The New Mainstream: Gartner, Microsoft and Hostway Discuss Mission-Critical Apps, Big Data and the Cloud

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1 TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO The New Mainstream: Gartner, Microsoft and Hostway Discuss Mission-Critical Apps, Big Data and the Cloud Lydia Leong, Research VP, Gartner Leen Kashyap, Strategy Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft Chris Samson, Senior Hosting Technology Specialist, Microsoft Aaron Hollobaugh, VP Marketing, Hostway JUMP TO A SECTION: 1. Intro 2. What types of applications can be moved to cloud infrastructure today? 3. What kinds of applications are companies actually moving to the cloud now? 4. What is the right architecture for database-intensive applications? 5. What should you evaluate when determining what infrastructure solution is best for your application? 6. How should you choose a service provider for a cloud solution? 7. What advantages do customers gain from choosing a cloud provider like Hostway that has a strong relationship with Microsoft? 8. What is unique about Hostway s FlexCloud architecture? 9. What applications does Microsoft think are well-suited for cloud and hybrid deployments? 10. What types of applications are Hostway customers running in their cloud or hybrid environment? 11. What efficiencies can you create by running database-intensive applications in the cloud? 12. How does Hostway meet the needs of clients with legacy or resource-intensive applications? 13. How does Hyper-V stack up against competitive hypervisor technologies today and in the near future? 14. Why did Hostway choose Microsoft over other hypervisors? 15. What is the Microsoft vision to allow Hyper-V users to connect their internal infrastructure and applications with that of a service provider for DR, burst capacity or regulatory demands? 16. Why are Hostway customers choosing cloud? 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

2 Intro As early as 1960, computer scientists predicted that someday computation would operate as a public utility: scalable, connected, and seemingly limitless in supply. It took more than 40 years, but this type of utility computing is now a reality, most commonly known as cloud computing. Even as the cloud has become more widely used, many businesses have consigned their cloud to running testing and development environments, wary of trusting fledgling cloud technology to run and store mission-critical applications. But advances in security, technology, and perhaps especially education about the cloud are driving more widespread acceptance of cloud computing as a complete, secure computing solution that is also more cost effective in many scenarios. The industry has watched cloud computing grow from a concept to a fledgling technology with limited applications to a new mainstream computing paradigm poised to surpass enterprise computing just as enterprise computing once surpassed the mainframe. Q: What types of applications can be moved to cloud infrastructure today? Lydia Leong, Research VP, Gartner: A: Today, it's possible to move most modern applications to cloud infrastructure, including databaseintensive and mission-critical applications. You must, however, be careful to match your application's need for availability, performance, and security to the technical characteristics of the underlying cloud infrastructure solution. Cloud infrastructure is not one-size-fits-all. Every provider has a slightly different architecture and underlying solution and, even within a single provider, that provider may have multiple solutions and service at multiple tiers within their cloud infrastructure offering. Although cloud infrastructure is theoretically an abstracted service, the underlying implementation does matter. However, with the right cloud solution, it is possible to run most applications, including those that require continuous availability or very high levels of performance on cloud infrastructure. Q: What kinds of applications are companies actually moving to the cloud now? Lydia Leong, Research VP, Gartner: A: Most applications that companies are actually moving to the cloud now are modern, web-based applications. Most organizations start by moving a development and testing environment to the cloud. However, many organizations are now moving production applications to the cloud. Most of these applications are externally facing websites and applications, internal business applications, and 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

3 collaboration applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint. Scientific computing and batch computing are also excellent use cases for cloud infrastructure. Q: What is the right architecture for database-intensive applications? Lydia Leong, Research VP, Gartner: A: In many cases, the right architecture for database-intensive applications is not a pure cloud infrastructure solution but a hybrid solution. It is very common to place the database on dedicated physical servers while placing the web and application tiers on cloud-based virtual machines. High quality cloud providers often offer colocation and hosting in addition to cloud infrastructure and can seamlessly blend those solutions together. However, many customers successfully deploy databases entirely to the cloud. It depends on what type of scale and performance you need from your database and the technical characteristics of the cloud provider solution. Q: What should you evaluate when determining what infrastructure solution is best for your application? Lydia Leong, Research VP, Gartner: A: When evaluating what infrastructure solution is best for your application, begin by determining your own application's technical requirements. What level of availability does your application need, or level of performance? What level of security and what regulatory compliance needs do you have? Determine what level of base capacity you'll need at steady state and then determine whether you want to scale your compute resources up or scale them out, whether you want to add more servers or add bigger servers when you need more capacity. The more variable your needs, the more likely that a cloud infrastructure solution will be more cost effective than using dedicated servers. Q: How should you choose a service provider for a cloud solution? Lydia Leong, Research VP, Gartner: A: When choosing a service provider for a cloud solution, begin by ensuring that the solution that the service provider has proposed to you matches the technical needs of the application that you have. 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

