Hello all! It’s that time again. 

This just in! - we just confirmed that theNew England based Cloud startup company still in stealth mode - CloudSwitch, as a second speaker at this months meeting. CloudSwitch is funded by Matrix Partners and Atlas Ventures.

This month we also have, Newton, Inc., a West Coast SaaS company that provides recruiting technology to corporations globally.  Having evaluated moving their services to the Cloud, Newton’s Chief Product Officer, Steve Hazelton, will explain his decision to forego the Cloud for now and why.  We will also get a demonstration of their product, one of the first enterprise Rich Internet Applications, and learn how companies are turning to this type of solution to build better internal recruiting capabilities. 

Looking forward to seeing you there!

-Wayne

Date: May 12, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7pm
Meeting: 7-9pm

NEW LOCATION!!! Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Address: 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA 02451 Phone: (781) 487-6400 Fax: (781) 487-6600

Directions:  Microsoft

CloudSwitch

Ellen Rubin, Founder and VP Products for CloudSwitch

As a founder and VP of Product, Ellen in the process building an innovative enterprise software product that delivers the power of cloud computing seamlessly and securely, so companies can dramatically reduce cost and improve responsiveness to the business.

Prior to joining CloudSwitch, Ellen was VP Marketing at Netezza (NYSE Arca: NZ), the pioneer and global leader in data warehouse appliances that power business intelligence and analytics at over 200 enterprises worldwide. Ellen was a member of the early management team responsible for growing the company to over $125M in revenues, profitability and a successful IPO in 2007. Ellen has an MBA and BA from Harvard University.

 

Newton On Demand

Joel Passen, Co-Founder and COO of Newton On Demand.

Joel is our lead product evangelist and is in charge of Sales and Marketing. Prior to joining Newton, Joel co-founded GravityPeople and served as Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Business Development where he led sales for Gravity’s recruitment outsourcing business unit. During his tenure, Joel led GravityPeople to be named to the San Francisco Business Times “Top 100″ for fastest growing companies in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. Joel received a degree in Political Science from The Ohio State University. You can email him at joel at newtonondemand dot com.

At last months (March) cloud meeting a cloud based company called Twinstrata  presented their cloud offering called Clarity AP.

Imagine being about to perform ”what if” scenarios during the design phase of your infrastructure. For example design A is going to use all local storage on traditional SAN architecture with vendor XYZ with only one primary network in place. For design B you consider using cloud storage again with one network connection. The Twinstrata product allows you to compare the risk and the costs of each scenario before making the investment.

Twinstrata does their development in the cloud and includes cloud infrastructure profiles for ROI and Risk analysis. A free trial can be downloaded to kick-the-tires on the product or a full enterprise version can be purchased for $500 which seems like a bargain for the architect looking at moving their infrastructure to the cloud.

For more details - listen to the cloudcast and take a look at the slide presentation. Also if you were wondering what Twinstrata means - dual clouds.

Cloudcast can be heard here: Twinstrata_MP3

Presentation can be viewed here: twinstrata-clarityap-cloud

March 11, 2009
6:00 pm	to	9:00 pm

 Welcome!

Once again we have a great lineup for the New England Cloud User Group meeting:

6th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group

Date: March 11, 2009  (Note: Wednesday)
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7 pm
Meeting: 7-9 pm

NEW LOCATION!!!

Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Address: 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA 02451 Phone: (781) 487-6400 Fax: (781) 487-6600

Directions:  Microsoft

 This next meeting (03/11/2009) brings two companies that provide Infrastructure related products to the cloud. Ed Beauvais, Sr. Product Manager from EMC Corporation will be talking about the new Atmos Cloud Optimized Storage. Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of Twinstrata will be talking about configuring infrastructure using private and public cloud technologies and how to avoid the risks in the design.

 

Ed Beauvais

Senior Product Manager

Cloud Infrastructure Group EMC Corporation

 

Ed Beauvais is Senior Product Manager in the Cloud Infrastructure Group at EMC Corporation and is responsible for EMC Atmos – the industry’s leading multi-petabyte information management solution for cloud storage environments.

 

Ed joined EMC’s Technology Ventures Group in April of 2007 with the objectives of creating innovative market solutions in emerging technology markets and creating business model innovation.  Prior to joining EMC, Ed was Director of Product Management for Fidelity Investments focusing on the development and improvement of a web based service platform for the Investment Advisor marketplace. 

