Hosting Blackbaud Software in the Cloud

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Hosting Blackbaud® Software in the Cloud

Software and services are moving off corporate and organizational

networks and into the cloud. The trends are clear and the pace is

accelerating. But what exactly is the “cloud”? Can client-server software that

was designed for the corporate network make the move to the cloud

successfully?

Most Blackbaud® software such as The Raiser's Edge® is client-server software. The primary or server-based component installs on a SQL database server. The secondary or client-based component installs on a workstation of each of the end users. Client-server software is a tried-and-true approach that works well in a typical corporate network. However, the typical corporate network is changing as more and more services move to the cloud.

For any client-server software to work in the cloud, it must be deployed in such a way that the software continues to work the same way as it would on the corporate network. After all, there’s no way the software can know it’s in the cloud. Therefore, not any cloud hosting will do. Only cloud hosting solutions specifically designed to work with Blackbaud® software or client-server software in general are an option.

This white paper will examine three different approaches for hosting Blackbaud® software in the cloud by three different vendors.

Vendors presented:

• Amazon EC2 • Beyond Nines

• Blackbaud OnDemand™

You'll understand the differences in each provider’s services and the unique type of cloud-based environments each offers.

Questions explored:

• What exactly is the cloud?

• Why should an organization consider hosting in the cloud?

• How do the cloud service offerings of each of these vendors compare?

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Hosting Blackbaud® Software in the Cloud

VIRTUAL TECHNOLOGY SEEDS THE CLOUD

The launch of cloud computing has been brought on by server virtualization. Before server virtualization, operating systems such as Microsoft Windows were installed directly on the "bare metal" hardware of a server. Any time you wanted a new server, you had to purchase new

hardware. If the server hardware failed, the server went down and had to be rebuilt or restored on new hardware.

Virtualization software introduces a new layer, called the “hypervisor,” that sits between the hardware or host machine and the server operating system or guest machine. With it, multiple guest machines run simultaneously on a single host machine. The hypervisor handles all the details of splitting up the host machine’s resources. And it fools the operating system drivers of the guest machine into thinking it’s communicating directly with hardware.

This was just the beginning. Hypervisor technology evolved to further abstract the hardware layer. Clusters of host machines now act as a single pool of resources to run dozens or even hundreds of guest machines. Guest machines can be migrated without disruption and while running from one host machine to another. This process can be automated so that guest machines are migrated automatically between host machines according to the load or capacity at any point in time. Server hardware has always been a commodity. With virtualization technology, those hardware commodity resources are aggregated and delivered as if they were one big server. We now no longer think about—or really care—which particular individual physical server our application is running on. Free from the physical, we just know it’s running out there, somewhere in a cloud of server resources.

Thus, the cloud era was born.

Public vs. Private

Just as we have many types of clouds in the real sky such as cirrus, cumulonimbus and stratus, there are different varieties of cloud computing.

Public clouds

Cloud computing started out with “public” cloud vendors like Amazon selling virtual server resources and storage on a self-provisioned, metered basis. It’s called public because it’s open to everyone for any purpose. Public cloud vendors are much like utility companies, simply charging on a metered basis for resources used. Public clouds are vast, with thousands of servers across multiple regions of the country or the world. The public cloud vendor doesn’t know and doesn’t care what you are running in their cloud.

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Private clouds

There are also “private” clouds. Any organization that deploys virtualization technology and delivers a cloud-like service offering technically has a private cloud. Private clouds are much smaller than public clouds. They also differ from public clouds in that they are only offered to a specific niche for a particular purpose. Private clouds are typically managed meaning the

provisioning and maintenance of the guest machines and the software are handled by the vendor. The most common deployments of private clouds are corporate IT departments. They deliver cloud-like services to internal departments and corporate users. Hosting service providers can also have a private cloud to deliver a specific service. For example, Beyond Nines can be thought of as a private cloud service providing hosting for nonprofits who use Blackbaud software.

