In April, we started a blog series called the “GoGrid Cloud Survey Report” where we highlighted findings from over 500 IT professionals, developers and CTOs. This series covered the industry’s perspective on everything from “What is Cloud Computing?” to “How do you use Cloud Computing?” and “What Operating Systems do you use in the Cloud?”. Today’s article marks the final installment to the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report, but we saved the most intriguing question for last…

What are the biggest barriers to deploying the cloud?

Yes, cloud computing has been one of the hottest technology trends in recent years, but it’s also been met with controversy. Many companies have yet to make the switch to cloud computing, and we wanted to know what our 500 IT professionals thought were the biggest barriers to deploying infrastructure in the cloud.

And can we really call “cloud computing” a trend? Analysts say that the addressable market for Infrastructure as a Service is estimated to be $1.8 billion. And this is part of a Global IT Market of $2.5 trillion. But barriers aside, cloud infrastructure has proven potential to drive companies to success via a re-optimization of resources and re-allocation of IT spend.

Let’s look at each of these categories a bit more closely:

Other – The majority of our respondents suggested that the largest barrier to entry was due to technical understanding, lack of imminent need or other internal reasoning. However, given that every company’s infrastructure requirements are unique (a “cloud fingerprint”), concerns, obstacles and uncertainties vary from company to company, and this explains why the “other” category is larger than others.

Knowledge – Like all new technology, there is a learning curve and many businesses are apprehensive to switch to a technology they aren’t as familiar with. But as businesses move along the hype cycle to an established practice and as cloud computing becomes increasingly commoditized, end-users’ knowledge grows and the cloud becomes more accepted not as an alternative to traditional IT but rather a complete replacement.

Cost and or Time – Having your own hardware or a data center to run your own infrastructure costs a lot of time and money. Many companies don’t switch to cloud computing because the want a return on their current infrastructure investments, or because they are simply so entrenched with their traditional IT, that they simply cannot justify a migration. The cost/time barrier, however, should be evaluated closely as a cloud migration could actually be much more feasible, realistic and less expensive than companies actually realize.

Control – Many businesses feel that they have more control if they manage their own infrastructure as opposed to outsourcing it to a cloud computing vendor. With the cloud, you still do have the ability to manage your own infrastructure, but in a more abstracted way. However, if the desire is to manage the racking and stacking of servers, networking and cabling, power and fire suppression as well as security, you will have more “control” (and associated costs) if you do it yourself.

Security – This is one of the most contested criticisms of cloud computing. The reason is that if businesses are sharing resources on a multi-tenant environment they are more susceptible to security risks. The reality is, cloud computing is potentially more secure than doing it yourself. For more details on the security side of cloud computing, please download our Security white paper.

Cloud computing is definitely here to stay, and is the fastest growing sector of the IT industry. Having a clear understanding of what the biggest barriers are is vital for cloud vendors so we can help further educate and innovate to bring the most reliable, affordable and secure solutions to the IT industry.

What do you see as the biggest barrier of adoption of cloud computing?

For a full list of questions and to see all the results, please download the Cloud Survey Report.

In this blog post series, I want to take a closer look at a storage technology called Gluster File System, and how it can be set up (this article), connected to (article #2) and expand storage (article #3). This is the first blog post of the series and I will review what GlusterFS is, why you would consider using it, and how to deploy it using the GoGrid GlusterFS Partner GSI.

GoGrid offers a great storage solution called Cloud Storage. But what if you want to deploy your own storage so that you can directly control performance and redundancy? What software would you use to provide this? The simple answer is Gluster. It is a powerful software-based storage solution that offers a centralized controlled storage pool management system that is very easy to use.

There are many different ways to take advantage of the GlusterFS storage solution. (Note: in the descriptions below a “brick” is a GoGrid Virtual Server.)

1. Distributed Volumes:

“Distributed volumes distribute files throughout the bricks in the volume. You can use distributed volumes where the requirement is to scale storage and the redundancy is either not important or is provided by other hardware/software layers.” – Gluster.org

2. Replicated Volumes:

“Replicated volumes replicate files throughout the bricks in the volume. You can use replicated volumes in environments where high-availability and high-reliability are critical.” – Gluster.org

3. Striped Volumes:

“Stripes data across bricks in the volume. For best results, you should use striped volumes only in high concurrency environments accessing very large files.”

These storage volume options seem very familiar, don’t they? Well, if you are familiar with the different RAID configurations of hard drives in server deployments, you will notice similarities with these options. For example, the “Distributed Volume” for Gluster is essentially a RAID 0. You sacrifice redundancy to gain superior performance and ease of capacity scaling.

The Replicated Volume is similar to a RAID 10 or RAID 1 where data integrity, redundancy and reliability are very important. However, the cost to scale is more since you need to basically add GoGrid Virtual Servers (bricks) in pairs to maintain the Replicated Volume structure.

The Striped Volume is similar to RAID 5 where data is striped across the GoGrid Virtual Servers (bricks). This comes in very handy when you are dealing with very large files (multiple GB files) and when the file is accessed multiple servers will stream the data to the web-server needing the file – offering very fast reads.

