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Of course there are very good models on the street for data center consolidation, particularly on government levels. In the United States, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) lists data center consolidation as the second highest priority, immediately after getting better control over managing budget and operational cost.

In March the Australian government announced a (AUD) $1 billion data center consolidation plan, with standardization, solution sharing, and developing opportunities to benefit from “new technology, processes or policy.”

Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner noted Australia currently has many inefficient data centers, very suitable candidates for consolidation and refresh. The problem of scattered or unstructured data management is “spread across Australia, (with data) located in not just large enterprise data centres, but also in cupboards, converted offices, computer and server rooms, and in commercial and insourced data centers,” said Tanner.

“These are primarily older data centres that are reaching the limits of their electricity supply and floor space. With government demand for data center ICT equipment rising by more than 30 per cent each year, it was clear that we needed to reassess how the government handled its data center activities.”

The UK government also recently published ICT guidance related to data center consolidation, with a plan to cut government operated data center from 130 to around 10~12 facilities. The guidance includes the statement “Over the next three-to-five years, approximately 10-12 highly resilient strategic data centers for the public sector will be established to a high common standard. This will then enable the consolidation of existing public data centers into highly secure and resilient facilities, managed by expert suppliers.”

Indonesia Addresses Data Center Consolidation

Indonesia’s government is in a unique position to take advantage of both introducing new data center and virtualization technology, as well as deploying a consolidated, distributed data center infrastructure that would bring the additional benefit of strong disaster recovery capabilities.

Much like the problems identified by Minister Tanner in Australia, today many Indonesian government organizations – and commercial companies – operate ICT infrastructure without structure or standards. “We cannot add additional services in our data center,” mentioned one IT manager interviewed recently in a data center audit. “If our users need additional applications, we direct them to buy their own server and plug it in under their desk. We don’t have the electricity in our data center to drive new applications and hardware, so our IT organization will now focus only on LAN/WAN connectivity.”

While all IT managers understand disaster recovery planning and business continuity is essential, few have brought DR from PowerPoint to reality, putting much organization data on individual servers, laptops, and desktop computers. All at risk for theft or loss/failure of single disk systems.

That is all changing. Commercial data centers are being built around the country by companies such as PT Indosat, PT Telekom, and other private companies. With the Palapa national fiber ring nearing completion, all main islands within the Indonesian archipelago are connected with diverse fiber optic backbone capacity, and additional international submarine cables are either planned or in progress to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other communication hubs.

For organizations currently supporting closet data centers, or local servers facing the public Internet for eCommerce or eGovernment applications, data centers such as the Cyber Tower in Jakarta offer both commercial data center space, as well as supporting interconnections for carriers – including the Indonesia Internet Exchange (IIX), in a similar model as One Wilshire, The Westin Building, or 151 Front in Toronto. Ample space for outsourcing data center infrastructure (particularly for companies with Internet-facing applications), as well as power, cooling, and management for internal infrastructure outsourcing.

The challenge, as with most other countries, is to convince ICT managers that it is in their company or organization’s interest to give up the server. Rather than focus their energy on issues such as “control,” “independence (or autonomous operations),” and avoiding the pain of “workforce retraining and reorganization,” ICT managers should consider the benefits outsourcing their physical infrastructure into a data center, and further consider the additional benefits of virtualization and public/enterprise cloud computing.

Companies such as VMWare, AGIT, and Oracle are offering cloud computing consulting and development in Indonesia, and the topic is rapidly gaining momentum in publications and discussions within both the professional IT community, as well as with CFOs and government planning agencies.

It makes sense. As in cloud computing initiatives being driven by the US and other governments, not only consolidating data centers, but also consolidating IT compute resources and storage, makes a lot of sense. Particularly if the government has difficulty standardizing or writing web services to share data. Add a distributed cloud processing model, where two or more data centers with cloud infrastructure are interconnected, and we can now start to drive down recovery time and point objectives close to zero.

Not just for government users, but a company located in Jakarta is able to develop a disaster recovery plan, simply backing up critical data in a remote location, such as IDC Batam (part of the IDC Indonesia group). As an example, the IDC Indonesia group operates 4 data centers located in geographically separate parts of the country, and all are interconnected.