Hybrid clouds

Finally, there are “hybrid” clouds. These are private clouds that have some public cloud

component added in for redundancy or flexibility. For example, a private cloud that uses Amazon S3 storage for backups or media files would be considered a hybrid cloud.

More Types of Clouds

Further divisions among clouds exist beyond public vs. private. There are also three primary types of cloud-based computing environments:

• IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service • PaaS: Platform as a Service • SaaS: Software as a Service

Let’s review the three environments with examples of how hosting The Raiser’s Edge would be managed in each environment.

IaaS

IaaS refers to the most basic cloud where an infrastructure of computing resources is presented as a service to users. IaaS cloud vendors provide all the underlying resources, including servers, storage and network connectivity. The users are responsible for configuring and maintaining the operating system and any software applications such as The Raiser's Edge®.

Amazon EC2 is an unmanaged IaaS public cloud. It’s based on the open source Xen hypervisor. To host The Raiser's Edge® with Amazon EC2, you would

• have the know-how to configure and use Amazon EC2.

• purchase virtual servers with Microsoft Windows and/or Microsoft SQL Server pre-loaded. • have the know-how to install, configure and maintain The Raiser's Edge®.

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PaaS

PaaS is the next type of cloud. PaaS is the same as IaaS with the addition of the configuration and maintenance of the platform required for the applications software such as the operating system, databases, web servers and any other supporting components.

Beyond Nines is a managed PaaS private cloud. Beyond Nines uses the market-leading virtualization platform VMware VSphere and is a VSPP (VMware Solutions Provider Partner). To host Blackbaud® software with Beyond Nines, the appropriate sized servers would be determined for you based upon the products you are using and the number of users you are licensed for. Beyond Nines would then install, configure and maintain everything—including the Blackbaud® software—for you.

And because Beyond Nines is a PaaS cloud, options exist to add other third-party software such as

• Microsoft Office • Crystal Reports • PaperSave

• Advanced Budget Management • GrantedGE

• Etc.

Beyond Nines is a PaaS service that specializes in hosting of Blackbaud® software. This provides the flexibility of a PaaS cloud but with the specializiation in and management of all Blackbaud® and third-party applications for you. It’s hosting without the headache.

SaaS

SaaS is the final type of cloud. SaaS provides everything including the application software. You don't have to install or configure anything. You just simply use the software! The disadvantage of a SaaS cloud is that it doesn't have the flexibiliy of the other cloud options. You can’t install and add your own software. What you see is what you get.

Blackbaud OnDemand™ is a managed SaaS private cloud. Blackbaud OnDemand™ is delivered using Citrix. To host The Raiser’s Edge® with Blackbaud OnDemand™, you work with Blackbaud® to determine the number of users who need access.

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REASONS FOR HOSTING

Now that you have a background on cloud computing and the types of clouds you might use to host Blackbaud® software, let’s examine the reasons you would want to move your Blackbaud® software to the cloud.

Infrastructure

The cloud provides a superior physical infrastructure. Very few organizations can invest in the physical resources required to build their own private cloud. So the questions then become

• Is what you have now good enough?

• Are you willing to take the risk that your data are adequately protected by a single physical server in the backroom?

• And if that server is on its last leg, does it make sense to buy another one or instead to move to the cloud?

• There’s also the matter of backups and recovery. Are backups kept on a different server than the server being backed up?

• When was the last time you tested your backups?

Remote access

With more and more people working at flexible times and locations, workers need remote access to be productive. Remote access can be tricky if you are self-hosted. Corporate or organizational policy may not allow it. Or there may be complex technology hoops such as VPN tunnels to jump through and that don’t provide the full level of capabilities needed. An ideal solution would be one that works equally well from the office as it does from remote locations.

Also, keep in mind that a fast and reliable Internet connection is mandatory in order for remote access to be practical.

