1. Cloud computing
클라우드컴퓨팅(Cloud computing)
○ 클라우드 컴퓨팅은 `개인(PC)`을 `집합`으로 바꾼 개념으로, 전 세계에 존재하는 컴퓨터들을 하나로 묶고, 특정 프로그램이 이들 컴퓨터에 있는 정보를 모아 사용자들의 질문에 답해주는 시스템임. 이용자들이 별도로 소프트웨어를 설치하지 않아도 되며, 웹, PC, 모바일 연결로 언제 어디서나 온라인에 접속할 수 있음. 클라우드 컴퓨팅은 컴퓨터끼리 결합해 업무를 수행하기 때문에 단일 컴퓨터가 할 수 없는 복잡한 작업도 해낼 수 있음(야후 용어사전에서 인용)
○ 인터넷 기반의 컴퓨팅으로 정보가 인터넷상의 서버에 영구적으로 저장되고 사용자는 서버에 있는 정보를 빌려쓰는 방식으로 운영됨. 모든 컴퓨터에 대용량 하드디스크 등 시스템을 장착할 필요가 없어 개인이 가지고 다녀야 하는 장비나 저장공간의 제약이 사라짐
○ PC의 경우 속도나 크기의 한계가 있었지만, 클라우드 컴퓨팅은 인터넷 접속만 가능하면 고성능 기기가 아니어도 원격으로 하고자 하는 작업을 수행할 수 있음
○ 수많은 컴퓨터를 하나의 컴퓨터처럼 묶어 분산 처리하는 방식으로 기상예측이나 우주적 문제 등 대규모 연산에 사용되어 온 그리드 컴퓨팅과는 명백히 다름
○ 모든 데이터와 소프트웨어가 중앙에 집중되기 때문에 손쉽게 다른 PC로 이동할 수 있어 장비관리업무가 크게 줄어들게 되고, 컴퓨팅 자원을 사용자의 필요에 따라 적당하게 할당할 수 있어 유휴 PC나 서버자원 등을 크게 줄일 수 있다는 것이 장점이나, 보안문제가 아직은 취약하다는 것이 큰 단점임
○ 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 사용한 우리나라의 사례가 클루넷(위즈솔루션)의 CCN(Cloud Computing Network)인데, 지난 2008 베이징 올림픽의 인터넷 생중계(SBS)에 사용되었던 기술이기도 함
from: http://kr.blog.yahoo.com/jo2000ke/1392075
2. Cloud computing
What is this Cloud Computing that everyone is talking about? The concept of Cloud Computing is a growing term that is gaining popularity and rightly so.
In order to talk about cloud computing you need to understand what the cloud is. The cloud is nothing more than an abstraction of resources on a remote/hosted server. The idea is that these servers are in secure *data centers giving you abilities that you may not have within your company such as scaling up and out.
Microsoft's vision of Cloud Computing is based on four key pillars: Scaling out, Automated Service Management, High Availability, and Multi-Tenancy. These pillars are used to help convey the concept of Software Plus Service. Simply put, working on documents, checking e-mails, and even listening to music are great things to do locally but having access to them online is even better. However, the opposite is true. Having things online is great but sometimes you need them locally just in case you don’t have an Internet connection.
Scaling Out rather than scaling up, Scaling Out means that that your application can use multiple resources on different machines and almost have a running parallel environment rather than trying divide the resources on one particular machine.
Automated Service means that the developer does not have to worry about all the logistics when developing a specific infrastructure such as management rules or patching an OS while still having the other three pillars support your application/service. This way the developer can focus on service development.
High Availability is simply having your service accessible; load balanced and can scale both up and out.
Multi-Tenancy means that the application can have more than one tenant/user at any given time as well as make sure resources on a machine are shared.
The platform that allows all this to happen is the Azure. Using the Azure platform, Azure SQL, and Azure Dot.Net you will be able to create or put your applications online in order to have all these attributes described above.
You can also check out the official Windows Azure home page at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
*Data Center- A facility used for housing a large amount of computer and communications equipment maintained by an organization for the purpose of handling the data necessary for its operations(msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb246417(VS.85).aspx)
**Details for this blog were taken from a session by Eric Morse (Depth Partners Director)
Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 12:04 PM by DPE Egypt
from: http://blogs.msdn.com/egtechtalk/archive/2009/12/23/cloud-computing-in-a-nutshell.aspx
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Google and Cloud web site
http://dvbox.net/lounge/go/9995
http://dvbox.net/lounge/search/tag/Cloud+Computing
http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogView.do?blogid=0AxwT&articleno=17366225#ajax_history_home
http://dvbox.net/lounge/search/tag/Cloud+Computing
http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogView.do?blogid=0AxwT&articleno=17366225#ajax_history_home
Monday, November 30, 2009
Pros and Cons of Grid computing
Grid computing has been of tremendous use to companies, both large and small scale, for quite a few years now. Grid computing, in short is a simple and easy way to carry out computing jobs like database queries with the help of a set of resources instead of a single central core. Silos or huge SMP boxes were used in the past and even now some companies use the SMP boxes but they are not economical and also not very effective. With the advent of grid computing the load on the server gets distributed evenly to small server components and jobs are carried out easily and efficiently.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages of grid computing.
Advantages
The need for huge SMP servers is eliminated and instead small servers which are cost efficient are used. The resulting work can be analyzed and the job made simpler.
Many resources are not utilized efficiently except during business hours and with the grid computing these idle computers or servers are put to good use. If there is a fault in one of the computers in a grid, the job is taken over by other servers or computers in the grid and thus the work does not come to a stand still. Jobs are programmed to restart automatically in case of system faults.
Grid software like Platform LSF, Data Synapse, Sun Grid Engine, Condor and UnivaUD are used to manage policies. Resources are surveyed and job reports are managed on the basis of internal policy engines. The grid computing has the ability to scale well. If more computing resources are required then they can be easily acquired by connecting additional servers or computers which can be detached as easily, if not needed. Upgrading is an easy task without the interruption of the ongoing work. One of the resources can be used for upgrading while others take up the work and see to its completion. Parallel speeding performance can be seen in the completion of the various jobs. With the use of MPI messages can be transmitted within the various resources easily.
Disadvantages
In case of applications that do not make use of the MPI model, reverting to the SMP may be needed. High speed interconnection between the computer resources like a gigabit Ethernet is needed and for MPI specific applications Infiband may be required. Tweaking of the application may be required in a few cases to get the full effect of the computing.
The process of licensing used in various servers at a time is not suitable for certain type of applications. The manufacturers have begun to be more adaptable in such an environment.
With the many advantages associated with the grid computing, it is clear that the benefits accrued are more and a proper knowledge about the computing will take care of the disadvantages realized. Areas like bioinformatics, oil and drilling and various financial applications have started to enjoy the benefits and it will not be long before all fields apply grid computing with resounding success.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages of grid computing.
Advantages
The need for huge SMP servers is eliminated and instead small servers which are cost efficient are used. The resulting work can be analyzed and the job made simpler.
Many resources are not utilized efficiently except during business hours and with the grid computing these idle computers or servers are put to good use. If there is a fault in one of the computers in a grid, the job is taken over by other servers or computers in the grid and thus the work does not come to a stand still. Jobs are programmed to restart automatically in case of system faults.
Grid software like Platform LSF, Data Synapse, Sun Grid Engine, Condor and UnivaUD are used to manage policies. Resources are surveyed and job reports are managed on the basis of internal policy engines. The grid computing has the ability to scale well. If more computing resources are required then they can be easily acquired by connecting additional servers or computers which can be detached as easily, if not needed. Upgrading is an easy task without the interruption of the ongoing work. One of the resources can be used for upgrading while others take up the work and see to its completion. Parallel speeding performance can be seen in the completion of the various jobs. With the use of MPI messages can be transmitted within the various resources easily.
Disadvantages
In case of applications that do not make use of the MPI model, reverting to the SMP may be needed. High speed interconnection between the computer resources like a gigabit Ethernet is needed and for MPI specific applications Infiband may be required. Tweaking of the application may be required in a few cases to get the full effect of the computing.
The process of licensing used in various servers at a time is not suitable for certain type of applications. The manufacturers have begun to be more adaptable in such an environment.
With the many advantages associated with the grid computing, it is clear that the benefits accrued are more and a proper knowledge about the computing will take care of the disadvantages realized. Areas like bioinformatics, oil and drilling and various financial applications have started to enjoy the benefits and it will not be long before all fields apply grid computing with resounding success.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
The cloud computing battleground takes shape. Will it be winner-take-all?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=1060&utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=technology
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Grid Computing - The Future of Internetworking
f you are using the internet from your desktop, then your computer is part of a network. This network in turn is part of another network. In short, the internet is a networking infrastructure. It was the result of some visionary thinking by the people in the early 1960s that saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. Shrinking computer sizes and information sharing services made it possible for every computer in the world to interconnect. The 'World Wide Web' is a service built on top of the internet which enables millions of computers around the world to share information.
The internet has served well so far but has a few shortcomings. Scientists and computing experts are always on the lookout for the next leap forward. The internet allows you to only share information and nothing more you can think of apart from that. In order to address this issue, the experts have devised a new system which is called the 'Grid'. A grid computing system is a type of parallel computing system which enables us to share computing power, disk storage, databases and software applications. The term 'Grid' first appeared in Ian Foster's and Carl Kesselman's seminal work - The Grid: Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure. Ian Foster is the Associate Division Director in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory (United States), where he leads the Distributed Systems Laboratory, and he is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. In one of his articles, Ian Foster lists these primary attributes of a Grid:
1. Computing resources are not administered centrally
2. Open standards are used
3. Significant quality of service is achieved
A grid computing system, also known as a distributed computing system, relies on computers connected to a network by a conventional network interface like the 'Ethernet' (the port into which you connect your LAN cable). These computers have the capability to combine and yield better results than a supercomputer. These computers are independently controlled, and can perform tasks unrelated to the grid at the operator's concern. This is what Ian Foster indicates in the first point of his checklist.
The striking feature of a grid computing system is that it enables sharing of computing power. This is also known as CPU scavenging in which a computer steals the unused cycles of any other computer. These cycles are nothing but the idle times of a processor in a computer. Shared computing is the act of sharing tasks over multiple computers. In other words, it is as good as getting the same job done from a bunch of people rather than a big strong man. As a result, a task which took days to complete will be achieved over a relatively small period of time. IBM is currently working on developing a global scale supercomputer based on the concept of shared computing. They have named it as 'Project Kittyhawk' and it will run the entire internet as an application. Shared computing is one of the services that a grid will provide.
Desktops, laptops, supercomputers and clusters combine to form a grid. All of these computers can have different hardware and operating systems. Grids are also usually loosely connected in a decentralized network, rather than contained in a single location, as computers in a cluster often are. Hence, a grid's flexibility and additional features distinguish it from its competitors. Moreover, a grid is built from open standard protocols and interfaces like TCP/IP protocol suite which is important to realize internationalization rather than subjugating it to local limits.
In addition to shared computing power, a grid allows you to share disk storage, databases and software applications. Altogether, this system will be very helpful to people belonging to different categories, ranging from scientists to consumers. Most of the computers in mid size and large size organizations are idle for a higher percentage of time. These idle processors can be utilized for other important tasks by the means of CPU scavenging. Different scientists of the world would like to visualize their applications in real time rather than wait for ages till their results are shipped, verified, and then sent back. With the help of grid, people from different fields of expertise will be able to hook up to remote computers and share their findings. This won't only speed up the process but will also produce accurate results.
One of the biggest projects on grid is being carried out in Switzerland by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Thousands of desktops, laptops, mobile phones, data vaults, meteorological sensors and telescopes will constitute the biggest grid which will produce an annual database of roughly 15 million gigabytes. This event will become possible when two beams of subatomic particles called 'Hadrons', will collide in the 'Large Hadron Collider' - A gigantic scientific instrument 100 meters underground at Geneva, Switzerland. Thousands of scientists around the world want to access and analyze this data, so CERN is collaborating with institutions in 33 different countries to operate a distributed computing and data storage infrastructure: the LHC Computing Grid (LCG).
To constantly reap the benefits of such a system, it is important to make sure that the computers performing the calculations are entirely trustworthy. The designers of the system must thus introduce measures to prevent malfunctions or malicious participants from producing false, misleading, or incorrect results, and from using the system as an attack vector. In a grid, computers drop out either voluntarily or due to their failure.
Many projects over the grid are underway and the day is not far when it will be globally implemented. But for any new technology to be successful, it needs to be given a chance. Its fate will be in our hands. There is going to be a lot of chaos and confusion before the scores are out. The chances for the grid to emerge as a successful computing system are high, and with it our understanding of the universe is going to change.
A novice writer who is looking forward to learn and share at the same time. Writing is his passion. As a newbie, he wishes to learn and add his view points on every subject that relates to him.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Emaad_Nakhwa
http://ezinearticles.com/?Grid-Computing-The-Future-of-Internetworking&id=3266001
The internet has served well so far but has a few shortcomings. Scientists and computing experts are always on the lookout for the next leap forward. The internet allows you to only share information and nothing more you can think of apart from that. In order to address this issue, the experts have devised a new system which is called the 'Grid'. A grid computing system is a type of parallel computing system which enables us to share computing power, disk storage, databases and software applications. The term 'Grid' first appeared in Ian Foster's and Carl Kesselman's seminal work - The Grid: Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure. Ian Foster is the Associate Division Director in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory (United States), where he leads the Distributed Systems Laboratory, and he is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. In one of his articles, Ian Foster lists these primary attributes of a Grid:
1. Computing resources are not administered centrally
2. Open standards are used
3. Significant quality of service is achieved
A grid computing system, also known as a distributed computing system, relies on computers connected to a network by a conventional network interface like the 'Ethernet' (the port into which you connect your LAN cable). These computers have the capability to combine and yield better results than a supercomputer. These computers are independently controlled, and can perform tasks unrelated to the grid at the operator's concern. This is what Ian Foster indicates in the first point of his checklist.
The striking feature of a grid computing system is that it enables sharing of computing power. This is also known as CPU scavenging in which a computer steals the unused cycles of any other computer. These cycles are nothing but the idle times of a processor in a computer. Shared computing is the act of sharing tasks over multiple computers. In other words, it is as good as getting the same job done from a bunch of people rather than a big strong man. As a result, a task which took days to complete will be achieved over a relatively small period of time. IBM is currently working on developing a global scale supercomputer based on the concept of shared computing. They have named it as 'Project Kittyhawk' and it will run the entire internet as an application. Shared computing is one of the services that a grid will provide.
Desktops, laptops, supercomputers and clusters combine to form a grid. All of these computers can have different hardware and operating systems. Grids are also usually loosely connected in a decentralized network, rather than contained in a single location, as computers in a cluster often are. Hence, a grid's flexibility and additional features distinguish it from its competitors. Moreover, a grid is built from open standard protocols and interfaces like TCP/IP protocol suite which is important to realize internationalization rather than subjugating it to local limits.
In addition to shared computing power, a grid allows you to share disk storage, databases and software applications. Altogether, this system will be very helpful to people belonging to different categories, ranging from scientists to consumers. Most of the computers in mid size and large size organizations are idle for a higher percentage of time. These idle processors can be utilized for other important tasks by the means of CPU scavenging. Different scientists of the world would like to visualize their applications in real time rather than wait for ages till their results are shipped, verified, and then sent back. With the help of grid, people from different fields of expertise will be able to hook up to remote computers and share their findings. This won't only speed up the process but will also produce accurate results.
One of the biggest projects on grid is being carried out in Switzerland by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Thousands of desktops, laptops, mobile phones, data vaults, meteorological sensors and telescopes will constitute the biggest grid which will produce an annual database of roughly 15 million gigabytes. This event will become possible when two beams of subatomic particles called 'Hadrons', will collide in the 'Large Hadron Collider' - A gigantic scientific instrument 100 meters underground at Geneva, Switzerland. Thousands of scientists around the world want to access and analyze this data, so CERN is collaborating with institutions in 33 different countries to operate a distributed computing and data storage infrastructure: the LHC Computing Grid (LCG).
To constantly reap the benefits of such a system, it is important to make sure that the computers performing the calculations are entirely trustworthy. The designers of the system must thus introduce measures to prevent malfunctions or malicious participants from producing false, misleading, or incorrect results, and from using the system as an attack vector. In a grid, computers drop out either voluntarily or due to their failure.
Many projects over the grid are underway and the day is not far when it will be globally implemented. But for any new technology to be successful, it needs to be given a chance. Its fate will be in our hands. There is going to be a lot of chaos and confusion before the scores are out. The chances for the grid to emerge as a successful computing system are high, and with it our understanding of the universe is going to change.
A novice writer who is looking forward to learn and share at the same time. Writing is his passion. As a newbie, he wishes to learn and add his view points on every subject that relates to him.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Emaad_Nakhwa
http://ezinearticles.com/?Grid-Computing-The-Future-of-Internetworking&id=3266001
Monday, November 9, 2009
Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 5
To date, this series has tried to guide you through the changes happening from the infrastructure, developer, and end user perspectives that signal the demise of the full-featured server operating system and the virtual server. Virtualization, and the large scale, multi-tenant operations model we know and love as "cloud computing," are enabling IT professionals to rethink the packaging, delivery, and operation of software functionality in extremely disruptive--and beneficial--ways.
(Credit: Wonderlane)
So, what does this mean to the future of information technology? How will the role of IT, and the roles within IT, change as a result of the changing landscape of the technology it administers? What new applications--and resulting markets--are enabled by the "big rethink"?
Here are just a few of my own observations on this topic:
Software packaging will be application focused, not server focused. As anyone who has deployed a distributed application in the last two decades can tell you, the focus of system deployment has been the server, not the application, for some time now. In the highly customized world of IT systems development before virtualization and the cloud, servers were acquired, software was installed upon the servers in very specific ways, and the entire package was managed and monitored largely from the perspective of the server (e.g. what processes are running, how much CPU is being used, etc.).
As OS functionality begins to get wrapped into application containers, or moved onto the hardware circuitry itself, the packaging begins to be defined in terms of application architecture, with monitoring happening from the perspective of software services and interfaces rather than the server itself. These packages can then be moved around within data centers, or even among them, and the focus of management will remain on the application.
That's not to say that no one will be watching the hardware. Infrastructure operations will always be a key function within data centers. However, outside of the data center operations team, it will matter less and less.
