The Planet Blog

If you weren’t able to attend the cPanel Conference 2009 last week in Houston, you missed out on a great show. With all the networking events, educational sessions and vendor booths to visit, it was pretty tough to keep up as a participant, so the cPanel team deserves a high-five or two —physical or virtual — for having everything so well prepared.

As you may have heard, I led a session about “Disruptive Technologies: The Road from Disruptive to Sustaining.” Instead of copying the bullet points from my presentation into this blog post, we recorded the whole session on a Flip MinoHD. If you’ve got a little time and you’re interested to hear my take on the effects of the Cloud and Virtualization on hosting, go grab a bag of popcorn, turn up your computer speakers, sit back and enjoy:

I opened the floor for Q&A in the session and for additional follow-up after the session after we ran out of time, so I want to do the same for you: When you watch the video, if you’ve got any questions, please post them in a comment below and I’ll be happy to respond.

-Todd

After reading our last few posts, you know all about “the cloud” now, right? Well, yes and no. You know about the cloud in a general sense, but when it comes to current applications of the cloud, we need to drill down a little deeper.

The hosting industry is abuzz about cloud computing and cloud storage. Based on some completely fictional research*, 7 out of 10 hosting customers do not differentiate between the two. *The numbers may be fictional, but based on my experience working with customers, the sentiment is entirely true.

Virtualization and Abstraction

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane … back to the days of virtualization. Why? Because the work put into developing virtualization has been a springboard for cloud technologies – specifically with regard to abstraction, the ability to present computational power and/or storage space without theoretical limits. Through abstraction, a single physical server can be divided into several distinct virtual servers, which function as independent physical servers that have their own dedicated resources.

Cloud computing and cloud storage take the principle of abstraction and tweak it. Instead of taking one physical server and creating several independent virtual servers, the development of the cloud takes multiple physical servers and creates virtual servers that freely move between physical machines as though they were all a single server. Naturally, that’s attractive to a hosting customer.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing allows access to theoretically limitless computational resources. A user can scale from one Web server and one database server, to five Web servers and three database servers on the fly, with no upfront capital expenditure. Cloud computing essentially makes one large virtualized server that spans the entire available hardware infrastructure. Instead of having 20 servers with 4GHz of processor power each, the cloud shows 80GHz of processor power.

Cloud computing customers purchase a part of that cloud computing platform, and if no other customers are using resources on a given installation, that customer has the can use all 80GHz of process power one minute and scale back to almost nothing the next minute. The technology is in its infancy, but it’s helping to redefine the concept of a server: It’s not a black-and-white matter of physical resources anymore.

While the hardware abstraction is impressive, the greatest potential benefit of cloud computing is its use in Software as a Service (SaaS). It’s revolutionary to have an office application that scales from 10 users to 10,000 users and also available to anyone or any device with a network connection.

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage can be an amalgam of SaaS and HaaS (Hardware as a Service): Straightforward user interfaces combined with a solid hardware storage infrastructure. Because a cloud storage installation is dedicated to access, protection and serving data, the key component is hard disk space. Being able to pay for the space that meets your specific needs at a given time has significant advantages over a traditional solution like building out a storage area network in your local office. Your storage can be available to all of your satellite offices in London, Asmara and Santiago. Moreover, your company isn’t responsible for repairing file systems, replacing drives, or dealing with Nick Burns (your company’s computer guy). Brilliant!

We’ve launched a very successful cloud storage solution, and if you’re interested in seeing what the cloud can do for you, you can sign up for our Storage Cloud Test. On the cloud computing side, our team has been evaluating the most powerful, reliable and cost-efficient cloud computing solutions, and we plan on launching a computing platform as dominant as the storage platform in the near future.

Cloud computing and cloud storage have come a long way in the past year or two, and with the hosting industry’s focus on the development and enhancement of the platforms, the sky is the limit for the clouds.

Pun intended.

- Chris

On Monday, Kevin touched on a pretty hot-button topic in our industry when he focused on the hype surrounding “The Cloud.” It reminded me of an interesting chart that plotted where various hosting technologies sit on the “hype cycle.”

