware licenses.

3. Private cloud is still an option (at least for another year)

Although I am a public cloud “believer,” adoption takes time and the enterprise IT will not shut down its on-premises resources on the spot.

The hype supports the penetration of the cloud to every IT team, including the enterprise … but traditional enterprises want risk free migrations. The basic recommendation is to move on with a quick proof-of-concept to taste and test the actual benefits.

The next move comes when a need for additional resources arises, such as an upgrade, new application, or load growth. Once a real need for additional resources arises, IT managers will then decide whether to purchase new on-premises technologies or cloud resources. And the innovative IT leaders will choose the latter.

Another option is that the enterprise experiments on the public cloud, and only then purchases dedicated resources due to high lease costs. But once a real price war takes place, I believe that the preferred option will be the public cloud, although I’m not sure that this will happen in 2013.

For these reasons, the hybrid cloud model is still valid (unfortunately).

4. Cloud brokers and managed service providers will flourish

Thanks to the knowledge gap, the simple reality is that IT can’t meet the demand for cloud skills. In fact, according to an IDC study, the demand for cloud computing will grow at six times the rate of IT skills overall.

The re:Invent APN summit for partners and the IDC study strengthen the position of cloud managed services. It is obvious that Amazon loves its MSPs because these vendors are growing like crazy. I follow at least five different MSPs whose business as integrators of AWS has grown to 80-90 percent of their whole business, and these are growing amazingly fast.

Amazon also invests in these vendors as it knows that the way enterprise deals with time-to-market issues is by outsourcing, and it will continue to do the same in the future.

5. Transparency is a Key value

One of the most important things I have learned from HP Discover was that the enterprise wants and will be happy to pay to maintain control.

The cloud puts control and transparency at risk due to the fact that traditional enterprise leaders and users are used to having great control of IT resources, and the concept of not having the “irons” intimidates them. The cloud vendors and developers will have to make sure they report back to leaders on the adoption progress, making sure that these new IT resources generate the expected business benefits without harming services, compliance, SLAs, and so on.

Organizations that run to deploy without planning and control will put their cloud adoption and innovation at great risk. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic move, and picking the right way to manage your new cloud resource is part of this strategy.

And one wish for 2013 …

I wish that public cloud competition would become a reality very soon, that it would generate great price reductions, and that it would enable adoption. I hope that Amazon’s cloud will continue to strike and overwhelm everyone with its enterprise penetration, bringing that future even closer. And I hope that the traditional enterprise will be able to adopt “continuous integration” and “cycles of refinement” while removing constraints and presenting the great innovation that the cloud enables.

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist at Newvem, a web-based cloud usage analytics service that enables CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, Developers and Operators to capture and improve the effectiveness of their public cloud operations and ensure their cloud infrastructure is in sync with business performance. Follow him at @iamondemand.

Image credit: Google

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

PepsiCo does not plan on moving its systems public cloud. Yet.

Frank Edwards, the director of IT strategy at PepsiCo has been working on the “Exit Strategy Group” at the global food and beverage giant. The group looks at how to bring operating costs down and make PepsiCo’s backend as efficient as possible. And he doesn’t think the public cloud fits that mold.

“We haven’t seen that it’s compelling to be less expensive or to fit our risk profile,” said Edwards at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif. “If you have a compelling case that will save us a million dollars, that’s not really compelling enough.”

PepsiCo takes in $65 billion in revenue a year.

In order to come to this conclusion, Edwards and his team used the Monte Carlo Simulation, which took over 40 billion different situations in which PepsiCo could save money through the public cloud, and found that it just didn’t make sense.

“I’d love to see more companies adopt this kind of mechanism when selling to large enterprise,” said Edwards. “It does seem like a lot of messages are geared toward the developer or SMBs [small to medium sized businesses].”

Edwards said that PepsiCo believes that it won’t last forever as a private cloud company, however.

“The public cloud is eventual, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he said.

In order to prepare for that, the company has purposefully built its data centers near Amazon and other cloud providers so that it can physically hook up to them if need be.

For an enterprise company like PepsiCo, the public cloud really makes sense for product launches and other unpredictable events. PepsiCo likes to work with public cloud vendors when it has various promotions or product launches so that it doesn’t have to deal with the resulting traffic spikes.

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you use popular cloud storage and sharing services like Box and Dropbox, you trust your sensitive information to third party data centers.

OwnCloud, the startup that positions itself as the open-source alternative to Box, is the newest contender in the cloud storage wars.

To expand into new verticals and grow its user-base, the Lexington, Mass. based startup pulled in $2.5 million from venture capital firm, General Catalyst. The firm’s Managing Partner Larry Bohn will join the company’s board of directors.

OwnCloud claims to give its 650,000 users a drop dead easy tool and more control over their data. Its server is typically deployed on a company’s servers or trusted service provider’s servers, and integrates well with existing security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools.

Young companies are increasingly positioning themselves this way in the wake of security breaches that may undercut the market leaders in the space. With its hybrid cloud solution, Egnyte is another young cloud storage vendor that emphasizes advanced security and user experience.