While this does not support all zero recovery time objectives, it does allow companies to lease a cabinet or suite in a commercial data center, and at a minimum install disk systems adequate to meet their critical data restoral needs. It also opens up decent data center collocation space for emerging cloud service and infrastructure providers, all without the burden of legacy systems to refresh.

In a land of volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, and man-made disasters Indonesia has a special need for good disaster recovery planning. Through an effort to consolidate organization data centers, the introduction of cloud services in commercial and government markets, and high capacity interconnections between carriers and data centers, the basic elements needed to move forward in Indonesia are now in place.

But “cool” does not carry your business goals. A solid ICT strategy encompassing all your business objectives, while enabling rapid development and providing maximum business flexibility will define the leaders of the future.

Cloud computing is a great concept. It is quickly grabbing the attention and imagination of everybody who has accepted the concept of “the network is the computer,” “The Big Switch,” and the “4th Utility.” In short, most who have grown up in the “Internet Age” either understand or fear the idea that compute and storage capacity will soon become as essential, and available, as cell phones and email.

Why Private Clouds?

Why consider a private cloud? If I can put together an email account, online office environment, and group collaboration site in 10 minutes through Microsoft or Google, why should I consider building an internal cloud infrastructure, or leasing infrastructure from a cloud services provider (CSP) to meet my business objectives?

Well, whether you are in the European Union, North America, or Asia, there are compelling reasons to separate your data from a public cloud. Maybe it is related to privacy considerations. Possibly security requirements. Perhaps you need to ensure you have total control over the location and structure of your mission-critical data.

So let’s consider a few of the benefits cloud computing bring to your organization:

The option of outsourcing physical data center infrastructure to a CSP

Usage-based billing
Infrastructure virtualization
Software as a Service (SaaS) applications standardization
Rapid infrastructure expansion/scalability
Physical and application level security
Infrastructure consolidation
And on…

In reality, while costs may be reduced if outsourcing into a public cloud, all of the above characteristics of cloud computing apply equally to a private cloud. The main difference is your internal IT department or CSP is responsible for expanding resources as needed to meet your business objectives through a level of physical provisioning vs. simply expanding further into a public cloud resource.

Some Additional Benefits of a Private Cloud

Within a public cloud infrastructure you have the benefit, and the shortfalls of being able to distribute your applications and virtual data center within a single – or multiple physical data centers. In a public cloud you cannot really put your finger on a single server cluster or disk where you actual data is maintained.

For applications that require little direct management, that is not a problem. For application that contains personal data that is regulated within a country or economic community that demands physical protection of personal or other sensitive data, it is at best a risk, and at worst a violation of security or privacy laws.

Imagine a 3 dimensional checkerboard with your company using 10 squares within the board. The board has a matrix of 10 squares by 10 squares on each plane, and there are 10 planes available – with a grand total of 1000 potential positions. Your square’s position is randomly moved within the 3 dimensional checkerboard every two seconds.

You will never really have a good idea where your squares have been, how long they will stay in a single place, or where they will be moved next. And the rest of the positions are shared among 300 other users whose positions are being changed at the same rate – possibly faster than your squares. That is one potential visualization of shared resources in a public cloud.

Now imagine your own 3 dimensional checkerboard. Your data is moved around at the same rate as the public board, however you do not share the board with anybody else. Thus, if you need to know where your data resides at any point in time, you only have to know it is within your own 3 dimensional checkerboard.

Consider the possibility that disks being removed for maintenance or technology refresh may contain your company’s mission-critical or sensitive data, and the CSP possibly losing positive control over the media – not a comfortable or acceptable situation.

You are also able to maintain better control over some aspects of cloud computing such as access to Internet Service Providers. In a private cloud you should be able to directly manage the relationship with “upstream” ISPs providing either corporate WAN connectivity, or public Internet connectivity without sharing a connection with members of a public cloud community.

This might be particularly important if a public cloud user is hit by a DDOS attack, loses control of a virtual process such as firewall or virtual router. You are able to stay separate from other shared resources – even if you decide to outsource your cloud service to a physical CSP.

You also have access to the same library of SaaS applications, utilities, operating systems, server images, firewalls, and any other feature of the public cloud service. You have the same ability to “spool” additional virtual machines, and quickly add or expand applications as needed to meet your business objectives – again the only difference is that your cloud environment is physically located on dedicated hardware, with the only limitation being the “current” resource capacity of your private cloud.