Personnel expertise

Of all the reasons, this is perhaps the most important. Installing, configuring and maintaining Blackbaud® software take a fair amount of expertise. Most IT departments already are

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CONSIDERATIONS WHEN MOVING TO THE CLOUD

Now that you understand the differences between the types of clouds and in particular the types of clouds offered by the vendors covered in this white paper, you can better evaluate them. If you have decided to investigate moving to the cloud for your Blackbaud® software, you'll need some criteria to compare and contrast vendors against. We will examine eight different

considerations you should evaluate.

Consideration #1: Cost and Term

First, let’s look at cost. Cost can vary depending upon the complexity required for hosting your Blackbaud® software. There are also one-time costs such as software licensing and professional services for data migration or setup of the servers. Let’s start with a look at a simple instance of a hosting The Raiser's Edge® for 10 users. Typical server requirements would include a SQL server, a terminal server and a domain controller.

Amazon EC2

Hosting costs ($796/month)

Amazon provides a calculator you can use to estimate your costs: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html.

• SQL server (Medium instance - 3.5 GB memory and 2 vCPU): $544/month. • Terminal server (Medium instance - 3.5GB memory and 2 vCPU): $168/month. • Domain controller (Small instance - 1.7GB memory and 1 vCPU: $84/month.

One-‐time costs

Amazon includes a license for both Windows Server and SQL Server standard edition. Should you decide to use Remote Desktop for remote access, you’ll need to purchase and install the CALs (Client Access Licenses) for that. Since Amazon is not a managed service, you will need to hire someone and pay them to install, configure, migrate and maintain everything. This cost could be substantial.

Term

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Beyond Nines

Hosting Costs. ($500/month)

Beyond Nines flat-rate pricing is based upon the number of licensed users. For up to 9 concurrent users of The Raiser’s Edge®, following configuration is provided:

• SQL server (4GB memory and 2 vCPU)

• Remote Desktop session host, aka Terminal server (3GB memory and 2 vCPU) • Domain controller (1GB memory and 1 vCPU)

One-‐time costs

Assuming your organization already owns the requisite software from Blackbaud® such as The Raiser’s Edge®, the only other requirement is that your maintenance support contract remains current.

There are no additional software licensing or installation fees. As an authorized hosting provider through Microsoft SPLA (Service Provider Licensing Agreement) Beyond Nines includes Microsoft software licenses for Windows Server, SQL Server, Microsoft Office and Remote Desktop. Term

Beyond Nines is on a month-to-month or annual basis. Those organizations that pay a year in advance get a discount equivalent to two months of free hosting.

Blackbaud OnDemand™

Hosting costs (unknown)

Blackbaud® doesn’t publish pricing. The costs will be in the same ballpark as Amazon EC2 and Beyond Nines for small configurations. Larger configurations will likely be more and—in some cases much more—depending upon the complexity involved.

One-‐time costs

Blackbaud OnDemand™ includes all the necessary Windows software licenses. However, Blackbaud typically does charge additional professional-service fees related to setup and migration.

Term

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Consideration #2: Ease of Use

Amazon EC2

Deployment.

Just getting a server running on Amazon EC2 takes a considerable amount of expertise in their platform. There are many a la carte options and variations in their service offering. Deciding exactly what to get and how to provision and configure it all can be very complex and time-consuming. File transfer

Windows Remote Desktop allows file system redirection so a local drive may be mapped to the remote server. While logged into your EC2 instance through Remote Desktop, you can open Windows Explorer and drag-and-drop files.

Beyond Nines

Deployment

Beyond Nines installs and configures everything for you. File transfer

As with EC2, Windows Remote Desktop allows file system redirection so a local drive may be mapped to the remote server. While logged into Beyond Nines through Remote Desktop, you can open Windows Explorer and drag-and-drop files.

Blackbaud OnDemand™

Deployment

Blackbaud installs and configures everything for you. File transfer

Unlike EC2 and Beyond Nines, Blackbaud OnDemand™ doesn’t permit file copy over a Citrix session. They offer a separate FTP area where files are uploaded or downloaded. So one must go outside the Citrix session, transfer the files via FTP, then return to the Citrix session and get the files from the FTP.

