Plutomic combines local support with global reach for Philadelphia cloud users

Founded in 2005, Plutomic Hosting is a great example of how hosting companies can use OnApp to create cloud services that are highly tuned to the needs of their local market, and help their clients extend their reach whenever they need to with OnApp's federated CDN.  

We spoke with co-founders Andrew Westfall (CEO) and Ben Chiapetta (CTO) about their cloud business, and their experience building and running services on OnApp. Check out the video for the full story!

"We target premium cloud and colocation clients in the Philadelphia metro area. We look for small to medium businesses that are in need of a reliable cloud hosting solution," Andrew explains.

"We’re also one of the only OnApp providers in Philadelphia, so for customers looking to deal with somebody more locally… that is the main value add, that’s what they love about us, that’s why they stick with us," adds Ben. 

Plutomic was founded on these principles, on the idea that a hosting company should have a closer working relationship with its customers. This is one of the most important ways that cloud providers like Plutomic can differentiate themselves and compete with larger vendors, by offering a more compelling alternative for their customers - "because they can reach us when they have a problem. They know who they’re dealing with. They know that we’ll help them. They know they can rely on us," says Ben Chiappetta.

"One of the best parts about OnApp is just the simple use of it. Especially with the control panel, the way everything is laid out. Everything just kind of works. It’s very reliable... for clients to learn the platform, it’s very easy, even coming from one of the other competitors," he says.

Plutomic's cloud is aimed squarely at customers who want the simplicity of a VPS service, but with the benefit of instant scalability, fault tolerance, utility billing and other cloud features. Its cloud services start from $30 a month, and include Continuous Data Protection from Idera and Sitelock website security, as well as OnApp CDN.

"The Content Delivery service from OnApp is amazing," says Andrew Westfall. "It lets you get into so many different points of presence around the globe for a very low introductory fee, for anybody to put their data anywhere in the world."

For more information about Plutomic cloud hosting, visit http://www.plutomic.com/cloud.php.

The real question is, how do you decide which is which? When it comes to 'the cloud' - a subject fraught with contradictory definitions, hype, rhetoric and FUD - it gets even harder.

That's why we launched Cloud Leaders.

http://cloudleaders.net | #cloudleaders | cloudleaders@onapp.com

What is Cloud Leaders?

Google 'cloud' and you'll get an awful lot of dross about buzzwords, and companies with vast marketing budgets. You won't find that here.

Cloud Leaders is about the quiet revolution, the companies bringing cloud services to people all over the world. The hosting companies, telcos and service providers making the cloud happen. The companies who are, belatedly, just starting to get noticed.

Cloud Leaders is not about us. It's about best practice in cloud service delivery, and helping service providers make the transition to the cloud. It's about practical advice. It's about sharing the experience of the companies who've quietly been blazing a trail to bring the best possible cloud experience to their customers - and how you can do the same, too.

So what does Cloud Leaders give you?

The view from the ground

Through Cloud Leaders we're determined to bring you the best possible advice and experience. Best practice, pure and simple. We couldn't do that without the help of companies who have managed to build successful cloud businesses, in spite of the hype, FUD and confusion.

Throughout our Cloud Leaders content we're featuring the real-world experiences of Companies That Are Actually Doing It. Companies like eApps, Shift to the Cloud, SlicedTech and Ubiquity Servers - with many more to come.

The view from the top

It won't come as a surprise that there are plenty of analyst firms talking about cloud. For Cloud Leaders, we're privileged to have contributions from analysts who've focused on practical advice, not just blue sky thinking. We're launching with six different reports, and there are plenty more coming if you register for updates at the Cloud Leaders site. Here's a quick run-down...

Cloud

We kick off with a series of reports based on detailed research from the Cloud Spectator team, which look at everything you need to consider when you're building a new cloud hosting business.

For service providers used to the comfortable world of dedicated, shared and VPS hosting, cloud hosting is quite a different animal. It's a different business model, and it poses a few challenges.

Such as, how do you package cloud services when there are so many variations? How do you price them? How should you market them? What kind of infrastructure should you be building on?

The Cloud Spectator team researched many providers around the world to assess the state of the market and provide some useful pointers for your own cloud best practice. Using this research, Cloud Leaders will look at a range of topics in more depth, starting with pricing and packaging your cloud services. 

Storage

We also have some great pieces from storage veteran George Crump, and the team at Storage Switzerland, which dive straight into the biggest headache of all for cloud providers: What To Do About Storage.

To start with, George breaks down the pros and cons of legacy SANs for cloud providers in a new report called How Legacy Storage Breaks The Cloud (or, as we've summarized, it Cloud vs legacy SAN). Not content with that, he went on to discuss a different approach to storage for cloud providers, which he describes as Cloud Defined Storage.

George is insightful and concise, and you can get both reports for free from the Cloud Leaders site. Check them out.

CDN

Completing the holy trinity of cloud, storage and CDN we have a couple of practical, can-do articles from Netforecast's Rebecca Wetzel. Netforecast is an analyst firm that focuses on network-centric applications and as a result, covers CDN extensively.

Cloud Leaders gives you instant access to Netforecast reports that take on one of the biggest questions facing cloud providers looking for a way to compete with AWS: why you should sell CDN services, and how you should go about it.  You'll find both reports on the Cloud Leaders site.

What do you think?

That's just the start. You can play a role in Cloud Leaders, too, by answering the most important question of all: what do you think?

Check out http://cloudleaders.net, and whether you agree or disagree - tell the world. If you know better, we'd love to hear from you. If you have some deep insight into cloud technology, or you've built a cloud service on your own terms - even if you just had a crazy idea - we want to know.

You can Tweet us with the #cloudleaders hashtag. If you don't have 140 characters in change, mail cloudleaders@onapp.com and give us the full story.

Guest blogs, Q&As, video interviews - everything's possible. If you believe you have a leading position on anything to do with public cloud, get in touch!

Join us...

We're really excited about the Cloud Leaders program. Cloud is undoubtedly the way most IT will be delivered and consumed, and it's high time the world recognized the importance of traditional service providers in this market. Companies like AWS and OpenStack might get the headlines, but for the vast majority of businesses, it's local service providers that are the unsung heroes of the cloud.

Whether you're a user, a provider or an industry commentator, you can be part of this cloud revolution. Join the debate!

http://cloudleaders.net | #cloudleaders | cloudleaders@onapp.com

In my last post I outlined four strategies you could use, as an MSP, to counter the threat to your core business posed by global cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This time I’d like to take a closer look at the first of these - how to simplify the deployment of your cloud, and introduce the core features you and your customers will depend on, without unnecessary expenditure of time, energy and money.

The foundation of your cloud isn't necessarily where you add value. I think of it as an 80/20 rule. For the majority of cloud providers, about 80% of what you do is the same as everybody else - infrastructure as a service, based on pretty much the same hardware.

It's tricky to find a sustainable way to differentiate based on your infrastructure investment. It isn't impossible - high-end servers, datacenters, even disks can be way of offering a premium service - but the opportunities are thinner, more niche, and require more up-front investment. There are usually more lucrative ways to offer a USP as you go up the pyramid, from hardware at the bottom, to the service layer at the top, and that's something we'll look at in another article.

Before tackling that, however, there is plenty to do at the infrastructure layer, and it mostly happens at the level of your cloud management platform. There are a few things to consider. Here are some of the most important.

Open source, off-the-shelf or DIY?

Your business may its own preferences, because of IT strategy or culture, but I would suggest that one factor should override everything: time to market. If you don't have a cloud already, off-the-shelf is the only way to go.
You can't afford to spend 6 months building your own from scratch, even if you do have the development budget, and the same applies to clouds built with open source components. You should be thinking in terms of weeks, not months, because the market share is slipping away from you now.

If you already have a cloud platform - and let's face it, you probably offer at least one virtualization option for your enterprise clients - there are still strong arguments for investigating alternatives that can run alongside, and plug the gaps. The classic scenario is an MSP that offers services based on VMware, services that only a larger enterprise can afford. The maturity and feature set of the leading turnkey cloud platforms give you a way to create new tiers of cloud service, quickly and easily, and expand into other parts of the market.

Automation

Think lazy. There isn't much point running a cloud service that requires constant manual intervention, either from you or your customers. We're making that core 80% as easy as possible, and that means automating as much of the provisioning process, and as many of the day-to-day cloud management activities as possible.

A simple place to focus on this is the control panel for your cloud. Is it easy to customize and configure for your own unique take on the cloud? Is it easy to manage hypervisors and storage? To manage user permissions, and set up billing plans? Can you lock down functionality for different clients, or different users? Does it have a complete API?

The automation applies to customers too. Does it make it easy for them to order and configure their service? Can they automatically scale their own services too? This is often a point of contention. Moving from a fixed resource, plan-based kind of service model (with nice consistent revenues) might seem counterintuitive, but the ability to scale down as well as up is one of primary reasons people want to move workloads to the cloud. It's what your customers want, and giving it to them increases stickiness and loyalty.

Feature completeness

This is also related to time-to-market, since your aim is to avoid development time and seek a cloud platform that has everything you need, out-of-the-box. The obvious place to begin is with the core IaaS cloud management/cloud orchestration functionality. Knowing what to look for is worthy of a series of articles in itself, but a reasonable starting point would be the features offered by the cloud providers your customers are already moving to, whether it's local cloud hosting specialists, or companies like AWS.

Cloud management platforms have matured extremely quickly in the competitive public cloud arena, and features that may once have seemed advanced - particularly in areas like failover, autoscaling, self-provisioning and billing - should really now be considered as standard.

Wider horizons

So too should support for different cloud models. Public, private, VPS, hybrid - you should be looking for a platform that can work for different lines of business, and support different tiers of service - not one that handles "enterprise", and another for "SME", and yet another for services based on traditional dedicated servers. A successful cloud business squeezes as much value from its infrastructure investments as possible, by bringing as many services onto the platform as possible.

The increasing standardization of the core feature set has driven the inclusion, into cloud management systems, of new service areas that complement IaaS. These are features like storage, DNS, CDN, and as cloud providers bring more services together, there is exponential value in the ability to manage each of these services through the same portal.

Sometimes, this 'single pane of glass' approach is seen as a great way to cannibalize existing business in those other service areas. It isn't: it's a great way to maximize ARPU, Average Revenue Per User. You have to remember, it's a single pane of glass for your customers too: it makes all of your services more visible and accessible, and that always helps you sell more.

Both of these things should be on your cloud platform checklist: the scope of what it'll let you do, beyond simple IaaS; and the ease with which it lets you manage those additional service areas. We'll look at this in more detail in a future post.

This article first appeared at MSPmentor.net. 

Maybe we should talk about our new VMware support. That's at the top of the list for a lot of our customers. Perhaps it's the addition of video to our CDN (which, by the way, just hit 148 PoPs). Maybe it's our fantastic new control panel.

For a lot of cloud providers, though, OnApp Storage is the real highlight of v3.0. Ubiquity Servers is one of the first companies to build a new service around our distributed SAN, and as their CTO Clint Chapman says, "it's the addition of OnApp Storage that's the real game-changer here." We're inclined to agree, of course. But what it is that makes OnApp Storage so important?

'Designed for cloud providers'

OnApp Storage is designed for cloud workloads. It's designed to help cloud providers who've always struggled to find the right mix of performance, resilience, scalability and price with traditional, centralized SANs.

The price part is always important, but let's put that to one side for the moment. You get OnApp Storage bundled with OnApp Cloud, at no extra cost - so enough said. Scalability is important too, but again that's a pretty straightforward argument: with OnApp Storage, your SAN scales naturally as your cloud grows, because you're using your cloud infrastructure to deliver your storage.

