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.

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.

Whether you’re a small, medium or enterprise company using cloud solutions, using secure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a must. A couple weeks ago I shared some survey data showing you the average security and compliance requirements from professionals in the IT industry. The results of the survey clearly shows that security is a forethought for most businesses, but just like the term “cloud”, “security” can be a bit of a buzz word if not given proper context.

When thinking about security and potentially compliance within an IT environment, there are a lot of important items to consider; some of these can be “offloaded” to your provider, but others are your own undertaking completely. Start by asking yourself the following questions:

1. Who is your “customer”? – Is your customer, your end user? Or is it your internal organization? More than likely, it is both. Do these “customers” require different levels of security? If so, what are they?
2. What level of security is “acceptable”? – This varies from company to company. Some organizations like healthcare or government must adhere to extremely strict security (and compliance) requirements, while other businesses might have more leeway when it comes to protecting their assets.
3. Who in your organization is responsible for security? – Is there a particular team that is tasked with not only determining the security requirements, but also maintaining and auditing those requirements and activities over time?
4. Is physical security required? – Do you need to physically audit and control your environment? Remember, while clouds are highly virtualized or abstracted, the providers are physical entities. Does your cloud environment need to be physically isolated from other cloud environments? (If so, you might want to consider a Hosted Private Cloud)
5. Does your company have their security best practices carefully documented? – If they do, you should review it with a critical eye to ensure that it reflects changes in technologies.

To the last point above, the most important philosophy for businesses to understand is that security isn’t a destination – it is a process that takes constant iteration and innovation. Regardless what cloud provider you use (or even if you use traditional in-house infrastructure), this mentality is important to maintaining infrastructure security and compliance.

There are two core levels where security is critical:

1. Your Cloud (or hosting) provider
2. Within your organization

As most hosting or cloud organizations build their business around providing secure services, you would think that this would be a no-brainer. For the most part, it is, provided that you do choose a reputable vendor whose core competency is focused on delivering these services. However, many security failures actually happen because a customer stopped at that point and merely assumed that because they chose a secure provider, that all threats would be neutralized. If you don’t set up security best practices WITHIN those environments, you could be leaving your infrastructure vulnerable. Remember, your security is only as good as the best practices your organization implements.

Assuming that you have implemented these best practices, achieving compliance is much more straight forward. Compliance, as I mentioned, does depend on the vertical and your business and what that industry requires, so there is no clear-cut golden checklist of things you should do that can be boiled down into just a few bullet points. However, doing your research and documenting the process is a great first step.

Even if you have selected a cloud provider with a deep commitment to security, it is also important for businesses to understand what hardware and software components are necessary to protect their data.

In order to help businesses learn about security and compliance in the cloud, GoGrid created a white paper entitled, “Cloud Infrastructure Security and Compliance,” which is a primer for explaining security architecture, data security and role-based user management. If you have any doubts or questions about security in the cloud, this free white paper is a great source of information that can bring more clarity.

Download the Cloud Infrastructure Security & Compliance Whitepaper

Last week, the 4th annual GigaOM Structure conference was held in Northern California and GoGrid was part of the show in many ways not only as a sponsor but also active in a variety of panels. This was our 4th Structure conference that we attended and 3rd that we have sponsored…so I guess you can say that we have been there from the start and support the efforts of the GigaOM team. Structure is GigaOM’s “flagship conference on Cloud Computing and Internet Infrastructure” and we have seen the conference grow from a single day to this year’s two day sold-out conference.

What struck me and my colleagues most about this show is the professional and technical level of the attendees. This was not a show of cloud or IaaS “tire kickers”, these were people and businesses who knew their stuff about cloud computing and who were bringing value to the cloud (not diluting the term “cloud” like we are seeing in the mainstream media, in TV commercials and elsewhere). This was a partnership-making event. You could just feel the deals being drafted out in the hallways between sessions.

(image source: GigaOM)

But Structure 2011 was also an educational event, with carefully chosen speakers and panels providing thought-leadership ideas and commentary to a captive audience. I’m not going to discuss each and every session in this article, simply because GigaOM already has that covered. However, because GoGrid was an active in the event, I did want to provide a brief recap of two sessions that we were part of:

• “Dedicated, In More Ways Than One: The IaaS Panel”
• “The What, How and Why of Secure SaaS Delivery – GoGrid and Orange Business Services Discuss the Hosted Private Cloud as the Enabler”

The IaaS Panel was hosted by Paul Miller, Founder of Cloud of Data. On the panel with Paul was our very on John Keagy, Executive Chair and Founder of GoGrid; Chris Pinkham, Co-Founder and CEO of Nimbula; and Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer. You can watch the full panel discussion in the video below.