A Hybrid Private Cloud

Now the good news. Depending on your business objectives, it is possible to mix the private and public cloud models. One example might be if your business desires offsite archival storage of data. Nothing will technically prevent your company from using a cloud storage utility offered by a company in a distant location – either within your country or in another country.

This also applies to applications, allowing your organization additional flexibility in planning disaster recovery models and business continuity plans.

Many other possible examples, and if we can now begin to consider compute, storage, application, and network capacity as a basic utility, perhaps the 4th Utility, then our job as IT managers becomes easier. Understand the business objectives, and then configure your cloud-enabled resources to meet those needs.

And it is pretty “cool” afterall…

Ten years ago most companies were happy to simply have a web presence, being able to extend their image and company profile throughout the connected world.  As business began to rely on real time, business-2-business transactions, the need for a high performance network and application evolved to the point no company can exist today without being part of the connected marketplace.

Users expect open APIs, near zero latency, and the ability to integrate both provisioning and accounting systems across corporate lines.

Federated Clouds 

The folks at the University of Melbourne’s “CLOUDS” Laboratory have published a study on InterCloud – or the future potential of federating cloud services and providers to allow users better control over their proximity-based processing, as well as on-demand processing capabilities.

The study cites a continuing challenge facing the cloud service provider community, specifically how to:

• dynamically expand or resize their provisioning capability based on sudden spikes in workload demands by leasing available computational and storage capabilities from other Cloud service providers;
•  operate as parts of a market driven resource leasing federation, where application service providers host their services based on negotiated Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts driven by competitive market prices; and
•  deliver on-demand, reliable, cost-effective, and QoS (Quality of Service) aware services based on virtualization technologies while ensuring high QoS standards and minimizing service costs.

Now we’ve considered all these topics either individually or collectively in the past.  We all want on-demand processing capacity, at the lowest cost, and at the best proximity to our users.  The challenge has always been getting past the desire for cloud software vendors, and some cloud service providers to attempt market dominance through producing proprietary software, without any desire to produce a standardized provisioning interface (although some have made half-hearted attempts participating in dead-end standards organizations).

However, very few cloud service providers have a global presence, nor is there any realistic expectation one cloud operating system, virtualization platform, or SaaS application will meet the needs of all users.

Therefore, cloud federations – or the ability to provision across platforms, vendors, and geographies on demand, make sense for both the industry and the market.  This will allow individual cloud service providers to build partners and quickly expand their markets well beyond a single location or region.

The CLOUD Lab promotes a vision of “focusing on design, development, and implementation of software systems and policies for federation of Clouds across network and administrative boundaries. The key elements for enabling federation of Clouds and auto-scaling application services are: Cloud Coordinators, Brokers, and an Exchange.”   

 The Cloud Exchange

If we consider the value and utility of an Internet Exchange Point/IXP, we can apply many of the same ideas to the cloud.  An IXP allows Internet service providers and content providers to interconnect their networks at a single location and bypass transit or intermediate networks.  A Cloud Exchange (CEx) as envisioned by the Melbourne team creates a spot market for cloud services.

A cloud provider is able to announce their available or on-demand excess processing and storage capacity to the exchange, and end users are able to provision into the CEx though business rules as defined by the CEx.

The CEx has three main components, providing directory services, dynamic bidding, and payment management services.

• Directory: The market directory allows the global CEx participants to locate providers or consumers with  appropriate bids/offers. Cloud providers can publish their available supply of resources and their offered prices. Cloud consumers can then search for suitable providers and submit their bids for required resources
• Auctioneer: Auctioneers periodically clear bids and asks received from the global CEx participants.
• Bank: The banking system enforces financial transactions pertaining to agreements between the global CEx participants.

Cloud and Compute/Storage Resource as a Utility

The Melbourne CLOUD team’s vision of cloud federations brings us one step closer to Nicholas Carr’s idea of compute resources as a utility. At some point in the future cloud computing, cloud service providers, cloud exchanges, and cloud federations will bring us one step closer to being able to expect processing capacity at the same level as we expect water, electricity, and roads.

