Let's Prove GigaOM Wrong On Enterprises + Clouds

On Tuesday, GigaOM published 10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud.

I personally think the title is somewhat misleading. It would have been more appropriately named “10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Take Their Entire In-House IT Operations to the Cloud.” The difference is huge. Enterprises can totally trust the cloud to perform certain operations. Massive data crunching tasks that need to run occasionally are perfect for this.

There is a single reason why we don’t hear more about enterprises adopting clouds (yet!) - it’s not that easy. First of all, if we have a massive dataset to run through a computation cycle, this dataset first needs to be transferred somewhere where cluster nodes can get to it. In case of Amazon Web Services,S3 is where one could put it. But before we can transfer the data, we need to extract it from the source (database, data warehouse etc). This can be easier said than done.

Once the dataset is ready, a number of cluster nodes need to be started - you need an AMI and a private communication mechanism for your instances. You also will need discovery tools, because EC2 assigns dynamic IP addresses and without discovery, your cluster nodes will not be aware of each other. And these are only high level steps…

So, if you are an enterprise and you would like to show GigaOM that you do trust the cloud, are you on your own to make it all happen? I happen to know the answer. I work for company called CohesiveFT and our Elastic Server platform can help you in several important ways. Firstly, remember that first step of extracting the dataset from your internal system? How would you feel if I told you that you can skip this step - instead you can set up a private virtual network between your Amazon EC2 instances and your corporate datacenter so that cluster nodes can access the data source directly? If you are interested, check out our VcubeV multisourcing technique. It will also help you sort out the problem of dynamically assigned IP addresses (hint: VcubeV virtual IP addresses can be static).

Secondly, you can use Upload Your Package feature to easily embed your home-grown software to be included in every cluster node. You will save quite a lot of time if you use a nice web GUI to assemble your cluster node instead of building and bundling an AMI manually. Patch management will also be easier - consider a couple of clicks to upload a new version of software and rebuild the server, vs. repeating entire bundling process from its very beginning.

And finally, Elastic Server On Demand can launch your servers in EC2 as easily as it can build a vmware image of exactly the same stack for you to test locally.

If you are an enterprise looking for help to get started in the cloud, you now know where to find us.

Categories: cloud-computing |