Ladies and gentlemen please be sure your tray tables and seat backs are in their upright and locked positions…we are going for a ride in the Skytap Cloud. It occurred to me today on a flight from Seattle to San Francisco to attend and exhibit at VMworld 2010, that we live in one of the most interesting times in human history. In the last twenty years we have seen the birth of the World Wide Web in 1989, to the founding of Yahoo and Google in 1994 and 1998 respectively, to MySpace in 2003, Facebook and Twitter in 2006, and the advent of the iPhone in 2007. Now we are living the age of the ever nebulous “Cloud”, which many people believe will be the source of technological innovation for the next decade. There is no question from a technology perspective we are living in one of the most if not the most fascinating times in human history.

To further illustrate my point I decided to use Alaska Airlines’s inflight wifi to launch Skytap Cloud as I sailed through the air on a Boeing 737 at 35,000 feet somewhere over the state of Oregon. In a matter of seconds through my web browser I was able to login to Skytap Cloud, launch and spin up 6 virtual machines in less than 30 seconds from my laptop.

To take my experiment further and make my point about how amazingly cool technology and specifically Skytap is, I suspended and relaunched the same configuration in Skytap Cloud from my iPhone. Now granted, an iPhone (or any mobile device) is hardly the most efficient way to configure, launch and administer a virtual datacenter. However, it can be done and quite quickly for that matter.

We now more than ever have the freedom and ability to create tremendous computing power from anywhere in the world within mere seconds. Assuming I was a training manager, I could have configured a robust training environment on a Sunday afternoon from an airplane, launched a training session from row 14 seat A and administered a training course with students in San Francisco, Sao Palo, Sienna, Singapore, or anywhere in the world. Likewise as a developer manager I could have just as easily created a development environment to test or migrate enterprise applications in the Skytap Cloud literally among the clouds. Or as an IT manager,  I could automate the provisioning, monitoring, resource management, user management and import/export of VM images.  I could have easily implemented my company’s IT policies and control services to ensure security, granular role based access control, audit usage, create reports, assign and track quota and maintain corporate compliance. This is powerful and amazing stuff.

When Google Enterprise Product Manager Rishi Chandra said at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference earlier this summer that “The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud”, there is no question Mr. Chandra was right and no denying that the next 20 years will be more amazing than the last.

- Nate Odell

- Nate Odell

Can there be no end to this status quo?
Can developing, testing and shipping software be made fun again?
Can that be done for lesser cost and in far less time than before?

We asked Dr. Becky Hammons, a renowned quality expert these questions. Her simple answer is, “Yes! Use the cloud”. Having worked in the software industry for 30 years and having built many cool new products, Dr. Hammons is no stranger to this stressful cycle. But she has broken out of the status quo. She shared her experience on Aug 19 with 70 other industry peers.

When asked to describe the typical challenges her team faced, she identified a few key ones:

• Availability of client, server and network configurations for complex test scenarios
• Baseline test configuration growth over time, with limited capital budget for new servers
• Cycle time needed to configure test environments, including localized operating systems
• Troubleshooting defect scenarios with offshore testers
• Sharing test resources with remote development teams

Dr. Hammons wanted to eliminate these challenges for her team. She looked at Cloud computing as a solution.  She felt the cloud model offered several distinct benefits:

• Cloud resources enable fast deployment of new test configurations upon demand
• Usage is scalable to meet virtual machine and storage needs
• Local physical test network can be integrated with cloud network via VPN
• Able to expand client and server test load beyond capabilities of our physical equipment
• Large variety of client and server operating systems in cloud enable teams to run more concurrent tests without additional capital investment
• Reduce cycle time from hours to minutes with cloud resources
• Cloud offers 24×7 test environment globally
• Local testers can work in same configuration with offshore testers
• Reduces need to recreate issues locally
• Cloud environment provides central test bed with standardized configurations & easily accessible

After an extensive analysis of market players, Dr. Hammons decided to try Skytap to break down the status quo. According to Dr. Hammons, the results “far exceeded my expectations”.

• While the typical physical test configuration takes about half a day, with Skytap, she cut it down to about 30 minutes. Testers saved 2 days per 2 week sprint cycle.
• Before Skytap, her team was often very constrained to execute load testing in our lab. Set-up took about 2 days per test run. With Skytap, her team can run multiple load tests concurrently with hundreds of clients and dozens servers. Reduce set-up time to an hour per test run.
• She was able to overcome the capital expense constraints and the impact of budget cuts. With she achieved 50% in realized savings.

She summed it up the best towards the end.

“The only way to find out if the Skytap model is right for you, is to try it out for yourself”.