For my blog post, I am going to configure a 4 server Distributed Volume Gluster setup using the GoGrid Gluster Partner Image. I am going to deploy 4 x 8GB Gluster servers. Each Gluster server will have 384GB of storage available. In the Distributed Volume setup (similar to RAID 10), I will have 384GB x2 worth of space equaling approximately 768GB of usable space.

First step is to deploy the 4 new GoGrid Gluster Virtual Servers using the GoGrid Partner GSI. I log into my portal and then follow the next steps:

1. Click “Add”

2. Choose “Cloud Server”

3. Filter for “Gluster” & choose that image

4. Accept the Terms

5. Fill in the server information (name, public IP, description, memory allotment)

6. Repeat this process 3 more time but using different server name and public IP address.

Once you have all 4 of your new Gluster servers deployed, you can then view the Support → Passwords page in your portal to find the login information. With this login information, you can run this command from your local Linux workstation to change the hostname, set the private IP address and reboot each system. Run the following Bash script from your Linux workstation. The script will prompt you for the server address and root login, and also ask for the hostname and private IP address/netmask you want to use. If you don’t want to use this script, simply log into each system manually, update the host names and private IP addresses, and then reboot.

https://github.com/sepulworld/Remote_Linux_System_Update/blob/master/system_update.sh

I should now be able to log into all 4 systems and see the appropriate hostnames and IPs on each.

This looks good – if you don’t see the right hostnames or IPs on one or more of the systems, double check what is configured in the /etc/sysconfig/network file and in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 file. Also, confirm if your host performed the intended reboot (this is necessary for the host name to update at the command line).

From one of your Gluster servers, confirm private network connectivity by pinging each of the other Gluster servers via their private IP addresses. See image below.

Once this has been confirmed, we can take a look and see if the Gluster process is already running. It is configured on this GoGrid Partner Image to start on boot.

Now I need to configure the trusted server storage pool. Basically, I log into just one of my 4 Gluster servers (I choose Gluster_1) and I run a single command to put each of the other 3 members into the trusted server storage pool.

[root@Gluster_1 ~]# gluster peer probe 10.129.151.107

See image here -

Next, I run the command to create the distributed volume using my 4 Gluster servers.

command: gluster volume create DataStore1 replica 4 transport tcp 10.129.151.105:/store1 10.129.151.98:/store2 10.129.151.108:/store3 10.129.151.107:/store4

You can name the directories anything you want. I used “store1” thru “store4”. You can also name the volume whatever you would like. I choose DataStore1.

Now let’s start the Volume with one simple command: gluster volume start DataStore1

And finally let’s view the volume information: gluster volume info DataStore1

Helpful link:

http://gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Main_Page

If you run into any issues or have questions about the Gluster Partner GSI, please email gogrid-beta@gluster.com

That is it! You have successfully deployed the GoGrid Gluster servers from the GoGrid Partner GSI and configured 4 of them in a new replicated storage volume. My next blog post will cover deploying a web-server and connecting to this new storage volume. The third and final post will cover how to scale your replicated storage volume on GoGrid.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3. Please let me know if you have any questions.

When most people hear the phrase “operating system in the cloud” they usually think of a really cool client-side, Web-based desktop like EyeOS or CloudMe or even Chromium OS. Perhaps that is the future of client operating systems, but when cloud infrastructure providers talk about operating systems, they are making reference to which OS your cloud infrastructure will run on. And, it’s not always limited to just one in many cases.

At GoGrid, we provide a variety of operating systems including:

• Windows Server
• Ubuntu
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Debian
• CentOS

Operating systems in the cloud are very important because they are what your applications and infrastructure are built upon. Whether you’re using the cloud to deploy test & development environments, act as your data center or run your company’s business critical applications, the operating system plays a vital role in cloud infrastructure.

Most IT professionals are pretty passionate about what operating system they prefer. For instance, search for “Windows vs. Linux” on Google – over 109 million results have some sort of opinion on the topic. But, since actions speak louder than words, we wanted to determine which operating system was used more by the IT industry.

In early 2011, as part of the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report, we polled over 500 CTOs, developers and IT professionals and asked them a variety of questions regarding cloud computing trends, best practices and use cases. Because there is such a wide variety of operating systems that serve different use cases, we decided to ask: Which OS do you use for your critical business applications?

The numbers exceed 100% because most businesses use several different server operating systems to run their critical applications (businesses either run several physical, virtual or mixed environments to accomplish this). When we look at the results, it isn’t terribly shocking that Windows Server is used by 80% of the sample – they’ve been dominating the server scene since Windows Server 2003 or earlier. However, the amount of Linux and Solaris servers is much higher than anticipated. In fact, if you do a search of various Linux distros, you can see how Ubuntu, for example, is making huge advances in the space.

Just last year, ZDNet shared stats from the International Data Corp. (IDC) that found 73.9% of servers were Windows and only 21.2% of servers were Linux based. Perhaps our 2011 survey data is showing Linux use in the cloud is on the rise.

Do you have any strong thoughts or opinions about operating systems in the cloud? Which server operating system do you use? How do you think cloud computing will affect server operating systems? Does the Operating System even matter? We look forward to your responses.

With only one more blog post left in the series, the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report is coming to a close. Our next post will also be our last survey results article, but it covers the most interesting cloud computing question thus far: Why aren’t you using cloud computing? Stay tuned…

For more information on our survey methodology or to see all of our results, please download the Cloud Survey Report.