4 Evaluate the provider's track record and service history and ask to speak to reference customers who have deployed solutions similar to the ones that you are considering. Find out how the service provider approaches service and support. Ensure that they are able and willing to do not just good reactive support in response to your requests but also good proactive support. Ensure that there are strong SLAs, service level agreements, backed by financial penalties. Finally, evaluate the customer service portal and ensure that it meets your needs for usability and functionality. Q: What advantages do customers gain from choosing a cloud provider like Hostway that has a strong relationship with Microsoft? Leen Kashyap, Strategy Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft: A: Today, customers have an opportunity to work with service providers like Hostway who have invested in a relationship with Microsoft over several years that continues to get stronger all the time. It gives the customers access to technology that Hostway gets by participating in early adopter programs like our TAP programs. We work regularly with Hostway engineers. They have direct access to product teams and they are always able to get out there and innovate really ahead of many people in the market as a result of those relationships. From a Microsoft perspective, that allows us to be confident that our technologies are making it out there in the cloud on top of our most recent and most innovative platforms and, as a result, customers are getting the best value possible. They're seeing things that we can be, that can be done on our platform that frankly are really just not happening many other places in the industry. So, we definitely value that relationship. Microsoft has always been a partner-centric company and looking forward to the evolution of our business in the cloud, partners like Hostway are obviously critical for us and continue to be a place where we can guarantee that our service, that Microsoft products will be serviced well for their customers. Q: What is unique about Hostway s FlexCloud architecture? Aaron Hollobaugh, VP Marketing, Hostway: A: Hostway's FlexCloud architecture is unique within the quickly evolving marketplace for four primary reasons. 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

5 The first reason is because technologists began building Hostway's cloud architecture in 1998 as they began constructing secure, multi-tenant environments to meet the needs of the quickly developing dotcom marketplace. Hostway's longevity and focus on providing secure multi-tenant environments sets them apart from many of the newcomers to the marketplace. The second reason is because Hostway's cloud solutions were also built by technologist with availability in performance top of mind. Within Hostway's cloud offerings, high availability comes standard. In addition, to support that, they were also architected with enterprise class technologies. So, no white boxes, no cheap security appliances, or unproven network equipment. Our cloud solutions were built to be enterprise class because we believe every business is an enterprise. The third reason why Hostway's cloud solution is unique is because our cloud solutions come with our managed support standard and our cloud management tools allow customers to easily add, subtract, or adjust cloud resources in an intuitive portal. It's intuitive because it was built by users of the technologies, ourselves. This allows our clients to self-select their level of service and also know that they can rely on industry leading support at any time at no additional charge. The fourth reason why Hostway's cloud solution is unique is because of our fast pace of innovation. From our recent hybrid cloud launch to connecting cloud nodes in different data centers to releasing the first API for a Hyper-V public cloud, we continue to develop a platform that is truly flexible and interchangeable based on a customer's specific needs. Or better, based on the needs of their individual application. Our cloud solutions continue to set the marketplace standard in terms of flexibility, technology driven enhancements, and unprecedented availability. Q: What applications does Microsoft think are well-suited for cloud and hybrid deployments? Leen Kashyap, Strategy Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft: A: So, with regards to the applications that we think are really well-suited for cloud deployments, we will clearly continue to see a lot of web application workloads living in the cloud, moving to the cloud and that's something we've seen for a long time in this industry but I think those types of environments will be able to scale further and just be able to accomplish more at a higher level of efficiency than they have in the past, given some of the technology that's being deployed by our service provider partners like Hostway. I also think we're going to start to see some more high I/O workloads and also some mission critical applications moving in. We're already seeing that today. Obviously, that's a natural trend as customers get more comfortable with the cloud and it allows scenarios like disaster recovery and high availability and business continuity scenarios to really deliver value to the customer. Of course, it will always be the case that we'll see a lot of Microsoft native applications moving to cloud environments. SharePoint and Exchange certainly come to mind and that's something that we'll continue to enable as we invest further in our technologies on the database, the server, as well as on the system center and operating management environments. 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

