GlassHouse Technologies Blog

So the cloud hype train rolls on and we’re all constantly being told how the cloud can help cut costs, increase agility and reduce time to market. The cloud certainly has its advantages and for SMB’s and start ups with little or no ‘IT baggage’ the cloud is an attractive proposition. However, for most [...]

With tightened budgets, businesses are constantly looking for way to see a rapid return on investment (ROI). This has increased interest in the adoption of pay-as-you-go cloud services and virtualisation technologies where the ROI can be very attractive. In recent months, Tom Brand, virtualisation practice lead at GlassHouse Technologies has found himself frequently answering the [...]

One of the lingering concerns about cloud computing is determining when it does or doesn’t make economic sense. There is certainly a crossover point at which either the requirements of scale or level of service are such that the cost of the cloud exceeds that of a more traditional approach. However, determining where that point [...]

Identity and Security Management
One of the big challenges sharing data between companies—for example, from your enterprise to an external cloud provider—is security management (authorization, access, and identity management).
In a traditional, campus-wide IT network, security rules and roles are relatively straightforward when tied to a directory service such as Active Directory or LDAP. In a single [...]

Transport Challenges—to WAN or not to WAN
How do you reliably upload gigabytes or terabytes of files (for example, application data or virtual machines) from your internal IT network to your cloud provider at a reasonable cost, in a reasonable time-frame? Use FTP? Possibly, but not likely.
You have a few options:

Create and pack backup copies of [...]

Compatibility, Portability, Interoperability
Imagine you’re a dock worker at the Port of Seattle in the 1950s having to handle hundreds of bushels of beans, halibut filets, and pallets of paint cans, all individually, and load them onto ships. It was costly and time-consuming labor.
Malcolm McLean of North Carolina is known as the innovator behind shipping containers. [...]

One of my favorite security books is Cliff Stoll’s the Cuckcoo’s Egg, where he tracks a spy impersonating a well-known computer scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Once inside, the culprit hacks into a shared server to stage a series of attacks into other remote systems, located on remote networks such as MILNET. Although he [...]

Everyone seems to have a definition and opinion on cloud computing—and every technology vendor seems to have a solution. There’s a reason many of us did not sign up for cloud computing 102 at [enter any recent industry event you’ve attended] and avoid vendor headlines related to C and C. Filter, delete. Dehumidify.
But the reality [...]

VMWorld 2009
All this week at VMworld 2009 we have been discussing the cloud. Since VMworld is mostly about infrastructure we have been discussing the internal, external and private cloud concepts from an infrastructure point of view. Of course the real value I see coming from the cloud paradigm is for application and application service levels.
Eventually, [...]

VMWorld 2009
In our video blog with Ron Oglesby yesterday, one of his thoughts was that our customers could really use a “Roadmap” for how to approach getting to the cloud. I agreed that this would certainly help cut through the confusion. I think one of the main problems is that vendors have jumped on the [...]