The technology works a little differently than the competition — IT users can store information in their cloud of choice. IT gets to decide whether files from services like Amazon, Dropbox or Google are shared with a broad spectrum of users — or accessed by just a small subset. In a recent update to the product, file owners can set expiration dates on shared files and password-protect the URL to a shared link.

The company will use the funds to expand its 70-partner strong channel, aggressively push into the enterprise, and support service providers who implement file sync and share based on OwnCloud.

“There’s no one in this increasingly crowded market that can do the things OwnCloud does — integrate closely with existing IT, innovate at lightning speed and offer choice of storage locations,” said Bohn in a statement. “With those capabilities already in place differentiating it from the competition, we’re confident that OwnCloud will succeed.”

Cloud storage image via Jules 2000 // Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As cloud adoption continues to accelerate, cloud leaders are defining ever more sophisticated app architectures that leverage both public and private clouds.

Earlier this year, a RightScale survey of more than 600 companies found that 68 percent of organizations have a cloud strategy that includes more than one cloud provider, with 53 percent choosing hybrid cloud (combining public and private clouds) and 15 percent choosing multiple public clouds.

These organizations are leveraging cloud management solutions to provide a level of abstraction from individual cloud capabilities and enable “workload liberation” — the ability to pick and choose the cloud infrastructure that is best for each application at any point of time.

Match up to the right cloud using app requirements

Combining a cloud management solution with a multi-cloud portfolio allows organizations to preserve choice while balancing technical, business and financial priorities. Here are a few examples of how cloud users match the right cloud infrastructure based to each application’s requirements:

Load variability

Applications with highly variable or relatively stable loads may be better suited for particular cloud providers. Companies like Zynga are leveraging the public cloud to handle the hard-to-predict spikes when they roll out new social games, while using the private cloud for more mature games with predictable loads.

Application requirements

Different applications may have different business requirements that influence the choice of public or private clouds. For example, CloudCare, a SaaS solution for practice management in doctor’s offices, runs web and application tiers in the cloud, while maintaining HIPAA-governed patient data in an in-house data center.

Geographical

Organizations with international reach are looking to leverage clouds, both public and private, in geographies that are distributed to match the user load and optimize performance. For example, web sites that provide online access to large data sources will typically leverage a master database in one region and replicating slaves in other geographies.

Architecting for high availability

Companies looking to eliminate single point of failures are building disaster recovery architectures that leverage multiple clouds. For example, one user that leverages the cloud for heavy-duty processing replicates their data to a second private cloud in case of an outage. Other cloud users take advantage of multiple regions, with a DR deployment that leverages a “warm” replicated slave database along with non-operational stand-by servers.

Factors to consider for a multi-cloud architecture

In most of these scenarios, companies realize that they need to create and leverage a portfolio of public and private clouds. Whatever the motivation for creating a multi-cloud architecture, companies should consider several factors:

Minding the functionality gap

When considering a multi-cloud architecture, it is important to understand that each cloud provider, whether public or private, will provide different features and services. Each cloud may provide different options for storage, load balancing, network, and application services. Even when cloud providers have similar services, the APIs and the behavior of those services will vary.

When implementing a multi-cloud architecture, a cloud management solution can bridge this functionality gap and enable consistent interfaces, processes, and automation for your organization.

Securely connecting clouds

When working with multiple clouds, organizations will need to make connections between those clouds and between their own data centers and any public clouds.

In many cases, these connections may traverse the public internet, requiring companies to use integration strategies that also meet their security needs. Companies can leverage VPN solutions like OpenVPN, VNS3 from CohesiveFT, or CloudOptimizer from CloudOpt to create this secure connection over the public internet.

There are also options to create these connections between clouds using private networks. Cloud providers, such as SoftLayer and Google Compute Engine, enable you to create an architecture that spans data centers in different geographies where all traffic between your servers is on a private network.

For securely sharing data across clouds, you can leverage SSL database replication services that are part of many databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.

Overcoming latency

Latency, the time delay associated with network traffic in distant geographies, is an important consideration for all of your cloud-based apps. A common approach to reduce latency is to deploy your applications in clouds that are geographically close to your end users.

When serving multiple geographies, multiple independent instances of the app might be acceptable. For example, a scalable website that has separate user bases located in Asia, North America, and Europe could have separate instances that serve those local regions. In that case, you might choose different clouds for each geography.

However, in some cases, a single instance of an application or a shared database needs to serve geographically distributed users. For example, an online gaming or social site that allows users in different geographies to interact may require a single shared database.

There are several technical approaches that can be used in these situations. One technique is to leverage WAN optimization technologies that aim to optimize the amount of data being sent over the network, thereby reducing latency of any transactions. A second technique is to deploy separate instances of the application in clouds located in different geographies, while connecting the databases through replication to provide a unified experience.

Controlling costs

One last thing: It’s very important to consider cost implications as you are designing and architecting your multi-cloud solution.

The first step is to understand the cost components associated with each particular public or private cloud option. You may also need to work with your financial team to accurately model the full costs of any internal clouds you may be developing. For example, in multi-cloud scenarios, bandwidth requirements can be a critical piece of the cost. In some cases, “data ingress” to a public cloud may be free, while “data egress” may incur higher charges.

