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Continuing to Innovate – New up.time Release

Monday, May 17th, 2010

It’s been a busy day for us at uptime software today, as our new release of up.time hit the marketplace this morning. We’ve had fantastic feedback from both analysts and media alike, especially surrounding our ability to address the needs to Mid-Enterprise IT departments.

We are finding that Mid-Enterprises are facing a very complex IT environment that includes applications and infrastructure spanning virtual, physical and cloud platforms. While there are expensive solutions available to large enterprises, there is little on the market for these mid-sized enterprises, which face the very same challenges. The key, we have found, is that they need:

  • Deep Monitoring: Providing metrics at the service, application and systems resource levels
  • Simple Management: Virtual, physical, and cloud environments with a single tool
  • Ensured Service Levels: Proactive issue avoidance and automated healing
  • Affordability and Ease-of-use: Most importantly, they need to do this with a tool that is quick to deploy, easy to use, and affordable based on their budgets.

I thought I would share a couple of the articles that have already been published on up.time today:

Information Week: uptime software Refreshes Monitoring Tool for Mid-Market

CTO Edge: uptime software Makes IT Simpler

What makes this exciting is the perfect fit that mid-enterprise companies have found when using up.time. In fact, more than 90 percent of our new customers in 2009 were mid-enterprise. So, we know first hand what these companies need to be successful. They need a powerful systems management solution that is truly low maintenance, able to deploy quickly and affordable at a mid-enterprise price. up.time is the perfect fit for mid-size companies that want deep monitoring of virtual and physical environments with a single tool but have constrained IT staff and budgets.

More to come…

Alex

P.S. and next blog, I’ll take my marketing hat off…

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Posted in cloud, IT operations, sla, uptime | No Comments »

Notes from #CloudCamp #Toronto

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

A few nights ago, I was at CloudCamp here in Toronto and it was my first experience with an un-conference and an un-panel.  The un-conference vibe meant there wasn’t an agenda, but a loose structure that involved flash/quick presentations from the sponsors, an un-panel, and then breakout sessions.

The sponsor five-minute talks were interesting in that none of them were customer story oriented, all were vendor me-me-me presentations.  The IBM one was squint inducing and the quick summary page had twenty different URL links on it for quick reference!  I did enjoy the OpsCode presentation as John Willis was pretty enthusiastic, might be worth a visit to an OpsCamp soon.

The un-panel aspect was engaging in that the facilitator asked the crowd who thought they were cloud experts and then got them to sit on the stage as the panelists.  A list of questions was then generated by the crowd and the panelists got to choose a question and had one minute to answer it.  My question of “how do you monitor your applications in the cloud” went un-answered, which irked me, but based on the other questions asked and discussed – most people just aren’t very far along the cloud deployment route.  People are still trying to understand things like security, lifecycle management, ROI, types of cloud, vendor lock-in, future of cloud, etc.

On the whole, worth the visit, and I’m sure as the crowds get bigger, the conversations will evolve and mature.

Alex

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Green IT, Green Peace Strikes out at the Clouds

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Green Peace is no stranger to controversy, and in this case their recently published study on Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change has certainly caused a lot of discussion on the inter webs.

The documents thesis is that we are building huge numbers of data centers and that we need to consider the impact of them, and also that we need to ensure we use renewable energy to power cloud based infrastructure.

Again, as usual with Green Peace, in general it’s hard to disagree with the overall argument that the planet is important, it’s the way they choose to deliver their messages, and the way they target them that I find issue with.

The document wants to attack the corporate “boogey man out to kill mother nature”, which is embodied by this quote: “But decisions about how the cloud will be built out are being made by business leaders primarily concerned with quarterly profit statements and earnings for shareholders.”

The first point I’d like to make is, data centers and computing resources are cost centers from a business perspective, the more efficiently and the less resources we can use to deliver IT, the better the profit statements and earnings for shareholders will be. So to say that business and being green are mutually exclusive would be naive and as usual irks me.

Secondly, Green Peace is totally missing the boat on what Cloud is. Cloud infrastructure would be the equivalent of public transit for the IT world. The fact that the stack can be scaled dynamically up and down and that many organizations/deptartments/stakeholders can share the same common infrastructure means far less wasteage in the form of dedicated hardware stacks for app silos that sit idle.

Thirdly, the world of IT has driven up productivity, increased the worldwide standard of living, enabled Green Peace and many other organizations to disseminate their message without using paper products, and due to supply chain enhancement has increased the efficiency of delivering goods on demand to consumers (thus reducing waste).