The fourth utility.  A combination of network access, processing power, software as a service, and storage as a basic utility offered to all persons as an expected service.  Cloud federations and exchanges may bring that vision one large step closer.

However, we need to take this one step beyond simple drag and drop bridges.  Cloud computing bridges need to operate among all platforms, and need to provide modeling for both geographic load balancing, as well as a powerful disaster recovery models.  The idea a company can easily bridge and provision a cloud computing strategy through either a one stop shop with a local company, or as an alternative, making on-demand arrangements with an inter-cloud bridge to multiple companies makes the cloud argument much more compelling.

What will it take to make this “bridge” an industry reality?

There are standardization groups working within the cloud industry – one being the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF). The CCIF promotes the “Cloud Computing Manifesto,” which has had controversy and lack of general support within the cloud development community.  The objectives of the CCIF appear fairly benevolent, and from a user perspective actually make a lot of sense.  Those objectives focus on interoperability, security, standards, and transparency. 

This is great, unless you view it from the perspective of a cloud computing vendor, struggling to discriminate their product from the pack, ensuring one or two very large service providers and software developers do not suppress innovation or competition within the cloud marketplace.

So, we’ll consider the probability we in the early days of cloud computing and virtualization (yes, while the product is becoming mature, we are at the 1995 level of Internet development).  Think of the Internet in 1995.  It was a pretty stable protocol, and Internet networks in general ran pretty well.  We were using email, online applications, file transfers, and remote logins – not bad for the early days of Internet use.  Solid operational network, and both academic and commercial Internet networks rapidly began showing how they’d make X.25, frame relay, and even ATM-based networks irrelevant.   

Cloud computing is clearly showing its value, and is a pretty stable infrastructure.  However, unlike development of Internet protocols, cloud computing still has competing architectures and standards.  As the technology develops, and applications available from within the cloud become more powerful and useful to the community, interoperability standards will evolve. 

Much like default routes available to networks and content providers through the Internet today, a default or common denominator protocol in the cloud service provider industry will emerge that will continue to extend interoperability of data and application among cloud providers, much like a Mac is able to read and write files created by a PC (and vice versa).  The bridge between cloud service providers will be understood, and the utility of interoperability will continue to grow.

The value of Cloud Computing is in service execution

So, many companies may be concerned that if true interoperability exists, then competition will be more intense, and products will be diluted into commodity pricing.  To an extent that is true, however the true value of cloud provisioning is, and will be, in the company that understands the customer’s needs, and meets service level agreements.

Companies such as ScaleUp Technologies continue to give the cloud computing industry credibility by delivering on that promise.

Drag and drop provisioning is truly exciting, and the potential of distributed computing and disaster recovery modeling as a logical extension of drag and drop is on the boards.  This vision will be fulfilled with service provider partnerships, industry standards, and a lot of hard, creative work.

As a cloud user, or future cloud user, what is important to you?  What does the cloud service provider industry need to hear from you to make their product meet your expectations?

Let us know!

“If an individual can create a free email account in a matter of minutes, and a small business can create its entire financial system online in a couple minutes, then why must the government spend billions of dollars building (similar) systems that may not be sensitive in nature?”

Vivek Kundra, the US Government’s Federal Chief Information Officer

What if you had more than 700 ministries, provincial governments, local governments, and government agencies all running separate servers located everywhere from small data centers, to closets, to old computers crammed under a desk?

The problems are clear:

• Poor security, as the servers are often undocumented and not managed
• Lack of management center visibility
• Usage of unlicensed or undocumented software
• Sensitive data being created without a backup or disaster recovery plan
• No data standardization

And we could go on and on.  Nothing we have not seen before in government – as well as private sector companies.  I am guilty as well.  I used to run a covert web host within my company, serving up files and acting as a common disk system for my division within the company, at least until the IT director caught me.  For me it was a way to get around the need for additional group applications, and a document management capability for the work group that was not being met by the IT department (budget, no staffing, etc., etc., etc).

Now that landscape is changing.  With cloud computing and software as a service, spooling up additional servers and checking our applications from a corporate software library is becoming a more common model for building a corporate IT architecture.

For governments it is not quite as easy.  Being a bureaucrat is by nature a political position.  Politics by nature are based on power and influence.  Giving up power or influence to another bureaucrat is not by nature a way to continue building a political power base.