Gartner, Inc. is the technology resource and advisory company that created the five-phase hype cycle to track new technologies. Because it’s much easier to understand each of the phases if you hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, take a moment to visit Gartner’s explanation of the five phases. Once you’re done there, come on back and we’ll take a look at a hosting-specific version of their hype cycle:

“The Cloud”

Cloud computing and cloud storage are hot and are getting hotter. With the Utopian promises of the cloud making every other hosting platform obsolete, Gartner places “Cloud” between the technology trigger and peak of inflated expectation phases. In its current incarnation, regardless of what you’ve heard, the cloud is not going to do your taxes, balance your checkbook or give you a massage. I’m pretty sure that you’ll hear that it can change your car’s oil and run a marathon for you before we hit the peak of inflated expectations for the technology, but don’t quote me on that yet.

In reality, cloud-based solutions are good for delivering on-demand services with utility-based billing. This is often misrepresented as being cheaper than dedicated alternatives, but the flexibility — of being able to use as much as you need one day and then dropping to zero the next — comes at a price. Your overall spend at the end of the month may well be less than a dedicated alternative, but your $/resource used may be more. If you have a relatively constant computing workload or storage needs, you will be better off with a dedicated device or a cloud product that offers discounts for commitments on usage.

Other important tenets of cloud services are scalability and elasticity. This means the ability to get as much as you need of a certain resource – whenever you need it – and then the ability to revert to your previous usage when the demand spike drops off. Elasticity – the ability to grow and shrink provisioned resources on the fly – is probably more important than scalability for most customers. Every cloud customer benefits from the on-demand management of provisioning additional resources to accommodate unanticipated traffic spikes, and very few will ever push the limits of the system.

Virtualization

Virtualization – the use of software to create independent virtual environments on a single server – is quietly falling from the peak of over-inflated expectations. We’ve realized that the virtualization model isn’t necessarily a complete game changer, but as we head toward the trough of disillusionment, we’re starting to see the real value it can bring.

Virtualization is a great enablement technology in achieving specific business goals: cost savings through higher utilization rates and resource consolidation – plus power and space savings – are achievable, as are cost-effective disaster recovery solutions. Not everyone can save money with virtualization. To begin, you need enough servers so when they’re consolidated, the virtualization technology spend is less than the cost of the decommissioned servers. In fact, a typical outcome is the infrastructure is made far more resilient because of the inherent values of virtualization – and costs don’t drop significantly … A good outcome overall, but not the panacea that was promised a few years back.

Hosting

While the dedicated hosting model has been around for a while, it’s still growing and evolving. As an offshoot of colocation, the model seemed pretty straightforward. One might assume that the hype has plateaued, but we’re still seeing flashes of enlightenment.

We’ve realized that hosting doesn’t just apply to Web servers, but is relevant to the rest of the back office. Multiple service levels have evolved in the hosted environment, so customers can choose exactly what they need – from completely self-managed dedicated servers to fully managed hosting solutions. Many who have long outsourced their Web hosting needs are starting to push email and collaboration applications to hosting providers. Email is a great example of an application well suited to hosting– while everybody needs email, does everybody need an email server or email administrator? Many hosting companies offer email as a service too, removing the need to even plan capacity on a single dedicated server.

Colocation

Colocation has found its groove, and we can safely say it’s on the plateau of productivity. It’s tough to misrepresent the expectations and the utility of the agreement: space, bandwidth and power to your server.

One sign that colo has found its place in the market is that we can easily define who it does suit: larger customers who own their equipment and have permanent IT staffs. It allows them to save money on data center acquisition and maintenance costs, while still allowing them to control over the infrastructure they desire. On the flip side, colocation is not necessarily suitable for a small shop with zero IT resources looking for regular maintenance assistance on a couple of Linux servers.

Caveat

Just because technologies like cloud and virtualization are apparently on their way to the trough of disillusionment doesn’t mean they are of any less utility than hosting or colocation … it’s just important to understand their popularity in the context of something like a hype cycle. Heck, we just released a storage cloud platform that is going to make hard drives obsolete.

Oh … did I just inflate expectations a little more?

-Rob

At the beginning of this week, The Planet sent a gaggle of sales and marketing folks (and an iPod) to the Windy City for HostingCon 2007. Having never been to Chicago, I jumped at this opportunity to get a slice of deep dish pizza and meet with some of the other players in this wild world of web hosting.

Little did I know that I would be walking into a maze of buzz words, tchotchkes, and salespeople eager to explain why their product was the most innovative, dynamic, and usable development to hit the hosting market since email.

