First, it adds more weight to the argument that VMware “gets” open source. Last month, news of its acquisition of Nicira, an OpenStack contributor, showed that VMware might be more receptive to joining forces with — or at least giving lip service to  – the OpenStack open-source cloud initiative. That would be a notable change since OpenStack has been seen as a counterweight to VMware in the cloud. VMware had already entered the open source fold with its Cloud Foundry PaaS but the company’s core vSphere franchise was seen as anything but open.

Reality bites VMware

To some, this move just shows that VMware — which had hoped to make vSphere the OS of the cloud — now grasps the reality that cloud data centers are not vSphere-only shops.

“I think they need to continue to find revenue opportunities up the stack, and although they want those to primarily drive vSphere workloads, they realize some of the higher level technologies, especially around PaaS and software-defined data centers, may use technology from other vendors, including technology from OpenStack. This and the Nicira relationship is what prompted the move at this time,” said Derek Collison, a former Cloud Foundry executive  via email. Collison left last year to found Apcera, a somewhat stealthy PaaS startup trying to define the next-generation cloud platform.

“There were a lot of questions on how Nicira’s role in software defined networks and OpenStack would continue post purchase, and I think this is trying to help with those fears,” Collison said.

VMware joining OpenStack doesn't make them more "open," it's shrewd & prudent, esp. w/Nicira acquisition. More like "OpenWallet"—
[Christofer] Hoff (@Beaker) August 27, 2012

A large VMware service provider partner who requested anonymity said, VMware remains dominant in server virtualization, but is having difficulty entrenching its other products both among service providers and end-user customers. “VMware is having a hard time selling SpringSource and some of its other acquired technologies,” he said. VMware bought SpringSource three years ago to become more of a full platform provider and to better compete with Microsoft.

In his view, Spring has not made a dent in either J2EE and .NET adoption. Beyond vSphere and Cloud Foundry, VMware is hurting — people see products like vFabric Director and vCenter Operations  Manager as maybe being good technology, but they’re cumbersome and hard to use, he said.

Others outside the OpenStack fold see possible conspiracy. Ignacio Llorente, program director of OpenNebula, which competes with OpenStack, has his own sets of questions that he posed via email:

Is VMware joining OpenStack for marketing or for strategic reasons? Are they going to discontinue the development of vCloud and create a new cloud manager based on OpenStack? What about the rest of the partners? Most existing OpenStack partners have their own cloud management tools (not OpenStack based) in the market … My point here is that these vendors want to make money with the cloud management layer and this conflicts with the creation of a foundation that plans to commoditize the cloud management layer … but thanks to this movement, they get the sympathy of the open-source community.

Citrix out in the cold?

OpenStack backers said this move puts Citrix at risk. In April, Citrix  (s ctxs), which had been an OpenStack backer, surprised the foundation by backing its own more-mature CloudStack platform as an OpenStack rival. Citrix, with XenServer, is a big server virtualization rival to VMware.

The addition of VMware to the mix is a huge validation of the effort, said Randy Bias CTO and co-founder of Cloudscaling, an OpenStack Gold partner. “VMware’s embrace of OpenStack further cements the growing community as the de facto standard for building open clouds.  In retrospect, it now looks like the Citrix departure from OpenStack left an opportunity for their rival to make a strategic play.”

However, he also urged caution. “Alongside the announced Nicira acquisition, VMware appears to be making bold moves; however, it remains to be seen whether they can truly embrace ‘open.’ Its infrastructure products remain largely proprietary, difficult to extend or modify, and focused on solving virtualization, not cloud problems,” Bias said.

#VMware is about to join the #OpenStack Foundation ow.ly/dfHIP <keeping your enemies closer? #cloud—
Ed Nadrotowicz (@EdN2Z) August 27, 2012

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Dell’s Official Flickr Page.

At about 9:44 in the presentation, I’m talking about how excited network engineers get when they can build a CLOS network that provides loads of bisectional bandwidth. I have been assured multiple times that what everyone is actually hearing is “bisexual bandwidth” – I’m not sure exactly what that is but it’s probably more interesting than a network diagram. Check it out for yourself and see what you think I’m saying….