Instead I'd like to focus instead on what distributed storage really means for OnApp Cloud providers: how it helps you make storage part of your cloud USP, by customizing it for the different needs of your customers. To understand why, we need to look at what a distributed SAN is, and how OnApp Storage works at a high level.

Building your distributed SAN

OnApp Storage lets you create a distributed SAN in your existing OnApp Cloud infrastructure. The basic components are the same: you have a controller server, which manages a number of hypervisor servers and hosts the OnApp Control Panel. However, instead of hooking up your cloud to a centralized SAN, you populate your hypervisors with additional physical disk drives. Those drives can be SSD, SATA or SAS devices.

The first step in setting up your distributed SAN is to identify which hypervisors (and their disks) you want to include in it. OnApp Cloud will automatically discover your hypervisor servers (that's another new v3.0 feature) and you just select the hypervisors you want with a few clicks in the control panel. 

Defining your storage service

So far so good. The next step is to create one or more virtual datastores in the OnApp Control panel, and assign disks from those hypervisors to each datastore. Datastores are categorized by performance, so you might create high performance, mid performance and lower performance datastores containing SSD, SAS and SATA disks, respectively. The disks in each datastore are distributed across multiple hypervisor servers.

Each datastore can have its own policies for striping, redundancy and overcommit percentage, too - and of course, its own pricing. All of this is set with a few clicks in the control panel.

Provisioning storage to customers

Now we get to the interesting part. When a customer sets up a virtual machine, you present them with storage options based on whatever datastores you have set up. For example, your 'turbo' package based on a datastore with high performance SSDs, 4 stripes and 2 redundant copies of data; or your 'slow but bulletproof' package based on SATA disks, with 4 redundant copies and no striping. Your pool of disks, of different types and sizes, can be sliced up however you like and presented to customers in many different ways - but with a single SAN in the back end, and a simple management GUI.

Behind the scenes is where the real magic happens. The customer's virtual machine is provisioned with a virtual disk (a vdisk), just as it would be with a traditional SAN in your cloud. However, OnApp Storage chooses which physical drives in the datastore actually handle the data for that virtual machine. 

• Which drives are chosen depends on how much available space they have, the number of vdisks already stored on each drive, and a few other factors. 
   
• How many drives are chosen depends on the striping and redundancy policy of the datastore used. For example, a vdisk on a datastore with 1 replica and 4 stripes will be stored across 4 physical disks. A vdisk on a datastore with 4 replicas and 4 stripes will have 16 physical disks as 'owners' of its content.

'VM-aware' optimizes performance

At the same time, OnApp Storage will always attempt to store a vdisk locally to its virtual machine - i.e. on a physical drive in the same hypervisor. It knows which virtual machine owns which vdisk, and on which physical disk that vdisk lives. This 'VM-aware' technology helps maintain a high throughput for cloud workloads - up to 95% of the speed of the disks you use, in fact - because a copy of the virtual machine's data is always stored locally to the virtual machine, whenever possible.

'Smart disks' increase resilience

Even cleverer is OnApp Storage's 'smart disk' technology, which is patent pending. As well as being aware of the relationship between virtual machines, virtual disks, physical disks and hypervisors, the system knows which physical disks hold copies of data and - crucially - can use that information to rebuild vdisks if a problem occurs with any of the physical copies.

This doesn't require a centralized management system - in fact, it depends on not having one. Instead the intelligence is on each physical disk. That's important for two reasons. Firstly, each physical disk in your distributed SAN is a smart, self-managing, self-discovering and self-contained unit. It can make decisions about data synchronization and load balancing, without depending on a central controller. Secondly, it means disks are hot-pluggable. You can move disks between hypervisors and preserve the integrity of the data they hold.

Adding value with your SAN

So, putting all of this together... how is our distributed storage different from traditional SANs?  If you're used to building cloud services with centralized SANs, it can be tempting to think about storage in a kind of binary way: it's either fast and expensive (and difficult to manage), or cheap and slow (and difficult to manage).

With our distributed SAN, however, you can start to think about storage from your customers' perspective, and design the storage part of your service to meet their needs.

You start with the basic performance characteristics of your disks; customize how much additional performance you'll offer to your users, by striping data across the SAN, and how much resilience you'll give them through redundant copies; and price and package the result.

You get a very simple way to manage your SAN through the OnApp control panel, as a seamless part of your cloud. Your customers can provision storage from as many different options as you care to give them. And behind the scenes the system takes care of performance optimization and data integrity, automatically.

With OnApp Storage, your SAN might be based on commodity hardware, but you don't have to provide boring commodity storage with your cloud. You get much more flexibility, and you can use your SAN to add real value to your clients.

Want to know more?

If you'd like more information or a demo, head over to our OnApp Cloud v3.0 page or get in touch!

For most MSPs, cloud services have been such an obvious step that they've just got on with it, without too much fuss, and without too much attention from the outside world - which is busy talking about the big brands like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

This disproportionate media focus is an important and worrying sign for MSPs. It isn't a sign of how much better the big guys are doing things. It's a sign of how much of a threat they really are for all service providers, managed or otherwise.

How do you avoid the race to the bottom?

The industry's finally waking up to the fact that Amazon has already established an almost unassailable position in cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Its growth is driven by convenience and price, and the same forces are contributing to the success of Google and Microsoft (to name just two examples) in Platform- and Software-as-a-Service. This is, or should be, core MSP territory.

With low cost, instant access to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS becoming the norm, the danger is that the shift to the cloud erodes not just your prices and margins, but the value of the M in MSP. The expertise you've created in your core domain - the value you've built painstakingly over the years - has been reduced to a simple cents-per-GHz equation.

So how do you mitigate that effect? How do you keep the value of your managed services business, and defend your turf as your customers head to the cloud?

The 80/20 rule

The starting point is recognizing that for the hardware fundamentals - your servers, CPUs, disks and datacenters - we really are talking commodities. RAM is just RAM. Storage is just storage. 

Your customers know this, or at least sense it:  that's also why it's so tempting to move apps to one of the big cloud providers. Wherever you host your apps, the underlying infrastructure is basically the same, and it's only going to get flatter and more commoditized as time goes on.

What does that mean for MSPs? You have to accept that about 80% of your cloud service is just a commodity, and that is not where you should try to differentiate. To use an old cliché, it ain't what you've got, it's what you do with it that counts. It's the 20% you build on top.

On the face of it, that might seem difficult when your customers are buying into the convenience and price of the big-name cloud providers. Since resources scale on demand, it's less obvious why customers need help speccing their service. Provisioning is automated, so it's less obvious why you need to pay someone to set it up for you. Apps, platforms and operating systems exist as ready-to-deploy templates, or simply in a browser. Monitoring, metering, billing and alerts - they're right there in the control panel, even in a no-frills, twenty bucks a month cloud.

Put the M back

So what can an MSP do to ensure their success as a cloud provider?

• Make the 80% as easy as possible. Since it's difficult to differentiate with your cloud infrastructure, choose a cloud platform that gives you that base 80% as quickly, easily and cost-effectively as possible. Cloud platforms are commoditizing too, and basic features like self-provisioning, billing, metering and failover are not something you should be spending time and energy on. If you have a 12-month plan to develop cloud features you can get off-the-shelf, you need to rethink that plan.
   
• Identify where that 20% really is. The real value of your managed cloud service lies in your specific expertise and service wrap. Focus on enabling your customers to migrate to the cloud: on specific products, platforms and technologies; on specific issues like security and compliance; and - perhaps surprisingly - on how you make basic cloud features actually work for your clients.
  
  For example, functions like failover and autoscaling, which any cloud should handle at the infrastructure layer: how do they benefit the apps your clients are using? How do they translate into business value, beyond generic scalable/reliable marketing messages? Building out this sort of competency will help you realize the promise of 'the cloud' for your customers, and raise you far above the Walmart cloud providers.
   
• Broaden your horizons. One of the biggest problems Amazon gives you is the range of products it can deliver to your customers. You can't afford to limit your cloud service to one flavor of virtualization, one set of apps or even just to private enterprise cloud.
  
  Your cloud should be a platform for multiple services, across everything from PaaS and SaaS to  storage and backup - and especially CDN. For cloud services to work the way your customers expect them to, you need an easy way to establish presence in countries and cities potentially all over the world. CDN broadens your horizons, adds huge value to customers (and their end users) and is a natural area for MSPs to expand into.
   
• Federate! The other big problem companies like Amazon give you is the sheer scale they can deliver to your customers. Even a large MSP will struggle to provide the kind of agility you get from a cloud provider that can spin up a few hundred servers on demand. Federated cloud is not just another cloud gimmick: it's the only way you can achieve that kind of scale without serious capital investment.

I'll explore these strategies in more detail in future posts.

This article first appeared at MSPmentor.net. 

Black Lotus

Black Lotus was one of the pioneers of Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) mitigation technologies in the U.S. They created the first commercially viable DDoS mitigation system in 1999, just weeks after the first known DDoS attacks.

Now Black Lotus offers a range of DDoS mitigation and DDoS-protected hosting services, including cloud servers and bare metal servers powered by the OnApp Cloud platform. The Black Lotus cloud features the company's patent-pending Human Behaviour Analysis (HBA) system.

We spoke to Black Lotus' president, Jeff Lyon, who explained how they're bringing DDoS protection to their cloud hosting customers. Check out the video for the full story!

“We came to OnApp because we have hosting customers, small-to-medium businesses, that require cloud instances – very simple, affordable clouds," he said. "But we also have enterprise customers who require Layer 7 DDoS mitigation, and we can power that through OnApp, by running our HBA engine in an OnApp cloud.”

Black Lotus' Human Behaviour Analysis (HBA) engine detects and blocks malicious connections in order to mitigate Layer 7 (application layer) DDoS attacks. Black Lotus now makes HBA and other DDoS mitigation technologies available as part of its cloud hosting service, running on the OnApp Cloud platform.

"With our HBA mitigation technology, we’re pioneering the case study," Jeff adds. "OnApp is not just for the hosting provider, it’s also for the enterprise, or it’s also for that hybrid company - the hosting company moving into the enterprise."

Black Lotus was recently named a finalist in the Government Security News 2012 Homeland Security Awards for its HBA technology. Its new DDoS-protected cloud services, featuring HBA, are available now.

Leading Canadian web host, BlackSun, has launched a new range of cloud hosting services powered by the OnApp Cloud platform.

BlackSun is promoting the launch of its new OnApp-based cloud service with a new $1.99 offer at http://www.cloudstuff.ca.

BlackSun already offers high quality shared hosting services, alongside dedicated servers, colocation services and VPS hosting based on VMware. Its new OnApp cloud service was created to enable customers to deploy virtual servers on demand, with pay-as-you-go hourly billing. BlackSun customers can now launch and manage their own cloud services through an intuitive web-based portal.

We talked to BlackSun's CEO Steve Rogoschewsky at this year's HostingCon about company's new cloud service. 

“Our customers were looking for an easy-to-use cloud based computing system where they could instantly deploy servers, and we found OnApp to be the best choice in this market,” he says. “They love the service, they love the fact that they can manage their servers with an iPad or their iPhone."

“We see a big movement now for our more technical clients to be able to control their systems, moving more from a managed type solution to a more hands-on solution, and OnApp fits that product perfectly,” Steve adds.

"Farthest from a faultline" 
Steve Rogoschewsky also talks about how the importance of reliability in its cloud platform. BlackSun services are hosted in a dual-redundant data center setup in Saskatoon, Canada, a location that offers a kind of natural resilience too.

“The nice thing about our location is that nothing ever happens there. We’re known as the web hosting company based farthest from a faultline,” Steve says.

BlackSun's new cloud website, http://www.cloudstuff.ca, joins http://dedicatedservers.ca and the core http://www.blacksun.ca site to give customers in Canada, and further afield, a range of hosting options backed by free technical support.

