Head in the Clouds

ISWest is a regional ISP based out of Agoura Hills, CA (approximately 30 miles north of Los Angeles). Started originally as a dial-up ISP, ISWest moved into the standard suite of ISP services including various forms of connectivity (DSL, T1, DS3, OC-x, Ethernet, etc) as well as ancillary services such as shared web and email hosting. Early growth was accomplished with a focus on small and medium sized businesses in the southern California area through strategic partnerships with outsourced IT organizations and customer referrals.

Business situation: To Stay Competitive by Offering an IaaS Cloud Service

With the benefit of owning and operating their own datacenters ISWest had a considerable amount of experience with the underlying infrastructure such as HVAC, UPS, Generators, structured cabling and other physical aspects related to datacenters.  The ISP side of the business gave ISWest experience with designing and implementing highly redundant, high performance networks, as well as the servers associated with various essential internet services such as DNS, email, and hosting.  Offering an IaaS cloud service was the next logical business step to stay competitive.

The business goal was to target existing clients either through the existing partner network of outsourced IT consultants or direct contact to prospects (typically colocation customers with old hardware).  The requirement for these customers was different than “traditional” cloud which was largely based around public-facing e-commerce or other consumer driven websites.  In contrast most customers were looking for a way to re-create network environments they were currently using which were primarily private (NAT) with only a limited number of public IP addresses used.  At the time this type of configuration was either not possible with the popular cloud providers (AWS, Rackspace, GoGrid, etc), or was exceedingly complex to configure.

Given the predictable usage of the target customer, a system that provided hourly billing data was not required, but it would be good to have available should it be required in the future.  An integrated billing system was also not required, as long as the usage data could be exported in a standard and structured format such as XML, JSON, or CSV.

Technical situation

The ultimate goal was to provide each client with their own private network, or in some cases multiple private networks, VPN access to those networks, and use VLANs to segregate customer networks from each other. ISWest evaluated a range different IaaS CMPs including Eucalyptus, Enomaly, and OpenNebula. At the time OpenStack was in its infancy and there were concerns as to its stability and/or production readiness, what direction(s) the project was moving in, and what type of support would be available if commercial support was needed.

PCextreme Achieves Business Agility with Apache CloudStack

PCextreme is one of the leading Internet Service Providers in Netherlands. The company offers a wide range of ready-to-use services including web hosting, colocation, dedicated servers, domain names and managed services. As a pioneer in the affordable hosting market, PCextreme operates with a level of scale and efficiency that allows them to combine reliability with competitive prices. What started out as a hobby for Wido den Hollander, CTO of PCextreme, quickly grew to become one of the leading hosting services providers in the Netherlands, serving over 40,000 customers and hosting 100,000 websites in two datacenters. PCextreme has deployed 120 racks of Supermicro server in those two datacenters.

The challenge: Increase business agility to enhance competitiveness

To sustain rapid growth and maintain leadership in the affordable hosting market, PCextreme had to constantly innovate and expand their services to meet new demands. Key challenges included responding to the desire of customers to control their infrastructure without always having to use managed services, as well as achieving the flexibility to scale PCextreme services up and down based on customers’ needs. Given rising energy prices in Europe, power consumption was another primary concern.

Adapting to these requirements called for a cloud solution that could easily integrate with PCextreme’s existing environment, allow them to manage their infrastructure more efficiently and reduce energy costs—all while providing customers the control and flexibility that they demanded.

Why does CloudStack need a mascot?

Mascots are a great way to provide a sense of unity and pride amongst a group aligned around a common cause.  Many colleges and sporting teams around the world have long rallied around the identity of their mascot.  In recent years, that mascot tradition has been extended to another passionate, loyal group – open source developers!   You may recognize Tux, the Linux Penguin, and Hadoop, the Big Data Elephant.  This competition will select a mascot for the Apache CloudStack community to rally behind for years to come, building excitement and loyalty for its members!

CloudStack mascot showdown

Now, the Apache CloudStack community is looking to establish its own mascot identity.  Today we launched a website introducing the eight finalists in the mascot competition.  Visit www.cloudstackmascot.org to view the finalists and vote for your favorite.  Then come back each week to help narrow the field to the ultimate winner.  Will it be Cloud Monkey, inspired by the powerful monkey kind who commands and orchestrates clouds in the epic Chinese novel "Journey to the West?"  Or perhaps the champion will be Cloud Girl, inspired by the colorful world of Japanese Manga animation bringing an elegance and style that makes it easy to create amazing new clouds. 

The winning Apache CloudStack mascot will be unveiled at the upcoming OSCON (Open Source Convention) event in Portland, Oregon the week of July 16.  

Citirx is looking for someone to help promote and support the Apache CloudStack community in Silicon Valley. This is an awesome opportunity to help grow the CloudStack project and interact with other open source cloud projects. The original job posting and application can be made on the Citrix Career website. 

Position Summary

The Citrix Open Source Cloud Evangelist will be an advocate for the Apache CloudStack project and be primarily be engaged with open source CloudStack users and developers of the Apache foundation project. In addition the Open Source Cloud Evangelist will be responsible for representing Citrix and explaining their products and services in the appropriate venues.

As an evangelist for CloudStack the candidate will provide education and support to end-users. They will conduct product demonstrations, training and provide other forms of assistance to Apache CloudStack users via online communications (IRC, Mailing Lists, forums, wikis) to insure their success using and adopting the open source CloudStack IaaS platform.

In addition the ideal candidate will also facilitate developer relations and encourage code contributions from the community. This includes being a liaison between the developers of CloudStack and facilitating participation in the Apache CloudStack community. The ideal candidate will facilitate communication between core developers and those interested in submitting enhancements, reporting bugs or requesting product features.

I had the pleasure last week of working with a Bothell-based hardware vendor, Silicon Mechanics, and a company called Private Cloud Leasing to get CloudStack up and running on what is literally a datacenter on wheels (the small unit in the picture).

We took this Cloud-on-Wheels to the LinuxFest Northwest show at Bellingham Technical College, and put it on the expo hall floor.

On Sunday, we unplugged it and rolled it out of the expo hall, across the plaza, and up to one of the classrooms for the CloudStack session. The unit itself is self-propelled, runs on UPS,  and you can basically move it around any building that is wheelchair accessible.

The Cloud-on-Wheels generated A LOT OF ATTENTION (it’s very blue) and thus was a great draw to the booth and session.  As we rolled the unit through the hallways of the college, it was a bit like the Pied Piper…we had a group of folks following us, curious to see what we were doing with this thing.