Selecting a CMS: Developing Usage Scenarios
By: cmswire.com
In this article I describe how to define some practical usage scenarios which you will use to shape the product evaluation process.
Selecting a CMS: How to Build a Short List
By: cmswire.com
It is easy to see why most companies struggle with the CMS selection process. The market is flooded with hundreds of products and there does not appear to be a “safe”, market-leading choice.
Drupal Goes Hosted, Launches Gardens in Private Beta
By: cmswire.com
Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) hopped up on his soap box today to announce the launch of Drupal Gardens into private beta.
Kentico CMS 5.0 offers enterprise level functionality
By: cmscritic.com
Kentico CMS version 5.0 was released on December 23, 2009 and this is no small update. The developer team have worked hard to integrate enterprise level functionality into this release and according to the changes, they’ve left no stone unturned.
Alert: What’s Coming In Open Source CMS In 2010
By: cmswire.com
Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. [Read More and Discuss]
Hybrid Clouds: Shoestring Solutions For Google-Like Businesses
By Ned Smith
Cloud computing gives businesses a number of options for the way they address their infrastructure and applications needs. The two most ballyhooed are the public cloud and the private cloud, the yin and yang of cloud computing.
The buzz currently is loudest for the public cloud, that digital realm of hosted services delivered over the Internet that includes software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service providers. One of the most well-known public clouds is Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The chief drivers of public cloud use are cost efficiencies, flexibility and nearly instantaneous scalability.
Less hyped are private clouds where proprietary networks or data centers are managed by the organizations they serve, in essence an update of the old client-server model with a Web interface. Adding a further note of nuance to this category are those organizations that use public cloud resources to create their private cloud, creating a virtual private cloud. The chief attraction of a private cloud is the perception that it provides greater security.
When it comes to cloud computing, though, it’s not a zero-sum, my-way-or-the-highway situation. A growing number of enterprises are opting for hybrid solutions that combine both public and private elements to get the best of both worlds.
The low cost of entry and flexibility in particular make hybrid cloud solutions attractive for shoestring entrepreneurs who hope to morph into the next Google. Postabon, a startup based in New York, helps users find and share geo-specific information about sales, deals, discounts and coupons available in brick and mortar stores, much like a Digg for Deals. “We don’t own any servers ourselves,” says Shaneal Manek, Postabon’s CTO. “Our entire infrastructure is virtual.”
A virtual private cloud presents Postabon’s face to the consumer. “Our main servers are hosted on Slicehost’s Virtual Private Server cloud,” Manek says. Amazon is Postabon’s public cloud host. “We also distribute some of our static content onto Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and use their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for load testing, development and offline analytics processing,” he says. Slicehost, as the name suggests, offers its services through a utility model, by the slice.
“The main advantage of cloud computing is that we have scalability,” Manek says. “When we launched, we had no idea how many users we were going to get. Slicehost gives us the flexibility to scale up as we need it. We had a few busy days last week where we got some great press coverage and had 20,000 or 30,000 people trying to hit the site within a few hours. I was able to take the server down for about two minutes, upgrade our slice from a 1 gigabyte slice to a 4 gigabyte slice and go back up without any trouble at all. With a dedicated server it would have taken at least a few days notice to upgrade our servers.”
A hybrid cloud environment also provides a way station for organizations that intend to eventually migrate to a full Web model. Curtis Helsel,VP for Information Services, oversees a hybrid cloud environment that uses both private and public clouds for the University of Colorado Foundation. The CU Foundation is the University of Colorado’s fundraising partner. The key enterprise application is a Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) system that is self-hosted at the foundation’s central headquarters in Boulder. Fundraisers located throughout the state connect to the application via the Internet. Security is the main reason that Helsel sandboxes this app in a private cloud. “We use it for prospecting for high-end donors,” he says. “We do have some information we consider sensitive. We feel a little uncomfortable about putting this set of data out and letting somebody else host it. This has been one of our applications that we’ve not wanted to move out of our tight control. Not that we wouldn’t. If the right security structure were in place, we’d certainly consider it.”
And that day may not be that far away. “We’re half-way there,” Helsel says. “We just changed to a Web-based model with this application. The next step would be to put it in the cloud and let somebody else manage the whole backend.”
That would complete a migration that began in 2003, when Helsel decided to outsource the foundation’s email and IT services. The accounting system followed them out the door and into the cloud. Today, he says, “all of our infrastructure is managed by somebody else. We don’t have anybody in our division that does anything with infrastructure management. We have very few servers here internally - maybe 17.” It doesn’t stop there. Virtualizing desktops throughout the foundation is on Helsel’s roadmap for consideration over the next few years.
“I look at the core of our business,” he says. “Our core business is really fundraising; it’s not IT. What we like to look at is anything that can drive the cost out of our transactions or drive the cost out of IT support and still provide the level of support we need.”
The CU Foundation has realized significant cost savings and operational improvement by implementing its hybrid cloud environment. In the first three years of outsourcing its infrastructure management Helsel saw annual savings of between 19 and 24 percent. “It far exceeded our expectations. We were hoping for 10- to 12-percent,” he says. “I would have been thrilled with that. We’re going to be at about 50 percent of what we were in the IT budget three years ago. What this has allowed us to do is add about 16 fundraisers. We’ve been able to shift the resources over to the core business, which is fundraising.”
There were bumps along the path, however, Helsel says. “When we jumped into this, we really didn’t have our processes, rules, policies and procedures documented and well-defined. When you have somebody providing services to you, you really need to explain to them the parameters, how you want things done. I think we were remiss in not having documentation up to snuff. Going into this again, I’d spend a huge amount of time on the front end doing documentation and nailing down processes.”
Like the University of Colorado Foundation, MediaUnbound uses a hybrid mix of public and private cloud resources. MediaUnbound, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., builds and supports custom personalization and recommendation software for companies such as eMusic, Napster and MTVN/Viacom.
“Hybrid cloud computing is a fancy name for the practice of hosting parts of your service in multiple locations,” says Michael Papish, MediaUnbound’s CEO. “MediaUnbound hosts critical components and data for its recommendation service in a private data center we control. That private cloud is used to host sensitive data and most production-level services.”
An elastic public cloud is used in conjunction with the private cloud to deal with spikes in demand and provide quick provision of development and staging environments. “Since MediaUnbound provides back-end services that power the consumer services of our customers, we can’t always anticipate demand spikes,” Papish says. “The public cloud is ideal for providing pre-production services to clients, since these environments can be created on-demand and completely walled off from sensitive private cloud operations.”
When evaluating the adoption of a hybrid public-private hosting solution, Papish says, companies should look at their ability to predict demand and usage, security needs and utilization. “When hosting multiple clients, a private cloud approach can provide increased comfort levels around data security,” he says. “And elastic public cloud resources can be ideal for one-off usage, since it will be cheaper than acquiring a large amount of private capacity that might sit idle.”
Ned Smith is a New York-based writer who reports on business and technology. He can be contacted at nedsmith@gmail.com.
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