We've been so busy in the last couple of years, and time has flown by so quickly, that sometimes it's hard to believe that we have deployed well over 1,000 clouds for our customers. 

I'm pretty darn proud of how fast our platform has been adopted, and used to run such a huge range of public and private cloud services.

But, even with all those clouds out there, there is still one question we get asked more than any other. And that is... what's the optimal hardware spec for a cloud?

What is optimal, anyway?

What's 'optimal' is a hard question to answer. It varies a lot from client to client, since your requirements and target audiences are all different.

If you search back through our blog you'll see a post from quite a long time ago with some hardware advice, but that hardware shopping list is showing its age now. 

We have grown, and we've added loads of new products and new capabilities to our platform (like OnApp Storage). And the way our customers use OnApp Cloud has changed too. So it's high time for a new hardware shopping list! 

Get kitted up!

Our recommended OnApp hardware spec isn't definitive. It can't be, because even within a certain configuration (centralized SAN, integrated SAN, local storage) some of you will need a beefier environment than others.

But I think it's a great starting point, a kind of ballpark configuration that we've seen plenty of service providers use to build their clouds. 

Head over to our new hardware config page to check it out. You'll find 'starter' and 'advanced' hardware lists for three typical cloud set-ups.

I hope it helps, and don't forget - when you're planning your OnApp Cloud deployment, our integrations team will be more than happy to advise you on the exact spec you should be aiming for. They're pretty good at it. After all, they've helped build more than 1,000 clouds :]

Best, 
Carlos Rego
CVO, OnApp

The mothership landed at this week's Structure Europe conference, when OnApp CEO Ditlev Bredahl joined a panel led by GigaOM's Barb Darrow to talk about federated cloud, and whether it really can deliver.

With Ditlev were Tier 3's Mark Cravotta, Akamai's David Drai and CEO of Lyatiss, Pascale Vicat-Blanc. Barb started by asking the panel what factors they thought might be hindering faster take-up of cloud services.

What's holding you back?

Ditlev said that there were two main things service providers need to get right.

"One is, service providers need to accept that the people that are buying infrastructure from them might be people they don't know... because there is a mediator in the middle, they might actually hand over a server to someone who they have never met," he said.

"And you may think, if you have thousands of servers in your datacenter, that's already the situation. But I've been running hosting companies for many years, and we always had a pretty good idea what's going on in the datacenters."

"The other thing is even worse. Where the people buying the infrastructure have to buy it from someone they don't know. They haven't shaken hands with them, they haven't been to the datacenter tours."

How federated cloud works

In the federated cloud, cloud providers can buy capacity through a central marketplace in order to build global services for their customers. The marketplace is populated by other cloud providers looking to sell their capacity, and by subscribing to the locations they have datacenters in, you can make their remote infrastructure available to your local users.

It's good for providers: they can start to offer truly global cloud services that compete with the big guys, like AWS. It's good news for end users, too. They can do business with their local federation member, and pick the provider with whatever pricing/resource package/SLA or expertise suits them, and still get access to as much global cloud capacity as they need.

The federation mothership lands

Of course, this begged an obvious question: who manages the thing? Enter the federation mothership.

"If you build a proper federation, and you have one platform above it - internally we call it the mothership - " said Ditlev - "the mothership is the point of contact for the services that are being deployed."

"The mothership should be someone outside of the infrastructure," he explained. "The infrastructure should sit below. All the datacenters, the service providers, the telcos that are part of the federation, should have a single point of contact above them - a pane of glass that the end users, the consumers, which could be enterprises or whoever is consuming this infrastructure, should use as the point of contact. And then the mothership should deal with the failover, the SLAs."

"If built properly the federation actually helps you that way, because you're not that reliant on a single datacenter's performance any more. Because you have this abstraction layer, the mothership - you have this abstraction layer between the infrastructure and the services deployed on it."

Up, up and away

The discussion moved on to the old issue of data protection in the cloud. The panel discussed whether there is an inherent problem in the cloud for data that needs to remain within borders, to comply with local legislation. 

"There is this misconception that data is flying around because it's in a cloud," said Ditlev. "I've had so many cases where you've had to sit down with a client and explain..."

Ditlev talked at this year's cPanel conference about how data hates to move at all, much less flit from cloud to cloud. Migrating production data means downtime. It's complicated, it's time-consuming and expensive. If you're a service provider looking after that data there is no incentive to move it.

Ditlev gave that service provider's perspective. "I'm not going to move it out of that place unless you pay me a lot of money," he said. "We don't have clients that are going to start moving data around, just because it's sitting in this virtualized infrastructure that we now choose to call cloud."

Spooky data

The panel discussed plenty more, including the differences between cloud in the U.S. and Europe, and a surprising story about just what percentage of data the CIA considered sensitive enough to keep hidden in the basement.

The GigaOM guys have a stream of the federated cloud session up on their site, along with the rest of their Structure Europe coverage. Check it out!

Bigger. Better. Easier to use.

Version 3 is a major new release of our cloud software, the biggest since the first launch of OnApp Cloud way back in July 2010.

It's bigger. It's better. It's even more stable and easier to use. In total we had more than 1,000 individual development tasks, and we've added dozens of new features and hundreds of improvements.

It's the best version of OnApp Cloud yet, and you can try it right now by joining our beta program.

What's new in v3.0?

What do you add to the cloud platform that has (almost) everything? Well, the v3.0 beta includes plenty of goodies that will help you take your cloud services to a different level, in terms of automation, ease of use and completeness.

For example...

• We added support for a little virtualization technology called VMware. Now you can manage cloud services based on VMware ESXi/vSphere 5.0, as well as services based on Xen and KVM hypervisors, in the same integrated environment.
   
• Or how about Cloud Boot, a new way to provision hypervisors. Wheel in a rack, hook it up to your network, and OnApp Cloud automatically discovers and installs your HVs, saving a huge amount of time.
   
• As if that weren't enough, we have integrated OnApp Storage, our distributed SAN, so you can build high-performance storage for your cloud using local disks in hypervisor servers.
   
• Oh, and we completely redesigned the UI at the same time :] 

And that's just for the beta. There's plenty more coming when OnApp Cloud v3.0 reaches general availability towards the end of this year, including CDN video streaming and http push support. 

I have to say, I am just so proud of our dev team, our QA and product guys. It has been an amazing effort to take everything we imagined for version 3.0, and combine that with so many features and improvements our customers have asked for, and bring it together for this new release. As anyone in development knows, that moment when it comes together is a pure and beautiful thing, and - especially because of the effort I know our team has put in - I hope they are as proud as I am. 

Try the beta today!

We'd love you to try the v3.0 beta - everyone's welcome. If you're already an OnApp customer, you can start right away by logging into the OnApp dashboard and setting up your beta license. If you're new to OnApp, you'll need to set up a free dashboard account first. 

You'll find more information, datasheets, instructions and sign-up forms on our OnApp Cloud v3.0 beta page. Now let the testing begin!

Join the beta and try it today! »

Exabytes is a Malaysian web host with 60,000 customers in 121 countries - and it's one of the latest providers in the Asia-Pacific region to move to the cloud with OnApp.

Exabytes was founded in 2001, and serves customers at home, in small businesses, public sector organizations and large enterprises. It uses OnApp as its platform for a range of cloud hosting and CDN services, with pricing and features tailored for this diverse customer base.

Chan Kee Siak, founder and CEO of Exabytes, was kind enough to talk to our roving camera crew about why he chose OnApp. Check out the video for the full story!

“OnApp is the only cloud software we saw that is tailor-made for the hosting industry," he says. "It fits the hosting business model very well."

"Almost everything is 100 per cent automated with OnApp," he comments. "Services are set up almost instantly with the automation provided by OnApp at the back end. That really improves our bottom line. More importantly, to our customers the experience is seamless."

He also talks about our federated approach to CDN, and how it enables service providers like Exabytes to offer global CDN services without investing in new infrastructure around the world.

“Prior to OnApp only huge companies were able to offer CDN services, because you need 50 or more locations around the globe... huge investment is needed," Chan says. "However, by tapping into the resources available in OnApp's CDN federation, you can still offer 50 plus locations and compete with other CDN providers."

Our thanks go to Chan for his time. You can read more about Exabytes' cloud services here.

Get involved!
This is the latest in a series of customer interviews we're publishing throughout 2012. If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line!

So why are we redesigning it? The UI we introduced to the world in v2.0 was a radical departure from the complex and unwieldy tools that hosters and users were lumbered with, if they wanted to get into this whole cloud business. We wanted to make it easy for anyone to build a cloud, manage a cloud, and buy and use cloud services. And – if I do say so myself – I think OnApp Cloud v2.0 was a triumph of design and usability.

However, we’ve added a huge number of new features since v2.0 launched in July 2010, and, to be honest, the original design simply didn’t scale well. We ended up trying to display too much information in sections that were not designed to be so information-rich.

In short, we outgrew our UI. So, with v3.0, we wanted to give the system a refresh, make it more modern and clean, but still maintain the uniqueness of its look and feel. At the same time we wanted to implement a more scalable design to support future growth in features. And trust me, our to-do list is massive!

#1: the dashboard

The first screenshot is of the new dashboard. Besides Disk and RAM we now show CPU cores and IOPS for your cloud - the whole cloud, if you’re an admin, or your personal resources if you’re a user. Just like today’s control panel, everything you see in the 3.0 UI is determined by our extensive user role and permissions system.

Top right, you’ll see our new, always on "Build" section, which makes it even easier to deploy VMs, LBs and edge servers. And we have more comprehensive status information displayed in the logs.

Also note the new controls to expand the entire view, hiding the background, and to minimize the sidebar.

#2: build wizard

Our second screenshot is of the new wizard for "Build" operations, like creating a new VM. Instead of having to work through every option on a single screen, we have divided build operations into steps. This allows us to make the build process even more intuitive and user-friendly, with more details available on what is actually being done at each step.

As you can see, our new Template Store is also present on Step 1 of the Build VM operation. We have great plans for the Store in future, so stay tuned...

#3: VM management

It’s never been easier to manage your VMs! The new UI gives you quick access to the most important information and frequently used tools, while hiding away operations you need less frequently, so you don't feel cluttered. 

Gone are the tired (and fairly ugly) tools and actions menus in the current UI. We’ve replaced them with a new Tools button that gives you access to every function. There are even dedicated Admin and End User notes per VM. 

#4: CDN PoPs

We have so many new things coming on the CDN side in v3.0... and from a UI perspective, one of the most exciting is the new ability to visualize the PoPs you are choosing to power your CDN resource. The entire CDN section has been redesigned to be even more intuitive and easy.

And for now, that’s all I can share with you :] It's just the tip of the iceberg, and all of this new functionality is coming real soon.

We can’t wait to show you – and don’t forget, you can join the v3.0 beta and see for yourself, around the end of August!

Best,
Carlos, CVO

dynaCLOUD

dynaCLOUD is a new range of cloud services for German financial services companies, and one of the few ways German banks and insurers can host applications and data in the cloud in full compliance with the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG), Germany’s national data security legislation. It's the latest innovation from Dolphin IT Services, a German company with deep experience of application development and hosting for the finance sector. 

We caught up with Dolphin's CEO, Andreas Kunter to get the low-down on dynaCLOUD and to ask about his experience with OnApp. "It just works," he says. "We tried three other products and there were always some kind of problems, technical problems or contract problems... OnApp, it just works."

We also asked Andreas about our new distributed SAN, OnApp Storage: "Storage is the most expensive aspect of cloud hosting," he says. "The new product from OnApp, they are going another way, they are saying just use the capacity we have on the hypervisors, or just extend them, and use them in a distributed system - so no need to use storage systems. It is very interesting in regards to cost."

Check out the video for more detail! 

