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The recent announcement of the Terremark Cloud offering has raised significant attention especially because of the competitive pricing and EC2 like features of elastic capacity and hourly charges with no commitment. On the surface the Terremark entry price of $0.036 per hour seems very low compared to Amazon EC2 at $0.10 but it's worth picking a few examples to provide a more apples to apples comparison.
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Not included in the comparison is the difference in storage costs which can be small or very significant depending on the circumstance. Amazon provides up to 160 GB of instance storage for a small image or 850 GB for a large included in the hourly cost. If you have only a small instance say 10GB that adds $ 2.50 to the monthly price at Terremark ( @ .25/GB ) however of you needed the 850 GB included in the Amazon Large image that would add $ 212 to the monthly Terremark costs. Also not included is bandwidth costs, however both charge the same $0.17 GB for data transfer out . ( Although Amazon charges $ 0.10/GB for data in vs Terremark $ 0.17 data in ).
Some the bigger differences will more likely depend on how the VMs are utilized. The numbers stated above assume a full month of 24x31 operation. With Amazon EC2 it's possible to save in S3 ( bundle in Amazon terms ) an instance and then shut down ( terminate ) the VM and the billing stops. With Terremark however although you can shut down the VM, the hourly charges do not stop. Only deleting the VM ends the billing, there does not appear to be an option of saving with the hourly charges turned off and allowing a new instance from the saved image to be started at a later time. This appears to be a big advantage for Amazon although I need to learn more about the Terremark offering to fully appreciate the capabilities.
Certainly economics is not the only factor in selecting a Cloud infrastructure provider. Vendor Lock-in and VM portablity often come up as concerns. Security is also a factor in regard to Cloud computing and this was a motivator for Amazons recent Virtual Private Cloud offering which provides a dedicated VPN connection from a customer premise to an isolated Cloud inside the Amazon infrastructure. I also have to admit I was impressed with a recent tour of the Terremark data center in Miami , this place was like a high tech Fort Knox when it came to security. The entire topic of Cloud security is worthy of specialized consideration not covered in this simple comparison.
Ease of use is another consideration that is worth evaluating. The Amazon Web Console is limited in function but easy to use plus includes access to many partner and community provided ( including Citrix C3 Lab ) templates that are prebuilt and ready to launch. In Amazon EC2 for example its now possible signup and launch your own XenApp server in as little a 15 minutes.
Terremark also provides a web base console that looks straight forward however I have not used it myself yet. Terramark does not provide the same portfolio of 3rd party templates however they do provide more granularity in the size of VMs and RAM plus they offer multiple versions of Windows Server.
As the options for Cloud Computing continue to expand the economic analysis of Cloud vs Premise will extend to Cloud vs Cloud, as Service Providers continue to provide dynamic cloud type offerings.
Cloud Economics 101 Part 1 - Premise vs Cloud vs Colo
Cloud Economics 101 Part 2 - Premise Plus Cloud
Cloud Economics 101 Part 3 - Amazon Reserved Pricing
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The Amazon Web Services (AWS) announcement of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offering has just made Cloud Computing more attractive to the enterprise. Most companies I talk with are interested in the "Cloud", but beyond a few SaaS apps and perhaps some dev/test they are not ready for any big change to their corporate IT infrastructure. On the other hand many of those same companies are currently or projected to be capacity limited in their own data center based on space or power limitations.
Many companies will opt to move or expand into a Co-lo (Co-location) facility which provides dedicated space, power and bandwidth. This solves the space and power problem but most of the same costs of computing are just moved to a remote facility. The expensive data center facility cost is shared among other companies but the Server, Storage and Networking are all dedicated. The promise of the Cloud and particularly IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) like Amazon EC2 is sharing computing and facility costs, having capacity available on demand, and only paying for what is used.
The obstacles to IaaS offerings that I hear most often include security concerns and the desire keep the corporate data and or legacy infrastructure in place. Making a massive move from premise to Cloud is not desired or warranted. On the other hand enabling a Premise Plus Cloud solution in a secure fashion and using it only for expansion or overflow capacity could be appealing for many companies. Essentially this is what Amazon is offering with VPC, a dedicated secure network extending from a company data center into the Amazon Cloud with isolated VM's available on demand.
