Early Questions

Hi Anne

Some good questions!  Hopefully some OK answers:

a)  Fundamentally, why would we want to be in the cloud?  Are there any  firm numbers yet about increased reliability, lower costs, etc.?

Typically the #1 reason people cite for moving to the Cloud is cost, quickly follwed by the elasticity and on-demand nature of the environment.  From a cost perspective we link within Arcade to the Amazon Cost calculator so you can model scenario's to see where the cost benefits would be for your organization.  The elasticity of Cloud is harder to quantify in some ways as it depends on the fluid nature of your business.  For some the ability to bring up an application on a different sized machine on a frequent basis is a huge benefit over having to purchase new hardware, and this applies to scaling down too.  There are numerous reports and stats that state 75% of servers are idle 75% of the time, so being able to make better utilization of your server resources has benefit.  In terms of Reliability, Amazon states that S3 (their storage) can.. "Store data with up to 99.999999999% durability, with 99.99%  availability. There can be no single points of failure. All failures  must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime." That's not to say it could never fail, but compare that you your own servers.

b) Logistics: We currently provide SaaS.  We have  a number of Windows  servers and the users (several hundred) log onto them via RTS sessions.   Our GUI client side is there, and then the Windows servers access  appservers on a number of Unix servers (many to many relationship  between the servers) where the databases reside.  Is it reasonable to  put everything in the cloud, or would it be just the Windows servers?

This is one of those, it depend's answers, and thats why the function of Stage & Test exists within Arcade to allow you to try out these various configurations to make sure what works for you.

c) Backups: we currently have a very complex backup scheme, with AI,  replication, incremental backups, complete copies of all databases on at  least two machines in different physical locations, rotating tape  backups stored offsite, etc.  If the databases were in the cloud, how do  we get a tape copy, keep the databases on multiple machines, etc.?

Backups are still your responsibility.  If you do replication today, you should do replication in the Cloud, it's no different.  You can use different regions to make sure the replication is being performed to a different physical location.  In terms of tape copies, you would have to ftp or copy the db backup locally in order to copy to tape or burn to cd, dvd etc.

d) IP addresses:  do these remain stable with the cloud?  we have  business partners who FTP files to the unix servers, etc.  Clients need a  stable IP for the RTS sessions, and so on.

By default IP addresses are dynamic, but you can associate static IP addresses (known in Amazon terms as Elastic IP's) to a server for use by business partners, etc.  You can also use services such as DynDNS or easyDNS that will handle the mapping of static references to dynamic addresses.

e) Printers: will network printers work correctly? Each of our Windows  servers has 100+ printers, many of them RTS printers for which we  install drivers on the servers.  I can't get my mind around local IP  addresses in the cloud for the network printers, and so on

Printing for windows is typically handled by the RDP client which maps to a local printing resource.  This is the same if you're using RDP to a server in your server room or a server that happens to be in a Cloud data center,

f) Security: I know there are concerns unique to cloud computing (http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/gartner-seven-cloud-computing-security-risks-853?page=0,1)   (Sorry, this editor widget won't let me un-italicize!)  We deal with  sensitive data falling under HIPPA regulations.  What is the status of  data at rest?  Is it encrypted?

Just as with back ups, encryption and security are your responsibility.  There are certain things we do as part of Arcade, such as minimizing the number of open ports etc, but data encryption for example would be responsibility of the application.  Of couse we'd reccomend using TDE :-) The Cloud providers themselves also have a bunch of certifications such as ISO 27001, SAS-70, HiPPA.  For Amazon check this out : http://aws.amazon.com/security/

g) Costs: So, say we get a Windows server up and running in the Cloud,  it would be $0.x /minute.  What if 100 users then log in?  How does that  work?

Cost is based upon the compute & storage of the machine being used, so it's more about the size of the machine to handle the load.

Thanks

Mike

Mike,

Thanks for this update.

Any further news re the availability of Arcade? The last I heard was that it would be available for Early Adopters this week.

Thank you,

John Nisbet

Prostar Software