Enterprise IT will begin to bend enterprise and solutions architectures to align better with what is offered from the cloud. I may not agree with some that the cloud will stifle differentiation in software systems, but one thing is very true.
As end users select software-as-a-service applications to run core pieces of their business, meet integration and operations needs from the cloud, and generally move from systems providers to service providers, the need to reduce customization will be strong. This is both to reduce costs and strengthen system survivability in the face of constant feature changes on the underlying application system.
The changing relationship between software and hardware will result in new organizational structures within the IT department. When it comes to IT operations--specifically data center operations--we've generally lived with administrative groups divided along server, storage, and network lines from before the dawn of client-server application architectures.
This organization, however, is an artifact of a time when applications were tightly coupled to the hardware on which they were deployed. In such a static deployment model, expertise was needed to customize these technologies in pursuit of meeting specific service-level goals.
When you decouple software deployment from underlying hardware, it begins to allow for a re-evaluation of these operational roles. Today, most companies are already in a transition in this respect, with increasing reliance on roles like "virtualization administrator" and "operations specialist" to fulfill changing needs.
The changing landscape of software development platforms will result in new philosophies of software architecture, deployment, and operations. I'm thinking here primarily of two things.
First, agility will become king in large-scale systems development for classes of applications ranging from web applications to data processing to core business systems. Agility from the service provider's perspective, in the frequency in which they can release features and fixes. Agility from the perspective of the enterprise developer, through the ways in which they can rapidly iterate over the write-build-test cycle. Agility from the perspective of the entrepreneur, in that data center services are now a credit card away.
Second, I think project management, whether for commercial offerings or for custom enterprise applications, will see rapid change. Agile programming and project management methods make a ton of sense in the cloud, as do service-oriented approaches to software and systems architecture. Project managers wondering what cloud computing will do to their day-to-day jobs should consider what happens if development can outpace a Gant chart.
The need for tactical systems administrators will be reduced. I've written about this in the past, but the tactical system administrator--the man or woman who grabs a trouble ticket from the top of the queue, takes care of the request, closes the ticket, then takes the next ticket from the queue--is going to largely (though probably not entirely) go away.
Why? Automation. Most of the tasks such an admin does day to day are highly automatable: provisioning, failure recovery, scaling, infrastructure management and so on. These administrators are among the last "clerks" in business, and a result of the unfortunate fact that IT has been excellent at automating everything in business--except IT.
Where tactical systems administration will still be needed, however, is in what I like to call the "private cloud operations center," a concept similar to the network operations centers that exist in many Fortune 500 companies today. There, the administrator would monitor overall performance of applications running in the cloud (on both internal and external resources), as well as monitoring the performance of the cloud providers themselves.
There are a lot more forward-thinking thoughts that you and I could probably come up with when we think of the demise of traditional IT in favor of a lean, tight, cloud-oriented IT model. However, the great thing about being involved in cloud today is that the ground is shifting so fast, that I find myself changing many of the long-term predictions I made last year. I wouldn't presume to be able to see the future clearly in the face of cloud computing, but many of the key drivers are already out there.
The trick is to be open-minded about what you see, and to be willing to "rethink"...big.
(Credit: Wonderlane)
So, what does this mean to the future of information technology? How will the role of IT, and the roles within IT, change as a result of the changing landscape of the technology it administers? What new applications--and resulting markets--are enabled by the "big rethink"?
Here are just a few of my own observations on this topic:
Software packaging will be application focused, not server focused. As anyone who has deployed a distributed application in the last two decades can tell you, the focus of system deployment has been the server, not the application, for some time now. In the highly customized world of IT systems development before virtualization and the cloud, servers were acquired, software was installed upon the servers in very specific ways, and the entire package was managed and monitored largely from the perspective of the server (e.g. what processes are running, how much CPU is being used, etc.).
As OS functionality begins to get wrapped into application containers, or moved onto the hardware circuitry itself, the packaging begins to be defined in terms of application architecture, with monitoring happening from the perspective of software services and interfaces rather than the server itself. These packages can then be moved around within data centers, or even among them, and the focus of management will remain on the application.
That's not to say that no one will be watching the hardware. Infrastructure operations will always be a key function within data centers. However, outside of the data center operations team, it will matter less and less.
Enterprise IT will begin to bend enterprise and solutions architectures to align better with what is offered from the cloud. I may not agree with some that the cloud will stifle differentiation in software systems, but one thing is very true.
As end users select software-as-a-service applications to run core pieces of their business, meet integration and operations needs from the cloud, and generally move from systems providers to service providers, the need to reduce customization will be strong. This is both to reduce costs and strengthen system survivability in the face of constant feature changes on the underlying application system.
The changing relationship between software and hardware will result in new organizational structures within the IT department. When it comes to IT operations--specifically data center operations--we've generally lived with administrative groups divided along server, storage, and network lines from before the dawn of client-server application architectures.
This organization, however, is an artifact of a time when applications were tightly coupled to the hardware on which they were deployed. In such a static deployment model, expertise was needed to customize these technologies in pursuit of meeting specific service-level goals.
When you decouple software deployment from underlying hardware, it begins to allow for a re-evaluation of these operational roles. Today, most companies are already in a transition in this respect, with increasing reliance on roles like "virtualization administrator" and "operations specialist" to fulfill changing needs.
The changing landscape of software development platforms will result in new philosophies of software architecture, deployment, and operations. I'm thinking here primarily of two things.
First, agility will become king in large-scale systems development for classes of applications ranging from web applications to data processing to core business systems. Agility from the service provider's perspective, in the frequency in which they can release features and fixes. Agility from the perspective of the enterprise developer, through the ways in which they can rapidly iterate over the write-build-test cycle. Agility from the perspective of the entrepreneur, in that data center services are now a credit card away.
Second, I think project management, whether for commercial offerings or for custom enterprise applications, will see rapid change. Agile programming and project management methods make a ton of sense in the cloud, as do service-oriented approaches to software and systems architecture. Project managers wondering what cloud computing will do to their day-to-day jobs should consider what happens if development can outpace a Gant chart.
The need for tactical systems administrators will be reduced. I've written about this in the past, but the tactical system administrator--the man or woman who grabs a trouble ticket from the top of the queue, takes care of the request, closes the ticket, then takes the next ticket from the queue--is going to largely (though probably not entirely) go away.
Why? Automation. Most of the tasks such an admin does day to day are highly automatable: provisioning, failure recovery, scaling, infrastructure management and so on. These administrators are among the last "clerks" in business, and a result of the unfortunate fact that IT has been excellent at automating everything in business--except IT.
Where tactical systems administration will still be needed, however, is in what I like to call the "private cloud operations center," a concept similar to the network operations centers that exist in many Fortune 500 companies today. There, the administrator would monitor overall performance of applications running in the cloud (on both internal and external resources), as well as monitoring the performance of the cloud providers themselves.
There are a lot more forward-thinking thoughts that you and I could probably come up with when we think of the demise of traditional IT in favor of a lean, tight, cloud-oriented IT model. However, the great thing about being involved in cloud today is that the ground is shifting so fast, that I find myself changing many of the long-term predictions I made last year. I wouldn't presume to be able to see the future clearly in the face of cloud computing, but many of the key drivers are already out there.
The trick is to be open-minded about what you see, and to be willing to "rethink"...big.
Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 4
So far in this series, I've described why the very form of application infrastructure delivery will change in the coming years, and why both infrastructure and software development will play a major role in that. These are powerful forces that are already at work, and you are already seeing their effects on the way enterprise IT and consumer Web applications are being operated.
There is one more key force that will change the way we acquire, build, and consume enterprise application functionality and data, however. It is the very reason that enterprise IT exists. I am speaking, of course, of the users--the business units and individuals that demand IT give them increased productivity and competitive advantage.
How is it that end users could affect cloud-based architectures? After all, isn't one of the key points about cloud computing that it hides infrastructure and operations from hosted applications and services? The answer is simple: the need for cloud-operated infrastructure comes from the need for more efficient application delivery and operations, which in turn comes from the accelerated need for new software functionality driven by end users.
The most obvious place where this is the case is software as a service. Cloud applications and services that fall under this category are targeted at end users; they deliver computing and storage functionality that meet specific business needs (such as customer relationship management (CRM) or application development and testing).
Here's the thing about most business applications, though, regardless of how they are delivered: they are almost never used out of the box, as is, without some form of customization. I worked for a short time at enterprise content management vendor, Alfresco, and I don't think there were any "as is" deployments. Every engagement involved customization.
For CRM vendor Salesforce.com, the evidence is the importance and success of its Force.com cloud development platform, as well as its AppExchange marketplace. Both allow users to customize or extend Salesforce.com for their needs, and even build new business applications that leverage customer data.
The result of this is that the cloud itself must be not only elastic, but agile. It must bend at all levels to the will of its users, and the degree and ease of configuring and customizing will quickly become competitive differentiators for vendors in all categories of cloud computing.
What are the best ways to accommodate this agility at scales large enough to meet the needs of cloud computing? Well, today that would be two technologies:
Virtualization--the abstraction of computing, storage, and networking resources from underlying infrastructure
Automation--the elimination of the need for human intervention in common, repeatable tasks and decisions
Now, if you are going to virtualize and automate infrastructure in support of a customization of a SaaS application, do you need an entire virtual server with a full featured operating system? Of course not. In fact, I would argue that you need least-common-denominator systems infrastructure to enable the customization to work. Otherwise you are creating unnecessary storage and computing baggage.
I think in many ways only the cloud-computing model enables this degree of efficiency in running customized business systems for end users. Because the service vendors (be it software, platform, or infrastructure services) are able to optimize for all customers at once, a given advancement in efficiency pays off much more (and much faster) for the service provider than it would for a single customer. Multi-tenancy is what makes the economics work for both the business user and the service provider.
My next and final post in the series will attempt to wrap all of this up, and to present a vision of what the cloud of the future may look like when the evolution and/or demise of the operating system and virtual server is complete. Though I harbor no illusions about it happening all at once, or being a pain-free transition, I, for one, am excited about the new technologies this future may enable. I hope you are, too.
There is one more key force that will change the way we acquire, build, and consume enterprise application functionality and data, however. It is the very reason that enterprise IT exists. I am speaking, of course, of the users--the business units and individuals that demand IT give them increased productivity and competitive advantage.
How is it that end users could affect cloud-based architectures? After all, isn't one of the key points about cloud computing that it hides infrastructure and operations from hosted applications and services? The answer is simple: the need for cloud-operated infrastructure comes from the need for more efficient application delivery and operations, which in turn comes from the accelerated need for new software functionality driven by end users.
The most obvious place where this is the case is software as a service. Cloud applications and services that fall under this category are targeted at end users; they deliver computing and storage functionality that meet specific business needs (such as customer relationship management (CRM) or application development and testing).
Here's the thing about most business applications, though, regardless of how they are delivered: they are almost never used out of the box, as is, without some form of customization. I worked for a short time at enterprise content management vendor, Alfresco, and I don't think there were any "as is" deployments. Every engagement involved customization.
For CRM vendor Salesforce.com, the evidence is the importance and success of its Force.com cloud development platform, as well as its AppExchange marketplace. Both allow users to customize or extend Salesforce.com for their needs, and even build new business applications that leverage customer data.
The result of this is that the cloud itself must be not only elastic, but agile. It must bend at all levels to the will of its users, and the degree and ease of configuring and customizing will quickly become competitive differentiators for vendors in all categories of cloud computing.
What are the best ways to accommodate this agility at scales large enough to meet the needs of cloud computing? Well, today that would be two technologies:
Virtualization--the abstraction of computing, storage, and networking resources from underlying infrastructure
Automation--the elimination of the need for human intervention in common, repeatable tasks and decisions
Now, if you are going to virtualize and automate infrastructure in support of a customization of a SaaS application, do you need an entire virtual server with a full featured operating system? Of course not. In fact, I would argue that you need least-common-denominator systems infrastructure to enable the customization to work. Otherwise you are creating unnecessary storage and computing baggage.
I think in many ways only the cloud-computing model enables this degree of efficiency in running customized business systems for end users. Because the service vendors (be it software, platform, or infrastructure services) are able to optimize for all customers at once, a given advancement in efficiency pays off much more (and much faster) for the service provider than it would for a single customer. Multi-tenancy is what makes the economics work for both the business user and the service provider.
My next and final post in the series will attempt to wrap all of this up, and to present a vision of what the cloud of the future may look like when the evolution and/or demise of the operating system and virtual server is complete. Though I harbor no illusions about it happening all at once, or being a pain-free transition, I, for one, am excited about the new technologies this future may enable. I hope you are, too.
Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 3
In the second part of this series, I took a look at how cloud computing and virtualization will drive homogenization of data center infrastructure over time, and how that is a contributing factor to the adoption of "just enough" systems software. That, in turn, will signal the beginning of the end for the traditional operating system, and in turn, the virtual server.
However, this change is not simply being driven by infrastructure. There is a much more powerful force at work here as well--a force that is emboldened by the software-centric aspects of the cloud computing model. That force is the software developer.
Let me explain. Almost 15 years ago, I went to work for a start-up that was trying to change the way distributed software applications were developed forever. The company was Forte Software, since acquired by Sun (itself soon to be acquired by Oracle), and its CTO, Paul Butterworth, and his team were true visionaries when it came to service-oriented software development (pre-"SOA"), event-driven systems, and business process automation.
What I remember most about Forte's flagship product, a fourth-generation language programming environment and distributed systems platform, was the developer experience:
Write and test your application on a single machine, naming specific instances of objects that would act as services for the rest of the application.
Once the application executed satisfactorily on one system, use a GUI to drag the named instances to a map of the servers on your network, and push a single button to push the bits, execute the various services, and test the application.
Once the application tested satisfactorily, create a permanent partitioning map of the application, and push a single button to distribute the code, generate and compile C++ from the 4GL if needed, and run the application.
This experience was amazingly productive. The only thing it could have used was automation of the partitioning step (with runtime determination of scale, etc.), and the ability to get capacity for the application dynamically from a shared pool. (The latter was technically possible if you used a single Forte environment to run all of the applications that would share the pool, but there still would be no automation of operations.)
I have spent the last 10 years trying to re-create that experience. I also believe most distributed systems developers (Web or otherwise) are looking for the same. This is why I am so passionate about cloud computing, and why I think developers--or, perhaps more to the point, solutions architects--will gain significant decision making power over future IT operations.
I look at it this way: if an end user is looking for an IT service, such as customer relationship management, a custom Web application, or even a lot of servers and storage for an open-source data processing framework, there is almost always something that takes the knowledge and skills of someone who can create, compose, integrate, or configure software systems to meet those needs.
Furthermore, there remains a lot of reliance by nontechnical professionals on their technical counterparts to determine how computing can solve a particular problem. For the most part, in most corporate and public sector settings, the in-house IT department has traditionally been the only choice for any large-scale computing need.
Until recently, if a business unit hired a technologist to look for alternatives to internal IT, the costs of any other "IT-as-a-service" offering (outsourcing, service bureaus, etc.) was extremely expensive and would immediately have to be rationalized against internal IT--usually to the detriment of the alternative. On top of that, all of those alternatives required long-term commitments, so "trying things out" wasn't really an option.
The economics of the cloud change things dramatically. Now the cost of those services are cheap, can be born for very short periods of time, and can all be put on a credit card and expensed. A business unit can go a long way to proving the economic advantages of a cloud-based alternative to internal IT before their budget is significantly impacted.
Developers are increasingly choosing alternative operations models to internal IT, and will continue to do so while the opportunity is there. Internal IT ultimately has to choose between competing with public clouds, providing services that embrace them, or both.
(There are often reasons why internal IT can and should provide alternatives to public cloud computing services. See just about the entire debate over the validity of private clouds.)
So, how does the cloud accommodate and attract software developers? I believe the key will be the development experience itself; key elements like productivity, flexibility, types and strength of services, and so on will be critical to cloud providers.
We need more development tools that are cloud focused (or cloud extensions to the ones we have). We need more of an ecosystem around Ruby on Rails and Java, currently the two most successful open development languages in the cloud, or innovative new approaches to cloud development. We need to tighten up the development and testing experience of PaaS options like Google App Engine, making things "flow" as seamlessly as possible.
We need more IaaS providers to think like Amazon Web Services. We always hold up AWS as the shining light of Infrastructure as a Service, but the truth is that they are actually a cloud platform that happens to have compute and storage services in their catalog. How much more powerful is AWS with other developer-focused services, such as DevPay, Simple Queue Service, and Elastic Map Reduce? This attracts developers, which in turn attracts CPU/hrs and GB/hrs.
How does all of this affect the virtual server and operating system, the topic of this series? Well, if the application developer is getting more services directly from the development platform, what is the need for a bevy of advanced services in the operating system? And if that platform is capable of hiding the infrastructure used to distribute application components--or even hide the fact that the application is distributed altogether--then why use something that represents a piece of infrastructure to package the bits?
Next in the series, I want to consider the role of the business users themselves in rethinking enterprise architectures. In the meantime, you can check out part 1 of this series about how cloud computing will change the way we deliver distributed applications and services; and part 2 about how server virtualization is evolving.
However, this change is not simply being driven by infrastructure. There is a much more powerful force at work here as well--a force that is emboldened by the software-centric aspects of the cloud computing model. That force is the software developer.
Let me explain. Almost 15 years ago, I went to work for a start-up that was trying to change the way distributed software applications were developed forever. The company was Forte Software, since acquired by Sun (itself soon to be acquired by Oracle), and its CTO, Paul Butterworth, and his team were true visionaries when it came to service-oriented software development (pre-"SOA"), event-driven systems, and business process automation.
What I remember most about Forte's flagship product, a fourth-generation language programming environment and distributed systems platform, was the developer experience:
Write and test your application on a single machine, naming specific instances of objects that would act as services for the rest of the application.
Once the application executed satisfactorily on one system, use a GUI to drag the named instances to a map of the servers on your network, and push a single button to push the bits, execute the various services, and test the application.
Once the application tested satisfactorily, create a permanent partitioning map of the application, and push a single button to distribute the code, generate and compile C++ from the 4GL if needed, and run the application.
This experience was amazingly productive. The only thing it could have used was automation of the partitioning step (with runtime determination of scale, etc.), and the ability to get capacity for the application dynamically from a shared pool. (The latter was technically possible if you used a single Forte environment to run all of the applications that would share the pool, but there still would be no automation of operations.)