But the Nation’s IT Infrastructure is at Stake

Just as the US appointed Vivek Kundra CIO of the US federal government, many other nations are following suit by appointing a national CIO.  The governments know, whether they want to admit it or not, that the global economy and society is advancing so rapidly that a society or government cannot ignore successful models of business process, implementation of models such as ITIL and SOAs, or integration of eGovernment, eLearning, eBusiness, and eEverything into the nation’s national interests.

Appointing a national CIO relieves many bureaucrats from the burden of fighting for their internal IT infrastructure.  As the national CIO sets information and communications technology standards, ministers and IT managers do not lose either “face” or prestige by supporting the national CIO, and if done right will get a better product for the effort.

So a country such as Indonesia has a great opportunity to go from being within the bottom 20 nations of the world in e-Readiness, to a leader.  It might be easier for Indonesia to accomplish this task, as there is very little existing infrastructure to migrate or replace. 

Consider a model where a country builds a few large data centers, all interconnected with high capacity communications, ample Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and a good library of either open source or licensed software online.

Consider the possibility that applications “checked out” to build a data base, office automation suite, eLearning, or other eGovernment application are available on demand.  In addition, if the base applications are all designed to use a common data structure(field formatting, data base formatting, or document versioning), then the potential having national data interoperability becomes more likely than if 700 individual organizations are creating their own data.

The same applies for disaster recovery and backup.  Much easier to have a backup plan for a single virtualized infrastructure than for 700 individual application servers.

Cloud computing, IaaS, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service become a national utility.  Each agency should simply expect compute and storage capacity to be available.

Of course I use Indonesia as an example, because I happen to be here today and have had the discussion several times today.  Indonesians are very interested in how to use cloud computing to help transform their nation’s government infrastructure into a model that leads Indonesia into the economic power it should be, rather than on the list of “developing nations.”

I have had the same discussions in Vietnam, Uganda, Palestine, Hawaii, and California.  The move to cloud and resource virtualization is happening today, and will only accelerate as we head into the future.

Many communities which support development of startup companies and entrepreneurs have groups such as the Tech Coast Angels in Southern California providing assistance to startups, and one of their activities is the dreaded, but valuable “fast pitch competition.”

A fast pitch competition allows entrepreneurs to “pitch” their idea in 90 seconds or less to a panel of experienced venture capitalists. The objective is to practice the pitch with a critical group of VCs who will critique their pitch, offering sometimes brutally direct guidance on how they may improve the pitch prior to going “live” for funding.

VCs Promote the Cloud

During a recent fast pitch competition a young entrepreneur was asked how much money he needed for his new company. The response was ~$5 million.  Surprised, the panelist asked the entrepreneur to further break down that number, and the resulting line item review included a significant amount of money for servers, computers, and data center space.

The panelist then replied to the entrepreneur, “you are a startup company.  With a 90% probability you will fail within the first year, buying that much hardware with investment money makes no sense.  All of your requirements are for processing resources needed to develop software and provide a web presence.  All of which can be done within a commercial cloud infrastructure. 

You should forget the servers and data center, start your company within a could service provider, and then I, as an investor, will also be assured that if you fail I will not get stuck holding a pile of hardware and lease on a data center space.”

Now that makes a lot of sense.  Why would you buy hardware to startup a company, if your business could be started using SaaS on a commercial platform?  Why would you spend precious startup funds on capital purchases supporting activities that can be done on a hosted resource, relieving the startup company from the burden of buying and operating equipment in an expensive data center?

A Harbinger for Future Entrepreneurs

The reluctance of a VC to support CAPEX in the data center is a vision into the future of startup investments.  While IT managers love to have a “hands-on” approach to equipment, it is becoming apparent the economics and utility of public cloud-enabled applications and resources are a factor which cannot be ignored.

Investors do not want to waste money on resources which do not directly support business development, and cloud-based SaaS does contribute to relieving the startup from much of the expense of starting a business.    

While there are always arguments and considerations when establishing any business plan, it is a very small percentage of companies that actually have needs extending beyond the standard suite of office automation, billing, provisioning, and other industry niche packages already available as SaaS.

And, the venture capital community, is beginning to speak very clearly – “don’t waste our money on IT resources that do not directly support the business.”

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.

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.

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.