Developing Disaster Recovery Models with Cloud Computing
How does a small or medium business ensure it can meet the basic needs for disaster recovery and business continuity? Whether it be Internet-facing applications, or Enterprise-facing applications and data, one of the most important issues faced by small companies is the potential loss of information and applications needed to run their operations.
Disaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites – it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.
Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company’s data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.
“In a traditional disaster recovery model the organization must have an exact duplicate of their hardware, applications, and data in the disaster recovery location” explains Christoph. “With cloud computing models it is possible to replicate applications virtually, spinning up capacity as needed to meet the processing requirements of the organization in the event a primary processing location becomes unavailable.”
ScaleUp did in fact demonstrate their ability to replicate databases between data centers in an October 2009 test with Cari.net, where ScaleUp was able to bring up a VPN appliance and replicate data and applications between Germany and Cari.net’s data center in San Diego, California.
While there may be issues with personal data being in compliance with European Data Protection Laws, nearly every company and organization around the world participates in a global market place. This means applications and data serving the global market cannot be considered local, and the next logical step is to extend access and presentation of the company’s network presence as close to the network edge (customers) as possible.
Some companies may have physical network capacity in multiple geographies, others may look to companies such as ScaleUp to develop relationships with other cloud service providers to allow “federated” relationships.
Until a true industry standard is determined to define data structures and protocols to use between cloud infrastructure and platform providers, it is probably easiest for relationships to develop between companies using the same cloud platform as a service (PaaS) application. Such is the case with ScaleUp and Cari.net, who used a common platform provided by 3Tera’s AppLogic.
The cloud service provider industry will provide a tremendous service to small and medium businesses which normally cannot afford near zero recovery time and recovery point objectives. Whether it is real-time replication of entire data bases, subsets of data bases, or simply parsing correlated data from edge locations at regular intervals, disaster recovery modeling is changing.
A backup location can be made in some cases by logging into a cloud service provider and opening an account with a credit card – or through a very fast negotiation with the service provider. Certainly not without cost, but potentially at a much lower cost of operation than in models requiring physical data center space, hardware, and operations staff at each location.
The important lesson for small companies is that both disaster recovery and a company’s ability to recover from either a physical disaster such as a fire in their data center, or data corruption, may limit or prevent a company’s ability to continue operations. Adding cloud services to the disaster recovery model may provide a very powerful, simplified, and cost-effective model to protect your business.
IPv6 in the Cloud
The Number Resource Organization (NRO) was formed by the global Internet community to oversee and manage unallocated Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses. On January 19th, the NRO announced that less than 10% of unallocated IPv4 address space remains, marking this a “critical moment” in the pending exhaustion of Internet addressing.
IP addressing is the method used to identify devices and applications on the Internet, including everything from laptop computers, to mobile phones, to network routing devices. Rule of thumb is if you can connect to something via the Internet, it has an IPv4 address. And the available addresses (around 4.2 billion) are forecast to be exhausted in 2012.
The answer is implementation of Internet Protocol version 6, which extends the potential Internet address expansion by trillions. For people who really care, the difference between IPv4 address space and IPv6 address space is the difference between a 32 (232) bit number and a 128 (2128) bit number.
Cloud Computing and IPv6
Cloud computing allows dynamic, on-demand, and elastic generation of both virtual infrastructure, and virtual machines running over the infrastructure. Whether physical, or virtual, each machine or application still requires an IP address.
Add all the new mobile phones, VoIP phones, intelligent GRIDs (imagine every electrical device in your home being Internet-enabled), and anything else that can be electronically tagged, you can see why we need to consider the relationship of clouds and IPv6 as a high priority for the cloud computing industry.
The trick is to make implementation of IPv6 easy not only for the end users – it should be near transparent, but also for network administrators and applications developers. End users don’t want to know, or need to know the complexities of network and device addressing. They just want their device to work over the Internet.
Administrators need to know this is not a punitive or limiting requirement, but rather a improvement enabling more rapid development of new applications and network architectures. And of course offer better than existing network and data security.
Future applications and services within clouds will require a much broader use of Internet-enabled resources. Whether it is automatically spooling additional servers, adding disk, or more complex functions such as global distributed processing, load-balancing, disaster recovery, and follow-the-sun dynamic resource allocations – IPv6 implementation is required to meet that demand.
Cloud computing as a concept supports all such processing models, and IPv6 will extend the ability of the global Internet to support the concepts and vision.
Perhaps the most intimidating requirement facing network administrators is the requirement to “restack” their entire infrastructure as an IPv6 network, while still supporting legacy IPv4 within their architecture.
The goal of all cloud providers is to insulate application administrators from the complexity of understanding IPv6, thus further encouraging aggressive adoption of IPv6 addressing. If the administrator is relieved to concentrate efforts on designing the application, scaling compute, network, and storage for his market or users, then the cloud service providers have done their job. And that job is ensuring the Internet continues to serve the needs of a global connected community.