Get the full dynaCLOUD story
After shooting the video we spent more time with Andreas to discuss the growth in financial services cloud in Germany, what the dynaCLOUD team looked for in their cloud platform, and why - in spite of their extensive in-house development capability - they felt OpenStack just wasn't ready for prime time...

You can read the full story in our new dynaCLOUD case study (pdf, 779KB). 

Coming next
This is the latest in a series of customer stories we're publishing throughout 2012. Next time, we stay in Europe but hop across the border to The Netherlands. If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line!

CDN77.com

Using OnApp's federated CDN platform, CDN77.com has launched a global Content Delivery Network with more than 60 Points of Presence, without having to build infrastructure in each location. With OnApp, service providers can build custom CDNs by choosing from PoPs all over the world.  

CDN77.com's founder, Zdenek Cendra, spoke to us about his new CDN service, and what federated CDN really means for service providers and website operators.

"We started with 50 locations around the world from OnApp CDN," he says. "Each PoP is competitive advantage for us, and it's very easy - one click, and we have a new PoP in Asia."

CDN77.com aims to disrupt the legacy CDN market, targeting its service at website owners who in the past have had more limited options from vendors like Amazon, Akamai and EdgeCast. "We can provide better price, more locations, faster support and easy integration," says Zdenek.

CDN77.com offers global CDN services starting from just $4.90 for 100GB of data, with no commits, and offers a free 14 day trial with no credit card required. 

Check out the CDN77.com site for more information.

Next time...
This is the latest in a series of customer videos. Coming next: Dolphin's in the cloud in Germany!

If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line - especially if you're going to HostingCon...

Shift To The Cloud is the cloud hosting division of Stone Internet Services, one of Belgium's leading web hosts. The Shift team chose OnApp software to build a new range of cloud and CDN services. Just four months after launch, 50% of the company's growth was being generated by its OnApp-powered cloud. 

We spoke with Shift To The Cloud’s technical operations manager, Stein Van Stichel, and sales manager Marijn Willems, about their experience using OnApp software, the shift in the market from traditional hosting services to the cloud, and how OnApp software enables them to offer enterprise-class services at midmarket prices.

Check out the video and our longer case study article for more info.

“We are a local player, but OnApp gives our customers the same features they would expect from a global provider. That’s one reason we’re seeing growth from customers outside of our home territory,” says Stein Van Stichel. “Adding CDN services is going to be another important part of that growth.”

“OnApp enables us to offer an enterprise product at a midmarket price,” says Marijn Willems. “Shared hosting that is just based on a physical node, I think that will disappear.”

Check out the Shift To The Cloud website for a range of cloud server and virtual data center services!

The Shift To The Cloud team - is the cloud more fun in Belgium?

Next time...
This is the latest in a series of customer videos. Next time: how to build a global CDN business from scratch!  

If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line (especially if you're going to HostingCon...)

How to patch your Xen hypervisors

We have rebuilt our Xen RPMs to include the fix for this issue. These have been tested and are available on our repositories.

To update your Xen hypervisors, run the following command on each box:

yum update xen

The following packages will then be updated: 

xen-3.4.4-2.el5.onapp.3
xen-libs-3.4.4-2.el5.onapp.3

We recommend that you reboot your hypervisors after applying the fix. 

The fix is installed by default in a clean installation. 

More information

For more information or help with the fix, OnApp customers with a full license should contact support. Thanks!

World Online was founded more than 20 years ago, and offers a complete range of hosting, web design and Internet marketing services. As well as migrating its existing colocation customers to its new OnApp cloud, World Online also plans to expand into the education and healthcare sectors, including support for a Government initiative to make medical records and imaging data accessible to doctors anywhere in Brazil.

We spoke with Edison Ely, Co-Founder of Cloud on Demand, about his experience choosing and deploying OnApp Cloud software, and the significance of Brazil’s new cloud-based medical imaging project.

“We looked at different products on the market, and we chose OnApp because it was the best one for us. It’s simple, easy to use, and we had no problems installing it and maintaining it,” he says.“It does whatever we need to run our business.”

“We are launching first to customers that have physical hosting colocation, but we’re also looking at other verticals,” he adds. “The Government is investing in a nationwide system where any doctor in any part of Brazil is going to have access to your files... the application to do that is being developed by the Government, and we’re going to be installing that on the cloud.”

Next time...
This is the latest in a series of customer videos we'll be publishing over the next few weeks. Next time we shift to the cloud in Belgium... If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line.

Founded in 2008, *um was determined to be different from the outset. It focuses purely on the high end of the market. It offers tightly integrated hosting and professional services, and emphasizes quality above all else. *um now has more than 100 clients split about 50/50 between large multinationals, e-commerce sites and media agencies, and smaller Web 2.0 start-ups. 

At WHD in March we spent some time with *um's Director of Operations, Mario Apitz, to talk about *um's experience of cloud hosting, how they went about deploying OnApp Cloud, and how *um got its unusual name... Check out the *um video for more information!

We also spoke with CEO, Ravin Mehta, who talked about the shape of the German cloud market and why so many customers are turning to *um to consolidate cloud services from Amazon and other providers. You can read the full story in our *um case study.

“We evaluated other competitors in the cloud market, but OnApp seems to be the right tool for service providers,” says Mario. “OnApp means we can design services with solid failover and scalability in the backend, but package them in a way our users expect a cloud service to look and behave. It’s easy to use, but incredibly powerful.”

“The German market is fairly conservative about the cloud,” says CEO Ravin Mehta. “Our customers don’t buy into the hype – but they definitely buy the improvements in availability and scalability, and the ease of management. We have seen a noticeable growth in revenues since going live with OnApp.”

Next time...
This is the latest in a series of customer videos we'll be publishing over the next few weeks. If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line.

Founded in 2003 by CEO, Hamza Aboulfeth, Genious has grown steadily and now manages more than 5,000 domains for 2,500 clients, including www.hespress.com, one of the largest Moroccan newspapers, and http://www.hmizate.ma, Morocco’s largest coupons site. After an initial cloud deployment and migration of existing dedicated server customers to its new OnApp Cloud platform, Genious has just publicly launched a full range of cloud hosting and CDN services, powered by OnApp.

At this year's WHD.global event we sat down with Hamza to talk about his new cloud service and the unique challenges of hosting in the Moroccan market. Check out the video and our longer Genious case study for more detail.

“OnApp definitely answered our needs, because we had a large number of dedicated customers, and we were making a small margin on every client,” he says. “The margins for our dedicated server business were just too tight for the price points expected in our market."

"Moving to OnApp meant we could immediately decommission 60 or 70 dedicated servers,” he adds. “The thing that makes our clients willing to give it a try is they are actually paying less… they have high availability, high scalability, and the most important thing is they pay less.”

Our thanks go to Hamza for his time. He's an incredibly enthusiastic advocate of the cloud and hosting in general, and has a real entrepreneurial spirit - he was just 15 when he got started. There's a recent interview with Hamza at Wamda.com where he talks more about his business, and don't forget to check out the new range of cloud services at http://genious.net (French, English and Arabic versions available!)

Next time...
This is the latest in a series of customer videos we're publishing weekly for the next couple of months. Coming next... how to do high quality enterprise cloud, German style!

If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line.

eApps

Founded by three ex-'Big 4' consultants in 1986, eApps has continually reinvented its services to respond to the demands of the market - from IT services and consultancy in the 80s, through Lotus application hosting in the 90s, to today's range of cloud hosting, Java application hosting, enterprise collaboration, email and security services.

At this year's WHD.global event, eApps' President, Richard Lingsch, was kind enough to spend some time with the OnApp team (and a camera crew) to explain why they chose OnApp software, and how they are using their cloud to grow their business.

“Since we launched the OnApp cloud service we’ve been experiencing a steady growth, and not only are we attracting new customers, but the customers on our previous VPS service are migrating to the new cloud service,” he says.

"The people at OnApp know the hosting industry... they know what we need to compete."

CDN: the cure for latency

OnApp Cloud also gives eApps the opportunity to expand into new service areas, such as CDN - expanding the services available to customers, solving the inevitable latency issues you get working with a global customer base, and bringing new revenue streams into the company.

“We have customers in over 125 countries. Latency is a big issue, and CDN is the solution to the latency problem. And the fact that the CDN capability is built right into the OnApp system, is very important to us,” Richard says. “We love the pay as you grow model. It matches our expenses to our revenues and allows us to put sophisticated services out there easily and quickly, without making a huge financial commitment.”

Our thanks again to Richard. Check out the eApps site to learn more about their range of services. 

Next time...

We'll publish more of these customer videos each week. We hope you enjoy them. You can also find more customer stories and comments (including more about eApps) on our customers page. Next up, the cloud comes to Morocco!

If you're a customer and would like to get involved in future case studies, drop us a line. 

The issue in brief

A security firm, Context IS, examined a number of different cloud providers. They identified an issue where fragments of VM data could be accessed by another VM, after the first one had been deleted, because disk space wasn’t wiped before it was allocated to another user. Among the firms they tested were Rackspace and VPS.NET. Both providers have confirmed that they have updated their clouds to address the issue.

How to update your cloud

We've had an update available for some time now - the ‘LV Wipe’ add-on for OnApp Cloud, which is available on our downloads page. The add-on ensures that VM disks are zeroed out after a VM is deleted, or when a virtual disk is removed from a VM.

Important notes

Please be aware that this add-on could have an impact on SAN performance and needs to be installed correctly to maintain proper operation of your cloud. Customers with a full/paid license should contact support for help, if required. 

While we're on the subject of security, it's probably a good time to remind OnApp customers about our Cloud Lockdown and Access Guide, which explains the recommended procedures for securing your OnApp Cloud. For the latest version, contact support, your integrations specialist or your account manager. Thanks!

OnApp Cloud v.2.3.2 integrates our fully redundant DNS network into the OnApp Control Panel, so you can manage DNS for your own domains, and your customers' domains. Our Anycast DNS service is hosted at datacenters around the world, and it's free of charge for customers running the full version of OnApp Cloud v2.3.2, with CDN enabled. Get fast, fully redundant DNS for free!

More 2.3.2 features

OnApp Cloud v2.3.2 includes hundreds of new features, improvements and fixes. In this short video, Carlos Rego, OnApp CVO, showcases seven top features in the new version. 

OnApp Cloud v2.3.2 also includes...

• New backup server options that improve stability and performance - add multiple dedicated backup servers and shift the load from your hypervisors
• New license options for Windows VMs: KMS, MAK, or 'bring your own' for users
• Multiple ports for load balancers
• Enhanced billing for network & datastore zones - easier monthly and hourly billing
• New search tools that simplify cloud administration and localization
• New custom user fields you can add to user profiles, which are available to the OnApp API

For more information, check out the OnApp Cloud 2.3.2 release notes or book a demo.

How to upgrade

If you have the full version of OnApp Cloud, you can either:

• Upgrade your own cloud: see the OnApp Cloud 2.3.2 release notes page for more information.
• Or, you can raise a ticket with support, and we'll take care of the upgrade for you.

If you'd like us to handle your upgrade, please be aware that there might be a queue :]

Free version users

If you use the free version of OnApp Cloud, you can find upgrade instructions at our community forum. 

“Mind-blowing support”…. “lightning-fast service”… “awesome support team”

Over the last couple of months we’ve been running some banner ads with fantastic testimonials from our customers, raving about the quality of OnApp support (those quotes are from Atlas Networks, Dediserve and Swiss Cloud VPS, respectively.)

We love our customers, and we’re happy they love us. But it’s a cynical world, and you might be thinking (quite reasonably) that such glowing praise involved endless cajoling from our Marketing department. Plenty of meetings and conference calls, possibly with fancy biscuits. Rounds and rounds of approval for customer quotes, and maybe even some bribery…

Nope. Not a bit of it.