OpenStack LA Meetup Jul 26 – Paul Guth from DreamHost on Vimeo.

Last week I had the pleasure to head (back) to San Francisco to spend a few days with other open source believers at this year’s Open Source Business Conference.  I was there on behalf of Dell, the company I work for.

Here are some of my thoughts from the sessions / keynotes I sat in on this past week.

• Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat spoke at a keynote and highlighted how the innovation that will be built on IaaS is where the revolution will reside, and that the role vendors will play in this new open source friendly enterprise will focus more on support and services.
    
• There was a great open source panel with personnel from Yahoo, Warner Music, Blackduck, Acquia, and NorthBridge that talked through real use cases at Yahoo and Warner, plus feedback on their annual open source survey which talked through the rise of open source adoption in the enterprise, how quality and cost is driving that, and how many companies are viewing open source software as a starting point for projects now, rather than an alternative option.
    
• HP’s Biri Singh talked through their cloud strategy including their tiered strategy of Iaas + ecosystem + marketplace.  Turns out they’re using quite a bit of open source as they are building out their public cloud  with focus on web services at scale.
    
• A panel on “Amazon vs the world”, panelists from Canonical , Eucalyptus, and Citrix talked about open private cloud with the backdrop of Amazon’s dominance as a public cloud provider.  AWS API compatibility came up a lot, as well as the need to productize open source technologies more.  Some opportunities that were highlighted included the need to have vendors who know more than just software, but also the “wiring” of actual working systems, and the importance of staying open as we are just starting to see adoption by the enterprise.
    
• CloudScaling hosted a great session on why open cloud is winning – how internet companies drove cloud technologies and how they were built with open source, the differences between the “Enterprise IT cloud” and the “Next Gen IT cloud”, and how “no lock-in” + flexibility + scale are the key tenets of open cloud.
    

Obviously there was a lot more at the event that I was not able to get to – You can check out a few of the presentation slides at https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/31601/50199/?& 

If you were out there last week, be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.

I enjoyed the few days out there – looking forward to the next open source event – likely in San Fran again.

Until next time,

JBGeorge
@jbgeorge

There’s been a lot of news about OpenStack recently — notably a conference dedicated to the open-source cloud-computing platform this week and IBM and Red Hat (s ibm) (s rht) signing on to the effort. And yet there is a feeling in some quarters that  it may be too late for the project to take hold.

Two years after Rackspace(s rax) and NASA launched OpenStack in part to counter Amazon Web Services (s amzn), AWS keeps getting bigger and broader — with new, increasingly enterprise-focused services coming out all the time. There also is fear — even among some OpenStack proponents — that too many cooks might spoil the effort. Sure OpenStack could become the “Linux of the cloud,” but it could also get fragmented as each vendor adds its own secret sauce to the OpenStack underpinnings. The downside scenario is that OpenStack ends up more like Unix than Linux.

Taking on AWS and VMware isn’t easy

AWS clearly took note of OpenStack ambitions to take on public, private and hybrid clouds, making a series of moves to make AWS more palatable to businesses that are wary of putting their data and applications into a shared public cloud. AWS’s API alliance with Eucalyptus — an open source private-cloud player that competes with OpenStack — is one example. AWS’s Storage Gateway and Simple Workflow Services are two others

Robert Shear, president of Greystone Solutions, a Boston development shop, is a big AWS user and sees no reason to change that. “Maybe OpenStack will be the ‘Linux of the cloud’ but every vendor playing catch-up is in favor of open standards. The reality is that each vendor selection is a commitment. The nature of the AWS stack is that the customer has a wide range of choices when deciding portability versus functional capacity. And, with AWS, the benefits of scale and cost-leadership are palpable and immediate,” Shear said via email.