ScaleUp Technologies is an early innovator implementing IPv6 as a standard feature in cloud deployments. Using 3Tera’s AppLogic VPN appliance, ScaleUp Technologies is able to deliver an advanced infrastructure that allows not only on-demand automatic configuration of IPv6 within the customer system, but also near transparent distribution of both processing and backup capacity which spans geographies.
A first step in the big picture, but an important step in providing industry leadership promoting not only adoption of IPv6, but also ensuring the transition to IPv6 is less intimidating to the cloud user community.
The First Cloud Solution in Europe to Support IPv6
About a month ago we were contacted by the technical team at 3Tera asking if we would like to be involved in an historic demonstration – the first use of IPv6 in cloud computing. Since we’ve been experimenting with IPv6 in our data center over the past year, we jumped at the chance to be involved. ScaleUp, along with 3Tera & a data center in the US, Cari.net, successfully demonstrated database replication between applications running in two different cloud provider datacenters using an IPv6 VPN tunnel created with 3Tera’s new VPN catalog appliance.
An exceprt from the recent press release… “By running their applications on the ScaleUp grid, we enable our customers to use IPv6 with their applications” said Christoph Streit, founder of ScaleUp Technologies. “This is possible, because the application is not aware of the underlying IP configuration. The whole IP configurations is done by the ScaleUp grid, so the customers software does not have to be changed in order to use IPv6.”
This is game-changing for the Cloud & IT/data center operations in general. We are very excited to be a leader in the use of IPv6 in a european cloud and look forward to helping to set the standard for other professional cloud providers. You can read more about this in our press releases :
- German: http://pitch.pe/28656
- English: http://pitch.pe/28039
The buzz about this industry first has been tremendous – leading to articles in major journals & blogs around the world. This is an exciting time for everyone here at ScaleUp.
Cloud Security & the Application Environment
The ScaleUp Cloud is the result of over a year of work by our internet4YOU team and has been made possible in concert with 3Tera®, the leading innovator of cloud computing technology. ScaleUp leverages 3tera’s AppLogic™ cloud computing platform for our solution. AppLogic is a grid operating system which enables cloud computing for running and scaling web applications.
Better Security Through Fixed & Defined App Communication Channels
AppLogic is oriented around “Applications” which are networks of Appliances in a private address space – essentially a virtual private data center. When we build an application environment on ScaleUp, we have to define which appliance is allowed to talk (connect via network) to other appliances and which protocols should be allowed. So even though all appliances (virtual machines) are on the same cloud/network, they cannot directly talk with each other via the internal network without us defining this (all via AppLogic).
A higher level of security is achieved when using ScaleUp, because all components of an application (webservers, database servers, etc.) do not have external network interfaces. They always have to be connected to a so called gateway appliance (IN appliance), which is basically another virtual machine running a linux based firewall. Only via the IN (or OUT/NET appliances) they are able to talk to the outside (internet).
In this multi-part ‘Security in the Cloud’ series we’ll dive deeper into a number of key security, privacy & access control topics. Our next post will analyze 2 of the most common fears – a focus on Data Control & Data Privacy.
Check out the the 1st Article – The Cloud is NOT Less Secure.
Stay tuned, or better yet subscribe to our RSS or Email subscription & we’ll make sure continue to receive these articles.
The Cloud is NOT Less Secure
There is a great deal of discussion & concern about the concept of security and cloud hosting/computing. In fact, a global survey of 500 executives and IT managers, conducted by Kelton Research and sponsored by IT consultancy Avanade, indicated security concerns as a key topic for cloud adoption for mission critical data & computing. “By a five-to-one margin, respondents feel that their own IT systems are more secure than the cloud. “Fears about security and control of data are limiting its broad adoption,” observes Tyson Hartman, Avanade’s global CTO.”
In the view of our team here at ScaleUp, the Information Week article’s description of this as a “perceived barrier” is completely accurate. It is our responsibility to help our customers & prospects understand where the overblown hype about security stops & where real business, technology & policy decisions need to start about new cloud initiatives.
As a CEO of 10 year old internet4YOU, I have a lot of knowledge/experience about remote data center management. Comparing a traditional hosted solution (using either a shared infrastructure or a dedicated infrastructure in a remote datacenter) with a cloud hosting infrastructure hardly reveals major differences in the security that can be achieved. I would even go so far to say, that using a cloud hosting is NOT less secure.
When talking about cloud computing for enterprises, people always compare running an application on some internal server infrastructure within a company with a hosted solution in a remote infrastructure. It is always mentioned that moving your data outside of the company is a big security risk
However, I would not say that having your data within your company makes it more secure. Every company nowadays is connected to the internet. Employees use USB sticks, emails and third-party application on their workstation PCs. So why should your data be less secure when you move it into the cloud (in a professional datacenter).
In this multi-part ‘Security in the Cloud’ series we’ll dive deeper into a number of key security, privacy & access control topics. Stay tuned, or better yet subscribe to our RSS or Email subscription & we’ll make sure we keep you continue to receive these articles.