I have spent the last 10 years trying to re-create that experience. I also believe most distributed systems developers (Web or otherwise) are looking for the same. This is why I am so passionate about cloud computing, and why I think developers--or, perhaps more to the point, solutions architects--will gain significant decision making power over future IT operations.
I look at it this way: if an end user is looking for an IT service, such as customer relationship management, a custom Web application, or even a lot of servers and storage for an open-source data processing framework, there is almost always something that takes the knowledge and skills of someone who can create, compose, integrate, or configure software systems to meet those needs.
Furthermore, there remains a lot of reliance by nontechnical professionals on their technical counterparts to determine how computing can solve a particular problem. For the most part, in most corporate and public sector settings, the in-house IT department has traditionally been the only choice for any large-scale computing need.
Until recently, if a business unit hired a technologist to look for alternatives to internal IT, the costs of any other "IT-as-a-service" offering (outsourcing, service bureaus, etc.) was extremely expensive and would immediately have to be rationalized against internal IT--usually to the detriment of the alternative. On top of that, all of those alternatives required long-term commitments, so "trying things out" wasn't really an option.
The economics of the cloud change things dramatically. Now the cost of those services are cheap, can be born for very short periods of time, and can all be put on a credit card and expensed. A business unit can go a long way to proving the economic advantages of a cloud-based alternative to internal IT before their budget is significantly impacted.
Developers are increasingly choosing alternative operations models to internal IT, and will continue to do so while the opportunity is there. Internal IT ultimately has to choose between competing with public clouds, providing services that embrace them, or both.
(There are often reasons why internal IT can and should provide alternatives to public cloud computing services. See just about the entire debate over the validity of private clouds.)
So, how does the cloud accommodate and attract software developers? I believe the key will be the development experience itself; key elements like productivity, flexibility, types and strength of services, and so on will be critical to cloud providers.
We need more development tools that are cloud focused (or cloud extensions to the ones we have). We need more of an ecosystem around Ruby on Rails and Java, currently the two most successful open development languages in the cloud, or innovative new approaches to cloud development. We need to tighten up the development and testing experience of PaaS options like Google App Engine, making things "flow" as seamlessly as possible.
We need more IaaS providers to think like Amazon Web Services. We always hold up AWS as the shining light of Infrastructure as a Service, but the truth is that they are actually a cloud platform that happens to have compute and storage services in their catalog. How much more powerful is AWS with other developer-focused services, such as DevPay, Simple Queue Service, and Elastic Map Reduce? This attracts developers, which in turn attracts CPU/hrs and GB/hrs.
How does all of this affect the virtual server and operating system, the topic of this series? Well, if the application developer is getting more services directly from the development platform, what is the need for a bevy of advanced services in the operating system? And if that platform is capable of hiding the infrastructure used to distribute application components--or even hide the fact that the application is distributed altogether--then why use something that represents a piece of infrastructure to package the bits?
Next in the series, I want to consider the role of the business users themselves in rethinking enterprise architectures. In the meantime, you can check out part 1 of this series about how cloud computing will change the way we deliver distributed applications and services; and part 2 about how server virtualization is evolving.
Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 2
n the opening post of this series, I joined Chris Hoff and others in arguing that cloud computing will change the way we package server software, with an emphasis in lean "just enough" systems software. This means that the big, all-purpose operating system of the past will either change dramatically or disappear altogether, as the need for a "handle all comers" systems infrastructure is redistributed both up and down the execution stack.
The reduced need for specialized software packaged with bloated operating systems in turn means the virtual server is a temporary measure; a stopgap until software "containers" adjust to the needs of the cloud-computing model. In this post, I want to highlight a second reason why server virtualization (and storage and network virtualization) will give way to a new form of resource virtualization.
I'll start by pointing out one of the unexpected (for me at least) effects of cloud computing on data center design. Truth be told, this is actually an effect of mass virtualization, but as cloud computing is an operations model typically applied to virtualization, the observation sticks for the cloud.
Today's data centers have been built piecemeal, very often one application at a time. Without virtualization, each application team would typically identify what servers, storage and networking were needed to support the application architecture, and the operations team would acquire and install that infrastructure.
Specific choices of systems used (e.g. the brand of server, or the available disk sizes) might be dictated by internal IT "standards," but in general the systems that ended up in the data center were far from uniform. When I was at utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt, I can't remember a single customer that didn't need their automation to handle a heterogeneous environment.
But virtualization changes that significantly, for two reasons:
The hypervisor and virtual machine present a uniform application programming interface and hardware abstraction layer for every application, yet can adjust to the specific CPU, memory, storage, and network needs of each application.
Typical virtualized data centers are inherently multitenant, meaning that multiple stakeholders share the same physical systems, divided from one another by VMs, hypervisors, and their related management software.
So, the success of applications running in a virtualized environment is not dependent of the specialization of the underlying hardware. That is a critical change to the way IT operates.
In fact, in the virtualized world, the drive is the opposite; to create an infrastructure that drives toward homogeneity. Ideally, rack the boxes, wire them up once, and sit back as automation and virtualization tools give the illusion that each application is getting exactly the hardware and networking that it needs.
Now, if the physical architecture no longer needs to be customized for each application, the question quickly becomes what is the role of the virtual server in delivering the application's needs. Today, because applications are written against operating systems as their deployment frameworks, so to speak, and the operating systems are tuned to distribute hardware resources to applications, virtual machines are required.
But imagine if applications could instead be built against more specialized containers that handled both "glue" functions and resource management for that specialization--e.g., a Web app "bundle" that could deal with both network I/O and storage I/O (among other things) directly on behalf of the applications it hosts. (Google App Engine, anyone?)
A homogeneous physical architecture simplifies the task of delivering these distributed computing environments greatly, as there is a consistency of behavior from both a management and execution perspective. However, as it turns out, a homogeneous virtual container environment has the same effect.
So, if the VM isn't hiding diversity at the hardware layer, or diversity at the software layer (which is hidden by the "middleware") what is its purpose? Well, there is still a need for a virtual container of some sort, to allow for a consistent interface between multiple types of cloud middleware and the hardware. But it doesn't need to look like a full-fledged server at all.
Thus, the VM is a stopgap. Virtual containers will evolve to look less and less like hardware abstractions, and more and more like service delivery abstractions.
In my next post, I want to look at things from the software layers down, and get into more detail about why applications will be created differently for the cloud than they were for "servers." Stay tuned.
The reduced need for specialized software packaged with bloated operating systems in turn means the virtual server is a temporary measure; a stopgap until software "containers" adjust to the needs of the cloud-computing model. In this post, I want to highlight a second reason why server virtualization (and storage and network virtualization) will give way to a new form of resource virtualization.
I'll start by pointing out one of the unexpected (for me at least) effects of cloud computing on data center design. Truth be told, this is actually an effect of mass virtualization, but as cloud computing is an operations model typically applied to virtualization, the observation sticks for the cloud.
Today's data centers have been built piecemeal, very often one application at a time. Without virtualization, each application team would typically identify what servers, storage and networking were needed to support the application architecture, and the operations team would acquire and install that infrastructure.
Specific choices of systems used (e.g. the brand of server, or the available disk sizes) might be dictated by internal IT "standards," but in general the systems that ended up in the data center were far from uniform. When I was at utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt, I can't remember a single customer that didn't need their automation to handle a heterogeneous environment.
But virtualization changes that significantly, for two reasons:
The hypervisor and virtual machine present a uniform application programming interface and hardware abstraction layer for every application, yet can adjust to the specific CPU, memory, storage, and network needs of each application.
Typical virtualized data centers are inherently multitenant, meaning that multiple stakeholders share the same physical systems, divided from one another by VMs, hypervisors, and their related management software.
So, the success of applications running in a virtualized environment is not dependent of the specialization of the underlying hardware. That is a critical change to the way IT operates.
In fact, in the virtualized world, the drive is the opposite; to create an infrastructure that drives toward homogeneity. Ideally, rack the boxes, wire them up once, and sit back as automation and virtualization tools give the illusion that each application is getting exactly the hardware and networking that it needs.
Now, if the physical architecture no longer needs to be customized for each application, the question quickly becomes what is the role of the virtual server in delivering the application's needs. Today, because applications are written against operating systems as their deployment frameworks, so to speak, and the operating systems are tuned to distribute hardware resources to applications, virtual machines are required.
But imagine if applications could instead be built against more specialized containers that handled both "glue" functions and resource management for that specialization--e.g., a Web app "bundle" that could deal with both network I/O and storage I/O (among other things) directly on behalf of the applications it hosts. (Google App Engine, anyone?)
A homogeneous physical architecture simplifies the task of delivering these distributed computing environments greatly, as there is a consistency of behavior from both a management and execution perspective. However, as it turns out, a homogeneous virtual container environment has the same effect.
So, if the VM isn't hiding diversity at the hardware layer, or diversity at the software layer (which is hidden by the "middleware") what is its purpose? Well, there is still a need for a virtual container of some sort, to allow for a consistent interface between multiple types of cloud middleware and the hardware. But it doesn't need to look like a full-fledged server at all.
Thus, the VM is a stopgap. Virtual containers will evolve to look less and less like hardware abstractions, and more and more like service delivery abstractions.
In my next post, I want to look at things from the software layers down, and get into more detail about why applications will be created differently for the cloud than they were for "servers." Stay tuned.
Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 1
Chris Hoff, my friend and colleague at Cisco Systems, has reached enlightenment regarding the role of the operating system and, subsequently, the need for the virtual machine in a cloud-centric world.
His post last week reflects a realization attained by those who consider the big picture of cloud computing long enough.
He summarizes his thoughts nicely at the opening of the post:
Virtual machines (VMs) represent the symptoms of a set of legacy problems packaged up to provide a placebo effect as an answer that in some cases we have, until lately, appeared disinclined and not technologically empowered to solve.
If I had a wish, it would be that VM's end up being the short-term gap-filler they deserve to be and ultimately become a legacy technology so we can solve some of our real architectural issues the way they ought to be solved.
Hoff goes on to note that the real problem isn't the VM, but the modern operating system:
The approach we've taken today is that the VMM/Hypervisor abstracts the hardware from the OS. The applications are still stuck on top of operating systems that don't provide much in the way of any benefit given the emergence of development frameworks/languages such as J2EE, PHP, Ruby, .NET, etc. that were built around the notions of decoupled, distributed and mashable application "fabrics."
My own observation here is that our current spate of operating systems were designed when competitors were pushing to use the OS as a differentiator--a way of distinguishing one company's product experience from another. OSes started out being targeted at software, providing a way for applications to use a generalized API to acquire and consume the resources they needed.
At the time, computers had one CPU and the logical thing to do was to design a single OS that could run multiple applications, preferably at once. This created the need for additional functionality to both manage resources and manage the applications themselves.
Furthermore, the operating system increasingly targeted not the needs of software, but the needs of people; more specifically, the needs of computing buyers. Take a look at OS X, or Windows, or even "enterprise" Linux distributions today. The number of features and packages that are included to entice software developers, system administrators, or even consumers to consume the product is overwhelming.
However, any given application doesn't need all those bells and whistles, and most OSes are unfortunately not designed to adjust their footprint to the needs of a specific application.
So, the problem isn't that OS capabilities are not needed, just that they are ridiculously packaged, and could in fact be wrapped into software frameworks that hide any division between the application and the systems it runs on.
By the way, that this is exactly why EMC purchased Fastscale last month, as noted by Chuck Hollis, EMC's CTO of global marketing, on the day the acquisition was announced. Simon Crosby, CTO of the data center and cloud division at Citrix, also notes that this change is coming but sees the OS playing a more important transitional role.
This is a critical concept for application developers wondering how cloud computing will affect software architectures. It is also a critical concept for why IT operations professionals need to understand that their roles and responsibilities are changing.
Because of this, I'll be following up with a few posts this week that will expand on this concept and give you much more of a sense of why the operating system, along with most server, network, and storage virtualization is a stop-gap measure as we move to a cloud experience centered on the application user and the developer.
Next on the list is an explanation of why cloud computing drives infrastructure toward homogeneity (at least within a data center) and why that is the bane of server virtualization.
His post last week reflects a realization attained by those who consider the big picture of cloud computing long enough.
He summarizes his thoughts nicely at the opening of the post:
Virtual machines (VMs) represent the symptoms of a set of legacy problems packaged up to provide a placebo effect as an answer that in some cases we have, until lately, appeared disinclined and not technologically empowered to solve.
If I had a wish, it would be that VM's end up being the short-term gap-filler they deserve to be and ultimately become a legacy technology so we can solve some of our real architectural issues the way they ought to be solved.
Hoff goes on to note that the real problem isn't the VM, but the modern operating system:
The approach we've taken today is that the VMM/Hypervisor abstracts the hardware from the OS. The applications are still stuck on top of operating systems that don't provide much in the way of any benefit given the emergence of development frameworks/languages such as J2EE, PHP, Ruby, .NET, etc. that were built around the notions of decoupled, distributed and mashable application "fabrics."
My own observation here is that our current spate of operating systems were designed when competitors were pushing to use the OS as a differentiator--a way of distinguishing one company's product experience from another. OSes started out being targeted at software, providing a way for applications to use a generalized API to acquire and consume the resources they needed.
At the time, computers had one CPU and the logical thing to do was to design a single OS that could run multiple applications, preferably at once. This created the need for additional functionality to both manage resources and manage the applications themselves.
Furthermore, the operating system increasingly targeted not the needs of software, but the needs of people; more specifically, the needs of computing buyers. Take a look at OS X, or Windows, or even "enterprise" Linux distributions today. The number of features and packages that are included to entice software developers, system administrators, or even consumers to consume the product is overwhelming.
However, any given application doesn't need all those bells and whistles, and most OSes are unfortunately not designed to adjust their footprint to the needs of a specific application.
So, the problem isn't that OS capabilities are not needed, just that they are ridiculously packaged, and could in fact be wrapped into software frameworks that hide any division between the application and the systems it runs on.
By the way, that this is exactly why EMC purchased Fastscale last month, as noted by Chuck Hollis, EMC's CTO of global marketing, on the day the acquisition was announced. Simon Crosby, CTO of the data center and cloud division at Citrix, also notes that this change is coming but sees the OS playing a more important transitional role.
This is a critical concept for application developers wondering how cloud computing will affect software architectures. It is also a critical concept for why IT operations professionals need to understand that their roles and responsibilities are changing.
Because of this, I'll be following up with a few posts this week that will expand on this concept and give you much more of a sense of why the operating system, along with most server, network, and storage virtualization is a stop-gap measure as we move to a cloud experience centered on the application user and the developer.
Next on the list is an explanation of why cloud computing drives infrastructure toward homogeneity (at least within a data center) and why that is the bane of server virtualization.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
레드햇, 이기종 서버와 클라우드 환경을 위한 가상화 플랫폼 구축
오픈 소스 분야의 세계적 선두주자 레드햇(www.redhat.com)은 레드햇 엔터프라이즈 가상화 포트폴리오의 신제품인 ‘레드햇 엔터프라이즈 가상화(Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, 이하 RHEV)’를 출시했다고 밝혔다. RHEV는 독립적 하이퍼바이저와 강력한 가상화 관리를 결합한 포괄적인 솔루션을 제공함과 더불어 가상화 기술을 확산시키기 위해 고안되었다.
2009년 2월, 레드햇은 자사의 레드햇 엔터프라이즈 리눅스 운영 시스템 플랫폼을 구현하고 검증된 보안성과 성능, 확장성 및 저비용의 오픈 소스 가상화 기술을 제공하는 RHEV 포트폴리오 출시 계획을 발표했다. RHEV는 2009년 6월 전세계적으로 베타 버전을 선보였다. 콤비바, 호스트 유럽, NTT 커뮤니케이션즈, 퀄컴, 스위스컴과 같은 대기업 베타 고객과 폭넓은 제휴를 통해 이기종 가상화 및 클라우드 환경을 보급하고 운영하는 데 있어서의 기업의 요구사항을 충족시키는, 보다 강화된 제품 성능을 이끌어 냈다.
콤비바 CAG, DPM, ISS 및 IT 담당 부사장인 아마렌드라 쿠마 싱은 “RHEV 베타 프로그램의 참가자로서 레드햇 제품의 확장된 성능, 보안 그리고 확장성을 확인했다. 레드햇과의 지속적인 기술 제휴를 기대하고 있으며, RHEV가 지향하는 새로운 가상화 업무로드를 우리의 시스템에 보급할 계획이다”라고 밝혔다.
호스트 유럽의 패트릭 푸버뮬러 전무는 “호스트 유럽은RHEV 베타 프로그램에 적극적으로 참가함으로써, 자사의 수 천 개의 가상화 시스템이 확장된 성능 및 확장성에 있어서 큰 혜택을 보았다”고 말했다. 또한 그는 “업계 선도적인 가상화 솔루션 제품들을 비교한 결과, 우리는 자사의 클라우드 서버를 위한 기반으로서 RHEV를 사용하기로 했다. 이는 레드햇의 차세대 KVM 가상화 기술과 레드햇의 새로운 서버 가상화 관리 툴의 강력한 조합을 이끌낼 것이다. 자사의 클라우드 및 가상화 보급에 대한 공동 작업을 통해 호스트 유럽은 레드햇과의 장기적 기술 제휴를 지속했으면 한다”고 덧붙였다.
NTT 커뮤니케이션즈의 IP 기술부서 및 비즈니스 네트워크 서비스 담당 부장인 마사토 미나미사와는 “RHEV 베타 프로그램 참가를 통해 레드햇의 가상화 솔루션의 뛰어난 신속성, 확장성 및 성능을 경험했다.”라고 밝혔다. “우리는 RHEV의 핵심인 KVM의 특별한 기술적 강점을 알고 있고, 레드햇과 함께 가상화 및 클라우드에 대한 지속적인 제휴를 원한다”고 말했다.
퀄컴의 IT 설계 담당 데이브 코스타코스는 “퀄컴이 5.0버전을 실행한 이후, 레드햇 엔터프라이즈 리눅스를 통해 리눅스 가상화에 있어서 비용 절감 및 효용성을 갖게 됐다. RHEV 운영자와 함께, 퀄컴은 저렴한 비용의 오픈 소스 가상화와 더불어, 기업 수준의 가상화 관리 성능들을 이끌어낼 수 있게 됐다”고 밝혔다.