The paper totally misses the most important point, which is the fact that the number one waster of energy in IT is overcapacity or sprawl. Regardless of whether we use renewable sources or not to power our data centers, the fact of the matter is that IT is nessecary for the progress of society, what is un-necessary and needless is the provisioning of unneeded hardware or sprawl in improperly sized environments.

Luckily there are monitoring solutions out there that can help with this key challenge. Whatever hardware/virtual/cloud, software or device stack you are using, make sure your monitoring platform allows you to determine whether you have too many “heaters in the data center”, “whether you can save on space”, “save on cooling” and all those other things Green Peace should love you for.

P.S: If you are interested in Green Peace’s original study, click here.

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up.time and Next-Gen Cloud

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

At uptime software, we’ve been quite bullish on Cloud initiatives but feel it has become old news and we are focusing on the future of systems management needs — the Ozone.  While allowing the connection of multiple Clouds, the Ozone still has some distance to cover before it lives up to the hype. In fact, I looked at a hypothetical company to determine the costs involved in moving an entire infrastructure into the Ozone. The results were not impressive, Ozone computing was too expensive to gain the critical mass it needs to catch on.

It’s amazing how much has changed in the past few months, as we have learned more about how the Ozone can be best utilized to provide efficiency beyond the Cloud.  Our developers have been working hard to determine how to best monitor, measure, and manage infrastructure that spans physical, virtual, cloud, and ozone.

Stay tuned for news on how uptime will help you with your datacenter’s move to The Ozone.

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2009: A Year in Review; and looking forward to 2010

Monday, January 11th, 2010

I thought I’d take a little time to review this past year, which has been a crazy year, and then briefly comment on the upcoming year.

In light of one of the most depressing economic years in a good long while, we’ve fared very well, acquiring several hundred new customers this year and retaining and growing our existing account base.  We have a fantastic customer renewal rate, and can you believe that 87% of up.time customers buy more within a year!  We launched a great new release of up.time (5.2) this past summer which has capabilities to help automate virtualized environments to minimize or eliminate incidents (or reduce MTTR), can scale to over 15,000 systems deployed globally, and is more tightly integrated with virtualization technologies to help oversee systems in the physical, virtual, and now ‘cloud’ based worlds.  Our VMware appliance (listed on the VAM) has seen its download rate skyrocket the past few months and is almost becoming our primary evaluation platform by prospects.

We’ve also been covered extensively by the industry press and analysts, and for good measure I’ve included a brief list below.  One exciting award includes winning (again) the TechWorld 2009 Product of the Year Award. See more of our awards and reviews here.

In keeping at the forefront of social media, we’re on Twitter as @uptimesoftware, so you can follow us for updates and successes.  There are also a number of staff Twittering about a variety of diverse topics, so @uptimesoftware to ask who they are to follow them.

We have some exciting new releases of the software coming out this year, all furthering our virtualization and virtual server monitoring, as well as cloud capabilities, more as we get closer to release times.

Staying strong, loving it, looking forward to 2010.  Cloud will definitely be first and foremost on people’s mind, but we’ll still be doing what we do best, and that is help you monitor, measure, and manage your systems.

Thanks from everybody on the uptime team.

Alex

o CIO Magazine: How Mt. Sinai’s IT Team Made Virtualization Easier – Kevin Fogarty, CIO Magazine, June 2009.

o Network World: Better Efficiency in VMware Environments – June, 2009

o InformationWeek: up.time Monitors VMWare Physical, Virtual Assets – Charles Babcock, InformationWeek, July2009.

o eWeek: up.time offers Deep VMware Monitoring and Management – July, 2009

o Virtual Strategy Magazine Podcast – June, 2009

o Award: TechWorld Product of the Year – November 2009

o Award: Braham Software 300 – March 2009

o Award: Software 500 – September 2009

o March 2009 – 451 Group Insight Report (No downtime for uptime as it retools its software for virtual, distributed IT)

o June 2009 – 451 Group Insight Report (uptime Software gets deeper into VMware with latest release)

o June 2009 – The Virtualization Practice (uptime software Delivers Next-Generation VMware Monitoring and Reporting)

o July 2009 – Gartner ECA Magic Quadrant

o August 2009 -  451 Group Focus Report (uptime as target for EMC)

o August 2009 – IDC Worldwide Performance and Availability Software Vendor Report (included as a ‘Vendor to Watch’)

o September 2009 – Forrester Webinar with JP Garbani (Doing More with Less: Today’s Success Essentials for Better IT Systems Management

o September 2009 – Forrester Webinar with Galen Schrek (“Virtual Dexterity:” The Keys to Successfully Leveraging Virtual Environments)


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Posted in awards, cloud, IT operations, uptime | No Comments »

2010 The year of cloud enabled convergence

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

This is my thesis for today’s post: Geek toys are important for the future of digital convergence.