Consideration #3: Security

Amazon EC2

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Beyond Nines

Beyond Nines manages all aspects for security for you. Each client is placed on an isolated subnet and VLAN and on a dedicated firewall interface with their own firewall access rules. Custom firewall configuration including opening special firewall ports, restricting access by IP address and site-to-site VPN are available.

Beyond Nines is PCI compliant and the datacenter is SOC2 audited. Network and application level scans by Qualys independently validate compliance.

Blackbaud OnDemand™

Blackbaud manages all aspects for security for you. Clients are placed on a shared network and no custom firewall configuration is available.

Blackbaud OnDemand™ is PCI compliant and the datacenter is SOC2 audited.

Consideration #4: Flexibility

Amazon EC2

Resources

Amazon EC2 offers different sized instances such as small, medium, large and very large. Each comes with a fixed amount of RAM, vCPU and storage. It’s not possible to configure something in-between—say a medium and a large. So if you need more than a medium but not quite enough for a large, you’re stuck getting the large. You are able to change instance types on the fly with a simple reboot being the only thing that is required to add additional resources.

Third-‐party software

You can install any software including Blackbaud® software, custom plugins and third-party software.

Beyond Nines

Resources

Beyond Nines offers a guaranteed amount of server resources needed to do the job. Each client’s servers are first configured with a set amount of resources based upon their expected usage. However, should it be required, more resources will be added to the client server instances at no additional charge. This way users are assured that system performance is truly elastic and if needed, will grow to meet the required demand over time.

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Blackbaud OnDemand™

Resources

With Blackbaud OnDemand™, you're not paying for resources; you’re paying to use the service. It’s not possible to pay extra to get a faster instance with more resources. What you see is what you get.

Additional custom plugins or third-party software cannot be added. You only get what already comes with the service.

Consideration #5: Backup and Restore

Amazon EC2

SQL backup

You are responsible for configuration and maintenace of SQL databases. File-‐by-‐file

You are responsible for adding, configuring and maintaining backup software. Server image backup

You can take server snapshots. There is no management interface for automating this, but it’s possible to use third-party software or scripting tools to setup automated server snapshots.

Beyond Nines

SQL backup

Beyond Nines configures SQL database backups for you. Typically this involves weekly full database backups and hourly transaction log backups. If needed, the database can be restored to within one-hour increments.

File-‐by-‐file

Beyond Nines uses backups software from Veeam to backup all files on a daily basis and retain them for 14 days. Files that are accidentally deleted can be restored by opening a ticket with support.

Server image backup

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Blackbaud OnDemand™

SQL backup

Blackbaud® configures SQL database backups for you. Typically this involves weekly full database backups and transaction log backups every 15 minutes. If needed, the database can be restored to within 15-minute increments.

File-‐by-‐file

Blackbaud® backs up all files on a daily basis. Files that are accidentally deleted can be restored by opening a ticket with support.

Server image backup

Since clients are within a shared hosting environment, there is no concept of a server image backup for a single client. Clients who wish to migration off Blackbaud OnDemand™ can request a SQL database backup and any individual files.

Consideration #6: Disaster Recovery

Amazon EC2

EC2 hosting has the infrastructure to support Disaster Recovery. However, the details of the configuration necessary to do so would be fairly complex. If Disaster Recovery is important to you (it should be), you should plan on additional costs for configuring, documenting and validating a Disaster Recovery plan. Most in-house IT professionals won't have the experience and expertise to implement Disaster Recovery in a public cloud.

Beyond Nines

Beyond Nines manages all aspects for Disaster Recovery for you. Beyond Nines has datacenters in Seattle and Dallas with Disaster Recovery failover between the two.

Beyond Nines uses Veeam Backup and Replication to backup all virtual machines daily to a local deduplication storage appliance from Exagrid. The Exagrid appliance replicates these backup data to a second Exagrid appliance at the other datacenter location. Both environments are configured to run all virtual machines for all clients, if required.