VMware(s vmw) is another target for many of the OpenStack players, who hope to use the cloud platform to prevent the virtualization giant from replicating the power it holds in server rooms to the cloud at large. Hewlett-Packard’s(s hpq) new OpenStack-based public cloud relies heavily on KVM virtualization, for example.

And many see Citrix’ CloudStack move — the former OpenStack backer recently launched its own competitive project  within the Apache Software Foundation – as being motivated by Citrix’s desire to push Xen as the virtualization of choice in the cloud. Citrix points to slow OpenStack development and an unwillingness to embrace the AWS APIs as reasons for its decision to launch the competitive effort, but says it’s far more concerned with competing against VMware than with OpenStack.

The Amazon API quandary

Whether you think OpenStack is done before it gets started also depends on whether you think AWS’s APIs are the be-all and end-all of cloud computing. There is healthy debate on that topic. Some in the OpenStack camp, including Rackspace, don’t think Amazon API support is the name of the game. In an interview last week, Rackspace CTO John Engates said Rackspace’s OpenStack implementation does not support the AWS API set nor should it.

“We don’t need to be compatible with the AWS APIs,” he said. “OpenStack itself does have some compatibility with the Amazon APIs but Rackspace is not exposing that compatibility in its public cloud … mapping to AWS APIs restricts innovation. If you have to wait for Amazon and reverse engineer [what it does], where’s the innovation? We want to spur innovation.”

Still, even those interested in OpenStack wonder how it is that Rackspace is still not offering a production version of the platform. As Keith Townshend commented on a GigaOM story on the Rackspace implementation: “After 2 years in the making, you would think they [would] have a product ready for beta. This market will not sit back and wait for the ‘good guys.” He later clarified: “I don’t think it’s too late, but it is late … Most are late including CloudStack. If I needed a solution today, what are my real options? I know it’s not vaporware but it feels like it.”

Enterprise cloud inertia helps Openstack

The fact that many businesses are still kicking the tires on cloud plays to OpenStack’s favor. For some companies, the specter of one big player — AWS — dominating key cloud functionality and services is disturbing. They weren’t wild about Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop and they certainly don’t want to see that situation replicated in the cloud.

OpenStack players are doing their best to play on that fear. This week, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier told CRN that ”Amazon’s proprietary system cultivates customer lock-in.”

All this means is that there’s still a window for OpenStack to succeed — if the various parties get their clouds out in good shape and don’t fracture the code base.

OpenStack “definitely still has an opportunity because so much of the market hasn’t moved [yet],” said Forrester VP and Principal Analyst James Staten. And, he notes, the market wants open source options just as it wanted an open-source alternative to Microsoft Windows. “While [OpenStack] may still not be ready for production they are definitely getting closer,” Staten said.

The problem is, he added, OpenStack’s perceived tardiness “leaves open a door Eucalyptus and Citrix will be more than happy to drive their trucks through.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Earls37a

As part of the Citrix announcement, Sameer Dholakia, their general manager of cloud platforms said:

“….we believe the biggest winners in the Cloud Era will be clouds built on a platform that is designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture, proven at scale in real production clouds, compatible with the Amazon architecture and fully committed to open source. With the significant momentum CloudStack has gained….it is the only cloud platform on the market that even comes close to meeting these requirements.”

Of course, this is a shot across the bows for VMware, but most pundits, bloggers, and journalists focused, somewhat rightfully, on what it will mean for OpenStack.

But what does this statement mean? How much is real, and how much is marketing-speak? What does it mean for VMware and OpenStack? What does it do for Citrix’s strategy?

Before digging into these questions, I want to make clear that I am absolutely biased. Cloudscaling, the company I cofounded, is a longstanding member of the OpenStack community, and the company’s Open Cloud OS is based on OpenStack software.

I’m also in a better position to understand the reality here. Working with KT in 2010 and 2011, Cloudscaling designed and built one of the largest CloudStack deployments to date. Working with a global top 10 carrier in 2011 and 2012, Cloudscaling helped them kick off one of the largest OpenStack deployments to date.