고급 가상화 사용자인 스위스컴IT 서비스는 레드햇의 통합된 가상프로그램을 포함하여, 시장에서의 가상화의 다양성을 리버리지했다. RHEV의 도입과 함께, 스위스컴 IT 서비스는 컴퓨터가상화의 장애와 문제를 해결할수 있는 확장된 레드햇의 가상화 솔루션을 얻었다.
진보된 가상화 유저로서, 스위스컴 IT 서비스는 통합된 가상화와 더불어 레드햇 엔터프라이즈 리눅스를 포함, 시장의 다양한 가상화 제품에 영향을 주고 있다. RHEV의 도입과 함께, 스위스컴 IT 서비스는 기업의 가상화 장애 및 위협 요소를 해결할 수 있는 확장된 레드햇 가상화 솔루션을 얻을 수 있게 됐다.
스위스컴 IT 서비스의 변환, 설계 및 프로젝트 수석 책임자인 하인즈 토벤은 “RHEL 어드밴스드 플랫폼을 오랜 기간 사용해 온 경험과 신뢰를 바탕으로, RHEV 베타 프로그램에 적극적으로 참여했다. RHEV를 통해 성취한 높은 수준의 성능 및 보안, 확장성과 더불어, 레드햇의 가상화 기술은 자사의 IT 인프라와 뛰어난 금전적 가치에 전략적으로 추가됐다.”고 밝혔다.
2009년 9월, 레드햇은 차세대 KVM 가상화 기술을 제공하는 RHEL 5.4버전과 함께 RHEV의 근간을 발표했다.
레드햇은 RHEV의 가용성과 함께 다음 단계의 포트폴리오를 발표했고, 그 내용은 다음과 같다:
- RHEV 하이퍼바이저:
독립적이면서 경량의, 고성능 하이퍼바이저는 리눅스 및 마이크로소프트 윈도우 가상 서버와 데스크탑을 호스팅하기 위해 고안됐다. 이 제품은 클라우드 보급과 여타의 역동적인 IT 환경을 위해 견고한 가상화 기반의 환경을 제공한다. KVM기술을 사용함으로써, 하이퍼바이저는 보다 효율적인 게스트 통합 및 라이브 마이그레이션과 같은 엔터프라이즈 특징을 가능케 하는 메모리 공유 기술과 함께, 고성능 및 보안성을 제공하고 있다.
- RHEV 서버 운영자:
가상화된 리눅스 및 마이크로소프트 윈도우 서버를 배열, 프로비져닝, 관리 및 운영하기 위한 플랫폼으로써 대규모 가상화 보급을 관리하는 데 필요한 비용, 절차 및 시간을 줄이기 원하는 고객들을 위해 고안됐다. 훌륭한 관리 성능과 강력한 서치 및 분류 기능과 함께 본 제품은 고객들이 가상화된 인프라를 효율적으로 제어할 수 있도록 한다.
레드햇 제품 및 기술 담당 부사장인 폴 코미어는 “RHEV는 RHEL의 강력한 기능성, 하드웨어 지원 및 인증을 물려받았기 때문에 여타의 가상화 솔루션과 확연히 다르다. RHEV는 ISV, IHV 및 고객들이 인증을 유지하면서 어플리케이션 및 하드웨어 플랫폼을 베어메탈 컴퓨팅에서 가상화 컴퓨팅으로 매끄럽게 옮겨갈 수 있도록 한다. RHEV의 관리적인 요소는 고객들로 하여금 가상화를 사용할 수 있게 할 것이다”라고 말했다.
시스코의 마케팅 및 서버접근 가상화 비즈니스 그룹 부사장인 소니 지안다니는 “레드햇의 가상화에 대한 접근성은 시장 내에서 시스코 통합 컴퓨팅 시스템에 레드햇을 보급하고 있는 양사의 상호 고객들에 의해 확인되고 있다. 우리는 전세계 기업들에 대한 공개 표준에 기반하여 고성능의, 그리고 신뢰할만한 기술을 제공하기 위한 목적으로 통합 컴퓨팅 시스템을 위한 RHEV 플랫폼을 최적화하기 위해 레드햇과 긴밀하게 일하고 있다.”고 밝혔다.
HP의 인프라 소프트웨어 및 블레이즈 부사장인 스캇 퍼랜드는 “총체적인 이기종 데이터센터 관리 능력과 더불어 집약된 인프라를 보급함으로써, 기업들은 유연성을 증가시키고 복잡한 절차를 감소시키는 방법을 찾고 있다”라고 말했다.” 또한 그는 “HP는 최고급 하드웨어 및 소프트웨어 인프라, 그리고 RHEV를 위한 관리 솔루션을 제공하기 위한 노력의 일환으로 레드햇과 긴밀히 공조하고 있다”라고 덧붙였다.
IBM 오픈 시스템 개발 부사장인 다니엘 프레예는 “IBM은 시장에 오픈 소스 가상화 기술을 제공하기 위해 오픈 소스 커뮤니티 내에서 레드햇과 공조해 왔다. 우리는 이 기술이 시장에서 큰 영향력을 행사할 것이라 믿어 의심치 않으며, KVM 기반의 RHEV 친환경 시스템을 구축하는 데 있어서 레드햇의 리더십은 시장의 수요를 충족하는 데 있어서 중요한 역할을 할 것이라고 생각한다”라고 밝혔다.
IDC 엔터프라이즈 가상화 소프트웨어 리서치 책임자인 게리 첸은 “고객들이 기본적인 통합 수준에서 진보된 사용 사례 및 가상 서버 스프롤의 문제로 옮겨감으로써, 관리는 가상화 시장에서 중요한 핵심 영역이 돼가고 있다. 이런 배경에 반하여, KVM은 오픈 소스와 리눅스 가상화 시장에서 중요한 발전이다. 레드햇은 기업들이 RHEV를 바로 도입할 수 있는 기술을 만드는데 적극적으로 투자하고 있다. 또한 관리적인 요소는 적절한 시기에 도달하고 있다”고 전했다.
데스크탑을 위한 RHEV는 개인 베타 버전만 가능하며 2010년 초에 상용화될 예정이다.
RHEV포트폴리오에 대해 더 알기를 원하면www.kr.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/server를 참조하면 된다.
2009년 2월, 레드햇은 자사의 레드햇 엔터프라이즈 리눅스 운영 시스템 플랫폼을 구현하고 검증된 보안성과 성능, 확장성 및 저비용의 오픈 소스 가상화 기술을 제공하는 RHEV 포트폴리오 출시 계획을 발표했다. RHEV는 2009년 6월 전세계적으로 베타 버전을 선보였다. 콤비바, 호스트 유럽, NTT 커뮤니케이션즈, 퀄컴, 스위스컴과 같은 대기업 베타 고객과 폭넓은 제휴를 통해 이기종 가상화 및 클라우드 환경을 보급하고 운영하는 데 있어서의 기업의 요구사항을 충족시키는, 보다 강화된 제품 성능을 이끌어 냈다.
콤비바 CAG, DPM, ISS 및 IT 담당 부사장인 아마렌드라 쿠마 싱은 “RHEV 베타 프로그램의 참가자로서 레드햇 제품의 확장된 성능, 보안 그리고 확장성을 확인했다. 레드햇과의 지속적인 기술 제휴를 기대하고 있으며, RHEV가 지향하는 새로운 가상화 업무로드를 우리의 시스템에 보급할 계획이다”라고 밝혔다.
호스트 유럽의 패트릭 푸버뮬러 전무는 “호스트 유럽은RHEV 베타 프로그램에 적극적으로 참가함으로써, 자사의 수 천 개의 가상화 시스템이 확장된 성능 및 확장성에 있어서 큰 혜택을 보았다”고 말했다. 또한 그는 “업계 선도적인 가상화 솔루션 제품들을 비교한 결과, 우리는 자사의 클라우드 서버를 위한 기반으로서 RHEV를 사용하기로 했다. 이는 레드햇의 차세대 KVM 가상화 기술과 레드햇의 새로운 서버 가상화 관리 툴의 강력한 조합을 이끌낼 것이다. 자사의 클라우드 및 가상화 보급에 대한 공동 작업을 통해 호스트 유럽은 레드햇과의 장기적 기술 제휴를 지속했으면 한다”고 덧붙였다.
NTT 커뮤니케이션즈의 IP 기술부서 및 비즈니스 네트워크 서비스 담당 부장인 마사토 미나미사와는 “RHEV 베타 프로그램 참가를 통해 레드햇의 가상화 솔루션의 뛰어난 신속성, 확장성 및 성능을 경험했다.”라고 밝혔다. “우리는 RHEV의 핵심인 KVM의 특별한 기술적 강점을 알고 있고, 레드햇과 함께 가상화 및 클라우드에 대한 지속적인 제휴를 원한다”고 말했다.
퀄컴의 IT 설계 담당 데이브 코스타코스는 “퀄컴이 5.0버전을 실행한 이후, 레드햇 엔터프라이즈 리눅스를 통해 리눅스 가상화에 있어서 비용 절감 및 효용성을 갖게 됐다. RHEV 운영자와 함께, 퀄컴은 저렴한 비용의 오픈 소스 가상화와 더불어, 기업 수준의 가상화 관리 성능들을 이끌어낼 수 있게 됐다”고 밝혔다.
고급 가상화 사용자인 스위스컴IT 서비스는 레드햇의 통합된 가상프로그램을 포함하여, 시장에서의 가상화의 다양성을 리버리지했다. RHEV의 도입과 함께, 스위스컴 IT 서비스는 컴퓨터가상화의 장애와 문제를 해결할수 있는 확장된 레드햇의 가상화 솔루션을 얻었다.
진보된 가상화 유저로서, 스위스컴 IT 서비스는 통합된 가상화와 더불어 레드햇 엔터프라이즈 리눅스를 포함, 시장의 다양한 가상화 제품에 영향을 주고 있다. RHEV의 도입과 함께, 스위스컴 IT 서비스는 기업의 가상화 장애 및 위협 요소를 해결할 수 있는 확장된 레드햇 가상화 솔루션을 얻을 수 있게 됐다.
스위스컴 IT 서비스의 변환, 설계 및 프로젝트 수석 책임자인 하인즈 토벤은 “RHEL 어드밴스드 플랫폼을 오랜 기간 사용해 온 경험과 신뢰를 바탕으로, RHEV 베타 프로그램에 적극적으로 참여했다. RHEV를 통해 성취한 높은 수준의 성능 및 보안, 확장성과 더불어, 레드햇의 가상화 기술은 자사의 IT 인프라와 뛰어난 금전적 가치에 전략적으로 추가됐다.”고 밝혔다.
2009년 9월, 레드햇은 차세대 KVM 가상화 기술을 제공하는 RHEL 5.4버전과 함께 RHEV의 근간을 발표했다.
레드햇은 RHEV의 가용성과 함께 다음 단계의 포트폴리오를 발표했고, 그 내용은 다음과 같다:
- RHEV 하이퍼바이저:
독립적이면서 경량의, 고성능 하이퍼바이저는 리눅스 및 마이크로소프트 윈도우 가상 서버와 데스크탑을 호스팅하기 위해 고안됐다. 이 제품은 클라우드 보급과 여타의 역동적인 IT 환경을 위해 견고한 가상화 기반의 환경을 제공한다. KVM기술을 사용함으로써, 하이퍼바이저는 보다 효율적인 게스트 통합 및 라이브 마이그레이션과 같은 엔터프라이즈 특징을 가능케 하는 메모리 공유 기술과 함께, 고성능 및 보안성을 제공하고 있다.
- RHEV 서버 운영자:
가상화된 리눅스 및 마이크로소프트 윈도우 서버를 배열, 프로비져닝, 관리 및 운영하기 위한 플랫폼으로써 대규모 가상화 보급을 관리하는 데 필요한 비용, 절차 및 시간을 줄이기 원하는 고객들을 위해 고안됐다. 훌륭한 관리 성능과 강력한 서치 및 분류 기능과 함께 본 제품은 고객들이 가상화된 인프라를 효율적으로 제어할 수 있도록 한다.
레드햇 제품 및 기술 담당 부사장인 폴 코미어는 “RHEV는 RHEL의 강력한 기능성, 하드웨어 지원 및 인증을 물려받았기 때문에 여타의 가상화 솔루션과 확연히 다르다. RHEV는 ISV, IHV 및 고객들이 인증을 유지하면서 어플리케이션 및 하드웨어 플랫폼을 베어메탈 컴퓨팅에서 가상화 컴퓨팅으로 매끄럽게 옮겨갈 수 있도록 한다. RHEV의 관리적인 요소는 고객들로 하여금 가상화를 사용할 수 있게 할 것이다”라고 말했다.
시스코의 마케팅 및 서버접근 가상화 비즈니스 그룹 부사장인 소니 지안다니는 “레드햇의 가상화에 대한 접근성은 시장 내에서 시스코 통합 컴퓨팅 시스템에 레드햇을 보급하고 있는 양사의 상호 고객들에 의해 확인되고 있다. 우리는 전세계 기업들에 대한 공개 표준에 기반하여 고성능의, 그리고 신뢰할만한 기술을 제공하기 위한 목적으로 통합 컴퓨팅 시스템을 위한 RHEV 플랫폼을 최적화하기 위해 레드햇과 긴밀하게 일하고 있다.”고 밝혔다.
HP의 인프라 소프트웨어 및 블레이즈 부사장인 스캇 퍼랜드는 “총체적인 이기종 데이터센터 관리 능력과 더불어 집약된 인프라를 보급함으로써, 기업들은 유연성을 증가시키고 복잡한 절차를 감소시키는 방법을 찾고 있다”라고 말했다.” 또한 그는 “HP는 최고급 하드웨어 및 소프트웨어 인프라, 그리고 RHEV를 위한 관리 솔루션을 제공하기 위한 노력의 일환으로 레드햇과 긴밀히 공조하고 있다”라고 덧붙였다.
IBM 오픈 시스템 개발 부사장인 다니엘 프레예는 “IBM은 시장에 오픈 소스 가상화 기술을 제공하기 위해 오픈 소스 커뮤니티 내에서 레드햇과 공조해 왔다. 우리는 이 기술이 시장에서 큰 영향력을 행사할 것이라 믿어 의심치 않으며, KVM 기반의 RHEV 친환경 시스템을 구축하는 데 있어서 레드햇의 리더십은 시장의 수요를 충족하는 데 있어서 중요한 역할을 할 것이라고 생각한다”라고 밝혔다.
IDC 엔터프라이즈 가상화 소프트웨어 리서치 책임자인 게리 첸은 “고객들이 기본적인 통합 수준에서 진보된 사용 사례 및 가상 서버 스프롤의 문제로 옮겨감으로써, 관리는 가상화 시장에서 중요한 핵심 영역이 돼가고 있다. 이런 배경에 반하여, KVM은 오픈 소스와 리눅스 가상화 시장에서 중요한 발전이다. 레드햇은 기업들이 RHEV를 바로 도입할 수 있는 기술을 만드는데 적극적으로 투자하고 있다. 또한 관리적인 요소는 적절한 시기에 도달하고 있다”고 전했다.
데스크탑을 위한 RHEV는 개인 베타 버전만 가능하며 2010년 초에 상용화될 예정이다.
RHEV포트폴리오에 대해 더 알기를 원하면www.kr.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/server를 참조하면 된다.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Cloud Computing Too Costly in the Long Term?
During their own Sept. 29 Cloud Computing Summit, IDC made what at first glance sounded like a self-defeating statement: clouds, in the long run, are actually a more expensive option than a company running its own datacenter.
That, needless to say, got my attention.
The story came out today from Computerworld UK, which I invite you to read. It gives good coverage of the presentation made at the Summit by Matthew McCormack, Consultant, European Systems Group, IDC. Lots of good quotes. I wanted to see the numbers, though, and while looking to contact McCormack, I found just the information I was looking for.
IDC ran a model that analyzed what the costs would be to run 100 percent of a large company's IT infrastructure entirely within the cloud versus on their own data center. It turns out that according to IDC's estimates, after the first three years of a cloud IT operation, costs would exceed those of an optimally run datacenter, and that includes the added three-year refresh cycles costs of 30 percent for the datacenter (see slide 6). By the end of 10 years, costs for the cloud operation would hit £26M (US$41M), while the datacenter would only rack up £15M (US$24.6M).
Of course, if your datacenter is being run very poorly, cloud computing can save you short- and long-term money (slide 7). Datacenters could reach as much as twice the cost of a cloud over ten years.
Clearly, the reality is somewhere in between, since no company would be perfect in operating their own datacenter, nor would you think it likely that complete idiots would be bungling a datacenter that long without some sort of course correction. It seems, then that ultimately, whether it's three years or five or beyond, cloud computing may not make long-term financial sense. Is that the case?
McCormack seems to think not. For one thing, he predicts in the Computerwold UK story "that cloud service costs will eventually fall, as more competitors enter the fray, and as suppliers act to improve market-take up." This is key to long-term growth of the cloud computing environment.
Right now, cloud computing is a lot of buying a hybrid car here in the US was a few years ago. If you researched a hybrid car, invariablely someone made a cost-benefit analyis and confirmed that the value of the fuel savings would never equal the additional cost of buying a hybrid version of a particular car model versus the standard-engine version. But, lately, things have changed. Gas prices have gone up and stayed up for the most part. Consumers are much more "green"-aware, and want hybrids despite the costs. There are more hybrid models available now than a few years ago. All of these factors are driving up demand and driving down costs as car companies seek to stay competitive.
The same will hold true for cloud computing. Yes, right now, there is a need to carefully weigh out the costs involved in using cloud computing for your company. But in the near future it should become increasingly more common to see the cloud as a better economic option as costs come down. Standards, like those on Linux, are key here, too--McCormack cautioned in his presentation that customers should avoid vendor lock in. This is exactly the sort of lock in that projects like Red Hat's Deltacloud are trying to prevent.
So while the initial read might come across as off-putting, really this was just IDC inducing a bit of common sense into the hype of cloud computing. And common sense is never a bad idea.
That, needless to say, got my attention.
The story came out today from Computerworld UK, which I invite you to read. It gives good coverage of the presentation made at the Summit by Matthew McCormack, Consultant, European Systems Group, IDC. Lots of good quotes. I wanted to see the numbers, though, and while looking to contact McCormack, I found just the information I was looking for.