Beyond Nines’ Disaster Recovery plan includes quarterly testing to ensure it remains valid and no items are overlooked. Beyond Nines Disaster Recovery provides a 24-hour RPO (Recovery Point Objective or maximum data loss) or and 24-hour RTO (Recovery Time Objective or maximum downtime).

Blackbaud OnDemand™

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Consideration #7: Transparency and Monitoring

Amazon EC2

System monitoring

EC2 provides a feature called CloudWatch that provides detailed system monitoring of your EC2 instances such as CPU usage, memory utilization and network usage.

SQL server monitoring

Software for application monitoring of SQL server would need to be procured, installed and configured seperately.

External monitoring

Software for external monitoring would need to be procured and configured separately.

Beyond Nines

System monitoring

Beyond Nines uses PRTG from Paessler to provide system monitoring such as CPU usage, memory utilization and network usage at no additional charge. Each client is provided with a web application login where this information can be viewed and reported against.

SQL server monitoring

Beyond Nines also users PRTG to provide SQL application monitoring such as locks per second, batch requests per second and cache hit ratio. These data are also available using the same web application login.

External monitoring

Beyond Nines uses Pingdom for independent monitoring of uptime of client services. Clients can receive uptime reports directly from Pingdom on a daily, weekly and/or monthly basis. If the service guarantee offered by Beyond Nines is not verified by Pingdom, a credit is due the client.

Blackbaud OnDemand™

System monitoring

Blackbaud OnDemand™ doesn’t provide system monitoring capabilities available to clients. SQL server monitoring

Blackbaud OnDemand™ doesn't provide SQL application monitoring capability available to clients. External monitoring

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Consideration #8: Support

Amazon EC2

Updates

With EC2, you’re on your own. You’ll to need to plan to find someone with the expertise to maintain and update all aspects of EC2 as well as configure and maintain the operating system, SQL server and Blackbaud® software.

Blackbaud® software support

Clients can call or email Blackbaud® for support related to Blackbaud® software.

Beyond Nines

Updates

Beyond Nines manages all updates to the operating system, SQL Server and the Blackbaud® software for you. Beyond Nines will coordinate changes with you ahead of time and make sure updates and patches are installed according to your needs.

Blackbaud software support

Clients can call or email Blackbaud® for support related to Blackbaud® software and call or email Beyond Nines for support related to the hosting environment. If you're not sure if your issue is specific to Beyond Nines or with Blackbaud® software, call Beyond Nines and they will contact Blackbaud® on your behalf, if needed, to resolve the matter.

Blackbaud OnDemand™

Updates

Blackbaud® manages all updates to the operating system, SQL server and the Blackbaud® software for you. Blackbaud® will notify you ahead of time when the updates will occur, but does not coordinate scheduling of updates with clients. Updates are mandatory.

Blackbaud® software support

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CONCLUSION

EC2 is a viable option if you have considerable in-house expertise in EC2 and Blackbaud®. You would need to plan for having ongoing resources devoted to maintaining the hosting instances. Beyond Nines provides everything you need to host your Blackbaud® services in the cloud and at a price that is considerably less or at least on par with the other services. Since Beyond Nines manages all the installation and updates, so you don’t need to have a dedicated resource for that. Additionally, Beyond Nines offers a high level of security, includes disaster recovery and additional features including detailed monitoring are also included at no additional charge.

Blackbaud OnDemand™ is an option if you want to stick with a single vendor, don’t have a need for flexibility and transparency, or don’t mind paying a higher price and signing for a longer term.

If you or a member of your team has questions about how to better support, maintain or host your Blackbaud® software and data, please contact Beyond Nines at [email protected] or 888-651-5099. We’ll be happy to answer any questions regarding the content of this white paper as well as discuss your organization’s specific situation and challenges. We really are rooted in your success.