More businesses are demanding dedicated infrastructure (not sharing hardware with other tenants) on the grounds that it is more secure and offers better performance. The panel discusses the merits of this reasoning and highlight the fact that you aren’t getting the true benefits of cloud computing using solely dedicated hardware. While public clouds, as multi-tenant environments, may make more sense financially, it’s still met with trepidation from “hardware huggers”. The speakers all believe that dedicated infrastructure will grow over the next 5 years, but will ultimately serve as a gateway to public and private cloud infrastructures.

The panel also talks about the mentality towards applications. For so long, developers were adamant about which hardware and operating systems they built their applications on. Now the types of cloud and OS aren’t as important as they used to be. The experts claim that cloud computing users should focus on the application and need to find solutions that best meet the needs of that application.

Finally, the video highlights and discusses the current trend away from virtualization – John Keagy even declares that, “The party is over for virtualization,” essentially, that cloud computing is not virtualization alone. As John states, the type of virtualization software that is used by a cloud provider usually doesn’t matter (unless it is costly to the vendor and that mark-up is passed on to the end-user – my side note) when the customer is shopping for a cloud and it will matter even less in the future. (For those interested, GoGrid uses opensource Xen and a proprietary management layer.)

The GoGrid and Orange Business Services Workshop was a question and answer panel moderated by Paul Miller. Panelists were: Lee Cardona – Director, Orange Business Services, Michael Mascia – Director, Technology Partners, Platform Engineering and Development, Orange Business Services, Mario Olivarez – VP of Products, GoGrid and Jeffrey Samuels – CMO, GoGrid. GoGrid and Orange recently implemented a private cloud using GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud service. Soon, GoGrid will be releasing the Orange Case Study which goes into more details of the reasoning behind Orange choosing GoGrid as their solution provider.

Did you attend or watch the livestream or recorded videos of Structure 2011? I would love to know what you thought of the event, the content, the speakers, the sessions and what you gained from it.

GoGrid is “suping up” its CPU architecture. Within the next few months, we will be rolling out new infrastructure using next-generation Intel microarchitecture, specifically the Nehalem 5500 line. Recently, we have been running a series of internal tests as we evaluate Intel’s new multi-core performance as enabled within these CPU chipsets.

Nehalem & GoGrid

I spent some time with Telemachus Luu, GoGrid’s Director of Business Strategy, and a senior-level GoGrid cloud architect in order to better understand what this means to GoGrid and its customers. I won’t bore you with overly technical details, if you do have any technical questions about the Nehalem processor or how GoGrid will be using it, please feel free to leave a comment on this post.

There are three main items that were outlined to me, specifically:

1. Increased Memory Bandwidth – For GoGrid users who have larger Virtual Machines that are processing a great deal of data (e.g., financial analysis or large database queries), those users will see a definite benefit with better memory handling.
2. HyperThreading – By utilizing HyperThreading, GoGrid is able to provide a better ratio of CPU processing elements (in the form of cores or threads) to our customers. This means that under heavy VM CPU loads, the scheduling latency improves.
3. Extended Paging Tables (EPT) – By using Extended Paging Tables and architecting appropriately, some of the critical memory management work that would have been done in the software layer can now be largely performed within the hardware itself.

However, in my discussions, I also picked up some other interesting tech tidbits that make a lot of sense. For example, there is a definite advantage of using the HT/Virtual Cores of the Nehalem processor versus just throwing in other older chipsets. You can, for example, get 30% “more” out of a virtualized core that uses only 5% more silicon than you can by simply adding more physical CPUs. Also, you can pack more cores (physical and virtual) within a server using the Nehalem than you could with the previous generation Intel chipsets.

Want More Info about the Nehalem?

Intel has provided a very nice Flash demonstration of the new benefits of the Nehalem chipset. (Click on the picture below to launch the demo.)

Regardless, moving GoGrid to the Nehalem Microarchitecture makes good business and technology sense from our perspective, and GoGrid users will see a performance bump for those VMs deployed on Nehalem GoGrid nodes.