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5 Keys to Enterprise
Cloud Computing
Contents
Introduction..............................................................................................1
5 Keys to Enterprise Clouds.................................................................2
Limitations of the Public Cloud..........................................................3
Cloud Economics.....................................................................................4
Enterprise Cloud......................................................................................5
InstantOnTM Solutions............................................................................6
Conclusion.................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Cloud computing, sometimes referred to as the “third
revolution” in the IT industry, follows the personal computer
and Internet “revolutions” and is already transforming the
way we think about computing.

But what is it? Gaining agreement on the definition of

cloud computing in the tech industry is approaching the
level of a religious war, with definitions running the gamut
-- describing everything from simple shared infrastructure,
to software as a service, to pay-as-you-go computing power
and storage space, to a systems architecture abstracted from
physical location and ownership.

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T he cloud concept represents a fundamental shift in computing, providing a platform

for agile and cost-effective business applications and IT infrastructure. New traffic
patterns, new forms of content and new applications are key drivers of the need for
dynamically allocated, scalable compute resources. It is no longer feasible to pre-pro-
vision to account for the peaks of demand.

Amazon.com®, the poster child for this kind of usage, really

created the cloud computing movement as we know it today.
In Amazon’s case, infrastructure was optimized to handle the
The cloud concept
surge in retail traffic from Black Friday through the New Year.
The under-utilized resources—largely idle for the rest of the
represents a fundamental
year—represented a huge opportunity cost for the company,
which led to the development of Amazon Web Services™. Now shift in computing,
Amazon, Microsoft® Windows® Azure™ and others provide
access to their compute resources using a pay-as-you-go model
that creates financial value around their previously under-uti-
providing a platform for
lized IT assets.
agile and cost-effective
While these extreme use cases of cloud computing show the
power of the model for content providers and highly sea-
sonal businesses, enterprises rarely experience these kinds
business applications
of patterns.
and IT infrastructure.
Quite simply, cloud computing is the convergence of virtualiza-
tion technology and utility-based billing.

5 Keys to Enterprise Clouds

1. Designed for production-ready enterprise applications.
2. Enterprise-grade provisioning, billing and support.
3. Architected for hybrid computing; blending cloud with dedicated hosting.
4. Support for private cloud
5. Enterprise cloud services

Key #1 - Designed for Production-ready Applications

Enterprises seeking to use cloud solutions, must choose a cloud solution that is engineered for pro-
duction-ready applications. Most public cloud solutions assume applications are deployed on a
simple network with minimal security, compliance and IT accountability. Ultimately, the solution
should be able to support private networking, enterprise grade virtual appliances and full visibility
into the lifecycle of IT applications running in the cloud.

Key #2 – Enterprise-grade support, billing and accountability

Most public cloud solutions are based on credit-card billing models with no ability to generate
monthly invoices or detailed billing information around resource utilization. Enterprises demand
a greater degree of financial and operational accountability where traditional billing controls and
payment terms/conditions are part of the solution. Customer support services typically offered
with traditional managed services (i.e., 24/7/365) should be a natural extension of enterprise cloud
solutions. These services include 800# support, portal, trouble ticketing and access to solution
engineers that can help build a cloud solution.

Key #3 – Architected for hybrid computing; blending cloud with dedicated hosting
All enterprises have dedicated infrastructure - whether in their own corporate datacenter or in a
3rd-party hosting facility. Enterprise cloud solutions must also be architected to support a hybrid

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computing model that combines cloud/virtual infrastructure and dedicated infrastructure in a

single solution. This begins with the network and the ability to securely interconnect cloud and
dedicated resources by extending to the orchestration layer, enabling dynamic provisioning of
resources to meet the workloads of the enterprise to provide cloud-bursting.

Key #4 – Private clouds

Private clouds allow enterprise customers full control over their IT platform. For example, those
running on the Citrix® XenServer® platform offer significant savings over a VMware®-based solu-
tion (typically a quarter of the cost) while still providing enterprise grade virtualization with full
support. These solutions make use of the same technology as Carpathia’s InstantOn™ cloud allow-
ing customers to move workloads between private cloud and InstantOn solutions.

Key #5 – Enterprise Cloud Services

Choosing an enterprise cloud provider that provides actual services on their cloud infrastructure
will significantly decrease the time to deployment and increase scale and stability. Enterprise cloud
services should include at a minimum: virtual networking, virtual compute, virtual storage, virtual
disaster recovery, virtual development and test and compliant clouds that meet key federal and
commercial compliance standards including FISMA, DIACAP, HIPAA and PCI.