6 Q: What types of applications are Hostway customers running in their cloud or hybrid environment? Aaron Hollobaugh, VP Marketing, Hostway: A: Since Hostway launched into the cloud marketplace with its solutions, FlexCloud Server and FlexCloud Private, the discussion has quickly moved from what will people put into our cloud to what won't people put into our cloud. For a long time, analysts, technology leaders, and even those within the hosting marketplace were adamant that clouds should be predominantly used for test/dev purposes and some small web applications. Over the last several years, that has changed dramatically. Today we see clients running production, database-intensive applications such as online gaming, and music search and sharing libraries to mission-critical web and SaaS applications to provide services such as an ecommerce platform or customer relationship management software. Customers are also combining Hostway's geographically dispersed network of data centers with the FlexLink hybrid cloud to create compliant environments with the disaster recovery between data centers. For most customers, if they were to house the application on a server at their facility or with another hosting company, at Hostway, and within our cloud, we can find a cloud-based or cloud-enabled hybrid solution to meet their specific application needs. Q: What efficiencies can you create by running databaseintensive applications in the cloud? Chris Samson, Senior Hosting Technology Specialist, Microsoft: A: Specifically running database applications in the cloud and sort of having efficiencies for that running SQL Server 2012, specifically running on top of the Hyper-V infrastructure and managing with our System Center 2012 infrastructure, I think gives you a tremendous amount of advantages as compared to other virtualization vendors. Specifically, going through some feature sets of SQL Server 2012, the high availability, specific business intelligence, and all the sub services that really enable that such as Windows clustering, load balancing services, fail over base services, the ability to actually have replication-based services, I think gives us a lot of integrated feature sets within SQL, a lot of integrated feature sets within Windows in terms of clustering load balancing services, as well as feature sets within System Center that gives you that quality of service of understanding how the applications are doing, what is needed to be done, not just from a monitoring perspective, from also a management perspective. What are the actions that need to be taken, I think really gives us a strong advantage in terms of having an end-to-end storage or maintaining a very robust database as a service and applications that are dependent upon the database as a service to run effectively in the cloud. 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

7 Q: How does Hostway meet the needs of clients with legacy or resource-intensive applications? Aaron Hollobaugh, VP Marketing, Hostway: A: Within the infrastructure marketplace there has been a gross misunderstanding for years that the purpose or use of infrastructure can fit into a box or server, literally. The truth is that each application is unique because of the different ways customers choose to use them. As a result, some applications may never be suited for a public cloud environment, but that doesn't mean an organization can't utilize and connect to a cloud environment for other applications. A perfect example is when a client uses our colocation or managed services for an internally developed back-office application and then they connect to the cloud through a private VLAN to support their webfacing applications and data assets. At Hostway, we work with a client to understand the needs of their business, the requirements of their applications, and the limitations of their applications to ensure that what they take to the cloud is actually suited for the cloud. Q: How does Hyper-V stack up against competitive hypervisor technologies today and in the near future? Leen Kashyap, Strategy Manager, Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft: A: With regards to how Hyper-V stacks up against competitors today, Hyper-V has been in market for four years. We've achieved approximately 25% market share. We feel great about the momentum. We believe it's the best place to host your Microsoft applications in the cloud today. Going forward into the Windows 8 timeframe, we'll continue to invest in a line across our server platform products, SQL Server, System Center, and ensure that Hyper-V not only additionally optimizes the environment for Microsoft applications but continues to take advantage of several years worth of cross platform work that we've done at Microsoft. So, that includes running your Linux operating systems in a Hyper-V environment. It also includes working and managing other hypervisors beyond just Hyper-V within our System Center management environment. We're looking forward to the next year or so, feel like enterprise IT professionals, application developers, are going to continue to get a level of performance from key service providers out there who've made investments in our platform that are just unparalleled in the industry today and then going into the next year, we feel good that we'll have a game-changing experience on the Windows platform. 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

8 Q: Why did Hostway choose Microsoft over other hypervisors? Aaron Hollobaugh, VP Marketing, Hostway: A: The decision to choose the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor was an easy one for Hostway to make. The first reason is because we've been delivering enterprise solutions to the marketplace with Microsoft for over ten years, and during that time, we've developed a strong trust in their development and their technical capabilities. The second reason is that we firmly believe that every business, regardless of size and budget is an enterprise and to that end, it is our mission to bring enterprise class technologies to businesses of all sizes. Microsoft's Hyper-V solution allowed us to offer what has quickly evolved into a virtualization leader in this space at cost effective price point. Our cloud solutions with managed support, high availability, and virtual machine fault tolerance are often half the cost of some of our competitors. Our relationship with Microsoft has allowed us to bring in cloud hosting and dynamic infrastructures to a much wider audience. In addition, we take advantage of running the world's largest Hyper-V public cloud and work closely with their engineers and product teams to continue to request and bring customer-driven technologies to the marketplace. We are extremely ecstatic about many of the features we will continue to release with Microsoft in the very near future and equally important, the value that we'll bring to our clients as we continue to grow our relationship with Microsoft. Q: What is the Microsoft vision to allow Hyper-V users to connect their internal infrastructure and applications with that of a service provider for DR, burst capacity or regulatory demands? Chris Samson, Senior Hosting Technology Specialist, Microsoft: A: Our vision to allow end users to really have that cross-premise connectivity to kind of speak to the needs of end users who have maybe compliance or disaster recovery needs, specifically when Hyper-V version 3 within Windows Server 8 that's coming out within the next year, there's three key features that I think really speak well to that. First is our Hyper-V Replica which basically allows an end user leveraging Hyper-V version 3 to actually take a virtual machine and move that from a virtual machine either on-premise or in the cloud securely and seamlessly. Secondly, we have another feature known as cross-premise connectivity which allows, basically, an end user to have a very seamless and very lightweight VPN connectivity without the overhead and the burden 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