For one thing, our customers tend to be above such low-brow tactics. If you're a cloud service provider, you know exactly what constitutes “mind-blowing” support, because that’s just the kind of support your customers demand from you.  If we provided anything less than stellar support, we’d get it in the ear.

For another thing, it just wasn’t necessary. We simply asked our customers what they thought. And, in more than one case, we found glowing testimonials already present on public forums, un-prompted and un-asked for. Check out WHT, for example.

When you’re successful, we’re successful

Support is critical to our customers, and from the get-go we’ve built awesome 24x7 support into our software. We’re passionate about making our customers successful. When you’re successful, we’re successful. When you're happy, we are happy.

That’s why all customers with a full license get 24x7x365 support, included in the price. Telephone and email support, included as standard. A 15 minute SLA for critical tickets, included as standard. Direct access to our highly talented L3 techs, if you need it, included as standard.

It’s a radical approach compared with open source cloud frameworks and other “enterprise” cloud platforms. So radical, in fact, that we spend quite a lot of time explaining to potential customers that yes, it’s included with a full license, and no, you don’t actually need to pay another 20% of the software cost, just to make sure there’s someone on the end of the 'phone.

Cloud is about uptime, and uptime is about support. That’s all there is to it, and that’s why you get mind-blowing support, fully inclusive.

February support stats

We're proud of our support team's performance, and want to start sharing some stats on how they're doing. In February they looked like this...

• On average, 4 out of 5 tickets are resolved by our first line support team
• On average, calls to our support team are answered within 5.5 seconds
• In February 2012, our support team didn’t miss a single call
• The average initial response time this year, on a weekly basis, has never been above 5 minutes
• Our longest call in February was 1 hour, 49 minutes and 55 seconds…
•  … we stay on the line with our customers, as long as they need us to

To make sure we keep up this performance we've doubled the size of the support team this year, and moved them into some swanky new offices.

Keep telling us what you think!

If you’re a customer, we’d love to hear about your OnApp support experiences.  Drop a line to marketing@onapp.com and we’ll share your feedback with the support team. Maybe we can work together on our next round of ads, a case study or video (we have plenty of great customer videos coming really soon). 

There won’t be any bribery, but there won’t be endless conference calls, either – we know you’re too busy making money from the cloud. If you’re in London, though, and you fancy popping into OnApp HQ for a chat, we can pretty much guarantee biscuits!

Best of all, we previewed a new free version of OnApp Cloud, which is something I'm really excited about. OnApp has always been about reducing entry barriers to cloud, and more recently CDN.

Our new free version is going to make it even easier for people to try the OnApp Cloud platform, and see just how powerful and simple cloud can be. Not just hosters and other service providers, but companies of all shapes and sizes. We'll be announcing general availability real soon, so watch this space!

OnApp CDN was another big focus for us at Cloud Connect. We started rolling out to customers at the end of last year, and even in that timeframe the network's grown to 40 PoPs. That puts OnApp CDN in the top 5, straight off the bat, and I think you're going to see a lot more competition and innovation in the CDN market as our CDN federation members start launching their own services.

The federated model is really becoming key in this market, and it's so cool to see our clients take the vision and make it real. We'll have more news about OnApp CDN in just a few week's time. 

There's a lot happening in this market, and there's even more happening at OnApp - stay tuned!

To win an iPad we asked our customers to tell us which OnApp feature Santa would appreciate most. We had a great range of entries, so let's look at few of the honourable mentions before we announce the winners...

Close, but no cigar

There were some popular themes in your answers. A lot of you thought today's Santa simply couldn't live without OnApp's autoscaling and load balancing, including Jeff at Uncorrupted.net: “so he can deliver presents to as many houses at once without getting tired and overworked!” Load balancing would also make life easier for Santa’s reindeer, especially if you add automatic reindeer failover, as Chris at Lightning Base suggested.

“Amazing support,” said Edward at CloudNext – “we have OnApp, Santa has his elves!” David at Royalty Networks suggested hot migration for Christmas gifts, “so Santa stays home and eats cookies instead.” Meanwhile, Richard at Dediserve suggested “Multi-Site Failover”, adding “It's awesome, innit?” It certainly is :]

Self-provisioning was another popular theme, saving poor Santa the bother of all that travel. You’d definitely need the OnApp permissions and limits system as well, though, if kids really could help themselves.

CDN was another popular response. “Christmas would not be complete without a CDN (Christmas Delivery Network)”, said Sean at DedicatedServers, along with a few others. Richard at eApps sent a more musical entry: “Dashing thru the Cloud / On an OnApp open sleigh / Selling CDN / Laughing all the way!”

Some of you came up with feature requests. These are always nice to read, especially when they’re already on the roadmap. Finally, some of your ideas were clearly inspired by a little too much Christmas spirit. At least one involved a sexy santa outfit – thanks Stéphan. We won’t share your suggestion here :]

And the winners are…

But who gets an iPad for their ideas? Our lucky winners are:

• Shannon at JoltDigital for suggesting ”easy backups –  do you have any idea of the hourly rate of an elf sysadmin?” Those pesky elves…
   
• Michael at Basedrive, who said: “Santa would love the analytics - to see who has been naughty and who has been nice. If little Billy uses too much and doesn't share he will get an overage for Christmas.” Poor Billy!
   
• Vince at Site5, for suggesting autoscaling – “for the rush on santa.com the week before Christmas”. One of many similar entries, but you were first!

Congratulations to our iPad winners, but don’t despair if you didn’t win… you should be getting an ultra-cool OnApp polo shirt in the mail very soon.

Our thanks go to everyone who entered our Christmas competition, and to all of our customers for your support in 2011. Here’s to a great 2012!

It’s an exciting week at OnApp, as we finally move into our new offices - complete with original street art by Nathan Bowen! Check out the video to see Nathan working, talking about how he got started and describing his art movement, Afterlives.

Our new office is still in the Old Truman Brewery complex on Brick Lane, but now we occupy a large chunk of what used to be the cooperage.

It’s a kind of neo-industrial space, with ancient wooden flooring and bare brick walls, and some fairly substantial pieces of ironwork dotted around.  Power and network tendrils hang from shiny metal gantries, and it’s all topped off by a very retro-looking aircon system.

It feels a bit like somebody crashed a B-movie spaceship into the roof of a Victorian factory.

We love it, but the top floor of the office had some very plain-looking white walls that were crying out for something a bit special, just to finish it off.

That’s why @Ditlev decided to get in touch with Nathan Bowen.

Nathan Bowen - Afterlives and crazy builders

Nathan is a street artist whose work can be seen around Brick Lane and other parts of London. We tracked him down and asked if he would transform our plain white walls.

As you can see below, he certainly did. Now we just have to sort out the boring stuff like seats and screens...

Art complete (everything else, still in progress!)

We grabbed a few minutes with Nathan to ask about his influences, his style and the Afterlives movement. 

"Afterlives is giving walls an artistic reincarnation," he says. "So I go to street locations, and find run-down walls... walls that have been completely vandalized... and I reincarnate that wall in an artistic way." 

Nathan draws quickly, confidently and with flair. Within minutes our walls are coming to life with the characters that feature prominently in his work at the moment - a motley crew of builders, part human, part troglodyte, part clown. 

They can often be seen on boardings at construction sites around London.

“A lot of building sites are quite run down, anyway, so they could do with a bit of Afterlives... a bit of reincarnation," Nathan explains.

Nathan has a soft spot for his strange construction workers.

"These builders are clumsy, they're immature...but I kinda feel for them, y'know? I feel what they're going  through. They're just fun-loving characters."

Nathan’s art is moving beyond London – he travels to Paris this week (“taking it global,” he chuckles). 

Nathan is a really nice guy, and we had a lot of fun watching him work.

Now his builders keep a watchful eye on the OnApp team at our new office...

More of Nathan's art

There's much more of Nathan's art at http://www.artofnathanbowen.com

You can also buy limited edition prints of his work here. 

Your fresh guesses

Before we announce the winners, let’s take a look at some of the suggestions you made.

Some of you took it seriously…

Quite a few of you thought the prizes on offer must mean our fresh announcement was an OnApp iPad app (try saying that after a night at HostingCon). Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Far too obvious!

You’ll be pleased to know, however, that an iPad client for OnApp is in the works, and will join the iPhone app we have already released.  We had a few guesses for an Android app, too – likewise, no, but one is in the pipeline.

We had plenty of cloudy guesses, which ranged from “didn’t read the website” (quite a few people thought we were launching cloud hosting software – we’re pretty sure we do that already) to more practical suggestions already on our to-do list (VMware and Hyper-V support) and a few unusual submissions (all VPSs should generate Bitcoins!)

Some of you didn’t...

There were many silly guesses too. We can only assume “ferret-powered hosting” had something to do with hamster balls and the CDN logo. One entrant guessed that we were cloning Ditlev, our CEO, and in a similar vein a “virtual Caroline Paine” was suggested as well. Sadly for all of us, Ditlev and Caroline are unique, one of a kind!

Quite a few of you seem to have customers with, shall we say, dubious taste. You thought the best thing OnApp could launch right now is a device to automatically remove references to certain celebs from the websites you host.

Our official position, of course, is that OnApp software is celebrity-agnostic, and from that perspective we couldn’t possibly comment. However, more than a few of us have worked in or run hosting companies, and were secretly impressed.

Some of you were spot on!

Finally, we said we’d award a prize to the most accurate guess – and a fair number of guesses were right on the money. Since it’s a many-way tie for the “most accurate” iPad prize, it seemed only fair to pick one of those guesses at random.

And the winners are…

We promised an iPad 2 to the people who made the most accurate, the most entertaining and the freshest guesses in our competition. And so, in reverse order…

Best Fresh Guess:

This was actually the hardest to judge, but eventually we decided to award the prize to RSKeens for his “recursive cloud” idea. Having a cloud host more clouds (and so on, ad infinitum) suggests to us that someone has spent a bit too much time thinking about, if not actually going down the rabbit hole. Anyway, we congratulate you - an iPad 2 is yours!

Most Entertaining Guess:

It was close, but in the end our ex-hoster judges decided that OnApp’s celeb-neutral policy should be ignored for the purposes of the competition. An anti-celebrity-reference device was deemed to be the most entertaining guess of all. Of the handful of you who suggested something similar, just one caught our eye for its snappy name – the Bieber Firewall. Our congratulations go to Matt, from HostMist, for his good taste and fine suggestion.

Most Accurate Guess:

Finally, we threw all of the CDN guesses into a hat, blindfolded a passing looter and had him take one at random. So, with commiserations to those of you who guessed right but didn’t win, our “most accurate” winner is Curtis, from Surmounted.net, for guessing we were launching a CDN platform. Good job!  (No looters were harmed in the drawing process.)

Congratulations to our winners. We’ll be in touch soon to sort out your prizes. And, a big “thank you” to everyone else who took part and made us smile.

Now go check out OnApp CDN!

We have three iPad 2s to give away for the freshest, the most accurate and the most entertaining suggestions we get. We were going to award a few Amazon vouchers, but - because we love you so much - we've decided to up the stakes and award shiny new iPad 2s instead!

A few of your guesses so far...

We've had some clever, funny and just plain weird suggestions...

• Ferret-powered hosting?
  Er, probably not. Although ferrets are certainly flexible and quick to deploy.


• Cloud software for hosts?
  That's kind of what we do already :]


• A new type of chocolate bar?
  No, but it is pretty tasty...


• A device for triple-billing hosting clients if they mention certain celebs on their websites?
  Now we're talking!

Can you do better?

Guess what's fresh and win a shiny iPad 2!