 

Nicos Vekiarides

Chief Executive Officer

Twinstrata, Inc.

 

Nicos has spent 18 years in the data storage field, both as a business manager and as an entrepreneur and founder in startup companies. Most recently, Nicos served as Vice President of Product Strategy and Technology at Incipient, Inc., where he helped deliver the industry’s first storage virtualization solution embedded in a Cisco switch fabric.

 

Prior to Incipient, Nicos was General Manager of the storage virtualization business at Hewlett-Packard, where he managed a multi-site business, delivering several releases of network storage virtualization products and growing the business to include host-based products. Nicos came to HP with the acquisition of StorageApps where he was a co-founder and VP of Engineering. At StorageApps, he built a team that brought to market the industry’s first storage virtualization appliance. Nicos was instrumental in the sale of StorageApps to Hewlett-Packard for $350M in 2001. Prior to StorageApps, Nicos spent a number of years in the data storage industry working at Sun Microsystems and Encore Computer. At Encore, Nicos architected and delivered Encore Computer’s SP data replication products that were a key factor in the $185M sale of Encore’s storage division to Sun Microsystems.

 

Nicos holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

 

 

 

This last meeting had two very different cloud companies - with the only constant being they both were cloud SaaS companies!

SnapLogic:

Mike Pitaro from Snaplogic spoke first and introduced the concept of “cloud-to-ground” information integration. Snaplogic builds a data integration server that connects and transforms information from SaaS, Web, and more traditional applications in the datacenter (kind of like an ESB/ETL service for the cloud).

SnapLogic uses REST and has an open API that allows a developer to built their own connectors to applications that SnapLogic hasn’t built yet. The ease of use, a free sandbox, and an Open Source version all qualify this as a cloud-friendly product. SugarCRM, Salesforce, and NetSuite are the core applications that connectors have been built for so far with standard Web 2.0 elements such as XML, RSS, and an HTML scraper included. Snaplogic also integrates more traditional data such as delimited files, databases, and spreadsheets making this very versatile to integrate the old and the new seamlessly - while connecting the datacenter apps to the cloud services all coming together in your browser.

Snaplogic is certainly worth a look if you want to be able to quickly integrate SaaS with your current infrastructure without having to face a total migration/rewrite and without having to jump with both feet into the cloud.

The slide presentation can be found here: SnapLogic PDF and the cloudcast can be found here SnapLogic mp3

 

Tamale Software

Tamale Software was a company targeted at financial services companies. I say ‘was’ because they were acquired by Advent Software back on October of 2008. The combination of Tamale’s “front office” capabilities for the analysts and researchers combined with Advent’s mid/back-0ffice services seems a natural fit.

John Fawcett from Tamale spoke about the new product that they have been building and testing that takes their offer to a new level - as a hybrid “cloud” offer. What makes it hybrid is their unique architecture that protects the privacy of the end users data while still leveraging common services.

For example - there is a main server that sits in the “cloud” - which is repsonsible for pushing software updates and upgrades non-disruptively and logs software problem/bug events - but does not have any end user information on it. All the user/company information is located on a local server and on the individual clients. The more private the data the closer to the source it remains with very fine grain protections at the field and user access level.

By using a hybrid SaaS model - the software services are provided and managed by Tamale while the data is kept inside the firewalls of the company using the service and not accessable by even the service provider.

The Tamale cloudcast can be found here: Tamale mp3

  We had two speakers at the January 13, 2009 cloud user group meeting in Boston. The first speaker was from Sonian (yes - they chose a nickname from Smithsonian) was Greg Arnette their CTO. Sonain is a startup company that built a cloud based service offering to archive email to the cloud. The complete stack lives in the cloud and they use Ruby-on-rails and Erlang for their IDE.

•  Started in 2006 http://www.sonian.net/
• They only have 10 employees and only needed $1M in angel funds because they claim they didn’t need the other $4M in technicians and infrastructure that startups traditionally used. This allows them to focus on their intellectual property and getting those key reference accounts before they even have to consider venture capital or other financial instruments (and give up the equity to go with it).
• They have 75 customers, 7 Vars signed, and 5 OEM agreements.
• The 75 customers range from 200 to 10,000 email boxes.
• Sonian runs on Amazon Web Services using EC2, SDB & MySQL, EBS and S3, SQS, UI is served via Apache (on AWS), and ERlang, RabbitMQ,, and Map Reduce for the ESB and processing.
• Their service supports all major email engines: Exchange, GroupWise, Notes, IMail Server, Zimbra, Scalix….
• $36/year/mailbox compared to standard offerings in the $120+/year/mailbox range. Each mailbox gets 2GB/User/year for that fee.
•  All data is stored with an MD5 hash and encrypted and is fully searchable for eDiscovery.
•  All data is replicated to 8 AWS datacenters for access and protection