Limitations of the Public Cloud

Over the last 24 months, enterprises and federal agencies have begun evaluating cloud technol-
ogy and not surprisingly, have come to the conclusion that public cloud as we know it today is not a
viable solution for core enterprise IT infrastructure.

With significant commercial and federal customers, Carpathia Hosting has gained a lot of insight
into what customers think about using public clouds for their own production-ready applications.
Common themes Carpathia Hosting has heard from its customers include:

• Authentication / user access models

Public clouds assume one person in each organization has full control over all operations. To
allow multiple people to collaborate on a single cloud deployment, most public clouds recom-
mend sharing accounts.

• Invoicing / billing
Often, there is no invoicing in the traditional sense, simply one line on the buyer’s credit card.
Enterprises and federal customers especially are looking for much more than a credit card swipe
to support production environments.

• Customer service
Enterprises are looking for more traditional ways to interact with customer service -- such as
800 numbers, trouble-ticketing systems, etc. Forums, Twitter and other new methods work
great for non-mission critical apps, but overlay a SLA or revenue generating solution, and cus-
tomers want a human to talk to directly.

• Virtual machines or virtual environments?

Private networking, which allows two or more machines to communicate in isolation, is some-
thing taken for granted in every traditionally hosted environment. This is the underpinning of
enterprise architectures and used to define traditionally-hosted security domains and boundar-
ies. In the public cloud, basically everyone is on the same network. To enforce security controls,
you need to do so with local firewalling in each virtual machine’s operating system.

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• Monitoring, ticketing and service management

In the public cloud, the person deploying solutions is on the hook to provide service manage-
ment. Enterprise customers running production applications demand service management
delivered as part of the solution and expect the contents of the virtual machines to be moni-
tored for health, performance and availability.

These are just a few of the challenges Carpathia Hosting has heard from customers who are adopt-
ing or evaluating cloud solutions. These challenges have driven the development of our own 2nd
generation enterprise cloud solution, InstantOn™.

Cloud Economics
Cloud is not always the most economical solution to IT problems. If, as a customer, you can commit
to a specific amount of resources (be they compute or storage), buying managed dedicated can
often be more effective. For example, a customer moved its financial support system to a public
cloud provider from an internally hosted solution. Before moving to the cloud, a ROI was created
to highlight immediate savings. The model was extremely complete and took into account power,
cooling, etc. One month into the project, however, the first billing statement was received, and the
cloud costs were 45% more than the internally calculated costs. The issue? The model was built on
a per CPU hour basis. Because of the application architecture, the customer wasn’t able to switch
off virtual machines – thus driving the cost up – and exposing one of the significant challenges of
this approach.

Another good example of how cloud economics can break down

is storage. Many content providers have looked at simple storage The cloud makes more
solutions like those provided by public cloud providers. Paying 15
cents per GB sounds like a great value if you are purchasing in
small increments. However, if you are able to commit to a larger
sense in situations where
block of storage -- lets say 30TB -- this comes in at $4,500 per
month! Add in bandwidth charges for access to the data, miscel- you need to grow in
laneous charges for access to the data, and you are quickly closer
to $5,000 a month.
smaller increments
In a hosted environment assuming some degree of redundancy
in storage, customers would expect to pay $1,800 - $2,400 per or to scale up and
month for the same amount of storage. In this case, dedicated
has much higher I/O rates. The cloud makes more sense in situ-
ations where you need to grow in smaller increments or to scale
down to meet the
up and down to meet the peaks and troughs of customer usage.
This is a good financial use case for a hybrid solution of dedi- peaks and troughs of
cated and cloud resources.

See www.WhatIsInstantOn.com to find out more about

customer usage.
Carpathia Hosting’s hybrid approach to dedicated hosting and
cloud computing.

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Enterprise Cloud
Carpathia Hosting developed InstantOn to meet the needs of customers as they experienced chal-
lenges on-boarding applications to public clouds.