Hosting providers have a real market opportunity to sell more flexible, profitable cloud services to traditional dedicated and shared hosting customers – who in turn want the increased reliability, convenience and pay-per-use pricing of the cloud. In the enterprise, IT infrastructure is in transition from silos of compute and storage to private clouds capable of flexible resource allocation, greater scalability, increased utilisation and better cost efficiency.

Whether you’re building a private cloud for internal users, or a public cloud for paying customers, the first challenge is finding the best way to “cloud-enable” that IT infrastructure. Some companies build their own clouds from scratch, but for most the quickest path to the cloud is to invest in a third party cloud deployment and management tool. There are many available. This is a vendor-neutral guide to ten areas a company should focus on when choosing a product and vendor.

1. Fundamentals

Top of the list of concerns for most cloud deployment projects: how much it will cost, how long it will take, and how can we ensure return on investment? A good cloud software provider will understand how these metrics relate to your company and industry. Look for clear pricing and implementation timelines, and focus on the value your cloud will deliver to the business – do they understand it the same way you do?

The product roadmap is also important. Your provider should already be working on what your users will need in future, and what development you will require as your cloud and the market matures. Find out what features are planned, including specific integrations, hypervisor support, available virtual machine templates, or support for a range of hardware or billing models. Identify those which will add commercial value to your business, and challenge your provider to do the same.

Key takeaway:

As with any critical business application, make sure you choose a provider with real understanding and experience of what your kind of business needs to successfully deploy a public or private cloud.

2. True cloud, not just virtualisation

There are lots of products that claim to “cloud enable” your infrastructure. Not all clouds are created equal, however. One example of this is automatic failover: if you don’t have it, you don’t really have a cloud – it’s a fundamental characteristic. The type of cloud support and the depth of cloud management capability also vary greatly between software platforms. Check whether a product supports public, private, hybrid or VPS cloud, or all of them. Other key focus areas are set-up time, load balancing, autoscaling, automated billing, secure multi-tenancy, firewalling, hypervisor support, and speed of provisioning for virtual machines.

Look for as much automated capability as possible, for the kind of cloud hosting you plan to deliver, to minimize the effort of provisioning and managing your cloud hosting service.

Key takeaway:

Not all cloud products are created equal. Insist on functionality that gives you maximum automation and efficiency. Above all, find a product that gives you the flexibility to adapt to the market as it evolves.

3. Time to “cloud-readiness”

Rapid deployment of public cloud services is not just a “nice to have”. A land grab is underway in public cloud hosting, fuelled by customer demand. Cloud hosting margins are as high as 50%, with low customer acquisition costs. Even six months from now the market landscape will be dramatically more competitive. Demand for private cloud infrastructure in the enterprise is also accelerating, and rapid deployment can naturally help to keep costs down.

Guaranteed speed of deployment to cloud-readiness from your chosen cloud software provider is essential. They need to show evidence of a bug-free platform, proven deployment and examples of the software in action. This is where expertise in real-world cloud deployment; your industry; and in user and billing management, server, network and SAN set-up, security, and integration really shows its worth.

Cloud software providers with a tailored product should have built their understanding into it. Aim for a complete implementation within a couple of weeks; in six months you could be too late.

Key takeaway:

A lengthy cloud deployment increases the risk of late entry into the public cloud hosting market where early adopters have become established leaders. For enterprises, slow cloud transition risks the need for fresh capital expenditure on new hardware, and operational inefficiency of existing infrastructure. Measure your deployment in days, not months.

4. Cost

Every move to the cloud should have its costs carefully scrutinised. For hosts, launching a public cloud business has to be profitable; building a private cloud in the enterprise demands clear cost structures to accurately budget for the lifetime of the project. In each situation, you need complete transparency from a cloud software provider.

Get the basics right by understanding what investment is required from you up front, the ongoing pricing model and contractual terms. Look out for any hidden costs in set-up, deployment and integration. SAN set-up can often be an additional hidden cost, and support also appears as an extra with some providers.

The ideal scenario is probably to run a proof of concept with the cloud software provider before committing. There may be a small investment required to build a working cloud and test the software, but you should not need to invest huge sums up front: best-in-class functionality can be had without much investment, or on a free trial basis.

Key takeaway:

The cloud management software market is increasingly competitive, and best-in-class functionality can be yours for little or no investment up front. You need to have a very good reason to insist on software with monolithic licensing and prices for integration, implementation and support.

5. Billing

Billing flexibility is critical. In public clouds, billing flexibility drives profitability for the host, and at the same time gives cloud customers more choice. The more things a host can measure and charge for – CPU, RAM, storage space and so on – the better they can design cloud services with the features and pricing different kinds of customer need, at a price point that makes sense. In private clouds, billing flexibility is more about efficient use of resources, by enabling accurate measurement of resource usage, and financial transparency for reporting, cross-charging or cost allocation purposes.

In each scenario, your cloud software’s billing functionality is critical. The minimum standard should include options to bill for CPU cores and share; disk space, both primary and backup; RAM; IPs and bandwidth; and IOPS. Also advantageous is the ability to bill for multiple tiers of resource, and to charge for idle or reserved resources. Finally, check the terms of utility billing. Not every customer wants to pay as they go, so look for a cloud management product that offers daily, weekly and monthly models, or a mixture.

Integration is also important here. Whatever type of cloud is being deployed, it’s important to understand the cloud software’s compatibility with existing billing engines or internal charging systems. Check which standard integrations have already been built, and who will pay for any integration work required.

Key takeaway:

Don’t assume that moving to the cloud means you have to adopt new billing platforms and utility billing models and a small set of billing options. Billing flexibility will be critical to the success of your cloud project.

6. Hardware compatibility

Whether a cloud is built on high-end racks or much less impressive hardware, the resources provisioned to customers and users are the same: a CPU resource is just a CPU resource. In spite of this, however, it is important to consider what hardware a cloud management product enables you to build your cloud on.

Different approaches to cloud deployment and virtualisation have different kinds of hardware requirements: some insist on homogenous hypervisor servers, for example, while other products can create clouds from a mix of hardware. Enterprise data centres tend to house a set of best-of-breed vendors, and are more likely to offer a standard hardware platform for cloud creation. Some hosting providers will have comparable hardware: others will be looking for ways to utilise older servers.

Both public and private cloud operators, however, will benefit from cloud enabling products that support the broadest possible mix of hardware for hypervisor servers and SANs. Not only does this provide more flexibility in the way a cloud is architected, it provides the potential for more efficient use of hardware in the future. Hardware that is due for a refresh may find a new lease of life provisioning CPU and RAM resources in the cloud.

Key takeaway:

Compatibility in server and storage hardware is a critical success factor for cloud projects. Focus on platforms that support the widest range of hardware types and performance levels; that enable you to re-use your existing servers and SANs; and providers that can help with any hardware investment you need to make.

7. IOPS monitoring

IOPS monitoring (disk Inputs/Outputs Per Second) is central to cloud efficiency and performance. Most cloud providers, public or private, have the ability to allocate chunks of CPU, disk and RAM to a user, and of course measure and (if required) bill for those resources. Being able to do the same for IOPS, however, is much rarer.

IOPS monitoring is important because of the dependence cloud hosting has on storage performance: a single virtual machine may consume minimal CPU and RAM, but generate intensive disk access and reduce disk performance for other users. In public clouds this is easy to mitigate by charging more for heavy IOPS users. In private clouds, there may be interdepartmental charges involved, and there will certainly be value in understanding how IOPS performance impacts overall cloud performance.

Tiered storage in the cloud is another consideration for distributing IOPS and maintaining performance levels. Multiple tiers of storage from multiple sources, and multiple disks per virtual machine, can go a long way to alleviating potential IOPS bottlenecks – and therefore, performance problems for customers. This is also a key feature to look for in cloud management software.

Key takeaway:

Unless you have good reason, avoid cloud management systems that cannot monitor IOPS or that don’t offer flexible tiered storage and swap disks.

8. User permissions

Another area to focus on is how well a cloud management product handles user permissions and limits. Granularity is the secret here. The more control a cloud platform provides over what users are allowed to do, the better it will be at delivering services tailored to the precise needs of those users.

As a minimum, a host needs a simple way of controlling permissions and limits to create all of the typical user types – standard users, VIP or power users, resellers, and its own L1/L2/L3 support teams. Beyond this, look for cloud management software that will enable you to offer premium and add-on services by enabling you to set up different user types with access to specific management features – higher-performing storage, remote access to virtual machines, advanced backup options, and so on.

In the enterprise, IT departments need to balance performance to the user with resource efficiency. The ability to categorise users, and control their profiles and permissions, allows private cloud operators to optimise sharing and allocation of resources to users across the business.

Key takeaway:

Look for cloud software that gives you granular control of user limits and permissions, so you can create the cloud service your users need.

9. Usability

Self-service is a fundamental characteristic of the cloud. The cloud’s back-end may be complex, but the user interface should be simple enough for anyone to use.

In public clouds the front-end has a direct impact on the quality of the customer experience, with a corresponding impact on sales. It also affects productivity for system administrators, support and billing teams.

In private clouds the same is true: user experience and productivity depend on the quality of the interface, and just like in a hosting business, the UI should meet the needs of a broad range of users with different experience levels.

As a result, you should spend time testing the UI from the point of view of different users, and investigate the extent of customisation, localisation and branding that the software provider can enable. Integration is another important consideration, particularly the ability to deploy an alternative customer portal if needed. Rather than the provider’s UI, you may prefer to use an existing control panel or develop your own front end to the service.

Key takeaway:

Focus on the UI from an internal as well as a customers’ viewpoint, and favour cloud platforms that enable you to customise the user experience easily – either directly, or through the API.

10. Support

The promise of the cloud is that it is “just there” – an always-on, instant access compute and storage resource. In the enterprise, cloud users expect their IT “to just work”, and in the public cloud, customers are also buying into the cloud’s uptime benefits.

With automatic failover, cloud users ought not to experience any service disruption. If things do go wrong, however, you will need rapid, high quality support from your cloud software provider.

The key questions to ask your provider are whether support is free or an additional cost; how skilled the support team is, and what hours they keep; and whether 24x7 support includes telephone, live and email support channels; and what response time you can expect. If things do go wrong you will need SLAs with response times measured in minutes, not hours.

Key takeaway:

Since this is the platform on which you’re running your cloud business, insist on free, high quality, 24x7 support from your cloud software provider.

I'm presenting at the show today, at 12:15pm in the Virtualisation and Cloud Theatre, and talking about my favorite two topics: the cloud hosting market, and, of course, OnApp.

Today we have also announced DedicatedNOW as a certified OnApp Cloud Service Provider. Using OnApp software they've put together a great D-I-Y cloud offer - cloud infrastructure as a service for web hosting providers, powered by OnApp.

Hope we see you at the show - and please do catch up with me or the rest of the OnApp team if you want to talk more cloud. We're at Stand A50.

Today should be even better - not least because I'm giving a keynote speech in an hour or so, along with VPS.NET. I'm really looking forward to it.

As a lot of you will know, VPS.NET is a huge hosting industry success story and the first true cloud host for the mass market. Powered, of course, by OnApp :]

Together with VPS.NET's Judah Johns, I'll be talking about the technical and business issues we overcame to enable VPS.NET to become the incredible success it is today. Cloud hosting in the real world!

Don't miss it - today at 10:30am, in the Security and Storage Track theatre, at Cloud Expo Europe. Hope you can make it - and if you want to chat after, just grab me or find us at the OnApp stand, #22.

OnApp has been in development for over two years now, pushing the boundaries of cloud provisioning and management. It's a journey we love being on, and one we're happy to share with our customers.

When we set out to build OnApp we set sail on uncharted territory. With version 1 we learned valuable lessons on what works and what doesn’t in the cloud. With version 2 we delivered a clean and streamlined version of the software that could do more with less overhead. Today we have more than 70 hosts using OnApp to power more than 40,000 virtual servers.