             Greg’s presentation was very interesting … and he got lots of questions from the crowd! Security and architecture were the hot topics as was how the service works - customer (email/system administrator) configures the policies for extracting and sending emails in a batch to Sonian Services on AWS via SSL. Administrator has a client that runs in the cloud that uses SSL and all Sonian components are in the cloud allowing Sonian to rely on AWS for security and robustness.

             For security they use the data encryption services provided by AWS with .509 certificates. They also only use their own AMI images and do not use or advocate using the public ones due to the potential of trojans or leaks. One thing they do in addition is they have their AMI’s reviewed using Ouncelabs or Vericode to make sure their code is “certified” as secure.

             Greg did a great job presenting the companies service offer and it was useful to see the value in shifting from a traditional “product” acquisition to a cloud SaaS model for enterprise email archiving.

             One other note is that from the four cloud meetings we’ve had so far – we’ve had two startup companies speak so far – both of which (Sonian and Pixily) have built services that “sell” to their customers (one enterprise and one consumer/SMB) storage/archiving in the cloud.  Security was a common theme during the Q&A’s. It will be interesting to see if the trend of startups, SaaS, Archive/Storage, and security continue to be the early issues and services chosen by entrepreneurs.

 Here is the sonian Podcast (MP3) and here is the sonian_cloud_archiving presntation (PDF).

 -wayne

On January 13, 2009  we had another great New England Cloud User Group meeting! We had two great speakers - both providing a view into what a startup is doing to change the way we do email archiving (www.soniannetworks.com) and what Sun is thinking about – how to integrate what they build and sell today with the cloud

                Sun’s speaker was Angelo Rajadurai who is one of their evangelists for all things cloud working with startups. According to Angelo they are trying to reproduce their success in the dot.com era by being successful with cloud companies. Angelo spent the first part of his discussion on how great the cloud was for the future in terms of the business model - removing the capital investment requirements, reducing a startups focus on infrastructure and allowing startups to invest in their Intellectual Property and business readiness instead.

                Part II of the discussion was truly brilliant in that Angelo started talking about AWS specifically and got the heads nodding in the room. He talked about how great S3, EC2, and EBS were in terms of providing a great solution to the startups - easy to use, low cost of entry, and very rich in terms of services. Now he had the room hooked.

                Part III - Angelo started talking about ZFS … and at first I was confused - what does ZFS have to do with the cloud? ZFS is a file system that has some very interesting features in it. For one - it can automatically tier storage based on the storage type. Angelo explained that ZFS is designed with the equivalent of an MMU in it that takes blocks and places them in the appropriate memory location - only instead of an MMU it is a DMU (disk management unit) that can put high read data on an SSD and data that is more general on slower storage such as Tier1 or Tier2 and manages file system storage pools. Angelo’s tie in to the cloud was that he created a ZFS to S3 bucket file system - or a FUSE (file system in user space). Now you may be scratching your head - but consider this … what if you could marry localized file system and storage tiering to the cloud as the slowest (cheapest) tier?

                Part IV - Angelo then told us that what they have found is that the $/TB cost are one dimension but the IOPs cost for the cloud are also important. IOPs in the cloud need to be looked at differently because if the IOP results in the data being transferred into and out of the cloud the cost model changes dramatically based on the direction the data is headed. Sending data to the cloud is pretty cheap whereas getting data out of the cloud is very expensive. What SUN has been proposing is a TCO model that positions a SUN Unified Storage Array at a local datacenter (non-cloud) that is used to present cached data to the customers for high volume read and the cloud is used for the archive. For example Angelo referred to a popular photo storage/sharing site that used their own storage, then realized the cloud was cheaper, then found out that the downloads were killing them in AWS costs - so they now used a local cache by storing heavily read photo’s on a local array and use the cloud to persist the archive.

                Personally I think this is a great strategy to use existing storage technology and marry it to the cloud - allowing ILM to now include the cloud as one of the data stores.  Any thoughts or reactions from all you cloud folks?

Here is the presentation sun-cloudstorage and this is the sun-cloud-storage PodCast.

 

-wayne