Having heard her success, the Skytap product team agreed on another thing. Shipping the next cool new release to market faster, better and cheaper is really sweet. But, having customers use it and transform their business is even sweeter. Taking Skytap for a test drive is real easy. Contact us and ask for a free trial. Don’t wait too long and let your old dev/test lab Grinch steal your development cycles (as well as your Christmas). We will get you going immediately.  We are confident you will say, in Dr. Suess’ words again, “Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”

- Sundar Raghavan

- Nate Odell

What we are seeing is that this power and simplicity has freed users from having to approximate their application environment.  Redundant network interfaces for failover, clustering, multi-tier topologies, policy-based routing and the like were all left out of the topology to live within the many limitations of traditional cloud networking. The result was the end-goal  - whether that is application testing, building a proof-of-concept or other – was only partially achieved.  Not any more.  Our users are deploying sophisticated application architectures in the cloud with multiple subnets, multiple network interfaces, application delivery controllers, routers, WAN simulators etc. By accurately replicating their production environment or their customer’s deployment environment, users are able to emulate, test, or improve their environment in richer ways than before.

If performing all these tasks required the same degree of specialized IT support as in a physical data center, the business value would still be gated by IT’s bandwidth. By providing a default capability that automatically establishes all the network services, we are seeing functional users quickly achieving high productivity – without needing IT help.  In many cases, IT performs the initial configuration according to their best practices and policies. But they do this once and clone these complex environments to replicate them when needed.  The customer feedback we hear is that this is a win-win for both IT and the business in meeting IT policies and business goals amidst resource constraints.

- John Janakiraman

- Nate Odell

However, from our experience talking with companies every day, we see enterprises are hot on the idea of private clouds, but not necessarily the reality. Specifically, they love the idea of:
(1) Self-service access for users
(2) Automation of manual processes to reduce operations overhead
(3) Ability to scale resources as needed and balance load between different business priorities
(4) Security and maintaining existing IT policies.

Usually, when it comes to actually implementing a private cloud, IT organizations realize:
(1) Building a scalable, cloud-based infrastructure is a major undertaking
(2) Ensuring performance, especially around managing storage, is very hard
(3) There are dramatic up-front capital costs for both hardware and management software
(4) There is no way to easily scale a private cloud on demand, resulting in the need for scheduling software or idle excess capacity

So can you ‘have your cake and eat it too’ with a private cloud (that is get all the benefits, without the risks and administration headaches)? Well, actually you can, it’s called a ‘virtual private cloud’.

Most IT professionals understand that an external cloud offers most of the benefits of a private cloud, but have concerns around security and ensuring IT policies are maintained. Virtual private networking now enables an organization to create their own private cloud using an external cloud service and utilize a secure IPsec tunnel to make this available on their corporate network.

IT administrators can then control policies, such as the allowable subnets a machine in their ‘virtual private cloud’ can utilize and common security controls (such as single-sign on and password policies).

Most organizations want to use private clouds for dynamic workloads, such as application development and test, IT sandboxes, and prototyping, so concerns over data security are typically not an issue (especially as best practice dictates these workloads should not be using production data).

The benefits of the ‘virtual private cloud’ model can be significant:
(1) The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a virtual private cloud is typically 60% lower than an internal implementation
(2) An IT organization can deploy a virtual private cloud in days vs. months for an internal effort
(3) A virtual private cloud can be scaled up or down at will according to business demand – something not easily attainable with an internal private cloud.

We have many customers that have proven out the virtual private cloud model. One customer, a major enterprise company, deployed their Skytap virtual private cloud within a week and now uses it for SAP release testing. Another customer, Bakbone, has been using Skytap as a VPC solution since last year. They’ve seen substantial cost savings and have scaled their Skytap cloud as demand has increased.

We’re strong advocates of the virtual private cloud model and believe it’s a lower risk and more cost effective approach than building an internal private cloud. It’s usually far better to try adopting a virtual private cloud first before making a large investment (that may fail). So, if you’re planning a private cloud strategy, feel free to contact one of our cloud specialists and we’ll get you started with a Skytap virtual private cloud so you can evaluate the benefits yourself.

Read the full press release here.

• Support for advanced, multi-tier network topologies
• Ability for users to deploy virtual data centers with multiple networks using Skytap’s self-service Web user interface
• Comprehensive network security and policy management using virtual routers

Click on this 3 minute video for an overview of Skytap’s network automation features.

“… the harsh economic climate will actually accelerate the growth prospects for the software as a service (SaaS) model as vendors position offerings as right-sized, zero-CAPEX alternatives to on-premise applications. Buyers will opt for easy-to-use subscription services which meter current use, not future capacity, and vendors and partners will look for new products and recurring revenue streams.”

This statement applies equally well to all cloud services, which convert expensive Cap-Ex investments into variable Op-Ex expenses and are low risk to adopt.

We’re definitely seeing many prospective customers looking for ways to offset cash outlays and a willingness to try new delivery models. We’re also confident that over time many of these customers will see cloud services as a compelling long-term alternative to in-house solutions.