OnApp 2.0 may have gone gold, but the journey continues. We're already hard at work on OnApp 2.1, which will - of course - add more great features and innovations to our cloud engine. The ETA is late December - watch this space.

In the meantime, you can see the latest version of OnApp 2.0 at our "under the hood" webinar on 1st December. Register today!

Everything has been moving so fast since OnApp went live and I really haven't had a moment to step a bit back and reflect over the last few months' development. OnApp was open for business the first of July 2010 - so almost five months ago now, the first few weeks Carlos and I were busy doing demos. We did five or so per day, and landed a lot of important clients during that time.  This was how my calendar looked the first week after launch. Crazy days. 

Now we've got Caroline and Steve doing most of the demos - Carlos and I still join one or two of them per month, we love talking about this stuff - but Caroline and Steve are doing a great job working with clients to find the best configs and solutions for them.

In the few months we've been online we've managed to get a fantastic team of 47 cloud-rockstars - including more than 25 developers, a 24/7 phone support team in the US, and my management group in the UK.

We've got more than 70 hosting provider customers with 40,000 virtual servers in Europe and the US that have created cloud services using our software. That's about  $1 million worth of annualized revenue in licenses alone - not bad for a 5 month old company. 

Customers range from small $1m+ revenue shops to very large $100m+ businesses – though most are in the $5-15m range. UK2 Group's VPS.net is our biggest customer. On a good day they can spin up 500 VMs.

Our clients are typically setting up new cloud brands providing cloud services 'powered by OnApp', or simply using OnApp to underpin existing services. 451Group estimate that are around 450 public clouds in existence so far - in that case OnApp would be powering close to 20% of those.

451Group produced an 'Impact Report' outlining the progress of OnApp. It was sent out in both the T1R and 451 newsletter and it's an amazing feeling seeing it in black and white.

Thanks for your support!
Ditlev

For the full list of changes, see our new changelog page.

Drop by the OnApp stand - we'd love to chat. Shouldn't be too hard to spot us, but just in case, here's a clue...

One thing we always end up spending a long time discussing is hardware, so I thought I'd present you with a shopping list of a decent-sized OnApp cloud setup. Now, we almost have as many configurations as clients, but it might interest you to see an actual real-world list, down to the last detail.

Before we get into the list, a couple of notes/thoughts. This client has gone with Super Micro boxes - the 2U ones with 4 HVs in each. They are pretty sexy - I'm impressed - but personally I'd rather stick to 2 HVs in each box, as it lowers the initial requirements for idle failover hardware. Other clients deploy on DELLs or HPs etc, and obviously OnApp works with any type of server - so the list below is just a suggestion and example of what can be used.

Also, their SANs are built using 7,200 RPM drives - some of you might want to go higher than that depending on your client profile and usage patterns.

Excluding networking, here is the basic shopping list:

1x CP - for OnApp administration setup.
8x HVs - for the VMs and failover of VMs.
2x SANs - for storage running SAN software like Open-E or Starwind for a HA setup.
1x Backup SAN - for backup and creation of custom templates.

1x CP Server

• 1U Rackmount Server Chassis
• 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5520 2.26GHz
• 2x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 1x 520W Power Supply
• 4x 4GB DDR3-1066 PC3-8500 CL7 ECC Registered RAM
• 2x Seagate Cheetah 15K 146GB SAS Hard Drive
• Adaptec RAID 5405 1 4I SAS/SATA 256MB PCI Express Controller
• Adaptec Battery Module ABM 800 for 3405/3805/31205/31605

2x Hypervisor Servers (2U Twin w/4 nodes)

• 2U Rackmount Server Chassis
• 8x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5620 2.40GHz
• 8x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 1x Redundant 780W Power Supply
• 24x 4GB DDR3-1066 PC3-8500 CL7 ECC Registered RAM
• 4x 250GB Seagate Barracuda SATA
• 4x 1x Intel Pro/1000 PT Gigabit Copper Server Adapter, PCI Express

2x SAN w/MaxIQ

• 3U Rackmount Server Chassis SC836E1-R800B
• 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5620 2.40GHz
• 2x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 800W Redundant Power Supply
• 6x 2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 Fully Buffered RAM
• 2x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 500GB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• 14x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• Adaptec 5805ZQ 16 Port SAS/SATAII PCI-E Controller w/MaxIQ and BBU

1x Backup SAN

• 3U Rackmount Server Chassis
• 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core E5620 2.40GHz
• 2x Onboard Intel Gigabit NIC
• Integrated IPMI 2.0 with KVM and Dedicated LAN
• 1200W high-efficiency (1+1) Redundant Power Supply
• 6x 2GB DDR2-667 PC2-5300 Fully Buffered RAM
• 2x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 500GB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• 14x Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB 16MB Cache 7200RPM SAS Hard Drive
• Adaptec RAID 51645 16I/4E SAS/SATA 512MB PCI Express Controller
• Adaptec Battery Module ABM 800T for Series 3 and 5

Questions? Feel free to contact me directly: ditlev@onapp.com - we'd love to discuss your setup as well.

The survey also touched upon usage patterns, and they listed three examples:

Application testing clouds: Test labs handle low-risk workloads with variable usage patterns, but are capital-intensive to build. Many SMBs simply can't afford test labs and, hence, rely on vendor partners for testing. This is low-hanging fruit for cloud service providers, and most service providers have answered with testing clouds.

Cloudbursting: This enables enterprises to smooth out variability. While seasonality and one-off marketing events require added capacity, it only requires this capacity for short durations of time.

Backup and disaster recovery: Cloud-based recovery services back up or replicate physical or virtual servers to the service provider's multi-tenant environment, which consists of virtual servers and shared storage. In the case of a disaster declaration, the service provider recovers servers as virtual servers hosted in its environment. With these services, systems can be recovered in hours – with just a few minutes to a few hours of data loss, but without the cost of dedicated IT infrastructure; storage-based replication; and high-bandwidth, low-latency network connectivity between a datacenter and the service provider. This is a net new capability for many SMBs, but for larger enterprises, this represents a low-hanging-fruit opportunity to cut costs.

Tier1's take on this puts the pressure on IT department managers. End users are looking for speed and flexibility, but at a lower cost. The new breed of service providers, who are leveraging virtualization and automation technologies - like OnApp clients - can compete directly with the internal IT shops by lowering the entry barriers, increasing the level of automation and providing more cost effective solutions.

This is not news to OnApp - we've seen this trend within our major clients for a long time, and the applications in use in OnApp powered clouds are wide-ranging. We are pleased to see that the T1 survey validates the market, and we hope that service providers realise that this is the time to move. Clients are requesting IaaS, ideally based on cloud infrastructure, but the number of service providers who actually have cloud services in their product portfolio is still limited.

Improvements

• Added copying the MBR file when converting Windows backups to templates

Fixes

• Fixed the potential for a user to edit/remove schedules of other users without permission
• Fixed an issue with the 'creation of a new schedule' permission
• Fixed a rollback issue with 'build_disk' transactions
• Fixed an issue with IP range generation during network configuration

OnApp clients have now deployed more than 50 clouds and 35,000 virtual servers on the platform.

The OnApp cloud platform provides an easy way for a web host to set up, configure and manage a cloud hosting operation using off-the-shelf server and storage hardware. Once the cloud is deployed, OnApp provides simple web-based control of clouds, virtual machines, storage and compute resources, users, billing and more.

“There’s a lot of fluff talked about clouds, but for web hosts it’s a very tangible business issue,” said Carlos Rego, MD of OnApp. “Hosting customers want more control over the services they buy. They want to be able to self-provision and scale those services, quickly and easily. They also need more flexibility in the way they pay for services. Cloud hosting meets this market need, but it presents a technical and a business challenge for the host.”

“That’s where OnApp has a unique proposition. We advise on cloud hosting business models, and provide a turnkey cloud platform designed specifically for hosts: affordable, easy to use, easy to manage and quick to deploy,” he said.

Dediserve (http://dediserve.com) is one of the recent converts to OnApp. Dediserve offers a wide range of virtual and dedicated hosting services from its HQ in Dublin’s Digital Hub.

Aidan Mc Carron, Dediserve’s Managing Director, said: “Having reviewed a wide range of cloud management solutions, including investing 6 months in our own solution, we were delighted to deploy OnApp. It answered every requirement we identified, and the credentials of the team involved are second to none, globally.”

In a typical host’s hardware environment, OnApp can set up a cloud in about one day. Once a cloud is deployed, it can take as little as 60 seconds for the host to set up a virtual machine and provision a cloud-based service to a customer. OnApp gives hosts a free license for 100 CPU cores for one year, after which licensing takes the form of a simple monthly fee per core and per cloud. As a result, OnApp makes it easy and affordable for a provider to start offering cloud hosting services to its customers, without massive up-front licensing costs.

The gold rush we are seeing now in Cloud Hosting attracts a lot of web hosts, both seasoned and start-up, and while most of them have their business plans in place and their budgets worked out, some make the move assuming that the cloud is "business as usual".

There are three factors that will dramatically change the game, though:

1. Entry barriers - both technical and financial
2. ARPUs - they are lower
3. Overselling - well, underselling in this case

The point about entry barriers is pretty straightforward. I would say most - if not all - hosts are realizing that the cloud as a concept is here to stay, that clients are requesting the service and that hosts need to make the move pretty soon to remain competitive. However, they also see that it's not straightforward to get your cloud offering up and running.

Hosts are typically buying best-of-breed software and tying the nuts and bolts together using the APIs provided, like Ubersmith+cPanel, WHMCS+Parallels etc. And that is the approach hosts would prefer for the Cloud as well - it's obviously the approach we've taken here at OnApp, and we feel that's part of our early success. The technical entry barriers are significant, and that is surely the main reason there are 'only' 3-400 cloud hosts out there (out of around 33,000 hosting companies).

Also, from a CAPEX perspective the Cloud is something of a game-changer - simply put, your first dedicated server client would cost you whatever the dedicated server costs (like, $2,500 or so). However, your first cloud hosting client would cost you quite a bit more to get online, typically $10-20,000, as you would need your fully redundant infrastructure in place before getting started. Now, your cloud hosting business segment - when scaled - would be way more profitable than your dedicated server offering: but you need to accelerate your signups to get above water on your initial CAPEX setup.

And yes, your ARPU goes down compared to your dedicated server clients. When your clients sign up to a utility-based billing model, their actual usage will be the base of the recurring revenue and typically a dedicated server is utilized less than 30%, so you will see a lower ARPU from day one. However, you are able to work at a higher margin and you can offer a wider range of add-on products to enhance your profitability. This is a structure closer to shared hosting, and your ability to acquire customers at a low CPA will be key for your business.

Finally, if you are running a shared hosting business, overselling is probably a key part of your business model. In the cloud business model it's very hard to oversell as you need to leave room in your infrastructure for clients scaling up (when your clients end up on the front page of digg.com) and for hardware redundancy.

The image above was part of the slidedeck I used for my presentation at the conference, and it is meant to illustrate overselling using the analogy of your average airline company. We've probably all tried boarding an oversold airplane - or been offered compensation if we agree to give up our tickets because a flight was overbooked. Typically airlines are oversold between 5-10% - and that works out fine, because thats the percentage of passengers that tend to be "no-shows".

That is a model that shared hosting businesses have adopted very successfully. Typically a shared server is oversold more than 500% or more.

Dedicated server providers obviously can not oversell hardware to the same extent, as it is 1:1 - one server to one client. Overselling is still done at the network level, though.

However, with cloud hosting you are actually pushed into underselling, as you have to set up your full airplane infrastructure, but only fill up 80-90% of the seats because your passengers might multiply 'mid-air' (when getting on digg.com). That is a serious game-changer and something that has to be thought through before launching your cloud hosting business.