Once you understand the cost components, you can now factor in cost considerations when choosing the right cloud for a particular application. For example, an application with high variability in load or one that will be running for a short period of time, may have lower costs when deployed in a public cloud, while an app with more steady usage may have lower costs in a private cloud.

Keep in mind that cloud providers are frequently changing their cost models and often lowering the cost of infrastructure services, so the cost profile of each cloud may change over time. A cloud management solution will give you the flexibility to choose the best cloud for your needs and to retain the ability to move clouds as needed.

Wrap up

The value of multi-cloud for a wide variety of use cases cannot be disputed. Companies of all sizes, from large enterprises to small startups, are seeing the value of taking a multiple cloud approach to manage their infrastructure.

After spending the last three years at RightScale helping companies develop and execute their cloud strategies, I’m seeing a growing adoption of a multi-cloud approach by industry leaders –- and I expect that momentum will only continue as organizations take advantage of these architectures to ensure success with their cloud-based applications.

Brian Adler is a Senior Professional Services Architect at RightScale, bringing years of experience working with multi-cloud environments. Brian advises on complex application architectures with customers and their cloud implementations, working directly with customers to dynamically configure cloud resources across multiple cloud infrastructures. Prior to RightScale, Brian held positions in systems engineering, architecting, hardware, and software in defense industry applications and as a software architect for Openwave.

Clouds photo via Nicholas A. Tonelli/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

While companies like Amazon and Rackspace mightily tout the power of the public cloud, some large enterprises still aren’t sold. These enterprises like the option of an on-premise private cloud that gives them a bit more control and security.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Nebula, which has raised $25 million in new funding today, takes serious advantage of these enterprise-level concerns and gives big companies tools to enable less-expensive private clouds. As we wrote about previously, the company takes advantage of Openstack technology and creates hardware appliances that make building and managing low-cost data centers a reality.

Nebula’s team is led by CEO Chris Kemp, who was the former CTO of NASA. Many other folks in the company come from places like NASA, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. If any team can make it easier for enterprises to improve the data-center building process and make data centers more functional, this might just be the group.

“We’re democratizing what Google and Facebook have done with their data centers,” Kemp told me. “You can use your favorite server vendor and plug those servers into our boxes. You plug in and 15 minutes later, you have Amazon running on premise.”

So what’s the company’s biggest threat? Public cloud and virtualization powerhouses that are already dominating the market. “Amazon and VMware are the two that keep me up at night,” Kemp said.

Nebula is still in beta and has a “couple dozen” customers. Kemp said he hopes to launch with general availability before mid-2013.

The new funding round was led by Comcast Ventures, with participation by Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Innovation Endeavors, Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, Ram Shriram, Harris Barton, William Hearst III, Scott McNealy, and Maynard Webb. Silicon Valley Bank is additionally providing Nebula with debt and credit facilities.

Nebula also previously raised a first round of funding in July 2011, but it has not revealed the specific amount. Kemp told me it was more than $8 million (after I guessed that), but less than this new $25 million round. The company has nearly 60 full-time employees, almost all of them engineers.

Star formation photo via NASA/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With so much talk about “big data” lately and data-focused companies like 10gen and Delphix recently grabbing large funding rounds, it’s a topic that won’t be going away any time soon. But what exactly is it and is there an easier way to comprehend just how big it all is?

Typically, big data describes working with monster-sized data sets that are hard to manage using standard database tools. Thus, we have all kinds of companies scrambling to provide new software and tools to manage, store, and analyze those data sets. Other big data startups that have seen investments include Cloudera, Palantir, Datahero, and Precog. On top of that, big dogs like Google, Yahoo, and HP are providing their own solutions too.

HP-owned Autonomy has taken a stab at trying to explain “big data” with a new infographic. Autonomy’s private cloud surpassed 50 petabytes in April and just last week, the company released new tools focused on big data, so clearly the company has big data on its mind.

Check out the infographic below:

Top photo credit: VLADGRIN/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise software and services player Autonomy‘s private cloud for businesses has now surpassed 50 petabytes to extend its lead as “the world’s largest private cloud,” the company announced this morning.

HP loudly announced its decision to buy Autonomy back in August 2011. And when the $10.3 billion deal closed in October, HP immediately folded Autonomy into its offerings for enterprises. The Autonomy buy was spearheaded by former HP CEO Leo Apotheker, who was later booted from the company. The expensive Autonomy purchase may have been one of the reasons Apotheker was canned, while another was his exploration of spinning off the company’s PC business. But after his replacement, Meg Whitman, took the reins, HP did everything it could to give the successful enterprise-focused company even more resources, especially when it came to the cloud.

Autonomy’s private cloud service, which has more than 1,000 customers, has grown at an incredible rate since HP announced its intent to acquire the company. It amounted to 31 petabytes in August 2011 and now stands at 50 petabytes, meaning the company grew its private cloud size 38 percent in nine months. Those 50 petabytes of data (equal to 665 years of high-def video) are stored on 6,500 servers in 14 data centers across the world.

“In terms of content stored under management, we believe no one else is even close to matching our offering,” Mike Sullivan, CEO of Protect at Autonomy told VentureBeat. “We have 1 billion pieces of content coming in each day.”