For Citrix Customers this could be particularly attractive for expanding XenApp farms or centralizing new applications on XenApp without the prerequisite facility and capital costs. Customers can bring their own XenApp licensees to VPC or point back to existing license server on premise. We have been collaborating with Amazon AWS to build and test XenApp servers in VPC to validate and number of scenarios and use cases. In addition we have made dedicated Amazon Machine Image ( AMI ) templates available with XenApp 5 preinstalled and ready to launch. Citrix C3 Blueprints are also now available to assist companies that want to start to evaluate the new offering. ( Note: the service is currently in Beta )
For Citrix this announcement represents another progressive move as a leader and enabler of Cloud Computing. Amazon EC2 based on the Xen Hypervisor has already made EC2 ubiquitous with start-ups and the undisputed leader in Public Clouds, VPC with XenApp now represents a significant opportunity for Enterprise IT. The Citrix Cloud Center ( C3 ) portfolio will continue to enable IT and Cloud providers to exploit the promise of the Cloud, stay tuned..
The Citrix C3 Lab with Amazon AWS now hosts XenApp Fundamentals on Windows 2003 Server with no installation required. The C3 Blueprint describes how to set up the environment so you can be testing or demoing apps delivered from the Cloud in minutes. XenApp Fundamentals is the new name for Access Essentials which is an ideal solution for SMB's looking for a simple way to administer and deliver Windows apps to office PC's , Thin Clients, Desktop Appliances, home PC's, Mac's, Laptops or mobile devices. Only a Receiver client is required on the endpoint, the applications get installed on a single XenApp server and are simply published to the users you want to access the app. The Admin console is wizard driven and easy to use, with the option for advanced features only if required.
Putting XenApp Fundamentals in EC2 makes everything even easier, no servers to buy or configure, the image is pre-built and ready to run. The Amazon plus Windows cost is only 12.5 cents per hour while you are using it. Even if you leave it on 24 hours a day all month that only $93 /mo ( plus storage and bandwidth, which is nominal for testing ). We have also included 2 User XenApp evaluation Licenses, so there are no other downloads or registrations required. Once you set up an Amazon account and start the server you only need to install your own apps in the image and click to publish to any user with any device.
This video walks you through every step to get started in 15 minutes.
( thanks to Simon Waterhouse for building the image )
Let us know of any questions or idea's on your use case in the comments below.
There are probably many scenarios that would benefit from the ability to separate XenApp servers from the data source. Unfortunately this has not been a recommended practice due to the latency incurred when moving data from one location to another. Now with the emerging availability of Private and Public Clouds and typically constrained premise space and power this capability could become even more interesting. The time to move data across the WAN securely has been the limiting factor but how about using the Citrix Repeater to accelerate the data and Access Gateway to secure it ? Yes this is possible and we wanted to provide a Proof of Concept, demo and C3 Blueprint that may be beneficial.
This demonstration was included in the Synergy session on Citrix C3 Cloud Architecture. The client laptop located in Florida is connecting over ICA/HDX to a XenApp server hosted in the EC2 Cloud in Virginia, which is pulling data from a file server located in Santa Clara Ca. As indicated in the demo when the Repeater acceleration is enabled the time to open a 5 Megabit file is about 7 seconds. A usable experience for the document delivery example. However with the acceleration disabled the time to open the same 5 Mb file grows to about 2 minutes and unacceptable experience. A 10X+ improvement from acceleration.
Certainly this configuration has limitations and may or may not apply to your situation but it may open the possibilities to solving many app delivery and data location challenges. This example can be recreated easily following the C3 Blueprint and the AMI ( Amazon Machine Image ) template available as part of the C3 Lab in EC2. This does presume you have an available Branch Repeater and Access Gateway on premise to complete the PoC. Try it out and / or let us know what challenges this type of solution may help solve.
Also check out Craig Ellrod's Cloud Bridge post that utilizes Vyatta for a full Premise to Cloud VPN.
http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/craigel/2009/06/08/Cloud Bridge
Follow me @ http://twitter.com/chrisfleck
Cloud Networking is secure and robust
You can create a complete end-to-end network from one cloud network, running on XenServer, through a VPN to another network in a different cloud. All servers and hosts communicate securely over SSL VPN. Amazon Machine Images are secured by the Amazon infrastructure using security groups.
The proof of concept speaks for itself. Between the Softlayer cloud and the Amazon EC2 cloud is running a site-to-site SSL VPN using Vyatta. All of the images in this architecture are running on XenServer. This proof of concept gives rise to many networking architectures for cloud computing.
The reason for using Vyatta site-to-site SSL VPN between the Softlayer and Amazon EC2 clouds is there needs to be a secure network between the two for the transfer of data. The Vyatta AMI (Amazon Machine Image) can also function as a complete router, firewall and DNS cache. The Vyatta SSL VPN router provides security with scalability. Suppose I wanted to separate the Vyatta SSL VPN from a Vyatta OSPF router, I would just launch another instance of the Vyatta AMI.