2010 will be a year where we will obviously see unprecedented leaps in the availability of geek toys. As you are all aware, CES is happening and a few well timed launches are expected.  The general themes are extremely clear, thanks to a few “leaks” to the press this year.  Consumers are expecting a huge explosion of  devices in ‘tablet form’ as well as a dollop of mobile computing devices based on the Android mobile application ecosystem.  In essence we are all expecting 2010 to be full of ultra powerful, low power, beautifully designed tablet ‘like’ devices that look like they came off the latest set of a Star Trek episode. All of these juicy play things will be delivering waves of toy induced Geek euphoria among the masses for months to come. Will I be partaking in this geek fest? Absolutely, I’ll be one of the early adopters rocking a Nexus One, but that’s not really the point of my post.

From a consumer standpoint, the entire internet and our entire digital lives are converging into devices like the Nexus One and the Apple tablet. That’s amazing when you consider that these devices are essentially a “piece of glass” with a wireless interface, a processor, some kind of solid state memory and a camera. This has been enabled by huge leaps in battery technology, low power computing, but more importantly the richness the “cloud” or essentially what the internet has to offer us on these new types of devices.

The contrast is that, from an IT systems management perspective, the stack used to deliver business services, and ultimately, the content and services to these endpoints gets exponentially more complex and layered with every iteration in the design of the devices. The iterations are also getting faster, as the race to conquer this wild west arena heats among all the usual suspects.

So, this is going to be great for consumers. We are going to see an explosion of different operating system variants, hardware paradigms, and new ways of consuming media. The question becomes, how many IT decision makers are already wondering, what will the impact of people wanting to rock an “ISlate” at work be? What will be the impact of having to provide more and more business services over the wire to mobile platforms like Android, Apple’s mobile tablet OS, Chrome on the Google Tablet (and the list will go on and on for 2010) be? What will be the business impact of having to monitor all the new infrastructure or SAAS based services needed to manage these devices from a corporate policy perspective? How about even the basics of trying to monitor the explosion of different kinds of endpoints themselves as they penetrate the enterprise? We all remember that the IPhone was initially a consumer only device, that later penetrated the enterprise with impunity. Most of my posts end with the same question – are you ready?

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Posted in cloud, IT Management, IT operations | No Comments »

The Cloud is truly “the human network”

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Remember the old tagline “the human network” from one of our favourite telecom providers? This is a great tagline, because it reminds us, that all of that telecom equipment that we put in place is ultimately used to facilitate communication and drive innovation between real people. That brings me nicely to the topic of today’s post – the cloud is actually the true “human network”.

Let’s ponder for a moment, that the cloud isn’t just changing the way we think about infrastructure, it’s changing the way we live. In essence, it’s cloud enabled applications that are making real what I think of as the “human network”.

If we look narrowly at social media networks and their exponential growth for just a moment, we can start to see what I mean. A simple cloud based application like Twitter has forever changed the way we interact, whether it be novel new ways for geeks (read anyone) to fundraise and promote social causes (HoHoTO.ca),  whether it be the dissemination of real-time news, a way to flirt in real-time online, or to simply having a catalogue of our everyday thoughts – all of this brings our humanity to the surface through these connecting technologies.

I have in the past stated that whole paradigm of the cloud is fraught with security issues because of the centralized nature of the data (I still believe this). However, if we examine the true potential of this new massive data set for the study of human interaction – we suddenly realize that we are at the cusp of a new era in understanding ourselves as social beings.

How else do you explain developments like graph node based databases engines like the one from Neo4j to help us find and articulate relationships between massive numbers of individuals? How about tools like Xobni , that link our every day communication by email to social networking (facebook,twitter,linkedin) and generate workplace analytics?