Sullivan said that with HP behind it, Autonomy has been able to speed up previously held plans to serve more customers and integrate with HP’s services and infrastructure. Using its Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), the company’s private cloud can recognize patterns in all the structured and unstructured data in takes in each day. IDOL enables “marketing and revenue optimization, archiving, data protection, eDiscovery, and information governance,” the company says.

Private clouds like Autonomy’s differ from public clouds like Amazon’s because they clearly separate usage for each organization, whereas users of public clouds have to share resources. (Amazon, by the way, reached a new growth peak with its Simple Storage Service (S3) last week and is now storing 905 billion objects.)

Sullivan said Autonomy’s private cloud gives businesses and government organizations much more security than they could get with public clouds. Nine out of 10 of the world’s largest banks use Autonomy’s private cloud for financial data, and it has attracted government agencies in the U.S. and Europe.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years,” Sullivan said. “We know we have to offer a high level of security.”

Clouds photo: Paul Bica/Flickr

But it didn’t mention one of the prime benefits of that shift. For every three servers that it used to have on Amazon Web Services, it can now get away with just one on the zCloud.

The zCloud can thus dramatically lower the company’s costs, Allan Leinwand, chief technology officer for infrastructure engineering at Zynga, told VentureBeat. That, in turn, gives Zynga some huge cost advantages over its rivals in the social game business, he said. Leinwand is sharing these details in a speech at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Calif. today.

Zynga started out using its own servers. Then, in June 2009, it launched FarrmVille. The game was an enormous success and it forced Zynga to shift to Amazon Web Services, a public cloud-based infrastructure that allowed it to tap Amazon’s extra computing resources as necessary to handle the enormous demand for Zynga’s games.

FarmVille grew from zero to 10 million daily active users in its first six weeks and hit 25 million DAUs in its first five months. AWS gave Zynga huge flexibility, and it formally adopted a hybrid cloud strategy that mixed public and private clouds. Between 2009 and 2011, Zynga’s server capacity grew two orders of magnitude.

But starting last year, the company began heavily investing in the private zCloud. Yesterday, the San Francisco company disclosed that it spent $238 million on capital expenditures in 2011, up four-fold from the year before. And most of that was due to zCloud spending on server infrastructure that was precisely suited for Zynga’s mix of games. As it designed the zCloud, Zynga focused on the hardware and tried to eliminate every bottleneck in server components such as microprocessors, storage, and memory.

“We launched with AWS and then began to understand the stresses of the traffic and how we could manage it,” Leinwand said.

At the beginning of 2011, 20 percent of Zynga’s daily active users were hosted on the zCloud and 80 percent were on Amazon. Now that has been reversed. Over time, even more users will be hosted on the zCloud. Zynga was able to deploy the zCloud for its initial trial within six months. CityVille Hometown, a mobile game, was the first to be entirely hosted on zCloud. In November, CastleVille started on the zCloud, and the system was able to handle huge traffic growth when the game grew to five million users in six days. Zynga now has 240 million monthly active users.

Of course, shifting most of its user base to a private cloud carries its risks. Zynga now has to invest in its own data centers. If its games suddenly become unpopular and the user count drops, Zynga could get stuck with too much infrastructure. But the bet has paid off so far with steady growth in users and lower costs per user. Zynga can now deploy up to 1,000 servers in 24 hours. Zynga’s infrastructure is one of the largest uses of public and private clouds in the world.

Leinwand also said that Zynga has more control over the availability of its games. The company can now precisely understand the computing experience that players have, like how many seconds they have to wait for something to happen. Now it can measure everything. Leinwand said Zynga embraced the idea of “all-in availability,” which meant it would handle the load even if Amazon went down.

“We wanted to understand our availability and make sure that it was solid and always there,” he said.

Now that the zCloud is up and running, the company is collecting data on just how well all of the parts of the data center are working and what can be done to cut costs and improve the user experience. While Amazon is an all-purpose four-door sedan, Zynga’s custom-built zCloud is a sports car tuned to one purpose.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage is easy, but if you’ve got a lot of data, the costs can escalate quickly.

Case in point: DNAnexus, a startup that is storing DNA data so researchers can access and analyze it through a web interface, is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power its applications, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store data.

The company now has half a petabyte of data stored in the cloud, at a cost of 11 to 12 cents per gigabyte per month. Additionally, Amazon charges 11 to 12 cents per gigabyte for data downloads. That adds up to a total cost of tens of thousands of dollars just for storage.

Like an old-school dime store hooking kids on nicotine with free cigarettes, Amazon makes it easy to get started.

“Amazon has made it very attractive to send data to them — they don’t charge for that. But they do charge when you want to get that data out of the cloud,” said Andreas Sundquist, the CEO and co-founder of DNAnexus.

Add up the costs, and Amazon looks like it’s about the same price as local storage.

“I can go to Fry’s and get a hard drive — and that’s what it costs to store data on Amazon for a month,” said Sundquist.

Despite the costs, it’s beneficial to have the data stored closely to the computing and web resources that Amazon offers. AWS has given DNAnexus flexibility and computing power it couldn’t have easily accessed otherwise.