Parsing the quote

Citrix makes several claims:

• Winners in the “Cloud Era” will be “designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture”
• These winners are “proven at scale in real production clouds”
• The winners are also “compatible with the Amazon architecture”
• The winners are “fully committed to open source”

Many of these claims seem to focus on “Amazon-style architecture” and Citrix’s right to claim the mantle of Amazon-ness:

“[CloudStack] is the only cloud platform on the market that even comes close to meeting these requirements.”

A bold claim, but is it true? Eucalyptus would claim otherwise and I won’t be bashful in saying that I think our OpenStack-powered Open Cloud OS will be more compatible with Amazon in every way when compared to Citrix. Vanilla OpenStack can also make similar claims.

So, what is “Amazon-style” and what is “compatible”?

Amazon-style architecture

There are a number of ways to interpret “Amazon-style,” but to be meaningful, we can assume that an amount of Amazon compatibility is implied. If “Amazon-style” means inexpensive, it means nothing. Anyone can build a cheap cloud.

Fortunately, Citrix provides a way forward when they also claim “compatible with the AWS architecture,” a more clear-cut claim.

AWS compatibility

What does AWS compatibility mean? Surely it means more than ordering virtual machines on demand. If not, then every cloud is “AWS compatible.” It must mean more. AWS-style networking, storage, and compute? Similar hypervisors, perhaps, given Citrix is the owner of Xen? Perhaps, it’s just providing AWS API compatibility?

How is an “Amazon-style architecture” compatible with AWS? Well, for most, I think it’s about replicating Amazon’s architecture (or, at least, elements of it) besides the APIs.

CloudStack versus AWS

I have heard that many of today’s CloudStack deployments were influenced by the architecture Cloudscaling designed at KT. This architecture involved the following key elements:

• Scalable layer-2 hardware virtual area network (VLAN) using Arista switches
• Local, in-rack storage area network using NexentaStor
• XenServer clusters
• CloudStack as the VM control system
• Cloudscaling’s provisioning system and accompanying chef recipes
• Cloudscaling’s methodology for building hardware blueprints
• Supporting open source software for monitoring, logging and related functions

Now let’s examine these elements and related technology differences between AWS and CloudStack.

Hardware VLANs are not AWS native networking

Obviously, standard AWS doesn’t provide hardware VLANs in its architecture. The closest capability that is a cloud service provided by AWS is Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). However, it’s not their default networking but an add-on. The default AWS networking is a flat layer-3 network, which CloudStack can support, but typically does not. Much of their value-added functionality (e.g. load balancing, network area translation) disappears when using flat networking. Default CloudStack deployments aren’t network compatible with AWS. Maybe you could claim that they’re compatible with AWS VPC, but even that is a bit of a stretch (more on that below).

AWS EBS is not a SAN

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud doesn’t use SAN storage for standard VMs, although it does provide a similar type of capability in Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Instead, EC2 provides primarily direct-attached storage (DAS) that is surfaced as ephemeral storage for each VM. No guarantees are provided around the persistency of local VM storage. This is in contrast to standard CloudStack, which typically uses XenServer clusters and persistent storage to provide high availability (HA) for a VM, where a VM is guaranteed to never be lost.

Clearly, this is different from AWS, which means the storage architecture for CloudStack is different. OpenStack, in comparison, uses a default storage model which is exactly like AWS.

Xen is XenServer?

AWS doesn’t use XenServer, but has their own customized version of Xen. This is close enough that we can call it the same. If “Amazon-style” and “AWS compatible” means the Xen hypervisor, Citrix claims are good; however, anyone running Xen is now AWS compatible.

1999 called and wants its application architecture back

CloudStack is a single monolithic piece of Java code. Most of the code resides in a single .jar file and runs on a single Java app server by default. This is a common architecture — from 1999. As you might expect, AWS has much more software, mostly written in a distributed service-oriented-architecture (SOA) fashion. The core software architecture is not similar at all between AWS and CloudStack.