As you can see from the network diagram and video, complete routing from the Softlayer cloud to the Amazon cloud network is seamless, without having to buy any proprietary hardware. In fact, it is very low cost compared to traditional network solutions. Virtualized networking is here, it is fast, secure and cheap.
A CloudBurst happens when Citrix Workflow Studio determines that one of the devices in the Softlayer Cloud has reached a high watermark. WFS then instructs the NetScaler VPX to start sending traffic to the Cloud - CloudBurst.
To get your own cloud, go here
Configurations used
Vyatta SSL VPN (V1) - Datacenter Configuration
Vyatta SSL VPN (V2) - Cloud Configuration
XenApp VPN Client - Cloud Configuration
Links for this solution
Vyatta for XenServer - go here
Amazon EC2 - go here
XenServer is Free! - go here
XenApp - go here
Workflow Studio - go here
XenApp VPN Client - go here
Dell Server - go here
IP Addresses - go here
Watch This
Its powerful AppExpert!
Cloud Networking is fast
You can create a complete end-to-end network from the datacenter to the cloud. All cloud servers communicate securely over SSL VPN.
Between the datacenter and the Amazon EC2 cloud is a site-to-site SSL VPN built with Vyatta. On the XenApp server in the cloud runs the Citrix Accelerator which connects back to the Citrix Branch Repeater/WANScaler at the datacenter, to accelerate data connections. The Citrix Accelerator makes cloud computing fast, Vyatta makes it secure.
The reason for using Vyatta site-to-site SSL VPN between the datacenter and Amazon EC2 cloud is there needs to be a secure network between the two for the transfer of data. The Vyatta AMI (Amazon Machine Image) can also function as a complete router and firewall. The Vyatta SSL VPN router provides security with scalability.
As you can see from the network diagram and video, complete routing from the datacenter to the Amazon cloud network is seamless. Data resides at the datacenter and is accessed, over the SSL VPN, by the Application running in XenApp. The remote user connects to XenApp, runs the application, and the application delivers the data to the remote user, quickly and securely.
To get your own cloud, go here.
Configurations used
Vyatta SSL VPN (V1) - Datacenter Configuration
Vyatta SSL VPN (V2) - Cloud Configuration
Windows VPN Client - Cloud Configuration
Links for this solution
Vyatta - go here
Amazon EC2 - go here
XenServer is Free! - go here
XenApp - go here
XenApp VPN Client - go here
Dell Server - go here
IP Addresses - go here
Watch This
Its powerful AppExpert!
Two days ago IBM announced the availability of 4 of their products on Amazon EC2 cloud. Check it out here.
It's another indication that cloud computing is gaining momentum. If you look closely though only virtual machines for development and demo purposes are available now. But IBM says production version is going to be supported too. The fact that IBM, the enterprise company, is trying EC2 says something. That's probably why the story has been making headline news. I am interested to know if IBM will create their competing cloud platform for enterprise in the future. What do you think?
I am not surprised with this IBM announcement since my group has been doing something similar. Chris Fleck announced unofficially the availability of popular Citrix XenApp on EC2 last week. Chris included a very informational video with step by step instructions on how to get your XenApp running in the cloud in 15 minutes. I found it very useful. I would rather prefer watching a 15 minutes video than reading a long getting started guide!
Plus the IBM getting started guides recommended EC2 command line tool. In Chris' video, he showed how to use the new Amazon EC2 GUI console. I tried Chris' method to launch IBM instances. It worked for me. So for the folks like me who prefers GUI over command line, you may find Chris video useful too even if you are only interested in trying out IBM products on EC2.
Let me know what Citrix products you would like see in Amazon EC2.
Ray
OK, actually it's 12.5 cents and it might take you a few minutes longer, but compared to the traditional methods of building/configuring servers the cost and time savings is dramatic. It is now possible to launch a pre-built XenApp image in the Amazon Web Service offering called EC2. The image includes XenApp 5.0 on Windows 2003 Server ready to run and is accessible as an Admin or user. Also included is the Citrix 2 CCU Developer license bundled into the image so you can be ready for test, dev, and demo's in minutes. In this demo image we have NOT included Secure Gateway or Access Gateway so we do not recommend this image for production environments. The actual minimum cost for EC2 with Windows Server is 12.5 cents per hour with no minimum or commitment, so you can actually run it for an hour, terminate the image and that's all you owe. In reality you will likely want to install apps, customize your image and run it for some length of time. It is also very easy to save your image after you have customized it and terminate the image so the EC2 charges stop. The associated S3 Storage cost is only 15 cents per Gig per month, again very cheap and easy. New VM instances can then be started from saved images at anytime. As you may know the magic that powers this service is based on the Xen Hypervisor and the business model that Amazon has put together makes this a very attractive solution for many scenario's, in this case starting with demos, test, dev, PoC's etc. Many thanks to Vishal Ganeriwala for putting this image together and leading the way for more to come.
