2010 Prediction: Dave Demlow, Double-Take Software
2010: Looking Into the Clouds
In 2010 we will see increasing interest and activity around cloud provided infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providing on-demand, pay as you go access to scalable compute and storage infrastructure. Clearly IaaS will not be the only area where services will be provided by the cloud, but it’s getting so much attention because it is a model that can be easily understood by most people, can evolve from and work with existing enterprise applications and architectures and can be quickly and easily trialed in low risk areas such as test or development and expanded incrementally. In addition, there are already a surprising number of providers to choose from with similar but differentiated service offerings and pricing models that can meet a variety of market needs.
I say IaaS is easily understood because when it comes right down to it, it’s all about virtual machines which by now are very well understood. Package up your operating system and application stack into a nice portable container, and run that container on a shared infrastructure but isolated from other workloads sharing the same infrastructure. The next logical question is whether to own the all the infrastructure to run those containers, which depends on the nature and longevity of the workloads, the utilization of existing infrastructure, geographic constraints (sometimes), compliance, legal issues, management preference, and of course, cost. I expect for the foreseeable future that most companies will want to have a mix of internal and external infrastructure to meet the changing needs of various workloads.
As a software developer, and particularly as the developer of software commonly used to replicate, failover and recover these “workload containers” (whether they are already virtualized or not) from one geographic location to another, we have been very early cloud watchers and users ourselves.
In addition to the test and development benefits that most software companies can receive by utilizing cloud infrastructure resources to run virtual machines in the cloud at least for peak demand times or special ad-hoc projects, being able to test things like cross country or trans-Atlantic data replication using virtual machines distributed across multiple clouds, purchased just for the time we are using them is fantastic. Of course, it also makes you start to think about many other possibilities.
Within a datacenter or corporate WAN, there are tools like ours available that can continuously backup and failover workloads on physical or virtual servers into virtual machines (P2V and V2V failover) in different locations for disaster recovery and high availability. If IaaS can allow me to run virtual machines and standard operating systems and applications, can I use it as a recovery site and actually failover workloads from my datacenter to the cloud? Sure, with the right networking and technologies, it’s certainly possible (and available). Coincidentally this mirrors the same thought processes and customer adoption that we saw early on when server virtualization itself was first limited to test environments, then moved to disaster recovery which gave people the confidence to start moving production workloads into their virtualized infrastructure.