CloudStack’s code focuses on features desirable in smaller deployments such as HA or high-availability of VMs (a common request in VPS-type environments that is irrelevant for customers who use DevOps-style automation). Amazon doesn’t provide HA for VMs. You can boot a VM off of a persistent EBS volume, but that is about as close as you can get. Again, this is dissimilar in architecture and capability.

Advanced networking in CloudStack and AWS

Regarding advanced networking capabilities in CloudStack that are comparable to AWS EC2 and VPC, the picture is rather bleak. When deployed with hardware VLANs, the CloudStack networking model depends on providing a router-VM for every customer. This router-VM provides networking functionality such as NAT, routing, load balancing and DHCP. All router-VMs are a certain size (number of cores, amount of RAM, etc.). The size of the router-VM directly impacts amount of throughput and number of TCP sessions possible through the load balancing software.

At KT, we did a significant amount of tuning of the router-VMs to support bigger deployments. This is problematic in that if all router-VMs are upsized, to say 2GB RAM with 2vCores, you give up significant capacity. If downsized to something smaller, they are unable to provide acceptable performance. It’s impossible to right-size these router-VMs or to scale them dynamically.

Regardless, this is nothing like Amazon. Amazon uses edge networking services that are horizontally scalable and are multi-tenanted rather than one router VM per customer.

CloudStack’s native API is not AWS compatible

The CloudStack API is not AWS compatible. Instead CloudStack provides a piece of software, called CloudBridge, that is installed co-resident with CloudStack. CloudBridge translates AWS EC2 API calls to CloudStack native API calls.

CloudBridge only provides EC2, not S3. In this regard, stacks like Eucalyptus and OpenStack provide more AWS API capability by providing both EC2 and S3 APIs. How then is CloudStack “the only cloud platform on the market,” “designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture” and “AWS compatibility”?

There are additional issues with Citrix’s claims that CloudStack was designed from the ground up with an Amazon-style architecture. It’s not even close nor can it be without a ground-up re-write.

Where does CloudStack play?

Given this comparison, it doesn’t sound very good for CloudStack. Yes, CloudStack has a number of deployments and traction. It’s been very successful. However, when we see customers choosing CloudStack, they are almost never building an AWS-style open cloud. Instead, they want a cheaper Vblock.

CloudStack, if anything, is an open source attack on VCE and VMware that is largely irrelevant in the open cloud space. When talking to other OpenStack-based open cloud vendors, they tell me that CloudStack is rarely competing against their products except when customers don’t understand the difference between an enterprise-style cloud and an open cloud.

If you want a cheaper VCE Vblock, I think CloudStack is a great option. If you want an open cloud that is AWS compatible for both architecture and APIs, CloudStack is a terrible option. OpenStack is a true open cloud solution. It has more architectural affinity with AWS than CloudStack.

Bringing reality to the unreal

No one should be under the illusion that CloudStack is more AWS/Amazon compatible than any other open source cloud software. Eucalyptus and OpenStack have similar or better claims to AWS compatibility.

To suggest otherwise is misleading.

Randy Bias is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Cloudscaling, which provides an OpenStack-powered open cloud solution with support for AWS and Rackspace APIs.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Radio Saigón.

For the uninitiated, OpenStack is a set of open-source cloud-computing building blocks currently being developed and used by a large number of IT heavyweights. Founded as an open source project in July 2010 by Rackspace (s rax) and NASA, OpenStack members now include Cisco (s csco), HP (s hpq), Dell (s dell), Citrix (s ctxs) and dozens more vendors. Many are already selling or in the midst of creating software and/or services based on the technology. The goal is to create something that can compete with the likes of VMware (s vmw) and Amazon (s amzn) by making it relatively inexpensive to deploy, and that promises users interoperability across a large ecosystem of OpenStack-based public and private clouds.

Randy Bias

However, according to Cloudscaling Founder and CTO Randy Bias — who also played a large role in building GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure as an early employee there — the core OpenStack code and even most of the commercially available distributions of it aren’t suitable for building webscale clouds that actually let a provider operate like AWS does. OpenStack is “completely devoid” of tools for managing, analyzing and scaling a large cloud infrastructure, he said, and when Cloudscaling has helped cloud providers build their OpenStack-based offerings in the past, it ended up building these features itself.