IDC ran a model that analyzed what the costs would be to run 100 percent of a large company's IT infrastructure entirely within the cloud versus on their own data center. It turns out that according to IDC's estimates, after the first three years of a cloud IT operation, costs would exceed those of an optimally run datacenter, and that includes the added three-year refresh cycles costs of 30 percent for the datacenter (see slide 6). By the end of 10 years, costs for the cloud operation would hit £26M (US$41M), while the datacenter would only rack up £15M (US$24.6M).
Of course, if your datacenter is being run very poorly, cloud computing can save you short- and long-term money (slide 7). Datacenters could reach as much as twice the cost of a cloud over ten years.
Clearly, the reality is somewhere in between, since no company would be perfect in operating their own datacenter, nor would you think it likely that complete idiots would be bungling a datacenter that long without some sort of course correction. It seems, then that ultimately, whether it's three years or five or beyond, cloud computing may not make long-term financial sense. Is that the case?
McCormack seems to think not. For one thing, he predicts in the Computerwold UK story "that cloud service costs will eventually fall, as more competitors enter the fray, and as suppliers act to improve market-take up." This is key to long-term growth of the cloud computing environment.
Right now, cloud computing is a lot of buying a hybrid car here in the US was a few years ago. If you researched a hybrid car, invariablely someone made a cost-benefit analyis and confirmed that the value of the fuel savings would never equal the additional cost of buying a hybrid version of a particular car model versus the standard-engine version. But, lately, things have changed. Gas prices have gone up and stayed up for the most part. Consumers are much more "green"-aware, and want hybrids despite the costs. There are more hybrid models available now than a few years ago. All of these factors are driving up demand and driving down costs as car companies seek to stay competitive.
The same will hold true for cloud computing. Yes, right now, there is a need to carefully weigh out the costs involved in using cloud computing for your company. But in the near future it should become increasingly more common to see the cloud as a better economic option as costs come down. Standards, like those on Linux, are key here, too--McCormack cautioned in his presentation that customers should avoid vendor lock in. This is exactly the sort of lock in that projects like Red Hat's Deltacloud are trying to prevent.
So while the initial read might come across as off-putting, really this was just IDC inducing a bit of common sense into the hype of cloud computing. And common sense is never a bad idea.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Battle of the clouds
최근에는 클라우딩 컴퓨터(Cloud computing)가 대세가 되는 듯합니다. 핫이슈죠. 이러한 새롭고 거대한 아이디어는 과거의 거대한 저장 장치를 활용하지 않고 인터넷을 통해 서비스가 제공되는 방식으로 문서, 이메일, 기타 데이터는 온라인 상에 저장되었다가 어떤 PC를 통해서나 혹은 모바일 서비스를 이용해 이용가능합니다.
거대 소프트웨어 업체들은 소프트웨어 개발자들에게 새로운 방식인 클라우드 기반의 서비스를 준비하기 위해서 서두르고 있습니다. 그들의 최대 적은 구글입니다. 야후나 애플, 전문적인 업체인 세일즈포스, 넷슈트 뿐만 아니라 아마존도 고민하고 있습니다.
클라우딩 컴퓨터는 소비자 뿐만 아니라 기업들에게도 혜택을 줄 것으로 보입니다. 소비자들은 더 쉽고 싸게 소프트웨어를 활용할 수 있게 되고, 기업들도 웹 브라우저에서 모든 것을 작동시키게 되어 복잡성과 유지비용을 줄일 수 있습니다. 즉 규모의 경제가 발생하는 것이죠.
컴퓨터의 역사에 비추어보면, 어느 한 기업이 시장을 지배하였고, 이것을 반독점 당국의 규제대상으로 관심의 대상이었습니다. 커다란 법정 소송으로 이어진 경우도 많았다. 현재는 클라우딩 서비스를 사용하는 사람은 주의깊게 사태를 관망하는 태도를 취하고 있으며, 기업들은 발빠르게 대응하여 긴장감속에 있고, 정부는 이제 관심을 가지고 있는 듯합니다.
클라우딩 컴퓨터와 관련된 이슈들을 간단히 설명하면, (1) 고착현상이 클라우딩 컴퓨터의 발전을 억제할 수 있다는 점. 과거 경쟁기업에 대한 우위를 계속유지하기 위한 기존 지배적 기업은 다른 호환가능한 소크프웨어를 줄이면서 업계의 표준화를 통한 진입장벽 구축에 힘써온 역사적 경험을 우리는 찾아볼 수 있습니다. (2) 개인 프라이버시의 침해 문제. 클라우딩 컴퓨터의 이용자들은 저렴한 가격에 각종 소프트웨어를 이용할 수 있게 되지만, 광고업자들의 주요 타켓이 될 수 있고, 그 결과 자신의 데이터나 프로파일을 제대로 관리해야 하는 어려움이 있습니다. (3) 데이터의 안정성 문제. 각종 자료와 주소, 포토 앨범, 일정 등의 내용이 안전하게 보장될 수 있는가의 문제가 제기되는데, 이 문제는 많은 기업들이 심열을 기울여 노력하는 부분입니다.
클로우딩 컴퓨터로의 이행은 점차적으로 새로운 표준과 완벽한 투명성과 신뢰로 이행하는 것입니다. 만일 충분히 빠른 속도로 이행되지 않으면, 규제당국이 매우 거세게 간섭할 수 있습니다. 그러나 기업과 사용자 유저들에게 이미 클라우딩 컴퓨터의 장점은 단점을 확실하게 능가하고 있습니다. 재미있는 점은 과거의 컴퓨터 산업의 사례와 달리 어느 한 승자가 시대를 지배하는 것이 쉽지 않을 것이고 (과거에 IMB은 메인프레임을, MS는 PC 시대를 풍미) 최적의 구름(클라우딩) 무리가 얻을 것입니다.
from: http://blog.daum.net/ecomania/13394193
거대 소프트웨어 업체들은 소프트웨어 개발자들에게 새로운 방식인 클라우드 기반의 서비스를 준비하기 위해서 서두르고 있습니다. 그들의 최대 적은 구글입니다. 야후나 애플, 전문적인 업체인 세일즈포스, 넷슈트 뿐만 아니라 아마존도 고민하고 있습니다.
클라우딩 컴퓨터는 소비자 뿐만 아니라 기업들에게도 혜택을 줄 것으로 보입니다. 소비자들은 더 쉽고 싸게 소프트웨어를 활용할 수 있게 되고, 기업들도 웹 브라우저에서 모든 것을 작동시키게 되어 복잡성과 유지비용을 줄일 수 있습니다. 즉 규모의 경제가 발생하는 것이죠.
컴퓨터의 역사에 비추어보면, 어느 한 기업이 시장을 지배하였고, 이것을 반독점 당국의 규제대상으로 관심의 대상이었습니다. 커다란 법정 소송으로 이어진 경우도 많았다. 현재는 클라우딩 서비스를 사용하는 사람은 주의깊게 사태를 관망하는 태도를 취하고 있으며, 기업들은 발빠르게 대응하여 긴장감속에 있고, 정부는 이제 관심을 가지고 있는 듯합니다.
클라우딩 컴퓨터와 관련된 이슈들을 간단히 설명하면, (1) 고착현상이 클라우딩 컴퓨터의 발전을 억제할 수 있다는 점. 과거 경쟁기업에 대한 우위를 계속유지하기 위한 기존 지배적 기업은 다른 호환가능한 소크프웨어를 줄이면서 업계의 표준화를 통한 진입장벽 구축에 힘써온 역사적 경험을 우리는 찾아볼 수 있습니다. (2) 개인 프라이버시의 침해 문제. 클라우딩 컴퓨터의 이용자들은 저렴한 가격에 각종 소프트웨어를 이용할 수 있게 되지만, 광고업자들의 주요 타켓이 될 수 있고, 그 결과 자신의 데이터나 프로파일을 제대로 관리해야 하는 어려움이 있습니다. (3) 데이터의 안정성 문제. 각종 자료와 주소, 포토 앨범, 일정 등의 내용이 안전하게 보장될 수 있는가의 문제가 제기되는데, 이 문제는 많은 기업들이 심열을 기울여 노력하는 부분입니다.
클로우딩 컴퓨터로의 이행은 점차적으로 새로운 표준과 완벽한 투명성과 신뢰로 이행하는 것입니다. 만일 충분히 빠른 속도로 이행되지 않으면, 규제당국이 매우 거세게 간섭할 수 있습니다. 그러나 기업과 사용자 유저들에게 이미 클라우딩 컴퓨터의 장점은 단점을 확실하게 능가하고 있습니다. 재미있는 점은 과거의 컴퓨터 산업의 사례와 달리 어느 한 승자가 시대를 지배하는 것이 쉽지 않을 것이고 (과거에 IMB은 메인프레임을, MS는 PC 시대를 풍미) 최적의 구름(클라우딩) 무리가 얻을 것입니다.
from: http://blog.daum.net/ecomania/13394193
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Microsoft's Danger Sidekick data loss casts dark on cloud computing
Microsoft has demonstrated that the dark side of cloud computing has no silver linings. After a major server outage occurred on its watch last weekend, users dependent on the company have just been informed that their personal data and photos "has almost certainly been lost."
While occasional service outages have hit nearly everyone in the business, knocking Google's Gmail offline for hours, plunging RIM's BlackBerrys into the dark, or leaving Apple's MobileMe web apps unreachable to waves of users, Microsoft's high profile outage has impacted users in the worst possible way: the company has unrecoverable lost nearly all of its users' data, and now has no alternative backup plan for recovering any of it a week later.
The outage and data loss affects all Sidekick customers of the Danger group Microsoft purchased in early 2008. Danger maintained a significant online services business for T-Mobile's Sidekick users. All of T-Mobile's Sidekick phone users rely on Danger's online service to supply applications such as contacts, calendars, IM and SMS, media player, and other features of the device, and to store the data associated with those applications.
When Microsoft's Danger servers began to fall offline last Friday October 2, users across the country couldn't even use the services; even after functionality was beginning to be brought back on Tuesday October 6, users still didn't have their data back. This Saturday, after a week of efforts to solve the crisis, T-Mobile finally announced to its Sidekick subscribers:
“Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”
A new report from Engadget says that T-Mobile has suspended sales of its Sidekick models and is warning: "Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power."
Sidekick and the iPhone
Danger's Sidekick platform bears some resemblance to the iPhone; Danger brought the GSM Sidekick to market by partnering exclusively with T-Mobile. The partnership involves custom network services that makes features of the device unusable on other networks, and of course the phones are physically incompatible with the CDMA service operated by Verizon/Sprint. In some ways, Microsoft's purchase of Danger is exactly the fix recommended by some pundits for Apple's iPhone: a third party who could swoop in and break the iPhone's exclusive partnership with AT&T by bringing Verizon into the mix. In Danger's case, the "Pink Project" operated by Microsoft not only failed to achieve this intended goal, but failed in large part because the goal was simply a bad idea.
After all, if exclusivity was inherently a bad thing, it wouldn't be being used to successfully bring competing new models to the crowded smartphone market; Danger's Sidekick, Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry Storm and Palm's Pre all gained their visibility in the market because of concerted marketing by their exclusive mobile partners. All have experienced some launch issues which would have been far worse and more complex to resolve had their hardware makers tried to simultaneously launch them on multiple carriers, as Microsoft planned to do with its Pink "Windows Phone," using components borrowed the Danger acquisition.
However, the Danger Sidekick also has some significant differences from Apple's iPhone business model. First, the iPhone is designed to plug into a computer running iTunes for initial setup, and while not entirely mandatory, it is designed to regularly sync with a desktop system. This process involves backing up all of the device's application data to the users' local computer, and allows the user to restore the device later. Apps running on the iPhone also run as local software and do not require an external service to be available. Most applications are designed to work offline, as a significant chunk of the iPhone platform is made of up of iPod touch users. Apps are only updated and/or removed by the user.
The closest thing to Danger's online services is Apple's MobileMe, which is sold separately as an optional package of services that can sync, update, and push messages, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and other data to the phone, to associated desktop computers and for presentation via the web. After a problematic rollout plagued by slow performance and frequent outages occurred last year, Apple's MobileMe has matured into a reliable service. Even so, an interruption in MobileMe services wouldn't result in users being unable to use apps on their iPhones nor would it risk the loss of data on the device or backed up by the user's copy of iTunes.
The dark side of clouds
More immediate types of cloud services take away users' control in managing their own data. In addition to the Danger services for Sidekick users, Microsoft also independently runs a MyPhone service for its Windows Mobile platform. It provides certain mobile and web publishing features (but not push messaging) comparable to Apple's MobileMe.
However, Microsoft's MyPhone performs its backups of users' phone data directly to the company's servers, and not to the user's local system. That means a Danger-like failure on the server end of MyPhone could easily result in unrecoverable data loss for Windows Mobile users, too.
Users have reason to be wary about keeping all their data on a vendor's cloud service without also maintaining their own local backup. If Apple's MobileMe service loses your data, the company won't do much to help you restore it because it also provides a variety of ways for users to backup and restore their own data locally, directly from apps such as Address Book and iCal, by using a local backup system like Time Machine, and in using iTunes to backup mobile devices at sync. Apple's MobileMe cloud services are run as an accompanying value added service in addition to the maintenance tools users are given to secure their own data.
Other vendors have very different ideas about accountability for data in the cloud. In 2006, a relatively small number of Google's Gmail users experienced a security-related loss of their email and contacts. At the time, Google could only offer to reach out to the people who were affected "to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have." Google's strategy moving forward is highly dependent upon "non-local" cloud computing, with the company's Gmail being joined by its online Docs, Picassa, and Gtalk clients (which store all their data on Google's servers) as well as future plans to deliver Chrome OS as a web-client substitute to the conventional local operating system. That will largely replace the entire idea of local apps under the user's own control with online apps that the vendor can change, update, or drop at any time.
Palm's new WebOS in the Palm Pre similarly banks on the cloud to provide web-based apps that are updated and replaced by the network operator, not by the local user as is the case with the iPhone. Amazon's Kindle also demonstrated the potential for the network to take control of users' data after the company revoked certain books from users' devices, a policy it has since apologized over and paid to settle. Delegating all control to the cloud sounds great until there's a problem that the cloud vendor has no interest or capacity to resolve for the user. It then quickly becomes a frustrating nightmare.
Is Danger in Microsoft?
Some users commenting on the week-long outage and its resulting data loss crisis at Danger were quick to absolve Microsoft of any responsibility in the incident, suggesting that Microsoft only bought the company last year and that it did not originally design the service. While Danger has run its services for years prior to the acquisition and has previously experienced outages, it hasn't lost all of its users' data across the board before. The frustration and dashed hopes voiced by long term Danger partner T-Mobile in its apology to Sidekick users was clearly worded to highlight Microsoft's involvement in the incident.
Microsoft's takeover of Danger almost two years ago should have given the software giant the time to fortify and secure Danger's online operations. Instead, it appears the company actually removed support to cut costs. According to a source familiar with Danger before and after the Microsoft acquisition, T-Mobile's close partnership with the original Danger was leveraged and then betrayed by Microsoft when Steve Ballmer's company decided there would be more money involved in dropping its exclusive deal with T-Mobile to partner with Verizon on the side.
Microsoft's accountability in supporting its acquired Sidekick support obligations with T-Mobile was also shirked. The source stated that "apparently Microsoft has been lying to them [T-Mobile] this whole time about the amount of resources that they've been putting behind Sidekick development and support [at Danger] (in reality, it was cut down to a handful of people in Palo Alto managing some contractors in Romania, Ukraine, etc.). The reason for the deceit wasn't purely to cover up the development of Pink but also because Microsoft could get more money from T-Mobile for their support contract if T-Mobile thought that there were still hundreds of engineers working on the Sidekick platform. As we saw from their recent embarrassment with Sidekick data outages, that has clearly not been the case for some time."
That indicates that Danger's high profile cloud services failure didn't occur in spite of Microsoft's ownership, but rather because of it. This has led observers to question the company's commitment to its other cloud services, not just Windows Mobile MyPhone, but also the Azure Services Platform of cloud computing efforts that the company has had on the drawing board for years. Azure is designed to allow third parties to build applications that are dependent upon Microsoft's data centers.
In covering the Danger debacle at Microsoft, Ina Fried of CNET wrote, "while outages in the cloud computing world are common (one need only look at recent issues with Twitter or Gmail), data losses are another story. And this one stands as one of the more stunning ones in recent memory."
Fried added, "The Danger outage comes just a month before Microsoft is expected to launch its operating system in the cloud--Windows Azure. That announcement is expected at November's Professional Developer Conference. One of the characteristics of Azure is that programs written for it can be run only via Microsoft's data centers and not on a company's own servers. It should be pointed out that the Azure setup is entirely different from what Danger uses: the Sidekick uses an architecture Microsoft inherited rather than built (Microsoft bought Danger last year). Still, the failure would seem to be enough to give any CIO pause."
While occasional service outages have hit nearly everyone in the business, knocking Google's Gmail offline for hours, plunging RIM's BlackBerrys into the dark, or leaving Apple's MobileMe web apps unreachable to waves of users, Microsoft's high profile outage has impacted users in the worst possible way: the company has unrecoverable lost nearly all of its users' data, and now has no alternative backup plan for recovering any of it a week later.
The outage and data loss affects all Sidekick customers of the Danger group Microsoft purchased in early 2008. Danger maintained a significant online services business for T-Mobile's Sidekick users. All of T-Mobile's Sidekick phone users rely on Danger's online service to supply applications such as contacts, calendars, IM and SMS, media player, and other features of the device, and to store the data associated with those applications.
When Microsoft's Danger servers began to fall offline last Friday October 2, users across the country couldn't even use the services; even after functionality was beginning to be brought back on Tuesday October 6, users still didn't have their data back. This Saturday, after a week of efforts to solve the crisis, T-Mobile finally announced to its Sidekick subscribers:
“Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”
A new report from Engadget says that T-Mobile has suspended sales of its Sidekick models and is warning: "Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power."
Sidekick and the iPhone
Danger's Sidekick platform bears some resemblance to the iPhone; Danger brought the GSM Sidekick to market by partnering exclusively with T-Mobile. The partnership involves custom network services that makes features of the device unusable on other networks, and of course the phones are physically incompatible with the CDMA service operated by Verizon/Sprint. In some ways, Microsoft's purchase of Danger is exactly the fix recommended by some pundits for Apple's iPhone: a third party who could swoop in and break the iPhone's exclusive partnership with AT&T by bringing Verizon into the mix. In Danger's case, the "Pink Project" operated by Microsoft not only failed to achieve this intended goal, but failed in large part because the goal was simply a bad idea.