Sundquist spoke on a panel discussion at CloudBeat 2011 today with vendors from four storage providers: Crossroads, Coraid, Scality and Whiptail.

The consensus of the panel: Initial costs, also known as capital expenditures (CapEx, or what you’d spend at Fry’s for that hard drive) are only part of the story. For large-scale enterprise storage, you’ve also got to account for network management, storage management, maintaining all those storage servers, ensuring that your storage area network is compatible with the rest of your applications, and so on. Therefore, the cost per gigabyte of raw storage is misleading.

“It’s a metric that doesn’t make any sense,” said Jerome Lecat, the CEO of Scality.

For that reason, it’s smarter to focus on the total cost of ownership per month, and in that light, Amazon doesn’t look like such a bad deal.

“Amazon is 70 percent cheaper than what legacy companies do, typically,” said Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman, who has studied the comparative costs of different storage solutions. “The biggest difference is you don’t need to pay for excess capacity. You only pay for what you do send to Amazon.”

For instance, if you have half a petabyte of data, you’d actually need to purchase 2 petabytes of storage capacity, in most cases, Reichman said. Cloud storage gives you the ability to pay for just what you use.

However, Amazon’s costs are higher than some of the alternatives. If you have the ability to build your own storage system in a datacenter, the companies on the panel are all able to offer you cost-effective alternatives so you can build your own cloud storage.

• Crossroads specializes in making tape storage work with modern storage systems, by essentially making the tape drive act like a USB drive. Because tape can be stored without requiring power — all you need is more cabinet space — it’s particularly economical for vast quantities of data. Crossroads storage can cost less than 1 cent per GB per month, or 1/10 the cost of Amazon, especially at the largest scale (exabytes of data).
• Coraid uses commodity hardware and Ethernet cabling to replace expensive FibreChannel and storage arrays. Using these pieces, it was able to sell the U.S. Department of Defense a $1 million storage contract with a “buy one petabyte, get the second petabyte free” deal. Coraid storage has a total cost of ownership of 5 cents per GB per month, or about half what Amazon charges.
• Scality offers software that makes storage networks work more efficiently, making it easier to add more capacity as needed — like “building an Amazon S3 at home,” Lecat said. Scality-based storage also costs about 5 cents per GB per month, all-in.
• Whiptail creates solid state storage-based systems that are more expensive than traditional spinning hard disks, but which are extremely fast. While it doesn’t charge by GB per month, its total cost of ownership works out to about 10 to 12 cents per GB per month for the largest scale installations.

Despite the advantages, it seems that DNAnexus will be sticking with the public cloud for now.

“The nice thing about Amazon is, I don’t have to think about what sort of storage device it is stored on. If I need to double my storage, I just do it,” said Sundquist.

Photo credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat. Panelists, left to right: David Cerf, Crossroads; Kevin Brown, Coraid; Jerome Lecat, Scality; Dan Crain, Whiptail Technologies; Andreas Sundquist, DNAnexus; Andrew Reichman, Forrester Research.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Recently, we were proud to publicly unveil the private cloud computing infrastructure that we use to scale our social games — infrastructure that we internally (and affectionately) call zCloud. zCloud leverages both our internal infrastructure components and our public cloud partner, Amazon Web Services. This hybrid cloud, using private and public clouds in unison, allows us to scale our social games efficiently and effectively for our millions of daily players.

The first rollout of zCloud was focused on building an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model designed specifically for social games in terms of availability, network connectivity, server processing power and storage throughput. And as we built and deployed zCloud, we challenged ourselves to drive innovation past the concept of a hybrid cloud and ask what other services zCloud could provide to our social games. We wanted to understand how we could make Zynga’s games faster, more reliable and easier to scale.

Before we could answer this question, we needed to understand the infrastructure requirements of each of our social games. Zynga is a particularly challenging environment to find exact computing requirements since each of our games is unique. Each one uses a variety of programming languages, storage mechanisms and social mechanics. On top of that, games continuously evolve, and we constantly explore the boundaries of new technologies to make our games more social.

To begin, our teams spent time building instrumentation for each layer of our application stack and understanding the existence of potential bottlenecks. We did this instrumentation both on zCloud and on AWS – this step was vitally important to help us understand our games’ operating environments. In some cases, we found servers that were constrained by the multi-core CPU performance, in others we found that our networking throughput or storage I/O was a limiting factor or that we had over-provisioned memory on some servers. In a private cloud, you need to measure how your applications perform and build matching infrastructure.

Because zCloud is our own private cloud that we can manipulate and control, we were able to optimize our infrastructure to quickly alleviate nearly all of these potential bottlenecks. Public clouds, while exceptionally good at providing a wealth of services for a great number of customers and computing needs, often leave little flexibility for infrastructure optimization.  We found that we had to modify how our games operated for their environment.

The flexibility that zCloud provides for our games is another key to our ability to scale. When we conceived of zCloud, instead of thinking about building infrastructure for specific games, we thought about the need for every one of our games to operate on any server in any geography – or on every server in all geographies. It was essential that we understood the implication of this flexibility on networking, load balancing, storage, caching, security, application messaging, and so forth.