“A lot of the OpenStack community is focused on adding sexy features at the expense of features that bring robustness and scalability,” Bias told me during an interview this week, but running a cloud takes more than just slick software.

That’s why Cloudscaling is going to announce next week its new business model centered around what it calls the Cloudscaling OCS (Open Cloud System). OCS contains three components, which the company explains thusly:

Open Cloud OS: An OpenStack-powered cloud operating system for production cloud deployments. Open Cloud OS extends core OpenStack software with production capabilities and features including management, scalability, security, and performance.

Hardware Blueprints: Proven deployment configurations for compute, storage, and networking equipment. Hardware blueprints detail turn-key, scale-engineered hardware configurations to meet specific price/performance and availability targets.

CloudBlocks: Cloudscaling’s unified architecture integrates Open Cloud OS with hardware reference blueprints to define modular cloud building blocks.

Cloudscaling is launching OCS along with partners Arista Networks and Quanta Computer Technologies, both of which are heavily involved in efforts to commoditize the gear within webscale data centers. Quanta is a particularly interesting partner, as it builds servers for a number of major server vendors, and was the company tasked with building Facebook’s custom-designed Open Compute servers. Bias wrote on his blog in October, “My money is on the success of [Open Compute Project] and Cloudscaling has designs we hope to push back.”

“We steal a lot of pages from the book of Amazon network art, as well,” Bias told me, which — along with its hardware partnerships — actually says a lot about the customers to which Cloudscaling is selling. As CEO Michael Grant explained, Cloudscaling isn’t going after legacy workloads that other cloud-software vendors tend to target. Instead, it’s targeting customer-facing clouds from carriers and MSPs, Internet applications from companies like Facebook, and entirely new applications within large enterprises. The types of applications, Bias said, that need the ability to spin up 1,000 instances for 15 minutes, and then scale back down with ease.

Cloudscaling might find itself in a tough competitive spot trying to sell OpenStack software and services against the likes of large companies Rackspace, Dell, Citrix and others, but Bias thinks his company’s experience in building numerous large clouds will carry the day. Perhaps he has good reason to be confident: Cloudscaling’s latest customer win is AT&T (s t), which announced its OpenStack-based developer cloud at CES in January.

Feature image courtesy of Facebook.

At the CloudBeat conference today, we got to catch up with Randy Bias, CTO and co-founder of Cloudscaling.

Bias works with large enterprises and telecoms on cloud solutions for massive-scale applications — they call their products “the world’s largest clouds,” in fact.

So he knows a thing or two about what holds water in his industry and what doesn’t. In this brief interview, we chat about “cloudwashing,” the practice of applying an expensive-sounding “cloud” sticker to a run-of-the-mill technology.

Stay tuned for lots more from CloudBeat today and tomorrow.

Essentially,with this partnership and integration, 80+ Commercial and Opensource software applications provided by Standing Cloud can be deployed and managed on CloudSigma’s IaaS Cloud.

I personally think this is an interesting event in the emerging European Cloud computing landscape and I believe it offers interesting possibilities for European ISVs,SMEs and MSPs. Let’s look at some of the advantages that this partnership may bring to these businesses.

Advantages for ISVs ::

a. ISVs including web2.0 and eBusiness startups across Europe are looking for ways to enable their on-premise software on a SaaS model or develop a new stack on a SaaS model to extend their market reach and business. CloudSigma IaaS Stack and Standing Cloud’s PaaS stack offers a potent combination to realize such initiatives

b. Time to market is an important factor for ISVs. Standing Cloud’s easy to use deployment services provides significant reduction in time to deploy production applications , for instance a B2C eCommerce site with Magento or say a vertical specific business service on a LAMP stack.

c. Once ISVs launch their business services on a SaaS model,their responsibility and ownership to offer a 100% up-time and manage the delivery of services without any issues called as the Quality of Services (QOS) increases  steeply. Standing Cloud provides a number of features to help manage the QOS of a service.

d. The performance of the Cloud and its delivery Network plays a significant role in the optimal service delivery and user experience. CloudSigma is a service that offers a great performance in European region. It is touted to be the fastest in Europe.This is an important factor that can help ISVs deliver a high performance service for their end users in the europe.