After all, if exclusivity was inherently a bad thing, it wouldn't be being used to successfully bring competing new models to the crowded smartphone market; Danger's Sidekick, Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry Storm and Palm's Pre all gained their visibility in the market because of concerted marketing by their exclusive mobile partners. All have experienced some launch issues which would have been far worse and more complex to resolve had their hardware makers tried to simultaneously launch them on multiple carriers, as Microsoft planned to do with its Pink "Windows Phone," using components borrowed the Danger acquisition.
However, the Danger Sidekick also has some significant differences from Apple's iPhone business model. First, the iPhone is designed to plug into a computer running iTunes for initial setup, and while not entirely mandatory, it is designed to regularly sync with a desktop system. This process involves backing up all of the device's application data to the users' local computer, and allows the user to restore the device later. Apps running on the iPhone also run as local software and do not require an external service to be available. Most applications are designed to work offline, as a significant chunk of the iPhone platform is made of up of iPod touch users. Apps are only updated and/or removed by the user.
The closest thing to Danger's online services is Apple's MobileMe, which is sold separately as an optional package of services that can sync, update, and push messages, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and other data to the phone, to associated desktop computers and for presentation via the web. After a problematic rollout plagued by slow performance and frequent outages occurred last year, Apple's MobileMe has matured into a reliable service. Even so, an interruption in MobileMe services wouldn't result in users being unable to use apps on their iPhones nor would it risk the loss of data on the device or backed up by the user's copy of iTunes.
The dark side of clouds
More immediate types of cloud services take away users' control in managing their own data. In addition to the Danger services for Sidekick users, Microsoft also independently runs a MyPhone service for its Windows Mobile platform. It provides certain mobile and web publishing features (but not push messaging) comparable to Apple's MobileMe.
However, Microsoft's MyPhone performs its backups of users' phone data directly to the company's servers, and not to the user's local system. That means a Danger-like failure on the server end of MyPhone could easily result in unrecoverable data loss for Windows Mobile users, too.
Users have reason to be wary about keeping all their data on a vendor's cloud service without also maintaining their own local backup. If Apple's MobileMe service loses your data, the company won't do much to help you restore it because it also provides a variety of ways for users to backup and restore their own data locally, directly from apps such as Address Book and iCal, by using a local backup system like Time Machine, and in using iTunes to backup mobile devices at sync. Apple's MobileMe cloud services are run as an accompanying value added service in addition to the maintenance tools users are given to secure their own data.
Other vendors have very different ideas about accountability for data in the cloud. In 2006, a relatively small number of Google's Gmail users experienced a security-related loss of their email and contacts. At the time, Google could only offer to reach out to the people who were affected "to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have." Google's strategy moving forward is highly dependent upon "non-local" cloud computing, with the company's Gmail being joined by its online Docs, Picassa, and Gtalk clients (which store all their data on Google's servers) as well as future plans to deliver Chrome OS as a web-client substitute to the conventional local operating system. That will largely replace the entire idea of local apps under the user's own control with online apps that the vendor can change, update, or drop at any time.
Palm's new WebOS in the Palm Pre similarly banks on the cloud to provide web-based apps that are updated and replaced by the network operator, not by the local user as is the case with the iPhone. Amazon's Kindle also demonstrated the potential for the network to take control of users' data after the company revoked certain books from users' devices, a policy it has since apologized over and paid to settle. Delegating all control to the cloud sounds great until there's a problem that the cloud vendor has no interest or capacity to resolve for the user. It then quickly becomes a frustrating nightmare.
Is Danger in Microsoft?
Some users commenting on the week-long outage and its resulting data loss crisis at Danger were quick to absolve Microsoft of any responsibility in the incident, suggesting that Microsoft only bought the company last year and that it did not originally design the service. While Danger has run its services for years prior to the acquisition and has previously experienced outages, it hasn't lost all of its users' data across the board before. The frustration and dashed hopes voiced by long term Danger partner T-Mobile in its apology to Sidekick users was clearly worded to highlight Microsoft's involvement in the incident.
Microsoft's takeover of Danger almost two years ago should have given the software giant the time to fortify and secure Danger's online operations. Instead, it appears the company actually removed support to cut costs. According to a source familiar with Danger before and after the Microsoft acquisition, T-Mobile's close partnership with the original Danger was leveraged and then betrayed by Microsoft when Steve Ballmer's company decided there would be more money involved in dropping its exclusive deal with T-Mobile to partner with Verizon on the side.
Microsoft's accountability in supporting its acquired Sidekick support obligations with T-Mobile was also shirked. The source stated that "apparently Microsoft has been lying to them [T-Mobile] this whole time about the amount of resources that they've been putting behind Sidekick development and support [at Danger] (in reality, it was cut down to a handful of people in Palo Alto managing some contractors in Romania, Ukraine, etc.). The reason for the deceit wasn't purely to cover up the development of Pink but also because Microsoft could get more money from T-Mobile for their support contract if T-Mobile thought that there were still hundreds of engineers working on the Sidekick platform. As we saw from their recent embarrassment with Sidekick data outages, that has clearly not been the case for some time."
That indicates that Danger's high profile cloud services failure didn't occur in spite of Microsoft's ownership, but rather because of it. This has led observers to question the company's commitment to its other cloud services, not just Windows Mobile MyPhone, but also the Azure Services Platform of cloud computing efforts that the company has had on the drawing board for years. Azure is designed to allow third parties to build applications that are dependent upon Microsoft's data centers.
In covering the Danger debacle at Microsoft, Ina Fried of CNET wrote, "while outages in the cloud computing world are common (one need only look at recent issues with Twitter or Gmail), data losses are another story. And this one stands as one of the more stunning ones in recent memory."
Fried added, "The Danger outage comes just a month before Microsoft is expected to launch its operating system in the cloud--Windows Azure. That announcement is expected at November's Professional Developer Conference. One of the characteristics of Azure is that programs written for it can be run only via Microsoft's data centers and not on a company's own servers. It should be pointed out that the Azure setup is entirely different from what Danger uses: the Sidekick uses an architecture Microsoft inherited rather than built (Microsoft bought Danger last year). Still, the failure would seem to be enough to give any CIO pause."
Monday, October 12, 2009
Grid computing is a work in progress
Computational grids are not new, but ongoing research suggests there is scope for improvement
Written by Alan Oxley
Computing, 08 Oct 2009
A grid is a computer network in which the resources are pooled. A job arriving on the grid needs to be allocated to a computer or, possibly, split up and allocated to several computers. The software responsible for making this decision must find a suitable computer. This activity is termed resource allocation. When jobs are queuing up awaiting the allocation of a computer, some queuing strategy needs to be employed.
This activity is termed job scheduling, for which an appropriate scheduling algorithm must be employed.
There is an almost infinite variety of algorithms that can be used. The final choice needs to reflect both the size, shape and nature of the grid’s architecture, and the traffic it is expected to handle.
Numerous recordings of traffic, known as workload traces, are available for researchers to study. By using statistical methods, it is possible to identify patterns present in a workload trace, patterns such as short-range dependence, long-range dependence, and self-similarity. By gaining a more detailed understanding of traffic patterns, it should be possible to generate any number of synthetic workloads against which algorithms could be tested.
Let us return briefly to another problem that we mentioned, resource allocation. To understand this topic, it helps to think in terms of an economy grid, where each computer is offering its services for a price.
Each computer site informs the grid manager – a program – about the resources that it has, its job turnaround times, its reliability, and the prices it is going to charge. The complexity of the situation is compounded by the fact that any computer on the grid pools only some of its resources, the rest being used locally.
The grid manager could assume that each site has told the truth about its likely performance. This would obviously be an unwise thing to do and so the grid manager must look at past performance as an indicator to future performance.
Therefore, we can appreciate that there is plenty for researchers to do in striving to improve the efficiency of computational grids.
from: http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/comment/2250683/grid-computing-work-progress-4836792
Written by Alan Oxley
Computing, 08 Oct 2009
A grid is a computer network in which the resources are pooled. A job arriving on the grid needs to be allocated to a computer or, possibly, split up and allocated to several computers. The software responsible for making this decision must find a suitable computer. This activity is termed resource allocation. When jobs are queuing up awaiting the allocation of a computer, some queuing strategy needs to be employed.
This activity is termed job scheduling, for which an appropriate scheduling algorithm must be employed.
There is an almost infinite variety of algorithms that can be used. The final choice needs to reflect both the size, shape and nature of the grid’s architecture, and the traffic it is expected to handle.
Numerous recordings of traffic, known as workload traces, are available for researchers to study. By using statistical methods, it is possible to identify patterns present in a workload trace, patterns such as short-range dependence, long-range dependence, and self-similarity. By gaining a more detailed understanding of traffic patterns, it should be possible to generate any number of synthetic workloads against which algorithms could be tested.
Let us return briefly to another problem that we mentioned, resource allocation. To understand this topic, it helps to think in terms of an economy grid, where each computer is offering its services for a price.
Each computer site informs the grid manager – a program – about the resources that it has, its job turnaround times, its reliability, and the prices it is going to charge. The complexity of the situation is compounded by the fact that any computer on the grid pools only some of its resources, the rest being used locally.
The grid manager could assume that each site has told the truth about its likely performance. This would obviously be an unwise thing to do and so the grid manager must look at past performance as an indicator to future performance.
Therefore, we can appreciate that there is plenty for researchers to do in striving to improve the efficiency of computational grids.
from: http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/comment/2250683/grid-computing-work-progress-4836792
Saturday, October 10, 2009
게임 속 클라우드 컴퓨팅 ‘열풍’
[지디넷코리아]클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 적용한 게임이 속속 선보이고 있어 화제다.
소니컴퓨터엔터테인먼트코리아(대표 이성욱)가 오는 16일 국내 정식 발매하는 플레이스테이션3용 게임 ‘언차티드2 : 황금도와 사라진 함대(이하 언차티드2)’가 그 주인공이다.
‘언차티드2’는 PS3의 성능을 한계까지 끌어올렸다는 평가를 받는 뛰어난 그래픽으로 E3 2009 최고의 게임으로 선정됐다. 특히 이번 작품은 전작과 달리 10인 멀티플레이를 지원하기 위해 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 접목할 것으로 알려져 전 세계 게임업계의 주목을 받고 있다.
▲ 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 도입해 10인 멀티플레이를 구현한 `언차티드2`
그동안 콘솔게임은 부하가 심한 그래픽 처리 프로세스로 인해 제대로 된 멀티플레이 기능을 즐기기 어려웠다. 그러나 ‘언차티드2’는 이를 효과적으로 처리할 수 있도록 기존 네트워크 기술에서 더 나아가 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 접목해 성공적인 안정화를 꾀했다.
내년 초 PS3로 출시되는 ‘MAG’ 역시 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 도입할 것으로 알려졌다. ‘MAG‘는 256명이 동시에 멀티플레이를 즐길 수 있는 일인칭 슈팅 게임이다. 이 게임 역시 아직까지 온라인게임에서도 시도한 적이 없는 대규모 집단 전투를 구현하기 위해 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 도입했다.
클라우드 컴퓨팅이 게임업계에 활용 된 사례는 또 있다. 지난 7월에는 클라우드 컴퓨팅 게임 서비스인 ‘가이카이(Gaikai)’가 최초로 공개돼 눈길을 끌었다.
‘가이카이’는 3D그래픽 카드가 없거나 처리 능력이 부족한 플랫폼 환경에서도 웹브라우저와 플래시 프로그램만으로 최신 3D게임을 즐길 수 있도록 하는 첨단 기술이다.
이미 IT업계에서 클라우드 컴퓨팅은 화두로 자리잡은 지 오래다. 오는 13일 코엑스 그랜드볼륨에서 개최되는 ‘ACC2009-클라우드 컴퓨팅 컨퍼런스‘가 주목받고 있는 이유도 이와 같다. 이번 컨퍼런스는 한국EMC, 한국오라클, KT, 세일즈포스닷컴, VM웨어, 삼성SDS, LG CNS, 한국넷앱 등 국내외 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술 선도 기업들이 대거 참여한다.
이번 행사에 참여할 예정인 게임업계 한 관계자는 "하루가 다르게 게임 규모가 대형화되는 추세 속에서 이제는 필수적이라고 할 수 있는 멀티플레이 환경을 구현하기 위해서는 게임업계도 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술 연구가 적극적으로 이뤄져야 한다"고 강조했다.
소니컴퓨터엔터테인먼트코리아(대표 이성욱)가 오는 16일 국내 정식 발매하는 플레이스테이션3용 게임 ‘언차티드2 : 황금도와 사라진 함대(이하 언차티드2)’가 그 주인공이다.
‘언차티드2’는 PS3의 성능을 한계까지 끌어올렸다는 평가를 받는 뛰어난 그래픽으로 E3 2009 최고의 게임으로 선정됐다. 특히 이번 작품은 전작과 달리 10인 멀티플레이를 지원하기 위해 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 접목할 것으로 알려져 전 세계 게임업계의 주목을 받고 있다.
▲ 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 도입해 10인 멀티플레이를 구현한 `언차티드2`
그동안 콘솔게임은 부하가 심한 그래픽 처리 프로세스로 인해 제대로 된 멀티플레이 기능을 즐기기 어려웠다. 그러나 ‘언차티드2’는 이를 효과적으로 처리할 수 있도록 기존 네트워크 기술에서 더 나아가 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 접목해 성공적인 안정화를 꾀했다.
내년 초 PS3로 출시되는 ‘MAG’ 역시 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 도입할 것으로 알려졌다. ‘MAG‘는 256명이 동시에 멀티플레이를 즐길 수 있는 일인칭 슈팅 게임이다. 이 게임 역시 아직까지 온라인게임에서도 시도한 적이 없는 대규모 집단 전투를 구현하기 위해 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술을 도입했다.
클라우드 컴퓨팅이 게임업계에 활용 된 사례는 또 있다. 지난 7월에는 클라우드 컴퓨팅 게임 서비스인 ‘가이카이(Gaikai)’가 최초로 공개돼 눈길을 끌었다.
‘가이카이’는 3D그래픽 카드가 없거나 처리 능력이 부족한 플랫폼 환경에서도 웹브라우저와 플래시 프로그램만으로 최신 3D게임을 즐길 수 있도록 하는 첨단 기술이다.
이미 IT업계에서 클라우드 컴퓨팅은 화두로 자리잡은 지 오래다. 오는 13일 코엑스 그랜드볼륨에서 개최되는 ‘ACC2009-클라우드 컴퓨팅 컨퍼런스‘가 주목받고 있는 이유도 이와 같다. 이번 컨퍼런스는 한국EMC, 한국오라클, KT, 세일즈포스닷컴, VM웨어, 삼성SDS, LG CNS, 한국넷앱 등 국내외 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술 선도 기업들이 대거 참여한다.
이번 행사에 참여할 예정인 게임업계 한 관계자는 "하루가 다르게 게임 규모가 대형화되는 추세 속에서 이제는 필수적이라고 할 수 있는 멀티플레이 환경을 구현하기 위해서는 게임업계도 클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술 연구가 적극적으로 이뤄져야 한다"고 강조했다.
Friday, October 9, 2009
CLOUD and OGSA-DQP
삼성SDS, KT, MS, 구글, IBM.... 모두가 뛰어든다! 그런데 클라우드 컴퓨팅이 뭐야? 해답은 애플에 있다.
http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=itgoon&logNo=40091629127
OGSA-DQP Coordinator Developers Guide
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/12786851/Query-Compiler-Design
http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=itgoon&logNo=40091629127
OGSA-DQP Coordinator Developers Guide
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/12786851/Query-Compiler-Design
Thursday, October 8, 2009
CIA endorses cloud computing approach to bolster security
The CIA is building an internal cloud -- still a relatively new idea among federal agencies -- but won't be outsourcing data to Google or Amazon
By Patrick Thibodeau | Computerworld
WASHINGTON -- One of the U.S. government's strongest advocates of cloud computing is also one of its most secretive operations: the Central Intelligence Agency. But the CIA has adopted cloud computing in a big way, and the agency believes that the cloud approach makes IT environments more flexible and secure.
Jill Tummler Singer, the CIA's deputy CIO, says that she sees enormous benefits to a cloud approach. And while the CIA has been moving steadily to build a cloud-friendly infrastructure -- it has adopted virtualization, among other things -- cloud computing is still a relatively new idea among federal agencies.
[ Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in InfoWorld editors' 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ]
"Cloud computing as a term really didn't hit our vocabulary until a year ago," said Singer.
But now that the CIA is building an internal cloud, Singer sees numerous benefits. For example, a cloud approach could bolster security , in part, because it entails the use of a standards-based environment that reduces complexity and allows faster deployment of patches.
"By keeping the cloud inside your firewalls, you can focus your strongest intrusion-detection and -prevention sensors on your perimeter, thus gaining significant advantage over the most common attack vector, the Internet," said Singer.
Moreover, everything in a cloud environment is built on common approaches. That includes security, meaning there's a "consistent approach to assuring the identity, the access and the audit of individuals and systems," said Singer. But there are limits. The agency isn't using a Google model and "striking" data across all its servers; instead, data is kept in private enclaves protected by encryption, security and audits.
The CIA uses mostly Web-based applications and thin clients , reducing the need to administer and secure individual workstations. And it has virtualized storage, protecting itself "against a physical intruder that might be intent on taking your server or your equipment out of the data center," said Singer.
Speaking at Sys-Con Media's GovIT Expo conference today, Singer not only provided a rare glimpse into the IT approaches used by the agency, but also talked about one of its greatest challenges: the cultural change cloud environments bring to IT. A move to cloud environments "does engender and produce very real human fear that 'I'm going to lose my job,'" she said.
In practice, highly virtualized environments reduce the need for hardware administration and, consequently, for system administrators. Barry Lynn, the chairman and CEO of cloud computing provider 3tera Inc. in Aliso Viejo, Calif., said a typical environment may have one systems administrator for every 75 physical servers. In contrast, a cloud-based environment may have just one administrator for every 500 servers or more.
