Cirrhus9

Amazon Web Services releases two pretty cool things.

Cirrhus9 has been using and promoting Amazon Web Services for well over 2 years now.  We're strategic partners with them and, when the business solution warrants it, we promote them as our environment of choice due to the excellent ability to scale out quickly and the virtually unlimited resources available to us.

Just about one year ago, AWS opened their European region, EU-WEST-1.  This allowed Cirrhus9 to be able to work in the European arena, keeping customers servers and data in the EU.  Something that a lot of customers outside of the U.S. find very appealing.  Well, yesterday Amazon announced the availability of a new Cloud region on the west coast.  US-WEST-1.

I'm really excited about this because we can now offer Replication and DR solutions in AWS regions that are very separate from each other.  Not to mention the fact that now, customers on the west coast can have their VPC's and VPS's running in territory much closer to them.  (It makes people feel warm and fuzzy knowing that any perceived latency issues will no longer be a concern.)

The reasoning behind creating an in-house DC or even setting up a new colo DC just goes out the window entirely now.  How can any company falling into the SMB / SME sector justify spending the time, effort and expense any longer?  Cirrhus9 can set them up and integrate any legacy IT for a fraction of the cost.  I'm really loving this!

The second announcement from AWS yesterday is the ability to boot instances from EBS volumes now.  OK, this is really cool on so many levels! 

I'm not going to get into the details here, because I want to keep your attention for the remainder of this blog post but, the first thing that comes to my mind is now Cirrhus9 has even greater control over our QMI's™ (Qualified Machine Images) and the change control process.  The QMI's can now be setup on an EBS root volume and client servers can be launched as many times as needed without having to touch the configuration.

The second thing that strikes me here is that now DEV or TEST servers can be stopped and started as needed, all the while retaining the work done on / to them since the last time it was running.  Even furthering the meaning of On-Demand utility computing, this really adds greater cost controls to the environment.  We can shut these instances down overnight or over the weekend for our clients and bring them back up very quickly when they're ready to start working again.

The possibilities of these two new features is really amazing and you can bet that Cirrhus9 will be including this new functionality into all of our SMB / SME business solutions.  If you're interested in learning more about these, and Cirrhus9's other products and offerings, please reach out to us. We are always happy to answer any questions you may have.

Mike

Cirrhus9 and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud

I've been doing a lot of reading about the new Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) that is now available on the Karmic Koala, the latest version of Ubuntu 9.10. What a great offering this is!

Cirrhus9 is a HUGE proponent of Ubuntu, collectively and individually. (We have been before Cirrhus9 was even conceived) But with this latest version, I can only get more excited about this enterprise ready Linux distribution.

Think about it, a fully FOSS server operating system that now has private cloud capability out of the box. Amazing!

It's based on the Eucalyptus cloud software out of the University of Santa Barbara. Ed and I have set up Eucalyptus on a small test grid in the past and found it to be very promising. The Ubuntu 9.10 UEC takes Eucalyptus to the next level and really smooths out any of the ruff edges.

The thing I like best about UEC is that we have the ability to make hybrid clouds with just a little bit of the old Cirrhus9 magic. Ubuntu's UEC and Eucalyptus both use the Amazon Web Services API's.  UEC Systems can be setup in house, in a private cloud implementation, for mission critical production machines while Dev, Test and R&D machines can utilize the Amazon's AWS services. Elasticity, power, security, cloud bursting and unlimited resources can now be combined into a very nice package for very low cost.

We're going to be setting up a small UEC cloud in our C9 Labs over the next week or so. We'll keep you posted on our progress and impressions but, I see another product for our clients and our CSP offering.

Ubuntu UEC, Amazon Web Services and 3Tera's AppLogic. A very impressive tool set for any company looking for cloud integration. Combine that with Cirrhus9's array of business solutions and consulting services and you've got one hell of a team behind your business!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Mike