Advantages for SMEs in Europe ::

1. SMEs looking at reducing their TCO (Total Cost of operations)through IT operations and improving their ROI,could leverage Standing Cloud’s services to streamline their Business Applications deployment and management more efficiently.IT Managers and Administrators of such companies can easily migrate,deploy,monitor and manage their CRM or ERP applications,for instance based on OpenBravo or SugarCRM.

2. Improving the Business agility is becoming the “Mantra” for Cloud adoption as businesses are seeking ways to improve their ROIs and shareholder value. This means they should be able to achieve Productivity and efficiency gains in a shorter span of time as well as they should be in a position to respond to changes quickly. A number of  automated service features including features such as “Server Resizing” , “Preview and Test Upgrades” and “Automated Restore” provided by StandingCloud on top of a robust and scalable IaaS Cloud by CloudSigma provides a great choice for European SMEs to improve their business agility. Also ,CloudSigma offers fine grained configuration of Cloud server capacities,which is a great way to optimise capacities and hence the cost of IT operations on the cloud.

3. Risk management and mitigation is a critical part of any business and this is an important part of the IT operations.StandingCloud on CloudSigma provides powerful features such as a. Backups and redundancies b. Automatic restore to reduce the risks of running the business applications. CloudSigma’s open IaaS model also provides seamless data portability which helps reduce the risks.

New Opportunities for MSPs/Managed IT service providers in Europe ::

• If you are in the business of  providing Managed IT services, this provides new avenues .Don’t under-estimate the potential, Leveraging CloudSigma and StandingCloud, you can be an ISP and an MSP and be the one stop shop for your customers to host and manage business critical applications seamlessly. In fact much of what you need to do in terms of an  IT deployment,monitoring,management and reporting has been automated and simplified by both StandingCloud and CloudSigma services. This means ,you can lower your cost of services ,manage more number of application deployments optimally with fewer resources and at the same time provide services to your clients with better efficiencies.
• Today Clients are serious about ROI on the cloud and a service such as this gives an MSP enough opportunity to tailor the services that offer a better ROI model to clients

So,  If you are an IT Services provider/MSP or a Systems Integrator, CloudSigma with StandingCloud provides new avenues to offer new services and value proposition to your clients as well as helps you to differentiate well and compete better in the market.Even as a small player, you get the power to  compete  with larger players. So, don’t miss this opportunity and start out now!

Finally, before I conclude this post, One very critical aspect that I would like to point out and emphasize both with StandingCloud and CloudSigma is the portability of your software. There is no lock in. This is very critical. If you are locked in to a cloud vendor, you have the biggest risk for your business and IT strategy on the cloud and the impact of a lock in has the potential to throw a business out of sync completely depending on the severity of the issue and the risk envisaged. The cost impact of this risk can be unimaginable.

CloudSigma offers complete data portability (You can just ship your server & app stacks and data HDDs out of CloudSigma through FTP as a standard ISO format) and StandingCloud offers portability between different Cloud services such as Rackspace as a core feature.

From this perspective,StandingCloud is a service that offers you a higher flexibility and lower risk that you don’t get from other similar players such as TurnKey Linux or Bitnami. Similarly Running your servers on CloudSigma offers you no-lock in which is not provided by Amazon or Rackspace cloud.

So, If you are an ISV,SME or a MSP in Europe ,It’s an interesting time for you to start exploring StandingCloud with CloudSigma

In an onstage conversation during day two of the GigaOM Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco, three API experts — HyperStratus CEO Bernard Golden, Cloudscaling co-founder and CTO Randy Bias, and Apigee VP of strategy Sam Ramji — discussed how well-designed APIs can have a positive impact on a company’s strategy.