I don’t want to use this post to brag about the assortment of toys that will be cluttering up my desk for the next month or two, and I am in no position to speculate on whether or not a new server-kicking robot will be the solution to all server-related problems in the future, but I can break down a few of the buzz words that have been creeping around the industry for a little while: Service Empowerment, Grid Computing, Software As A Service (SaaS), Virtualization. I am a technically literate guy with a few years of experience in the hosting realm, but I had to stop and scratch my head about what some of these terms meant (assuming that they actually mean something).

Service Empowerment

On Tuesday morning, a keynote panel was scheduled to discuss Service Empowerment, but that discussion quickly led into a Grid Computing, Virtualization, and Software as a Service debates. The panelists unanimously shrugged at the title topic and admitted to searching for the term in preparation for the discussion. This buzz term has not built much steam (yet?), so by nipping the potential confusion in the bud, I’ll keep you from furrowing your brows and running to “The Google” in the future … it’s all about usability.

While “usability” has gotten more than its fair share of buzz in the past few years, it has gained such a broad understanding that its vernacular definition perfectly defines Service Empowerment: Allowing your customer to use your service easily and intuitively. If I offered you a petabyte of storage and an account that allows you to upload a megabyte of storage per day, I am not empowering you to use the service I am selling you. That example may seem silly, but it is a clear-cut way of thinking about the issue.

Grid Computing

The Planet’s very own Bryce Edwards explained the basics of clusters and Grid Computing about a month and a half ago, but I hope that you will accept my toonie on the topic (because two Canadian dollars are worth just a bit more than two cents here in the US).

In theory, grid computing allows for high availability across a group of servers and failover in the event of hardware failure. Imagine that your single server’s resources are water in a water glass. If your site or service has an influx in traffic or usage, the glass fills up. If the water reaches the top of the glass, your server is operating at 100%. But what happens when one more person comes to your site or uses your service?

In a true grid computing setup, you will have a group of servers functioning as one. Grid computing would be illustrated in our example by placing several other drinking glasses next to yours. One glass takes some parts of the water, the other glasses around it take other parts of the water. The glasses will not fill up nearly as quickly because the water is spread among them, and if necessary, more glasses can be added. Putting it back into server terms, your server will share the work with as many other servers as are necessary to provide the same seamless service for your users/customers as one user/customer accessing one machine. In this setup, because no single server is shouldering the entire processing load, individual servers in the grid can be replaced without service interruption.

Currently, grid computing is in its infancy, but as we see operating systems and software developed to fully realize its potential, this technology could gain a whole lot of momentum.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

A large compounding factor in understanding Software as a Service is understanding the idea of “advanced” or “managed” services. An advanced service, in the IT infrastructure sense, is a hands-on hosting solution. Whether you order an advanced service to monitor the loads on your server or seek software-specific service and support, you are essentially paying for additional features from your hosting provider. The idea of “Software as a Service” is a hands-on hosting solution that provides you specific software service and support.

The biggest player associated with this buzz term is Microsoft Exchange. Exchange is the most widely recognized enterprise email solution on the market, and when businesses seek Exchange hosting, they are actually ordering Microsoft Exchange’s software as a service from their hosting provider. Rather than starting with a blank slate, ordering Software as a Service sets up your account to be immediately usable in a particular way.

If all of that isn’t confusing enough, I’ve got one more gem for you: If you have ever ordered Web hosting, you have likely ordered software as a service. The control panel that you are given with a new hosting account is the software you are given to control the tangible server resources you ordered! Because everyone has spoken so generally about “Software as a Service” recently, I’m not surprised to see blank stares around the room when someone mentions it.

Virtualization

Virtualization is a very broad term in the IT infrastructure environment, so I do not have an easy task in trying to define it. Essentially, virtualization is the process of fooling software about hardware resources. In one case, virtualization can break down a single server into multiple similar and independent instances (a la Virtual Private Servers), and in another case, it can combine multiple servers together to appear as one single server (a la Grid Computing). The process of virtualization separates hardware and software layers working together in order to more efficiently manage resources and scale.

As soon as the virtualization concept is fleshed out a little more and developed, it will lead to a different IT infrastructure perspective. As one of the keynote panelists at HostingCon explained, “It will allow us to get away from looking at boxes (servers) as containers.”

I know, I know … this picture doesn’t have anything to do with Virtualization, Software as a Service, Grid Computing, or Service Empowerment, but I was going to get in trouble if I didn’t include it.