As the next step in building zCloud, we looked to build software and tools that allow us to operate and scale faster. These new automation tools allow us to provision services in minutes that used to take days to deliver and validate. We can now consolidate and correlate thousands of alerts into a single notification, associating specific processes for people to perform. We also built a reporting dashboard that shows both real-time and historical information about the performance of each game on zCloud.

It’s this next set of zCloud services that has made our games perform faster, scale better and be more reliable. Our keys were instrumenting our application well, building the right infrastructure to match the application needs and thinking about the flexibility that a private cloud allows for our games.

As unique as Zynga’s infrastructure needs may be, these are tenets that all businesses may want to consider when exploring cloud deployments.

Allan Leinwand is the chief technology officer for infrastructure engineering at Zynga. He is responsible for all aspects of technology infrastructured used in the delivery of Zynga’s social games, from data centers to cloud computing. He was previously a venture partner at Panorama Capital and founded Vyatta in 2005. He spoke with Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat, at our CloudBeat conference this week.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dell announced today that it will acquire network security firm SecureWorks. This is another acquisition aimed at preventing its smaller and mid-sized business customers from migrating to public cloud providers like Amazon.

SecureWorks gives users with a number of tools to help manage security threats and control access to local networks. The service includes email encryption, and SecureWorks provides a degree of consulting for its customers. The entire security suite is deployed on in-house servers.

Most of Dell’s business is in providing companies with private, in-house cloud servers that run multiple computers. Dell has said before that it doesn’t feel threatened by the public cloud — a bunch of services that offload heavy-duty computing to remote servers and stream the results through the Internet. Dell brought in around $1.8 billion last quarter off sales of its servers. Dell’s Data Center Solutions is the third-largest distributor of servers using chips from Intel and AMD.

But companies buying Dell’s servers have to bear the costs of keeping those private cloud servers up and running. That isn’t the case with public cloud servers from companies like Amazon and Rackspace. Dell’s strategy lately has been to reduce those upkeep headaches and keep companies interested in the private cloud. It recently acquired Compellent, which provides some software to help companies store and access their data more efficiently on private cloud servers, as part of that strategy.

Dell’s largest customers, like OnLive and Microsoft, are probably going to stick with the private cloud because it is faster. Dell still needs to bring in some new incentives for smaller and mid-sized businesses that are flocking to public cloud services because they are typically cheaper. One way to do that is to draw attention to the notion that public cloud services aren’t as secure as private servers because the information has to be transmitted across the Internet.

This is the second big acquisition in a few months for Dell. SecureWorks raked in about $120 million in revenue last year and has around 1,500 customers running its software. The financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it probably wasn’t cheap with that kind of revenue.

Security firms are another big acquisition target. SecureWorks acquired VeriSign and DNS Limited, other security providers, last year. Intel also dropped $7.7 billion to buy McAfee, one of the largest providers of computer security software, last year.

Atlanta, Ga.-based SecureWorks was founded in 1999 and has around 700 employees. It has raised $31.5 million in funding.

At VentureBeat, we pride ourselves on being a scrappy startup while practicing old-fashioned journalism. That means we spend a lot of time on the phone.

Our writers are glued to their smartphones, of course, but it’s nice to have an alternative to bad reception and dropped calls. So when we moved into new digs in San Francisco in February, we decided we needed real phone lines.

Traditional phones were out of the question, though: They’re way too expensive. While consumer phone lines have gotten dirt cheap, big phone companies still rake in money from businesses. And because we’re in a high-rise building, downtown, we were facing big installation fees.

Luckily, I’d gotten to know the folks at Sutus after they presented at DEMO Spring 2010. Sutus offers a small-business server in a box — data, networking, and voice-over-Internet-Protocol telephony. They offered to give us their Business Central 200 for free, and even helped us get some Polycom VOIP handsets, and we agreed to write about our experience with the product.

Installation went off without a hitch, and our sales operations guy set up extensions and voicemail through a Web-based interface. Voicemails get forwarded to reporters’ email inboxes, which is way more convenient than checking it the old-fashioned way. (I’m not sure anyone actually checked our voicemail when we were in our old office and had a single conventional phone line.)

We could have gone with a purely Internet-based VOIP solution, but there’s something reassuring about having a critical function like your phone lines running off a machine you can actually see. Okay, call us server huggers. But really, the Sutus server could be anywhere: The important thing is it’s dedicated for our use and under our complete control. It’s essentially a private cloud-computing service. Mix in the public cloud services we use, like Google Apps, and we’re actually practicing what we write about — a hybrid cloud solution as a transition to moving everything to the cloud.

And it’s supremely flexible — as we add writers around the globe (we have contributors everywhere from Finland to New Zealand these days), we could add phone extensions to give them U.S. numbers in a snap. With softphone apps, we could route calls to their computers and they wouldn’t have to pay international long-distance fees. That’s a huge savings.

Business Central is built to run the entire phone, network, and data infrastructure for businesses such as ours. So my biggest critique is that it has so many functions that we just haven’t found the time to learn them all. But I know that when we’re ready to start taking advantage of, say, its email, file-storage, or CRM features, we won’t need an IT guy to set them up: We’ll just roll up our sleeves and dive into the Web interface to configure what we need. — MATT MARSHALL

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Cloud Engines, maker of the Pogoplug set-top appliance that turns external hard drives into private cloud servers, announced today that it has raised $15 million from Softbank Capital and Morgan Stanley.