It turns out, having an API can be useful to companies on all ends of the tech-savvy spectrum. “APIs are [beneficial] to digital natives like Netflix (s NFLX), and digital immigrants like Sears (s SHLD),” Ramji said. In fact, he said, having an API today is just as important, and common, as having a website in the year 2000. “The impact is pretty huge, and the benefits are obvious.”

Golden, who served as the panel’s moderator, drew a similarity between APIs and another major software movement. “This reminds me a lot of open source, where it started small, and gets adopted first in a small group,” he said. “You have to have a sales and marketing strategy that supports that.”

Ramji agreed heartily to the open source comparison, especially in regard to the ideal API pricing model. “It’s critical to have a freemium model for your API so that any developer in the world can get out there and start using it.”

It’s extremely important for companies to be forthright about their overall strategy if they want their API to be successful, Bias said. ”If the provider of the API is opaque about their intentions and their roadmap, there’s hesitancy there [on the part of the developer].”

It’s also key for API providers to be prepared to scale if any one of the applications built on top of it takes off, Bias said. ”You don’t know who’s going to use [the API], and you shouldn’t have to know that in advance,” he said. “In order to build these next generation, cloud-ready applications, you have to really think through that cloud-ready infrastructure.”

Really enjoyed sharing our experiences deploying several petabytes of OpenStack Object Storage service (Swift) at the OpenStack conference. Great questions all around.

Major points were:

• Offer storage alongside other other services not as a standalone service.
• Take advantage of fault tolerance by using lower-cost, commodity equipment. Hardware for a petabyte of durable storage can be had for $750,000.
• Build a cross-functional team to deal with system design, software development and operations.

Also see my post on the cloudscaling blog: OpenStack Object Storage basics Q&A

It seems like this might be the case at Cloudscaling, which provides consulting and design services for organizations looking to build their own cloud architectures. Since launching in late 2009, Cloudscaling has helped three providers launch clouds, and has provided consulting services for VMware and Engine Yard on some of their cloud efforts. It also helped Internap build its OpenStack-based cloud-storage offering, which became available in January. Further, Bias himself has become an outspoken, respected and occasionally controversial member of the cloud community, which certainly doesn’t hurt draw attention to a startup company.

Although large vendors such as IBM (s ibm) and HP (s hpq) have their own cloud consultancy businesses, there aren’t a lot of third parties providing this type of service for large-scale cloud deployments. But it’s an important business — despite vendors claims to that effect, clouds aren’t always as easy as plug-and-play, especially if organizations want to achieve efficiency levels on par with those experienced by Amazon Web Services (s amzn) and other leading cloud providers. The open source OpenStack platform also provides a potentially rich source of income for Cloudscaling — as its Internap win illustrates — because although the open-source cloud computing software is attracting lots of attention, it doesn’t have any formal support mechanism (although Rackspace (s rax) has suggested it will get into that racket).

New Cloudscaling CEO Grant has held various product management and marketing roles with Apple, Sun Microsystems and Documentum, as well as a stint as executive in residence at Red Rock Ventures.

Image courtesy of Flickr user thisisbossi.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

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I just gave a talk at the OpenStack Conference on deploying the Object Storage, Swift. Here are the slides! Click through to slideshare if you want to read the speaker notes.

Thanks goes to Val Beck with the slide designs! Thank you!

Rackspace is not in the game to sell ‘cloud-in-a-box’ software to service providers. For this strategy to be successful, they have to explicitly not offer a paid version of CloudStack. For a community to catch hold, an ecosystem of service providers, hardware vendors, infrastructure software providers and cloud systems integrators must have a stake in the outcome.

Rackspace is behind Amazon’s AWS in the infrastructure-as-a-service space. As a new crop of competition enters the market over the next few years, Rackspace had to make a move to begin leveling the playing field for infrastructure clouds. Time will tell if Rackspace’s “cast a wide ecosystem net” strategy will out-maneuver Amazon’s closed approach.

It should be a fun ride.