9 of VPN to allow them to securely authenticate and have secure application and communications both onpremise and in the cloud. And then third, cloud service connectivity which allows basically, if it's an application that's what's known as claims-aware, which gives the end user the ability to have an application that will allow them to seamlessly authenticate within the application, whether the application is running on premise or is communicating with an infrastructure in the cloud, it gives them the ability to go ahead and conduct that end user experience without having the overhead of VPN, without having the overhead of managing two different infrastructures, and it really makes it a seamless end user experience especially when you're talking about specific disaster recovery requirements as well as compliance requirements that the end user may be enforced to use. So I think I you take those three specific feature enhancements, Hyper-V Replica, cloud service connectivity, and cross-premise connectivity, I think those three features specifically within Hyper-V version 3 within Windows Server 8 really allow an end user that might be having to conform to regulatory compliance and disaster recovery requirements really makes that a very seamless experience. Q: Why are Hostway customers choosing cloud? Aaron Hollobaugh, VP Marketing, Hostway: A: Hostway customers are beginning to move large amounts of their infrastructure to a cloud-enabled infrastructure for several reasons. The three primary reasons are because they are beginning to expect more dynamic scaling from their infrastructure. They demand more flexibility and equally important is overall utilization of their infrastructures. Our customers tell us that they're choosing FlexCloud server in our hybrid cloud options because, for the first time, their infrastructure needs are being met exactly where they are as a company, and the flexibility to expand or collapse resources is exactly what they need as the economy continues to rebound or as they go to market with a new product or solution where uncertainty continues to loom. A great example is a recent customer that operates the fastest growing online housing auction site. They're kicking off a large national media campaign for their organization. A hybrid cloud solution allows them to build what is needed now to support their business, anticipate growth, but not pay for the infrastructure needed to support that growth until the growth actually occurs. And when that growth does occur, as we are sure it will, they'll have instant access to a virtually unlimited amount of cloud resources to ensure their auctions are never interrupted. This client is just one example of thousands of Hostway customers and millions of customers globally that are moving to the cloud for those three primary reasons: scalability, flexibility, and overall utilization of their infrastructure expense. Hostway currently services over 600,000 clients throughout the world through our cloud platforms that offer infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. Hostway has become one of the largest and most widely respected infrastructure services companies in the world and we credit the work we have completed with our customers to creating our reputation and driving our growth. The primary reason why customers choose Hostway is because we treat them and their businesses as the individuals that they are. Absolutely, we have standard solutions that we offer, but our growth is 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e

10 mostly attributed to our ability to build custom solutions to meet our customer's current, future, and often unanticipated needs. Our custom solutions provide instant scale without a restrictive product catalog. We grow with our customers as they grow, and we ensure that infrastructure or access to it are never obstacles that slow their business. We're truly a global company with data centers and employees all over the globe and, as a result, our support and our services are always available. Our focus is on building great technologies that do not fail, but if they do, we have redundant support staffs that work proactively and respond immediately when any issues or concerns arise, and we back our services and availability up in writing through our SLAs. Finally, we have companies choose Hostway because we have experience meeting most any infrastructure requirements in a proven, cost-effective manner. If we haven't seen it, if we haven't built it, if we haven't done it, we will work with our customers to architect a custom solution for them. Because customization is a standard practice at Hostway, we're able to bring enterprise-class, leading-edge cloud solutions to the market place at price points that allow customers to focus on their core competencies, not their infrastructure, and certainly not the cost to support their infrastructure. The New Mainstream: Gartner, Microsoft and Hostway Discuss Mission-Critical Apps, Big Data and the Cloud Watch the Video 100 N Riverside Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois P a g e