The CIA has "seen a significant amount of pushback, slow-rolling [and] big-process engineering efforts to try to build another human-intensive process on top of enterprise cloud computing," said Singer. "It will take us a good long while to break that."
By Patrick Thibodeau | Computerworld
WASHINGTON -- One of the U.S. government's strongest advocates of cloud computing is also one of its most secretive operations: the Central Intelligence Agency. But the CIA has adopted cloud computing in a big way, and the agency believes that the cloud approach makes IT environments more flexible and secure.
Jill Tummler Singer, the CIA's deputy CIO, says that she sees enormous benefits to a cloud approach. And while the CIA has been moving steadily to build a cloud-friendly infrastructure -- it has adopted virtualization, among other things -- cloud computing is still a relatively new idea among federal agencies.
[ Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in InfoWorld editors' 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing Report newsletter. ]
"Cloud computing as a term really didn't hit our vocabulary until a year ago," said Singer.
But now that the CIA is building an internal cloud, Singer sees numerous benefits. For example, a cloud approach could bolster security , in part, because it entails the use of a standards-based environment that reduces complexity and allows faster deployment of patches.
"By keeping the cloud inside your firewalls, you can focus your strongest intrusion-detection and -prevention sensors on your perimeter, thus gaining significant advantage over the most common attack vector, the Internet," said Singer.
Moreover, everything in a cloud environment is built on common approaches. That includes security, meaning there's a "consistent approach to assuring the identity, the access and the audit of individuals and systems," said Singer. But there are limits. The agency isn't using a Google model and "striking" data across all its servers; instead, data is kept in private enclaves protected by encryption, security and audits.
The CIA uses mostly Web-based applications and thin clients , reducing the need to administer and secure individual workstations. And it has virtualized storage, protecting itself "against a physical intruder that might be intent on taking your server or your equipment out of the data center," said Singer.
Speaking at Sys-Con Media's GovIT Expo conference today, Singer not only provided a rare glimpse into the IT approaches used by the agency, but also talked about one of its greatest challenges: the cultural change cloud environments bring to IT. A move to cloud environments "does engender and produce very real human fear that 'I'm going to lose my job,'" she said.
In practice, highly virtualized environments reduce the need for hardware administration and, consequently, for system administrators. Barry Lynn, the chairman and CEO of cloud computing provider 3tera Inc. in Aliso Viejo, Calif., said a typical environment may have one systems administrator for every 75 physical servers. In contrast, a cloud-based environment may have just one administrator for every 500 servers or more.
The CIA has "seen a significant amount of pushback, slow-rolling [and] big-process engineering efforts to try to build another human-intensive process on top of enterprise cloud computing," said Singer. "It will take us a good long while to break that."
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Rugby sidesteps cloud computing
Cut out pass to Macquarie Hosting.
Australian Rugby Union has signed an agreement to host its multimedia-rich content with Macquarie Hosting after being disappointed with the solutions available from cloud computing providers.
The ARU's IT team, which manages the technology needs of the Wallabies, Super 14 clubs and 850 community organisations, went to market in search of a more flexible hosting environment - but Rugby's head of online business and IT services Paul Templeman said he was disappointed by most responses.
"When I joined the ARU [in] August last year, I walked in and found we had 15 servers hosted on machines that [were] four or five years old," he said. "Needless to say that [environment] wasn't offering great performance - so we went to market."
Speaking at a Cloud Computing event hosted in Sydney, Templeman said that Rugby's IT shop needed to adjust to changes in social media and broadcast technology, while meeting new content requirements from fans - and all while Rugby was reducing its IT budget.
"We wanted to have infrastructure as a utility model - to pay for what we get, pay for what we want month to month," he said.
At the same time, Rugby expected "some certainty of service levels and security" and wanted to avoid having to re-write any applications.
Public cloud solutions like Amazon's Web Services and Microsoft's Azure were immediately off the list, Templeman said, as they "required us to change our apps in some way."
But offerings from the traditional hosting providers were almost as disappointing, he said.
"None of vendors offered a true infrastructure cloud," he said.
The ARU received five formal responses from tenders - all from Tier 1 hosting providers and telcos. Every single provider proposed a virtualised environment based on VMware - but all but one proposed the use of dedicated host servers.
In addition, all wanted the ARU to purchase the hardware and amortise that cost over three years.
In Templeman's view, there were still major challenges around the virtualisation of the network and storage layer, preventing traditional hosting companies from offering a cloud-like service.
Templeman said the industry had not yet solved the challenge of offering an administrator complete control of virtual servers, network and storage from one interface.
He applauded the integration efforts of EMC, Cisco and VMware to solve this challenge, but also pointed out that this solution was "proprietary between three vendors."
"If that scales out to other vendors, it's going to be a lot more interesting," he said.
Nor has the industry worked out how to make cloud-based environments open and flexible enough for a company to shift their applications between cloud providers as they see fit, he said.
"What is required is a cloud equivalent to SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol," he said. "Before SNMP, everyone was using propreitary tools to manage their network. Now you wouldn't think about using a tool unless it met that standard."
Templeman said he expected organisations to adopt cloud computing services in "small iterations", for new applications or test and development.
"A production-ready cloud is still a little way off in this country. There are not enough tools offered by the cloud vendors to take your internal physical environment to the cloud environment easily," he said.
There are also not enough guarantees, he said, as to equivalence of service in the cloud.
"How do you put an SLA [service level agreement] on a cloud service? How is an Amazon.com processing hour compared to using my Intel Xeon server? And in a shared environment, how do I know whether our performance will suffer if somebody else in that environment has a problem? It's not enough just to say, you have to trust us."
While he is satisfied with the services available through Macquarie Hosting, Templeman said cloud computing will eventually pose a big challenge to existing hosting models.
"The majority of hosting vendors have business models that are not based on utility computing. They still use three-year amortisation models. It's probably around 18 months before you'll see some of them come out.
"Hosting providers are worried. There is no doubt that [public cloud computes] will put pressure on traditional hosting vendors."
from:http://www.itnews.com.au/News/156051,rugby-sidesteps-cloud-computing.aspx
Australian Rugby Union has signed an agreement to host its multimedia-rich content with Macquarie Hosting after being disappointed with the solutions available from cloud computing providers.
The ARU's IT team, which manages the technology needs of the Wallabies, Super 14 clubs and 850 community organisations, went to market in search of a more flexible hosting environment - but Rugby's head of online business and IT services Paul Templeman said he was disappointed by most responses.
"When I joined the ARU [in] August last year, I walked in and found we had 15 servers hosted on machines that [were] four or five years old," he said. "Needless to say that [environment] wasn't offering great performance - so we went to market."
Speaking at a Cloud Computing event hosted in Sydney, Templeman said that Rugby's IT shop needed to adjust to changes in social media and broadcast technology, while meeting new content requirements from fans - and all while Rugby was reducing its IT budget.
"We wanted to have infrastructure as a utility model - to pay for what we get, pay for what we want month to month," he said.
At the same time, Rugby expected "some certainty of service levels and security" and wanted to avoid having to re-write any applications.
Public cloud solutions like Amazon's Web Services and Microsoft's Azure were immediately off the list, Templeman said, as they "required us to change our apps in some way."
But offerings from the traditional hosting providers were almost as disappointing, he said.
"None of vendors offered a true infrastructure cloud," he said.
The ARU received five formal responses from tenders - all from Tier 1 hosting providers and telcos. Every single provider proposed a virtualised environment based on VMware - but all but one proposed the use of dedicated host servers.
In addition, all wanted the ARU to purchase the hardware and amortise that cost over three years.
In Templeman's view, there were still major challenges around the virtualisation of the network and storage layer, preventing traditional hosting companies from offering a cloud-like service.
Templeman said the industry had not yet solved the challenge of offering an administrator complete control of virtual servers, network and storage from one interface.
He applauded the integration efforts of EMC, Cisco and VMware to solve this challenge, but also pointed out that this solution was "proprietary between three vendors."
"If that scales out to other vendors, it's going to be a lot more interesting," he said.
Nor has the industry worked out how to make cloud-based environments open and flexible enough for a company to shift their applications between cloud providers as they see fit, he said.
"What is required is a cloud equivalent to SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol," he said. "Before SNMP, everyone was using propreitary tools to manage their network. Now you wouldn't think about using a tool unless it met that standard."
Templeman said he expected organisations to adopt cloud computing services in "small iterations", for new applications or test and development.
"A production-ready cloud is still a little way off in this country. There are not enough tools offered by the cloud vendors to take your internal physical environment to the cloud environment easily," he said.
There are also not enough guarantees, he said, as to equivalence of service in the cloud.
"How do you put an SLA [service level agreement] on a cloud service? How is an Amazon.com processing hour compared to using my Intel Xeon server? And in a shared environment, how do I know whether our performance will suffer if somebody else in that environment has a problem? It's not enough just to say, you have to trust us."
While he is satisfied with the services available through Macquarie Hosting, Templeman said cloud computing will eventually pose a big challenge to existing hosting models.
"The majority of hosting vendors have business models that are not based on utility computing. They still use three-year amortisation models. It's probably around 18 months before you'll see some of them come out.
"Hosting providers are worried. There is no doubt that [public cloud computes] will put pressure on traditional hosting vendors."
from:http://www.itnews.com.au/News/156051,rugby-sidesteps-cloud-computing.aspx
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Grid Computing X Cloud Computing X Volunteer Computing
Title in portuguese “Computação em Grade X Computação em Nuvem X Computação Voluntária”
During the event “LHC Grid Fest” we discussed the difference between Grid Computing, Cloud Computing and Volunteer computing. I will explain the biggest difference between those technologies based on the discussion taken in place at CERN, Geneva during the event. (Also this information is stored in the LHC Grid Fest Media Guide.)
Internet: It is the first layer
Internet is the technology that provides the ability to interconnect millions of computers around the world. It provides the basic (first layer) infrastructure required for many IT services, such as WEB, E-mail and also Grid Computing.
Web:
As I mentioned in previous posts the WEB was invented by CERN and it provides a service to share information. It provides a “simple language” to share documents in a quick way.
Grid Computing:
Grid Computing is a service to share computing power. Grid is a set of distributed computers ,owned by various entities, connected in the way that a remote user can have a shared user of this computing power. Like the Web, Grid computing relies on Internet network to operate properly.
Cloud Computing:
A cloud computing is a group of computers owned by one entity that provides a service for an user. It means that every time you search for a flight online, or use your e-mail account provided by Gmail, you are using a cloud computing. My sister-in-law sent me one great article that Richard Stallman (GNU Founder) criticizes the use of cloud computing based on proprietary software threats . (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman). Thanks Daniela!
Volunteer Computing:
Volunteer Computing is technically a Grid Computing however it is based on user collaboration approach. CERN has two different structures on the WLHC (World LHC Grid Computing):
- One is the main infrastructure which is based on dedicated servers hosted in more that 140 institutions around 33 countries. This is called Grid Computing infrastructure by CERN.
- Also, CERN provided a service that any user connected in the Internet can help the LHC project sharing his idle time machine to increase the Grid Computing power. It is called Volunteer Grid inside the WLCG. It is a famous technique and I can tell some examples, like World Community Grid, a project which relies on the users collaboration to provide computing power for many researches.
During the event “LHC Grid Fest” we discussed the difference between Grid Computing, Cloud Computing and Volunteer computing. I will explain the biggest difference between those technologies based on the discussion taken in place at CERN, Geneva during the event. (Also this information is stored in the LHC Grid Fest Media Guide.)
Internet: It is the first layer
Internet is the technology that provides the ability to interconnect millions of computers around the world. It provides the basic (first layer) infrastructure required for many IT services, such as WEB, E-mail and also Grid Computing.
Web:
As I mentioned in previous posts the WEB was invented by CERN and it provides a service to share information. It provides a “simple language” to share documents in a quick way.
Grid Computing:
Grid Computing is a service to share computing power. Grid is a set of distributed computers ,owned by various entities, connected in the way that a remote user can have a shared user of this computing power. Like the Web, Grid computing relies on Internet network to operate properly.
Cloud Computing:
A cloud computing is a group of computers owned by one entity that provides a service for an user. It means that every time you search for a flight online, or use your e-mail account provided by Gmail, you are using a cloud computing. My sister-in-law sent me one great article that Richard Stallman (GNU Founder) criticizes the use of cloud computing based on proprietary software threats . (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman). Thanks Daniela!
Volunteer Computing:
Volunteer Computing is technically a Grid Computing however it is based on user collaboration approach. CERN has two different structures on the WLHC (World LHC Grid Computing):
- One is the main infrastructure which is based on dedicated servers hosted in more that 140 institutions around 33 countries. This is called Grid Computing infrastructure by CERN.
- Also, CERN provided a service that any user connected in the Internet can help the LHC project sharing his idle time machine to increase the Grid Computing power. It is called Volunteer Grid inside the WLCG. It is a famous technique and I can tell some examples, like World Community Grid, a project which relies on the users collaboration to provide computing power for many researches.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Network and wireless analysis: Grid computing
The definition of grid computing entails the notion of making computing power...
At a glance
Grid computing involves aggregating processing capacity, storage and other resources to achieve a task that would be beyond the resources of a given institution.
The electricity grid is used by some as a model for grid computing, but processor power 'on tap' is a long way from reality for complex projects.
Volunteer computing projects rely on individuals donating spare 'processing cycles' on their PCs to solve problems in areas such as medicine, astrophysics and climatology.
Large academic research projects, such as those planned for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), rely on grid computing to analyse their vast data sets.
Issues around security and mutual trust when 'donating' capacity are balanced by advantages of higher resource utilisation and contributing to worthwhile projects.
Educational networks could be used to advance volunteer projects or for in-house processing tasks, but security issues may limit the former while the latter may be more effectively achieved through 'cloud' services.
Getting on the grid
The broad definition of grid computing, otherwise known as utility computing, entails the notion of making computing power as available as the national grid - some strategists foresee a time when you will be able to plug a terminal into a 'wall socket' and get all the computing power you need. This view simplifies the current state of computing to 'pure' processor power, analogous to electricity, without reference to all the complexities of differing processor architectures, storage requirements, peripheral interactions and a host of other factors. In many respects cloud computing (see TechNews 11/08) offers these facilities by providing computing power and storage via the internet; the user does not know where those servers are located, but can lease the capacity required.
'Grid computing', in more common use and as discussed in this article, refers to a form of distributed computing whereby users can access spare capacity on other people's resources to deal with tasks that would take far too long on in-house hardware. Provision is enabled by a complex web of co-operative pacts and predefined service level agreements (SLAs) that are a far cry from the 'plug in, use now and get billed after' vision of utility computing. As defined on Wikipedia:
Grid computing (or the use of computational grids) is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task.
This definition indicates one of the key features of current computing grids: heterogeneity. There are many computing platforms and a whole mass of communities, research projects and nascent standards, only some of which will be covered in this article.
Grid computing is most suited to scalable, massively parallel computing tasks. These applications can generally handle out-of-order processing, with algorithms that deal with late or missing results, and rely on 'message passing' protocols to control execution by allocating tasks, sharing progress and transferring completed data to the appropriate point. Such tasks include searching very large data sets, video rendering, climate simulations, genome analysis, processing particle physics data and drug research. Some projects involve 'volunteer computing' where people grant access for applications to run on spare processor capacity while their computer is idle. One the most widely known examples is the SETI@home project, searching for signals attributable to intelligent sources among the radio background 'noise' of the universe. Some projects allow the greatest contributors to propose their own tasks to be run on the virtual, networked processor.
Many large academic research projects also use grid computing, taking advantage of facilities in partner organisations to process data during idle time, perhaps at night or between in-house applications.
Educause has a helpful article, 7 things you should know about Grid Computingand the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) has published Grid computing in five minutes.
The structure of the grid
The grid is inherently heterogeneous, a loose collection of processors, storage, specialised hardware (for example particle accelerators, electron microscopes and particle accelerators) and network infrastructure. For each task, appropriate hardware has to be discovered, processor time booked, network capacity scheduled (especially where large data sets are involved) and collation of results organised. Although this can be achieved on a peer-to-peer basis (in which no one machine has overall control), it is generally arranged as a client-server structure. 'Middleware', is often utilised to manage the applications and resources required to achieve a particular outcome, such as the Globus toolkit or Berkeley University's BOINC software (both of which are open source).
The complexities of managing grid applications are offset by significant advantages, including:
access to resources beyond those available within a given institution
optimisation of spare capacity
flexibility to scale and reconfigure available resources
avoidance of single points of failure in the computing infrastructure used
data replication across a number of facilities
provision of 'virtual' resources in-house, so that experienced researchers are less tempted to go to institutions elsewhere.
Academic institutions have created partnership groups for sharing resources, notably GridPP(for particle physics tasks in the UK), the EU's EGEE science network and the UK's National Grid Service (NGS); while international directories like the GridGuide provide international contacts. The Open Grid Forum (OGF) has been behind a number of substantive projects, especially developing standards for the protocols required to deliver and manage grid applications.
Volunteer computing
Volunteer projects are the simplest structure of grid computing: a server provides an application for users to download and a series of 'work units' to be processed during the processor's idle time; each work unit is independent, so results can be returned in any order. However, the researchers running the application do not know whether the user or client PC will produce accurate, authentic results, so tasks are generally randomly duplicated between users, with results compared to ensure validity. The owner of the client PC has to manage the installation and patching of the client application, while trusting that the application provider is doing the work purported, that no malware is being delivered and that the application will not interfere with the operation of the computer. Networks of PCs in schools and colleges could contribute huge numbers of spare processing cycles to these projects, but management overheads and security concerns often deter system managers from volunteering their resources.
Applications include research into disease, medicines, climate change, astronomy and particle physics. GridRepublic and the World Community Grid allow users to select the projects they wish to contribute to, while Intel is promoting its volunteer projects through Facebook. Many projects, such as the protein folding simulation Folding@home, now support processing using games consoles and the parallel instruction pipelines found on graphics processors. (See 'GPU computing' in TechNews 09/08.)
Research networks
Collaborative networks of academic researchers can assume that the infrastructure is trusted, diminishing the problems faced by public volunteer projects. However, the actual tasks are often far more complex, involving very large data sets and a much greater range of hardware, from desktop PCs through to supercomputers.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be reliant on massive grid computing capabilities to process the data that it is expected to produce. The WLCG has 11 Tier 1 and 140 Tier 2 data centres that will distribute the 15 million gigabytes (15 petabytes) of data created each year. The primary fibre optic network links will run at 10Gbps, allowing data transfers of several gigabytes per second through clustered channels.
