Cloudbursting allows failover into the cloud

Cloudbursting allows failover into the cloud

This is a link to a podcast who's primary focus is to generate interest in F5 and how they can serve cloud computing but I like the analogy Jason Meserve uses to describe cloudbursting. He compares it to overdraft protection on your bank account. When data center resources are exhausted for a particular application/system, you can push it to the cloud which essentially gives you on-demand provisioning. While this is somewhat of a sidebar for cloud computing, I think it does well to make you think about ways to commodotize cloud computing.

To put it into perspective, I'll use a recent example with one of our customers. Anyone who follows Hosted Solutions knows that we recently signed Belk department stores as a customer (belk.com). Just before the big Thanksgiving shopping weekend, Belk had some concerns about whether they would be able to handle the shopping load to their site. Obviously when you put a lot into your e-Commerce environment, you want it to be able to handle heavy traffic when needed. Otherwise, you lose money. Members of my team spent a lot of late nights helping to make sure Belk could handle their needs the day after Thanksgiving. We worked with third party companies that essentially model customer load so that you can see how your systems react. At the end of the day, we ended up adding some additional resources in the Belk environment so that it could scale to an extreme amount of users in the event they got slammed with shoppers.

From a cloud computing standpoint, think about how this could have been different. If we had a cloud where we could instantly call upon resources when needed and the management interfaces necessary to harvest those resources quicly and efficiently, we could have allowed the existing Belk infrastructure to run and only provisioned more resources if we needed to. Best case scenario, Belk would have had a portal to view their customer traffic load, set threshholds where if traffic reached certain levels they would have been alerted and they would have had the ability to instantly order additional cloud resources to help with their volume. That order would have kicked off automatic processes that replicated their data/site and within a few minutes (or sooner) they would have the capacity to deal with their spike in customer traffic volumes. All of this of course could be automated as well.

Working for a company that provides data center services, I personally think this could be a way to get "cloud's foot in the door" so to speak. If you can offer companies the ability to provision additional resources on a dime, then you don't waste money or engineering cycles with load testing and trying to estimate how much volume will increase. Who cares at that point? If it goes up, they'll be able to respond instantly and meet their business challenges.

Cisco's Project California

Cisco planning significant data center assault - Network World

This is a good article hinting at the future of where Cisco is taking their push into the server market. I had the opportunity this week to participate in a briefing on Project California. I'm under NDA and can't comment on specific details until the product is released but it will be interesting to see where this goes. As anyone who has worked with Cisco for any length of time knows, they focus on technology unification. If they can do for network and server unification what they did with network and telephony unification, it significantly changes the future landscape of computing. We're already seeing that collapse with their drive towards the unified fabric technologies. Should be a fun 2009.

There is also some mention in this article about HP and the switching market. While I think there are definitely niche groups that lean towards using non-Cisco products, I think Cisco has the market fairly locked down in switching. It was interesting to see Juniper annouce that they are moving into the LAN switching market this year and I think Juniper probably has a much better chance at pushing their market share upwards than HP. Networking pros like Juniper and the company is very forward thinking. HP is still viewed as a legacy Goliath and while they have made some impressive releases (especially in the 10G+ market), they have many more reputation problems to overcome....similar to IBM.

The Purpose Of This Blog

Since this is the first posting, I figured I would just take a brief moment and explain my purpose here.

I've been directly involved in the networking arena for almost fifteen years now, starting with small business networking as a part time job while attending North Carolina State University. I quickly picked up on the fact that Cisco would end up leading the world of networking for many years to come so I started learning as much as I could about Cisco while working for Sprint. I was fortunate enough to come to Sprint's internal Network Engineering group as they migrated from an Olicom bridged network to a fully routed Cisco network back in the 1990s. Training and certifications followed and the rest is history.

Although I am thankful to Cisco's technology for being a catalyst of my career, I am much more open to best of breed products from many different networking technology vendors including Juniper, Check Point and F5 to name a few. I am committed to evaluating products and technologies based upon their true technological and business value and not just because one vendor says their product is superior to the other. Hopefully you will find this to be true.

Since I have focused my entire career in the networking arena, I feel that I have now gained enough experience with the technologies to offer some value into what is truly relevant to today's enterprise environment. Technology, after all, is only relevant to business if it can solve business challenges.

With that said, I see a major change coming in the networking world and it centers around virtualization. Network Engineers have been virtualizing for years (think VLANs). However, everything is moving towards a more virtualized state as we move closer to cloud computing type models. I saw the first wave of this new focus at Cisco's Networker's conference this year. Almost all of the sessions I attended revolved around virtualization of some sort and it seemed many of the first adopters of the new technologies were going to be the data center & service provider markets. Hence, I made a recent job change and went to work for one such organization so that I would have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this shift.

Hopefully others may learn a tiny bit from this blog but if it serves no other purpose than to document my own learning experiences as we move forward, it will be worth it.