Here is a VideoTip to walk you through every step ( also available at our VideoTip site http://citrix.utipu.com/app/tip/id/6236/ )
Step 1.
Go to http://aws.amazon.com and get an account with EC2
Step 2.
Go to http://console.aws.amazon.com to access the AWS management console
Step 3.
Setup Security Groups per the video
Step 4.
Find the publicly listed XenApp Amazon Image, Right click and Launch
( citrix-c3-lab/XenApp5.0_32bit_v1.4.manifest.xml )
Step 5.
Enter the IP address provided into your browser http://xx.yy.zz.tt; and you are ready to go !
( ID: administrator, PW: Citrix123, Domain: CTXSLic1 )
Tip : When saving " Bundling " your AMI image remember to register it so you can relaunch it.
| Do you plan to get your own XenApp Server in the Cloud ? | Choose |
|---|---|
| If it's really this cheap and easy, I am definitely going to try it. |  |
| No, I don't trust the cloud for anything .. | |
As described in part 1 of this blog series, the cloud is not the answer for every enterprise or every workload. This is true based on the current economics even without considering additional factors like security, control and SLA's. On the other hand the economics do point out a major cloud advantage when it comes to short term or variable workloads. ( pointed out by Michael Keen and Billy Marshal as well ) Perhaps this is not very surprising to many, but it does help to look at the numbers to put it in perspective. The largest Intrinsic cost advantage of the Cloud is the ability to share infrastructure among multiple customers ( i.e. Multi-Tenancy and/or Multi-Instance ). This comes into play when many customers have variable workloads that are not likely to overlay at the same time. A Cloud infrastructure can load balance this workload on-demand significantly reducing the cumulative infrastructure required to support N number of customer workloads.
A Premise only solution will typically deploy the infrastructure required to accommodate the anticipated peak demand plus a factor of safety. As a result excess capacity is built into every deployment even if it is rarely ( or never ) utilized. This formula gets very expensive for many scenarios such as implementing a redundant DR solution across multiple data centers or a retailer building infrastructure to accommodate the Christmas shopping season but paying for it all year. As noted in the Cloud 101 example however, when a premise based is well utilized it can be the most cost effective solution to stay with especially if the on-site facilities can accommodate the anticipated growth.
The following Premise Plus Cloud scenario provides an optimized view of where a fully utilized premise infrastructure is used for constant predictable workloads and the Cloud is used for the variable workload. To put some simple numbers to it based on the original example, let's assume that the constant workload is roughly equal to 5 Quadcore server capacity. The variable workload on the other hand peaks at 160% of the base requirement, however it is required only about 400 hours per year, which could translate to 12 hours a day for the month of December or 33 hours per month for peak loads such as test or batch loads. The cost for a premise only solution for this situation comes to roughly 2X or $ 15,600 per year assuming existing space and a 20% factor of safety above peak load. If on the other hand you were able to utilize a Cloud for only the peak loads the incremental cost would be only $1,000. ( Based on Amazon EC2 )
| Premise Only | |
|---|---|
| $ 15,600 | Annual cost ( 2 x 7,800 from Part 1 ) |
| Premise Plus Cloud | |
|---|---|
| $ 7,800 | Annual cost from Part 1 |
| $ 1,000 | Cloud EC2 - ( 400 x .8 x 3 ) |
| $ 8,800 | Annual Cost Premise Plus Cloud |
As noted for this example the server cost of using a Premise Plus Cloud solution could save as much as 44%. This does not factor in many costs that either the Premise only scenario or Premise Plus Cloud would face but those costs vary according to the situation. So the challenge is how to identify variable workloads that can be placed in the Cloud or split between premise and cloud. The CSP ( Cloud Service Provider ) must also provide the proper infrastructure and remote administration to enable corporate IT to control and manage applications and images in the extended cloud as a virtual private network of their own. Economics aside, the CSP also needs to address the SLA's and security concerns that corporate IT has identified as prerequisites for adoption. Given the intrinsic cost savings possible as portrayed in this example, there is little doubt that CSP's will fill the gaps and the industry will move to Premise Plus Cloud solutions.