The Pogoplug (pictured left) connects to any external hard drive to the Internet and allows its owners to access the hard drive from anywhere in the world. It basically turns the hard drives you have sitting around into private cloud servers.

Users access their information via the web by going to a personalized site on my.pogoplug.com to upload or download files. The information can be accessed from any computer, iPhone, iPad or mobile device running on Google’s Android operating system.

“We coined the term personal cloud,” said Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman. “People are buying hard drives at such an alarming rate and collecting them in their houses — this is a way of taking the investment you’ve already made and making it useful.”

Pogoplug users can give other people, like friends and family, limited access to the files. It’s an actual retail product — available in stores like Best Buy — that costs $99. The idea is to provide users with a way to set up a cloud storage service without having to pay a monthly fee to sites like Dropbox.

Not stopping at just a Pogoplug device, Cloud Engines wants to stick their product in just about everything else — including routers and television set-top boxes, Putterman said. The device is pretty low power and is about as reliable as online cloud storage services. It’s mostly geared toward the average consumer, so it doesn’t directly compete with some of the cloud storage giants like Salesforce’s database.com service.

The company has around 30 employees and was founded in 2007. The first Pogoplug product actually appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2009. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company raised $6.25 million from its first round of fundraising from Foundry Group and an additional round of equity.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Hewlett-Packard? They’re just a minor roadblock, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

After easily beating the expectations of many analysts with its most recent earnings report, Oracle is setting its sights on capturing market share and claiming HP’s spot of number two database hardware and software provider behind IBM.

Net income for Oracle jumped 28 percent to $1.87 billion in its second quarter of 2011, up from $1.46 billion in the same quarter a year earlier, according to its most recent financial statement. Oracle’s operating revenue also rose 47 percent to $8.6 billion in its most recent quarter, compared to $5.9 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.

Oracle continues to successfully fend off the public cloud  (which allows developers and companies to offload storage and heavy-duty computing to remote servers at a lower cost) said Oracle president Mark Hurd on the company’s earnings conference call. Some of its servers and accompanying software can cost upwards of $1 million. But the strategy seems to be working. Its most recent line of servers and software is able to run more than 30 million online transactions per minute, shattering the previous record of 10 million transactions per minute set by IBM.

“We expect overall that our new generation of SUN machines, Exadata, Exalogic and SPARC will enable us to win significant share in the high-end server market,” Ellison said. “That will put us in the number 2 position very soon behind IBM, then we’ll fight it out for the number 1 spot.”

Despite the popularity of the public cloud, servers and databases that are run in-house are usually faster and easier to access. A number of security concerns prevent some of the largest companies in the world — big targets for Oracle’s hardware and software products — from jumping on board the public cloud. Those are companies that can afford the massive price-tags of Oracle’s software and hardware and have the staff to install and maintain them.

HP, which is second in market share at this point because of its legacy in servers, came a distant third in speed with 4 million transactions per minute, Ellison said. Despite the presence of former HP CEO Hurd on the conference call, Ellison did not mince words when it came to HP’s servers. He said they were downright terrible when compared to Oracle’s new products and IBM’s servers and software.

“HP’s servers are slow, expensive and have little or no software, that makes them vulnerable to market share,” Ellison said. “All our new servers are engineered to run databases and middleware faster than HP and IBM.”

But even with its success with on-premise database hardware and software, Oracle isn’t going to shy away from the public cloud. It’s releasing a suite of applications called Oracle Fusion that can run on in-house hardware and public cloud servers. Ellison said he expects it to compete with Salesforce and other public cloud applications beginning next year.

“You’re just seeing the beginning of us getting share in applications,” he said.

Investors loved the news, sending Oracle’s shares up about 4 percent to $31.45 in extended trading.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dell has picked up cloud storage provider Compellent for $820 million after losing out on its bid for storage provider 3Par a few months ago to Hewlett-Packard.

Compellent, like 3Par, is a provider of technology and software for cloud-based storage. It allows users to store data on both public and private cloud servers more efficiently and cut some management costs.

It’s an increasingly important set of technology as many companies move to have their employees use virtualized versions of software that are run on remote servers. That brings hardware costs down by letting companies just purchase high-powered servers — or computing power from public cloud providers like Amazon — instead of multiple individual computers.

Not to be outdone by HP, Dell took what it could as a consolation prize after 3Par sparked a massive bidding war between the two companies. Dell was willing to offer up to $2 billion for the storage provider, and HP countered with a successful $2.4 billion offer. The very public bidding war is another indicator of how important this kind of technology has become.

Most of Dell’s business is in providing companies with private cloud servers. It sells large servers that are run and maintained in-house and are directly connected to networked computers rather than using the Internet. Usually private cloud servers are faster, and a lot of people argue that they are more secure than public cloud services. Dell has already said that it doesn’t expect public cloud services to overtake private cloud usage for those exact reasons.

