John Considine

Founder & CTO at CloudSwitch, Inc

John Considine brings two decades of technology vision and proven experience in complex enterprise system development, integration and product delivery to CloudSwitch. Before founding CloudSwitch, John was Director of the Platform Products Group at Sun Microsystems, where he was responsible for the 69xx virtualized block storage system, 53xx NAS products, the 5800 Object Archive system, as well as the next generation NAS portfolio.

John came to Sun through the acquisition of Pirus Networks, where he was part of the early engineering team responsible for the development and release of the Pirus NAS product, including advanced development of parallel NAS functions and the Segmented File System. John has started and boot-strapped a number of start-ups with breakthrough technology in high-performance distributed systems and image processing. He has been granted patents for RAID and distributed file system technology. John began his career as an engineer at Raytheon Missile Systems, and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Contributions

Article: Do VMs Still Matter in the Cloud? - August 2010
There's a long running debate about the true role of Virtual Machines (VMs) in cloud computing. In talking with CTOs at the large vendors as well as the "Clouderati" over the last two years, there seems to be the desire to eliminate the VM from cloud computing. While the argument is appealing, and there is growing support for the idea, there are compelling reasons to keep the Virtual Machine as the core of cloud computing.
Article: OpenStack - Advancing Cloud Computing in the Open - July 2010
An infrastructure that has actually been deployed and scaled to cloud size has real value to everyone trying to build a cloud. So when a company that has been in the cloud business for a long time in "cloud years", like Rackspace, decides to open up and share their software, you have to stop and look.
Video: An Introduction to CloudSwitch - April 2010
The co-founder and CTO at CloudSwitch, John Considine, discusses how their Cloud Isolation Technology helps customers overcome the four primary barriers to enterprise cloud computing by allowing them to securely move their existing applications and data into the cloud.
Article: Dealing with the Cloud's Latent Tendencies - March 2010
A frequent question when engaging customers moving applications to the cloud is: what about the latency issues when using a cloud? This question arises because most IT departments have had to struggle with application performance issues and the idea of adding a big chuck of latency when integrating the cloud is very troubling. Here is how CloudSwitch addresses this.
Article: Security vs Compliance in the Cloud - January 2010
Security is always top of mind for CIOs and CSOs when considering a cloud deployment. Here is a look into cloud security and the standards used to determine compliance.
Articles: Moving to the Cloud - November 2009
This series of articles examines the issues involved when moving applications between internal data centers and public clouds.
- Part 1: What's Really Required
  If you want to use the cloud and deploy a server, it is really quite easy to "build" a server from the base templates offered by cloud providers. It becomes a lot more complicated when you try to integrate an application with multiple servers running in the cloud with your existing data center infrastructure.
- Part 2: Key Considerations for Cloud Storage
  The true challenges in storage and data management in the cloud result from the diverse and often unfamiliar processes and infrastructures offered by the cloud providers, including: new provisioning methods, storage properties, data population and transfer, and systems for data management. The cloud providers define the relationship between servers and storage and often impose constraints on everything from allocation size limits to the ways in which storage is managed. These are just some of the things you'll want to consider as you start to think about integrating cloud computing into your existing IT environments.
- Part 3: Key Considerations for Cloud Networking
  Clouds have a unique networking infrastructure that supports complex and flexible multi-tenant environments. The cloud providers have to control their networking so that they can route traffic within their infrastructure and their design is completely different from your enterprise networking architecture, design and addressing. This is not a problem if you're doing something stand alone in the cloud because you don't care what the network structure is as long as you can access it over the internet. However, if you want to extend your existing networks and use your existing applications, there are serious discontinuities that have to be addressed.
- Part 4: Managing Your Environment
  One of the advantages of cloud computing is that someone else is managing the infrastructure - including the servers, network devices and storage systems, not to mention the data center power conditioning, cooling and fire suppression equipment. One of the costs of offloading this infrastructure is that the cloud becomes something different and separate from your data center. In most deployments today, the cloud is almost completely isolated from your data center, and this often requires changes in how you manage and interact with your applications.
- Part 5: The Road Ahead
  Looking forward to the evolution of cloud computing, the cloud will continue to play a larger, more significant role in enterprise IT. Cloud providers have shown they can rapidly iterate and improve their offerings in response to customer input and have been drawing from their experience to develop new and powerful infrastructure and features. Here are some of the key principles that guide the technology and product development at CloudSwitch.
Article: Amazon's VPC Opens the Door for Innovation and Enterprise Cloud Adoption - September 2009
Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) represents the next big advance in the evolution chain for cloud computing. By allowing customers to integrate their data center networks with Amazon's cloud, VPC takes the first step in bringing the cloud and enterprise data center together. As customers review the VPC offering, there are things they need to consider as they determine how to deploy and use it.