TheWhir.com has a writeup on my session: you can read about it here.

Feel free to send me any questions you have about everything above (ditlev@OnApp.com) - would love to discuss with you!

Best,
Ditlev

New features

• Added power cycle to VMs for the restore backup process
• Added power cycle to VMs for the rebuild process
• Added a permission to allow/disallow adding extra IPs for VMs
• Added formatting disk after building

Improvements

• Wide range of API improvements

Fixes

• Fixed issues with migration between hosts sharing common data stores
• Fixed reboot hypervisor issue
• Fixed login output for Windows VMs
• Fixed losing port speed limits after hot migration
• Fixed disabling backup schedule
• Fixed issue with removing disks action through stop/start VM
• Fixed failure on creating VMs with max RAM allocation when user limits are not divisible by 256

For a low monthly fee, hosting companies can deploy the entire JumpBox library of ‘ready to use’ web applications in the cloud, using OnApp’s unique elastic cloud engine, while benefiting from easy upgrades to those applications from JumpBox. The result is significantly reduced cost, complexity and time to deployment for the applications that hosting providers’ customers want to use. The monthly fee includes unlimited user access per cloud.

“The combination of OnApp’s highly configurable cloud hosting engine, and JumpBox’s ‘ready to use’ web applications, makes it simple for hosting providers to deploy and manage the applications their customers need,” said Carlos Rego, MD of OnApp. “With more than 50 JumpBox applications available today, a low monthly fee, and OnApp’s unique approach to cloud hosting, our clients can expand the services they offer in a very quick and cost-effective way.”

“With the combination of JumpBox and OnApp, hosting providers now have a ready library of application solutions for their customers,” said Kimbro Staken, CEO of JumpBox. “Adding these easy to deploy applications to a hosting service encourages increased usage by hosting customers and higher revenue for the hosting provider. Plus, since the library gains more applications over time, the provider’s revenue opportunity just continues to increase while the low monthly fee stays the same.”

OnApp’s elastic cloud engine enables hosting providers to set up and manage cloud and virtual servers on commodity hardware, extremely quickly, using virtual machine templates and a web-based user interface. JumpBox makes it simple to deploy and manage Open Source web applications by packaging each one as a ‘ready to use’ virtual machine.

With the library of JumpBox virtual machines available through OnApp, hosters and other service providers can quickly deploy, configure and manage cloud-based applications – from blogging and content management systems to wikis, bug trackers and e-commerce platforms – to meet the needs of their customers.

The OnApp cloud hosting engine is licensed to users on a cost per CPU core and cost per cloud basis, but is currently available with a full year’s free trial. See http://onapp.com/onapp-pricing/ for details.

About JumpBox
With customers in forty countries and over 350,000 JumpBoxes distributed to date, JumpBox is the recognized leader in providing hassle-free Open Source server software. JumpBox enables businesses to deploy a wide array of collaborative infrastructure in minutes across a variety of computing environments. Offering the convenience of a SaaS-based service and the control and flexibility of private, run-anywhere instances, the JumpBox service enables IT admins to concentrate on extracting value from their software rather than maintaining it. For more information, visit JumpBox on the web at http://www.jumpbox.com

About OnApp
OnApp is one of the fastest growing cloud platforms in the market, with over 30,000 virtual servers deployed in less than two years. Designed for the needs of the hosting market, OnApp enables hosting providers to set up public or private clouds based on commodity hardware, and deploy customizable virtual machines in just a few clicks. OnApp uses multi-hypervisor technology (such as Xen and KVM) to ensure complete security and isolation for virtual machines. It also offers unrivalled scalability, with virtualization management that enables service providers to optimize their use of server resources, creating the potential for significant hardware and energy cost savings.

Features

• Implemented user dashboard view: when users log in to the Control Panel, they see the resources used by each VM marked in different colors per VM
• Added possibility to suspend and delete users. When a user is suspended, all VMs are stopped and login disabled. When a user is deleted, all VMs and other resources are scheduled to be destroyed
• Added NTFS resizing and provisioning of hosts larger than template size. The system now also prevents provisioning of hosts smaller than template
• Introduced PHP API Wrapper
• Added permissions that allow restricting access to transactions/logs and their details
• Added time zone settings to user profiles
• Implemented running automatic backups

Improvements

• When adding an IP to a VM, users can choose between viewing unused or used IPs in the list
• The Reset button at the Users->Your_User->Edit menu now resets all the fields
• Improvements related to granting permissions to users. Fixed Usage Statistics, Hypervisor's VM list, See own backups, and See own disks permissions. Added permissions on Settings
• API-related improvements: added possibility to view status, usage, profile info, and the list of all permissions/IDs through the API
• Extended the contents of logs
• Added sliders showing new prices during the VM resize
• Improved hot migration of VMs between hosts sharing common datastores. Added rollback to hot migrations for safety
• Implemented slider that sets the port speed, as well as the Unlimited checkbox that nullifies the value set by the slider

Fixes

• Fixed wrong values shown after RAM allocation
• Fixed users not allocated max value for the Primary disk size field during VM creation
• Fixed cancellation of pending tasks for a VM
• Corrected disk usage calculation and display on the Dashboard
• Fixed the misbehaviour of creating the power off VM task two times
• Fixed creating a disk, adding a new one, or allocating a Swap disk with more resources than allowed by the limits
• Fixed the issues with the minimum and maximum disk sizes set during the VM creation
• Removed possibility to create or assign memory more than available on Hypervisor
• Fixed HV monitor timing out under heavy disk IO load
• Fixed VMs attempting to hot-resize when powered off

We would love to touch base with you - so if you are around Houston or Vegas, let me know (ditlev@onapp.com) and I'd be happy to meet up and talk cloud.

Best, Ditlev

Most of our clients are service providers (ISPs, Webhosts, DCs etc) and they are setting up OnApp in order to offer some flavour of cloud hosting to their clients. There is a huge difference in the offerings they have in mind, though.

We've got clients deploying high-end multi-10g HP/NetApp powered enterprise solutions, where everything is set up for High Availability (HA) on branded hardware in SAS70-II DCs. They love the failover features built into OnApp, and the fact that we allow several storage devices to be attached to the same VM/Cloud/HV/etc. They demand flexibility and reliability and they are very focused on the fact that we have VPS.NET with their large userbase (30k servers) as a proof of our scalability.

The enterprise clients are also those digging most into our security features like anti-sniffing, custom firewalls etc. Typically we have 2-3 demo sessions with these guys, followed by an OnApp install in their DC so they can try to break it on their home turf. Integration takes a few days because most of the enterprise clients run custom billing/CRM systems.

Then we've got a lot of clients asking for HA-on-a-budget. These companies take their business and clients serious, they want to provide the best possible service to them - but they are also sensitive to prices and they know their market segment very well. They are typically very hardware and network savvy and know exactly what sort of offering they want to deploy and at what cost.

They are deploying Open-E, Openfiler or Nexenta SANs on commodity SuperMicro boxes. These clients are typically very creative, and it's an interesting process putting the solution together. Integration is normally easy as they use standard billing systems such as Ubersmith, WHMCS or Hostbill - OnApp works really well with those.

We've also seen a few SaaS companies signing up. They typically set up smaller clouds, with 2-3 hypervisors only - and they actually do not give their clients access to the OnApp GUI. Generally they just set up a template with their SaaS application in OnApp and deploy an instance for every client. OnApp takes care the deployment, IP settings, password settings etc etc. These clients typically integrate fully using our RESTful API, and so far they seem to grow fairly fast.

The demos and client installs are great fun for us - there is nothing like seeing our software being put into good use.

Best,
Ditlev

Carlos, the MD and Chief Architect is @nullmind on Twitter, and here on LinkedIn. I am @ditlev and here on LinkedIn.

Also, I am speaking at Hostingcon in Austin again this year. OnApp has a booth there, and we'd love to touch base with you, so drop by if you're around.

Best, Ditlev

A quick post to thank you for the support during our launch. And, wow - what a launch we had. We've done more than 25 OnApp demos (check out my calendar) the last 2 weeks. It's been great fun, we've had so much fantastic input and ideas to make OnApp even better.

We use tungle.me as our demo booking system, and it has been a lifesaver: without their service we would never have been able to squeeze that many demos into such a short timeframe. Btw, book your demo here if you haven't already.

We've also signed our first 12 service providers (with more to come) and 5 of those are already live ... selling cloud hosting to their clients, powered by the OnApp platform. It's just the best feeling ever, seeing something that we've worked on for 2-3 years finally being put to good use, setting servers live, providing cool services and producing a good margin for our new clients. I couldn't be happier :)

The demo-process has been interesting in many ways - like, we thought we had to start by explaining "the cloud" as a concept ... that has not been the case at all. You all 100% get it, but you've been looking around for a long time for the right turnkey platform to get your cloud business unit started. That's actually quite a bit like when we started the development of OnApp.

A bit of background
As you may know, OnApp is funded by some of the investors behind UK2Group (where I was the CEO) and it actually began as a platform for the UK2Group cloud brand called VPS.NET that launched back in early 2009. VPS.NET was a fantastic success. We sold more than 10,000 servers in the first 6 months - and more than 25,000 servers so far. It is the fastest growing entity in the UK2group, and it is showing great promise for the future.

When UK2Group started the process of building VPS.NET I was looking around for a good turnkey cloud platform that I could use. I spoke with the all the other solutions on the market (really, all of them), they all had good set ups, but not flexible enough, too pricy, or no large installed base etc etc... and while I really did not enjoy the idea of us building our own platform, I saw no other option.

So I hired a team of developers headed up by Carlos Rego (who was a senior guy at Parallels at the time, and had experience from Cpanel, and Hsphere (MD)), and we got cracking. Some 6-8 months later we were ready with an initial beta platform, and after about a year of development in total we came out of beta. VPS.NET sold 10k servers in the first 6 months.

Around a year ago, VPS.NET started to see a lot of interest from other webhosts in the market. They wanted to provide a "VPS.NET-like" product to their clients. We built APIs, and set up an OEM version of VPS.NET, and that was fine for most webhosts - so VPS.NET managed to build a strong reseller client base, now representing around 30% of the revenue. Those clients were all running on the VPS.NET infrastructure, but with a white label setup, so there was no easy way for their clients to see that VPS.NET was the actual provider.

For some hosts it was not enough, though. The larger guys wanted the VPS.NET technology, but on their own hardware/datacenters/infrastructure. They did not like the idea of VPS.NET powering a core part of their business, since they felt out of control in case of hardware failures, and they wanted to run their own networks and so on.

However, we could not install VPS.NET technology in external datacenters, as the code was very customized, and there was no structured set up for support/service/pricing/etc outside of VPS.NET.

The demand was huge, though, and as a reaction to that we decided to set up OnApp - a software company focused on developing cloud hosting platforms for service providers. We made that decision about 6-8 months ago, and we hired 20+ developers for the project, worked on product development, business plans, pricing etc. OnApp is now an individual company, with its own management team and funding, now totally split out of UK2Group.

That was a bit of background - Next week we will announce a bunch of cool partnerships that will make it even better to be an OnApp client - and we have so much more on the way. I'll catch up with then and tell you more.

:)
Ditlev

PS. Btw, we will be at HostingCon in Austin, Texas next week - stop by our booth if you are there.

OnApp is an elastic cloud platform for service providers, tailored to the hosting market, with ease of use and maintenance at its core.

Over the coming weeks we will be adding more content to our site. In the near future you can expect information on additional resources such as Webinars, Conferences and much more.

Please make sure you schedule a demo to find out more... it only takes 90 minutes and it will amaze you what OnApp can do. Or contact us for more information.