Let’s start with the facility. InstantOn V2 is hosted in two

SAS70 Type II facilities. SAS70 Type II is the “must-have” cer- InstantOn V2 is hosted in
tification for all hosting companies. It’s basically a definition of
a set of controls and an auditor’s review and opinion on those
controls. A control could be as simple as “we lock the datacen-
two SAS70 Type II facilities.
ter door,” which an auditor could review and pass. Sharing the
auditor’s opinions of these controls is something enterprises SAS70 Type II is the “must-
often demand. Very few public cloud providers offer this level
of transparency.
have” certification for
Additionally, cloud on-boarding is something enterprises are
coming to expect. Having great API’s and web UI’s, etc. is fine, all hosting companies.
but when it comes to moving applications and data to the cloud,
enterprises are looking for consulting and professional services.
They need help understanding what should move and what
It’s basically a definition
should remain on dedicated infrastructure, understanding the
ROI, potential savings, building a migration strategy and devel- of a set of controls and
oping a DR plan – all key items an enterprise looks for when
embracing the cloud.
an auditor’s review and
If we take a look at enterprise workloads, we get a little more
insight into the characteristics that become more important opinion on those controls.
for an enterprise vs. a 2.0/developer customer. Many enter-
prise cloud deployments are “project”-based — that is, the enterprise needs to add a new feature
(e.g. CRM), needs it up quickly, wants to avoid capital expense, etc. The need for extreme elas-
ticity is rarely included in the workloads of an enterprise. Sure, once a month having some extra
horsepower to close the books is great, but it’s not an hour-by-hour swing of multiples of the envi-
ronment we might see from a social media site. There is also the need for short-term project-based
solutions (e.g. a company needing a development environment for a few months to build out a new
version of an app, do a trial with a new software solution, etc.)

When enterprises do take the plunge, they need more than just a flat pool of virtual machines. They
look for a higher-level construct, group or application. Grouping allows architecture to be defined,
blueprints created and run books produced. They also look for “topology” in that virtual appliances
- such as loadbalancers - need to connect to firewalls, and web servers via vlans/virtual switches.
They want the same degree of isolation they have with today’s dedicated infrastructure.

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InstantOnTM Solutions
Carpathia cloud architects can help design a solution that meets your business and financial
demands. Using our cloud foundation, we can take cloud compute, storage and networking build-
ing blocks and construct a solution. These solutions can be deployed in minutes to create the agility
required for today’s IT.

• Virtual Compute
On-demand computing services for both simple virtual machines and complex topologies
including connections to existing dedicated infrastructure in a secure manner. InstantOn
uses Citrix® XenServer™ 5.5 hypervisor providing industrial level technology and support
for virtualization.

• Virtual Storage
Object and block storage solutions designed to support enterprise compute requirements.
Storage can be shared between multiple virtual machines and dedicated servers with multiple
copies of each object. Storage is provided in redundant configuration that is persistent after
virtual machines are stopped.

• Virtual Networking
Networking solutions to support virtual compute and storage allowing InstantOn to be deployed
in enterprise configurations taking advantage of solutions like Citrix® Netscaler® VPX™.

Disaster Development *Virtual CLOUD

Recovery Test Desktop SOLUTIONS

Cloud Orchestration
CLOUD
Virtual Virtual Virtual FOUNDATION
Networking Compute Storage

*Q2 2010

InstantOn also has a number of cloud solutions available; this ever-expanding list is focused on
common enterprise IT challenges.

• Private Cloud or Private Virtual Datacenters

Virtual Compute and Storage solutions deployed in a private or reserved deployment. Combines
the advantages of cloud technology such as dynamic scaling and instant provisioning and a fully
managed environment.

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• Compliant Cloud
Designed to meet government IT standards including FISMA and DIACAP. Enhancements include
RSA authentication, SSL VPN for management access and inter/intra virtual machine firewalling.

• Virtual Disaster Recovery

Replicated data ensures you have a current offsite copy of mission critical information at a frac-
tion of the cost of traditional disaster recovery solutions. Pay for cloud resources on-demand
during DR testing and DR events.

• Virtual Development & Test

Virtual Compute and Storage solutions designed specifically for test labs for easy deployment
and promotion into production at a dramatically lower price-point than deploying dedicated
development and test lab environments.

SPECIALIZED
Private Hosted Cloud Compliant Cloud
CLOUDS

Cloud Orchestration
CLOUD
Virtual Virtual Virtual FOUNDATION
Networking Compute Storage

Conclusion
As we’ve seen here, enterprise cloud is a little more than “enterprises using the cloud”. To support
mission critical workloads, enterprises look for the right blend of people, process and technol-
ogy. The cloud isn’t one size fits all — if it was, the battle for the cloud would be over. There is
plenty of room for innovation in the enterprise cloud realm. The key is for an enterprise to define
its requirements and seek out a cloud service provider that will work with a customer to architect
and implement the right solution vs. forcing them into a cloud solution that meets the service pro-
viders requirements to scale and manage their own standardized cloud offering.

For more information on Carpathia Hosting’s unique enterprise cloud solution, InstantOn, visit
www.carpathiahosting.com/EnterpriseCloud

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