Wouldn’t it be cool to have the data to describe every friendship between every person on earth, how people do business and with whom, a giant database of what people are thinking about right now in real-time, who’s connected to who in the workplace, who’s who in the world of executive leadership? Wait a minute… we’re already there! [Facebook,Salesforce,Twitter,Linkedin, Hoovers]

Wouldn’t it be cool to have all this data all the time, converged to your mobile device? (we are almost there, the cloud is bringing it, why do you think I love Google Android?).

So if we were to say that there isn’t a lot of hype surrounding the cloud, I think we would be lying to ourselves. At the same time, we also need to recognize that the paradigm is real, and that it IS indeed a game changer, not just from a business perspective….. it’s actually about “the human network”.

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization | No Comments »

2010 – The Year of Cloud Experimentation – Part 2 of 2

Monday, December 7th, 2009

This is Part 2 of The Year of Cloud Experimentation.  Please click here to read Part 1.

How is the experimentation starting?

The first steps involve application inventorying and application topology.  What business applications are in the inventory?  What can be migrated?  How are the applications interrelated and what is their topology?

The initial cloud evaluation is going to be similar to the P2V consolidation analyses that have been occurring over the past few years. An added dimension to the Cloud assessment, besides having to understand workload profiles, is identifying proximity of data to the compute aspects of the applications.  Moving large amounts of data between a Cloud and a private network is not yet feasible.

An additional element to testing the Cloud, unlike in-house virtualization, is vendor risk assessment.  If a vendor does indeed collapse, how quickly can workloads be migrated to a different vendor?  Are there any technological ‘gotchas’ like unsupported platforms? This will be a very important hurdle for Cloud to overcome.

Furthermore, what types of Cloud services need to be evaluated?  Cloud servers, Cloud storage, dedicated hosted platforms?  Looking for a DR/HA environment to duplicate in-house infrastructure?  Or perhaps looking to leverage fractional compute during peak application load times?  How is network infrastructure integrated?  Are VPN services available?  How does storage fit into the deployment plans?

Ultimately, cost modeling will be needed to determine the true cost saving.  A number of factors play into this equation: compute intensity and workload profile, network demand, storage throughput, and since services will now be remote, service latency plays a larger role in application delivery.

When evaluating how to deploy applications into the Cloud, there are a number of operations issues to consider.  This includes packaging applications as images for quick deployment and scaling, as well as understanding the potential patch management needs.  A considerable amount of experimentation with lifecycle management tooling will be required, especially if applications are multi-tiered or distributed.  Experimentation with systems management tooling will be essential in order to monitor and manage physical, virtual, and Cloud (PVC) infrastructure from a single-pane-of-glass.  Will tooling integrate with automation solutions to assist in dynamic allocation of resources, or possibly avoid incidents through proactive changes in infrastructure?

Evolution in automation will occur around “bundling” workflows.  Currently, there are very few sophisticated automation workflows related to Cloud technologies.  For example, imagine if VMware’s Orchestrator enabled Amazon EC2 or Rackspace drag-and-drop workflows around provisioning.  If this were the case, dynamic changes in demand would be possible in just a few clicks.

An area of Cloud that we don’t see yet, but which will become more relevant as Cloud services mature, is the concept of cost brokering.  Ultimately, since the workloads in a private environment are known, which Cloud vendors can be used most cost-effectively for fractional compute bursts?  Quite conceivably, depending on location and time of day, rates will differ and you’ll be able to take advantage of the discounts and drive concrete cost-savings.

Internally developed applications won’t be the first applications in the Cloud environment. However, it is important to evaluate which application development platforms are available in the Cloud to be future-ready.  This would include environments like Engine Yard, Azure, Google AppEngine, or SpringSource.

Here is a list of the first five things that an IT manager should consider when evaluating the Cloud:

  1. Where on the IT Spectrum do we fit?
  2. What business applications do we have?  What are their topologies?
  3. What is the profile of the application workloads (can we take advantage of fractional compute)?
  4. Are the applications data or network heavy? Are they highly interdependent?
  5. What systems management tooling passes the P-V-C (physical, virtual, and Cloud) test. Is all this infrastructure inside and outside our walls manageable through a single-pane-of-glass dashboard?

Overall, Cloud will change IT and business in a way similar to the Internet. Make no mistake, we are on the edge of a big and positive change. While there are many hurdles to overcome before the Cloud becomes a mainstream component of IT, these issues will be solved over the next few years.

