We're Launching The Cloud!

After many months of work, we're finally ready to launch our cloud computing offering. The cloud is built and we completed failover testing yesterday. We're also holding a special open house event/launch party for this new offering and we've already got customers wanting to sign up for the service. It's really picking up steam around here and we're all excited.

We ultimately ended up going with the following networking components for the cloud:

Virtualized Firewall Platform - Juniper ISG 2000s, creating a VSYS for each customer
Switching Platform - Cisco Nexus 5000 and Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders
Virtual/Shared Load Balancer - F5 BigIP LTM & GTM for global traffic management

I think the most exciting piece of this offering is our ability to rapidly deploy new customer environments. We're promising customers that we can deliver their entire environment from the firewalls to the load balancers to the virtual machines to the storage....all within 5 days from order submission. In the past, we were shooting for 30 days in a typical dedicated environment where the customers had dedicated hardware that had to be purchased and provisioned before we turned it over to them.

From a business standpoint, this is big. If an e-commerce site suddenly experiences increased demand, they can request more virtual machines be added to their application server pools and within 4 hours they'll have them. Anyone that has worked in big dedicated environments can tell you that having that ability significantly increases your ability to add capacity on the fly. It eases the burden in many areas.

Look for the official press releases next week. I just wanted to report that we have completed the build and are in the final stages for launch. After the launch, I plan to provide a few helpful details around the integration of the server/VM environment with the Cisco Nexus switching platform. We learned a few lessons there for sure.