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Cloudy Picture for Cloud Computing?

May 2nd, 2008

I read a piece this morning from Network World (http://url.ie/cuf) which detailed the challenges and concerns facing adoption of co-called ‘cloud’ or ‘grid’ platforms.

The piece included a quote from Kirill Sheynkman, head of start-up Elastra – “Equipment inside the corporate data center isn’t going away anytime soon,” Companies remain reluctant, for a variety of reasons, to trust the cloud for their mission-critical applications.

I was surprised to read such a perspective, as running on our Cloud right now are ‘enterprise’ or ‘blue chip’ companies like Carphonewarehouse, Tesco, Citijet and many many more, but as I continued through the article I realised the 8 points being raised as ‘blockers’ to adoption have already been addressed by hosting365.

Specifically:

1. Data privacy. Many countries have specific laws that say data on citizens of that country must be kept inside that country. That’s a problem in the cloud computing model, where the data could reside anywhere and the customer might not have any idea where, in a geographical sense, the data is.

The Hosting365 cloud service is maintained in Dublin, Ireland. Currently in one physical facility, it is currently ‘growing’ to encompass two facilities for redundancy, but both are in Ireland, in the European Union, and regulated by Data Protection and Privacy legislation in this jurisdiction.
2. Security. Companies are understandably concerned about the security implications of corporate data being housed in the cloud.

With our platform, the concern is no greater than with traditional colocation or dedicated servers. Our cloud is protected by best-in-class Cisco Firewalls and VPN devices, with comprehensive filtering, monitoring and netflow analysis, 24/7.

3. Licensing. The typical corporate software licensing model doesn’t always translate well into the world of cloud computing, where one application might be running on untold numbers of servers.

Simply track how many servers you are running in real time – we need to do this ourselves so we can report license usage to both VMware and Microsot (as just two examples)

4. Applications. In order for cloud computing to work, applications need to be written so that they can be broken up and the work divided among multiple servers. Not all applications are written that way, and companies are loathe to rewrite their existing applications.

Our cloud platform allows horizontal and vertical scaling that does not force application developers to ‘build for the cloud’.
5. Interoperability. For example, Amazon has its EC2 Web service, Google has its cloud computing service for messaging and collaboration, but the two don’t interoperate.

VMware (our cloud platform of choice) is pretty ubiquitous. You can move VM’s to your own kit, you can convert back to physical servers, you can move to another data centre, you can move between virtualisation platforms. You can even use something cool like VMware Fusion on your Mac laptop to build a Debian server just the way you like, then put that online in our cloud, without having to change anything! By adopting enterprise standard virtualisation, and probably the most mature virtualisation platform available, we’re ensuring zero ‘lock in’ for our cloud users.

6. Compliance. What happens when the auditors want to certify that the company is complying with various regulations, and the application in question is running in the cloud? It’s a problem that has yet to be addressed.

For all of the reasons above, we’ve built an environment that can achieve PCI compliance (among others).
7. SLAs. It’s one thing to entrust a third party to run your applications, but what happens when performance lags. The vendors offering these services need to offer service-level agreements.

We offer better SLA’s on our cloud than we do with any other offering. Want 24/7/365 support, 100% network and power uptime SLA’s and a guarantee of no more than 15 minutes downtime even in the event of physical hardware failures – step right in! Our approach from day-1 with our cloud platform was to build an enterprise solution that could replace the ‘old’ way of building bespoke kit, but still deliver the same or better SLA’s.

8. Network monitoring. Another question that remains unanswered is how does a company instrument its network and its applications in a cloud scenario. What types of network/application monitoring tools are required.

We provide comprehensive network and application level monitoring on our grid, with full web access for customers to the same.

There are lots of misconceptions about what a cloud actualy is (or can be) in the marketplace, but, from the customer interest and take-up we are already seeing, I feel we’ve provided a solid, enterprise grade platform, that can deliver better performance and reliability than dedicated hardware, with the same or better SLA’s, but also offer the flexibility and control of rapid scalability, complete mobility of resources and workloads, all backed up with our dedicated support.

  • Hi Stephan,

    I would like to talk to you about this. But I do not have your email address. I have sent three emails to the noc@.... address under ticket 166060. One marked for you attention. None of these have been replied to after 2 weeks.

    (087) 2441725
    kieran[at]mill-yard.com
  • Hi Kieran,

    This is the first I've heard of any issue and, reviewing your ticket history, it looks like you had an issue in July, which appears to have been resolved, and then again in September, which also was resolved at the start of October. I can't see any other tickets open in the system?

    As for the cloud, it's simply a new deployment platform, nothing fancy :) We could migrate your current server to the cloud should you wish, which would give you vastly improved reliability and scalability over the very basic machine you currently have.

    Let me know if you want me to escalate your issue - you have my email address.
  • Hi Stephen.

    Does your move into the clouds mean you are trying to dump your dedicated server customers.

    I hired a dedicated server from H365 in Feb 2006. Did the deal with you personally.

    It needed to be reinstalled in July this year. However there were hardware issues which have taken 4 months to resolve. Now your staff tell me I have to pay for the botched reinstallation + the 4 months I've been without the server.

    Will you treat your cloud customers like this in a couple of years, when you decide to move to some other fancy new infrastructure.

    Regards.
  • Hi Joe,

    Many thanks for your comment and, more importantly, your feedback.

    I spoke to the customer care manager this morning and he tells me there are no outstanding tickets for you in any of our support systems. Have you tried live chat, or called us by phone?

    If you have a ticket number, please email it to me directly for escalation.

    As for SLA's and resources, we deliver better uptime than the industry average, and do it for an excellent price, we have more engineers in our operations team today than we had staff two years ago.

    Hosting365 has grown explosively over the last 7 years and we've had to make the (very painful) transition from a small to a 'medium' sized company during that growth. I'm the first to self-criticise and concede when we could do better, and we are about to kick off a major recruitment drive.

    In addition, we'll be making a major announcement on the 22nd of this month, which will change how we deliver our services and deliver greatly improved support options.

    In the mean time, once you return from China, I'd love the opportunity to give you a tour of our facilities and introduce you personally to some of the team, including our new Service Delivery Manager (ITIL, Prince2) and Customer Care Manager (ITIL also).
  • Joe Byrne
    Stephen congratulations on your expansion into Cloud computing - an area I am very interested in myself and see as a major growth area.

    However it will fail without support and while SLA's are fine on paper, if your company does not have the resources (as I have been told by your own staff) then it is hard to have any confidence.

    I have found the level of support from Hosting365 to be disastrous in the last couple of years having enjoyed excellent support since the day you opened your doors. This is not just my opinion - it's the word in our small IT industry. I was one of your first customers and you got me to move on the promise of good customer support, which I know you believed in and were once able to deliver on.

    While my company is tiny and I use some of your services for a number of small clients, our primary business is IT & Project Management work for SME's and Corporate companies e.g. Enterprise Ireland, RTE, BOI, INTO etc. and as such we influence these businesses. While we don't do a lot with you directly, we have put an enormous amount of business your way. Currently I have a very small problem but can get NO RESPONSE at all from either support@hosting365 or support@register365 - now 8 days. Is there anyway we can do something about the support, now and in the longer term. I am genuinely interested in using your Cloud services - it's up to you whether I do or not.

    Regards, Joe Byrne
    CEO: Glanmire Electronics Limited
    Currently in our China office but you can call me on my direct line 01 2768008.
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