Remember when the internet first started getting major traction? Were you one of the pioneers in your company that saw its potential? Don’t forget that one of the biggest software companies in the world missed the internet boat and fell behind in catching the ‘internet wave.’ Well, the horn has sounded. Cloud is the next big thing. What are you going to do with it?

Alex

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization, IT Management, Systems Management | 2 Comments »

2010 – The Year of Cloud Experimentation – Part 1 of 2

Monday, November 30th, 2009

At uptime software, we’ve been quite bullish on Cloud’s potential but feel it still has some distance to cover before it lives up to the hype. In fact, I wrote a blog in January looking at a hypothetical company and the costs involved in moving an entire infrastructure into the Cloud (using Amazon EC2). The results were not impressive, Cloud computing was too expensive (in this example) to gain the critical mass it needs to catch on. It’s amazing how much had changed in the ten months since that blog, as we have learned more about how the Cloud can be best utilized. Recently, the media has driven the Cloud excitement and IT managers are now thinking about how the Cloud, in one form or another, can be used in their environments to drive performance and efficiencies.

The real question is this; in what capacity will organizations adopt Cloud over the next few years? With that in mind, we see the coming year as one of exploration and experimentation. The first step is for companies to quantify what Cloud means to their business.  Is it as banal as remote storage used for DR purposes, or something as evolved as dynamic compute with secure private/public networking?

Let’s take a look at the “IT Spectrum,” which is loosely aligned with IT maturity and size of organization.

In this diagram, the left represents most small businesses who house their own servers and have a small number of IT staff.  As the small business matures, they may evaluate SaaS-type applications (like Salesforce.com) or push some servers out to an MSP.  Further maturing, or growing, businesses may have additional servers in remote hosted datacenters, like web servers or remote disaster recovery storage.  At the right-most point in the spectrum, businesses/enterprises have opted to completely outsource their IT and minimize the number of IT staff employed by the business.

Understanding the spectrum’s components is important. They represent a “menu” of options that businesses can use to leverage virtualization and cloud technologies to reduce costs (either labor or infrastructure).  This “menu” is most likely how IT managers will choose to evaluate the relevance of Cloud to cost savings and enhanced service delivery.  For example, with VMware’s new VBlock offering and the ongoing relationship with Terremark, entire stacks of infrastructure can be pushed into off-premises locations and operated in a mission-critical environment. So, whether it’s just dipping a toe into the Cloud waters (like hosting a server in Amazon EC2 or the RackSpace Cloud to deliver a decoupled application) or leveraging the VBlock to move entire mission critical infrastructures, there are many options to consider. Keep in mind that issues such as backup management, lifecycle management, and systems management need to be addressed in all cases.

How is the experimentation starting?

[ more next week in Part 2 ]

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization | 3 Comments »

Microsoft finally draws their line in the clouds

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

As many of you are likely aware, last week Ray Ozzie announced that Azure (Microsoft’s cloud service) would go into full production on January 1st, 2010. Azure is interesting because Microsoft wants to keep the paradigm of desktop OS’s as a key part of the architecture with “the cloud” as an adjunct in what they call the “three screens and a cloud” vision. This vision is important, because it makes the cloud real for consumers and makes it more understandable and accessible to the general populace. Project “Dallas” also re-affirms Microsoft’s commitment to cloud computing as a whole, Microsoft unveiled just enough details to make the project interesting – i.e.  data-as-a-service.

For all the “evil empire” slag that Microsoft gets, people tend to forget, or ignore, what happens when Microsoft embraces a technology and tries to dominate that market – the technology just gets easier to adopt and becomes more real.

This is an important milestone in the development of the entire “cloud story”. Let’s be clear – Microsoft, due to their size and market position, does not have the need to innovate or invent new paradigms. All they have to do, and what they are good at, is step into nascent markets that are at the edge of becoming mature enough to explode. This is generally a moment of truth for any incumbents, as Microsoft can and does take advantage of their massive resources in an all out war for dominance. Once they ‘put their toes in the water’, they slowly wage a war of attrition on the incumbents, and buy all the best players and minds, until eventually their technology is pervasive.  We have seen this strategy in effect to great success over the years. Remember the browser wars, Database (SQL?), ERP, CRM, Content Management (Sharepoint), Audio Devices (Zune), Console Gaming (XBox) and the list goes on.

So what’s the moral of the story? When Microsoft wades into the game, it’s a very strong sign that it’s time to get with the program and adopt this emerging pardigm.

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Posted in cloud, Cloud Virtualization, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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