But with private cloud servers, each company has to bear the costs of keeping those servers up and running. That isn’t the case with public cloud servers, where companies like Amazon and Rackspace are responsible for keeping them running. So adding ways to reduce the IT headaches that private cloud servers bring seems to be another way Dell is hoping to keep the private cloud popular.

Dell’s server business is already booming. If you split Dell’s Data Center Solutions off from the main company, it would count as the third-largest distributor of x86 architecture servers, or those with chips from Intel and AMD. Dell’s top 20 customers — including Microsoft and cloud video game company OnLive — regularly purchase tens of thousands of server nodes from the company.

This post is sponsored by Dell. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity. Dell had no involvement in the content of this or other posts.

If you’re tackling your company’s computing needs, you’re going to have to look to the clouds. But which ones?

You’ve likely heard of cloud computing – shared computing resources available over the “cloud,” or the Internet. But it turns out there’s more than one way to cloud.

When most people talk about the cloud, they mean a public cloud — big server farms maintained by companies like Rackspace and Amazon.com available to and shared by a wide range of customers. They typically sell storage, bandwidth, and computing power at rates cheaper than most businesses could obtain on their own by maintaining their own computing infrastructure.

There are also cloud applications, like Salesforce.com’s customer-relationship management service, which provide both the software and the computing power needed to run it as a package deal. These, too, are a specialized form of public cloud.

The cost savings are compelling: Why own when you can rent? But cloud computing requires a shift in how programmers design and develop applications, however. That’s a burden for businesses both large and small. Add to that lingering concerns over security and availability, and it’s easy to understand why not everyone’s rushing to the public cloud.

Security concerns with the public cloud are mostly a myth, said Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer of cloud-computing provider Joyent. But most major companies will probably still always have security standards that will prevent them from moving their business into the public cloud. Many businesses don’t want to ship sensitive information off to public cloud servers, especially if they’re in regulated industries. And for time-sensitive tasks like, say, computerized trading, firms may not want to give up the edge they get from running their own servers.

That doesn’t mean companies can’t embrace cloud computing. The notion that the cloud is “all or nothing” is a myth, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels, a big public-cloud proponent, said earlier this year.

Some businesses are beginning to set up their own cloud-like pools of computing resources, called private clouds. They use the same kind of over-the-Internet architectures as public clouds, but they’re reserved for the use of the organization and can be firewalled off from the public Internet for a higher level of security and performance.

The best-of-both-worlds mix, where businesses use private clouds for their most important computing tasks and public clouds for occasional peaks of demand or less-sensitive tasks, like serving up images on a website, is the hybrid cloud. And it could be the way forward for businesses that aren’t ready to sail all the way to the cloud.

Startups and big software companies are gearing up for the hybrid-cloud opportunity. Eucalyptus Systems, a startup which recently raised $20 million, is making tools that help businesses adapt their applications to run on hybrid clouds. Microsoft and SAP are increasingly talking about hybrid clouds, where their software is available for installation on customer-owned servers and also provided as a service over the Internet.

Odds are that the public cloud will be the infrastructure that inevitably wins out, especially as the strength of their security gets tested and proven to the satisfaction of customers and regulators. But hybrid clouds could win in the short-term, as a way to get businesses started on cloud architectures. And in some ways they live up to the ultimate promise of cloud computing — that it doesn’t matter where our servers are physically located. Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud — as long as it’s in the cloud, and we’re getting more efficient, we’re headed in the right direction.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Dell makes a good chunk of change off selling servers. The Texas-based company raked in $1.8 billion off server sales in the last quarter alone — which was up 20 percent from $1.5 billion the same quarter a year earlier.

But with the emergence of companies like Rackspace and Amazon’s EC2 cloud services, there’s a diminishing need for companies to purchase servers to perform all the data crunching they need. They can offload it to public cloud servers that have the computing firepower to handle it.

Dell’s response to the public cloud? It isn’t going to affect their server sales at all, said Roy Guillen, general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions.

Most businesses — whether they are large or small — are still going to elect to purchase Dell servers and keep them in-house because they will be able to access the data more quickly. There are also a number of security concerns when shipping data off to cloud servers that many companies have, Guillen said. Some IT firms simply can’t meet security compliance requirements that companies have, so the public cloud isn’t an option.

Those security concerns are mostly a myth, said Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer of cloud computing provider Joyent. His company purchases servers from Dell, and the public cloud infrastructure they offer is immune to security threats like rootkits. But most major companies will probably still always have security standards that will prevent them from moving their business into the public cloud.

Dell’s server business is already booming. If you split Dell’s Data Center Solutions off from the main company, it would count for the third-largest distributor of x86 architecture servers, or those with chips from Intel and AMD. Dell’s top 20 customers — including Microsoft and cloud video game company OnLive — regularly purchase tens of thousands of server nodes from the company.

But cloud computing is growing just about as quickly as everything else, and is a lot more cost efficient for many businesses. Amazon recently began offering graphics processing as part of their cloud computing products. The limits of cloud computing when compared to in-house data servers are starting to quickly disappearing. And as the public cloud options for developers continue to grow, it seems like the public cloud could be more of a threat than Dell realizes.

For now, at least, their strategy is pretty clear — see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.