Computing facilities at this scale represent a considerable investment, so the prioritisation, scheduling and job control are critical to effective use. A number of projects and protocols (in the widest sense) are focussed on this issue. For example:
GridFTP is an extension to the standard internet file transfer protocol (FTP), allowing much larger blocks of data to be simultaneously and securely transmitted across multiple channels, as well as providing the facility for just part of a single, extremely large file to be downloaded.
GridCOMP and Phosphorus are assembling frameworks and services to facilitate higher level project management.
Commercial opportunities
Large companies, including those involved in pharmaceuticals, aerospace simulations, data mining for market research and prospecting, also have immense processing requirements, but the data they handle can be commercially sensitive. SLAs must be legally watertight, covering issues like security, intellectual property and data protection (especially where personal information is held).
The function of GridEcon is to create an online auctioning, scheduling and management system for computational capacity. The EU's SIMDAT project had a wider remit, investigating all elements of grid computing, from protocol standardisation through to systems that allow companies to readily create virtual organisations through which they can define projects involving establishing, administering and securely taking down distributed processing and storage capacity.
The grid and the cloud
Many applications already run in the 'cloud', leasing facilities such as Amazon's Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft's soon to be launched Windows Azure Platform. Although these may use a distributed computing model to provide the services, they have a single point of accountability through the provider's SLA. The grid computing applications outlined in this article are far more complex, but they can provide computing power for 'free', or at a substantially reduced price, for academic researchers, while ensuring near full utilisation of expensive computing resources. This grid remains more informal in structure, collaborative in development and altruistic in nature, although it is becoming more formalised as the environment matures and the scale of individual projects increases, especially as commercial entities begin to adopt these approaches.
Educational establishments could consider donating spare computing cycles to advance areas of research considered to be for the good of humanity, although they need to factor in the management overheads that deployment is likely to incurand consider whether it will add significantly to energy consumption. Middleware, such as BOINC, could be deployed across a large institution to manage in-house processing tasks, or capacity could be leased from one of the cloud providers. However, access to massively scalable, grid computing resources is likely to remain the province of research organisations based in higher education and industry.
At a glance
Grid computing involves aggregating processing capacity, storage and other resources to achieve a task that would be beyond the resources of a given institution.
The electricity grid is used by some as a model for grid computing, but processor power 'on tap' is a long way from reality for complex projects.
Volunteer computing projects rely on individuals donating spare 'processing cycles' on their PCs to solve problems in areas such as medicine, astrophysics and climatology.
Large academic research projects, such as those planned for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), rely on grid computing to analyse their vast data sets.
Issues around security and mutual trust when 'donating' capacity are balanced by advantages of higher resource utilisation and contributing to worthwhile projects.
Educational networks could be used to advance volunteer projects or for in-house processing tasks, but security issues may limit the former while the latter may be more effectively achieved through 'cloud' services.
Getting on the grid
The broad definition of grid computing, otherwise known as utility computing, entails the notion of making computing power as available as the national grid - some strategists foresee a time when you will be able to plug a terminal into a 'wall socket' and get all the computing power you need. This view simplifies the current state of computing to 'pure' processor power, analogous to electricity, without reference to all the complexities of differing processor architectures, storage requirements, peripheral interactions and a host of other factors. In many respects cloud computing (see TechNews 11/08) offers these facilities by providing computing power and storage via the internet; the user does not know where those servers are located, but can lease the capacity required.
'Grid computing', in more common use and as discussed in this article, refers to a form of distributed computing whereby users can access spare capacity on other people's resources to deal with tasks that would take far too long on in-house hardware. Provision is enabled by a complex web of co-operative pacts and predefined service level agreements (SLAs) that are a far cry from the 'plug in, use now and get billed after' vision of utility computing. As defined on Wikipedia:
Grid computing (or the use of computational grids) is the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains applied to a common task.
This definition indicates one of the key features of current computing grids: heterogeneity. There are many computing platforms and a whole mass of communities, research projects and nascent standards, only some of which will be covered in this article.
Grid computing is most suited to scalable, massively parallel computing tasks. These applications can generally handle out-of-order processing, with algorithms that deal with late or missing results, and rely on 'message passing' protocols to control execution by allocating tasks, sharing progress and transferring completed data to the appropriate point. Such tasks include searching very large data sets, video rendering, climate simulations, genome analysis, processing particle physics data and drug research. Some projects involve 'volunteer computing' where people grant access for applications to run on spare processor capacity while their computer is idle. One the most widely known examples is the SETI@home project, searching for signals attributable to intelligent sources among the radio background 'noise' of the universe. Some projects allow the greatest contributors to propose their own tasks to be run on the virtual, networked processor.
Many large academic research projects also use grid computing, taking advantage of facilities in partner organisations to process data during idle time, perhaps at night or between in-house applications.
Educause has a helpful article, 7 things you should know about Grid Computingand the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) has published Grid computing in five minutes.
The structure of the grid
The grid is inherently heterogeneous, a loose collection of processors, storage, specialised hardware (for example particle accelerators, electron microscopes and particle accelerators) and network infrastructure. For each task, appropriate hardware has to be discovered, processor time booked, network capacity scheduled (especially where large data sets are involved) and collation of results organised. Although this can be achieved on a peer-to-peer basis (in which no one machine has overall control), it is generally arranged as a client-server structure. 'Middleware', is often utilised to manage the applications and resources required to achieve a particular outcome, such as the Globus toolkit or Berkeley University's BOINC software (both of which are open source).
The complexities of managing grid applications are offset by significant advantages, including:
access to resources beyond those available within a given institution
optimisation of spare capacity
flexibility to scale and reconfigure available resources
avoidance of single points of failure in the computing infrastructure used
data replication across a number of facilities
provision of 'virtual' resources in-house, so that experienced researchers are less tempted to go to institutions elsewhere.
Academic institutions have created partnership groups for sharing resources, notably GridPP(for particle physics tasks in the UK), the EU's EGEE science network and the UK's National Grid Service (NGS); while international directories like the GridGuide provide international contacts. The Open Grid Forum (OGF) has been behind a number of substantive projects, especially developing standards for the protocols required to deliver and manage grid applications.
Volunteer computing
Volunteer projects are the simplest structure of grid computing: a server provides an application for users to download and a series of 'work units' to be processed during the processor's idle time; each work unit is independent, so results can be returned in any order. However, the researchers running the application do not know whether the user or client PC will produce accurate, authentic results, so tasks are generally randomly duplicated between users, with results compared to ensure validity. The owner of the client PC has to manage the installation and patching of the client application, while trusting that the application provider is doing the work purported, that no malware is being delivered and that the application will not interfere with the operation of the computer. Networks of PCs in schools and colleges could contribute huge numbers of spare processing cycles to these projects, but management overheads and security concerns often deter system managers from volunteering their resources.
Applications include research into disease, medicines, climate change, astronomy and particle physics. GridRepublic and the World Community Grid allow users to select the projects they wish to contribute to, while Intel is promoting its volunteer projects through Facebook. Many projects, such as the protein folding simulation Folding@home, now support processing using games consoles and the parallel instruction pipelines found on graphics processors. (See 'GPU computing' in TechNews 09/08.)
Research networks
Collaborative networks of academic researchers can assume that the infrastructure is trusted, diminishing the problems faced by public volunteer projects. However, the actual tasks are often far more complex, involving very large data sets and a much greater range of hardware, from desktop PCs through to supercomputers.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be reliant on massive grid computing capabilities to process the data that it is expected to produce. The WLCG has 11 Tier 1 and 140 Tier 2 data centres that will distribute the 15 million gigabytes (15 petabytes) of data created each year. The primary fibre optic network links will run at 10Gbps, allowing data transfers of several gigabytes per second through clustered channels.
Computing facilities at this scale represent a considerable investment, so the prioritisation, scheduling and job control are critical to effective use. A number of projects and protocols (in the widest sense) are focussed on this issue. For example:
GridFTP is an extension to the standard internet file transfer protocol (FTP), allowing much larger blocks of data to be simultaneously and securely transmitted across multiple channels, as well as providing the facility for just part of a single, extremely large file to be downloaded.
GridCOMP and Phosphorus are assembling frameworks and services to facilitate higher level project management.
Commercial opportunities
Large companies, including those involved in pharmaceuticals, aerospace simulations, data mining for market research and prospecting, also have immense processing requirements, but the data they handle can be commercially sensitive. SLAs must be legally watertight, covering issues like security, intellectual property and data protection (especially where personal information is held).
The function of GridEcon is to create an online auctioning, scheduling and management system for computational capacity. The EU's SIMDAT project had a wider remit, investigating all elements of grid computing, from protocol standardisation through to systems that allow companies to readily create virtual organisations through which they can define projects involving establishing, administering and securely taking down distributed processing and storage capacity.
The grid and the cloud
Many applications already run in the 'cloud', leasing facilities such as Amazon's Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft's soon to be launched Windows Azure Platform. Although these may use a distributed computing model to provide the services, they have a single point of accountability through the provider's SLA. The grid computing applications outlined in this article are far more complex, but they can provide computing power for 'free', or at a substantially reduced price, for academic researchers, while ensuring near full utilisation of expensive computing resources. This grid remains more informal in structure, collaborative in development and altruistic in nature, although it is becoming more formalised as the environment matures and the scale of individual projects increases, especially as commercial entities begin to adopt these approaches.
Educational establishments could consider donating spare computing cycles to advance areas of research considered to be for the good of humanity, although they need to factor in the management overheads that deployment is likely to incurand consider whether it will add significantly to energy consumption. Middleware, such as BOINC, could be deployed across a large institution to manage in-house processing tasks, or capacity could be leased from one of the cloud providers. However, access to massively scalable, grid computing resources is likely to remain the province of research organisations based in higher education and industry.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
클라우드 컴퓨팅 VaaS형태로 구현돼야
클라우드컴퓨팅 기기, 환경의 제약 없어야
[디지털데일리 최용수기자] “진정한 의미의 클라우드컴퓨팅은 SaaS(Software as a Service), PaaS(Platform as a service), IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service)가 가상화 기술을 통해 구현 돼야 합니다.”
16일 서울 삼성동 코엑스에서 열린 ‘2009 틸론 클라우드 컴퓨팅 전략 발표회’에서 틸론의 이춘성 실장은 발표자로 나와 클라우드 컴퓨팅이 나가야 할 방향을 이같이 제시했다.
그는 클라우드 컴퓨팅을 ‘인터넷 기술을 활용해 다수의 고객들에게 확장성을 가진 IT자원들을 서비스로 제공하는 것’ 이라고 정의했다.
하지만 "이런 SaaS형태로는 고객관계관리솔루션(CRM)과 같은 단순한 기능과 연동되는 상태라며 다양한 연동을 하기에 아직 기술적 제약이 많다"고 지적했다.
또 그는 애플의 앱스토어를 예로 들며 "PaaS형태는 특정업체 디바이스에 종속된다는 단점이 있어 발전을 저해한다"고 말했다.
이어 “진정한 클라우드 컴퓨팅은 언제 어디서나 서비스에 가입만 돼 있다면 기기, 환경의 제약을 받지 않는 것이 중요하다”라며 VaaS(Virtualization as a Service)가 실현돼야 한다고 그는 강조했다.
이에 대한 해답으로 회사의 가상화 기반 클라우드 컴퓨팅 솔루션 어코드스테이션을 예로 들었다.
그는 “어코드스테이션은 서버기반컴퓨팅(SBC)의 장점과 로컬의 장점을 포함했다”라며 “보안도 확립된 솔루션으로 디바이스의 구애를 받지 않는다”고 설명했다.
[디지털데일리 최용수기자] “진정한 의미의 클라우드컴퓨팅은 SaaS(Software as a Service), PaaS(Platform as a service), IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service)가 가상화 기술을 통해 구현 돼야 합니다.”
16일 서울 삼성동 코엑스에서 열린 ‘2009 틸론 클라우드 컴퓨팅 전략 발표회’에서 틸론의 이춘성 실장은 발표자로 나와 클라우드 컴퓨팅이 나가야 할 방향을 이같이 제시했다.
그는 클라우드 컴퓨팅을 ‘인터넷 기술을 활용해 다수의 고객들에게 확장성을 가진 IT자원들을 서비스로 제공하는 것’ 이라고 정의했다.
하지만 "이런 SaaS형태로는 고객관계관리솔루션(CRM)과 같은 단순한 기능과 연동되는 상태라며 다양한 연동을 하기에 아직 기술적 제약이 많다"고 지적했다.
또 그는 애플의 앱스토어를 예로 들며 "PaaS형태는 특정업체 디바이스에 종속된다는 단점이 있어 발전을 저해한다"고 말했다.
이어 “진정한 클라우드 컴퓨팅은 언제 어디서나 서비스에 가입만 돼 있다면 기기, 환경의 제약을 받지 않는 것이 중요하다”라며 VaaS(Virtualization as a Service)가 실현돼야 한다고 그는 강조했다.
이에 대한 해답으로 회사의 가상화 기반 클라우드 컴퓨팅 솔루션 어코드스테이션을 예로 들었다.
그는 “어코드스테이션은 서버기반컴퓨팅(SBC)의 장점과 로컬의 장점을 포함했다”라며 “보안도 확립된 솔루션으로 디바이스의 구애를 받지 않는다”고 설명했다.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Leveraging Information and Intelligence
Leveraging Information and Intelligence
David Linthicum
Why Data Integration is Critical to Cloud Computing
While the interest in cloud computing is at a fever pitch, the use of cloud computing brings up some fundamental questions, such as how we're going to drive data integration between the on-premise systems and the emerging use of the cloud. You can either be proactive, and reactive.
Truth-be-told data integration is often an afterthought, and cloud computing is no exception to that. Typically, those moving to cloud computing understand the need once the data is now housed on remote cloud computing platforms, and there is a desire to share or synchronous data between them. This is usually followed by a quick tactical solution, which has no long term value, usually replaced at some point in time.
You approach data integration with cloud computing in one of two ways.
First, the understanding that integration is systemic to the solution, thus you need to design integration into the architecture. This is the optimal approach, but often an approach that enterprises don't employ, due to budget and resource limitations, and I've heard many other excuses as well.
Second, is the ability to design and create a data integration solution that is retrofitted into the cloud computing solution. Again, not optimal, but many approach integration this way and it's just a matter of understanding the source and target data, how to deal with semantic mediation, connections, and the right integration technology to make this happen. Often overlook here are security and governance which needs to be part of the data integration solution.
The fact of the matter is that without data integration cloud-based systems won't provide the value you're seeking, indeed they may not be cost effective at all. Processes span on premise and cloud-delivered systems, and if the integration with the data does not exist, those processes can't exist either.
Many of the enterprises out there moving quickly to cloud computing need to get a clue.
David Linthicum
Why Data Integration is Critical to Cloud Computing
While the interest in cloud computing is at a fever pitch, the use of cloud computing brings up some fundamental questions, such as how we're going to drive data integration between the on-premise systems and the emerging use of the cloud. You can either be proactive, and reactive.
Truth-be-told data integration is often an afterthought, and cloud computing is no exception to that. Typically, those moving to cloud computing understand the need once the data is now housed on remote cloud computing platforms, and there is a desire to share or synchronous data between them. This is usually followed by a quick tactical solution, which has no long term value, usually replaced at some point in time.
You approach data integration with cloud computing in one of two ways.
First, the understanding that integration is systemic to the solution, thus you need to design integration into the architecture. This is the optimal approach, but often an approach that enterprises don't employ, due to budget and resource limitations, and I've heard many other excuses as well.
Second, is the ability to design and create a data integration solution that is retrofitted into the cloud computing solution. Again, not optimal, but many approach integration this way and it's just a matter of understanding the source and target data, how to deal with semantic mediation, connections, and the right integration technology to make this happen. Often overlook here are security and governance which needs to be part of the data integration solution.
The fact of the matter is that without data integration cloud-based systems won't provide the value you're seeking, indeed they may not be cost effective at all. Processes span on premise and cloud-delivered systems, and if the integration with the data does not exist, those processes can't exist either.
Many of the enterprises out there moving quickly to cloud computing need to get a clue.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Virtualization and the cloud: Tech, talk to converge
SAN FRANCISCO--The claim has been made in the last couple of weeks that cloud computing has reached the top of analyst firms' famous hype cycle and is a top-of-mind issue for most IT organizations.
That's a bit misleading, as the interest in cloud computing is often taken out of context, and when you bring virtualization into the picture, that interest seems to remain exploratory rather than strategic.
Amazing innovation is happening in both public- and private-cloud offerings, and the overwhelmingly positive response to cloud computing--in particular to Amazon's top-notch Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, and related offerings, as well as Google Apps and the first generation of software-as-a-service superstars, such as Salesforce.com.
But the critical truth--that interest in virtualization technologies currently outweighs interest in the cloud-computing model--has been evident at trade shows I've attended over the the last several months targeting subjects ranging from networking to next-generation data centers to cloud computing itself, and it has hit home here at VMworld this week. The bottom line is that virtualization is where the money is this summer; cloud computing isn't.
Technology trends follow the patterns described by the science of complex adaptive systems. There is constant change and mutation, and there is a feedback loop that encourages stronger innovations to survive and grow while killing weaker ones, yet somehow, the system maintains a working balance that doesn't get too chaotic to manage or too ordered to allow innovation.
As with any complex adaptive system, traits that eventually come to dominate the system tend to start small: a single mutation, or the introduction of a small number of invasive foreign entities, for example. In the case of the "invasive" cloud computing model, the "DNA" is strong.
Amazon Web Services proves that you can get your infrastructure over the Internet. Salesforce.com proves you can run your business relationships through a browser. Both public and private clouds introduce flexibility and efficiency into IT services.
Cloud-computing bellwethers
Cloud computing is definitely in your future, in one form or another. It probably already plays a strong role in your day-to-day computing experience. That said, when you measure audiences at technology trade shows such as Cisco Live and Interop, you see where the real interest of the everyday IT professional is. At VMworld, the audiences at virtualization-related sessions have been consistently larger than those at cloud-centric sessions.
Recent cloud-only conferences have remained quite small--typically in the tens or hundreds of participants--in comparison to their brethren, and cloud-focused sessions at larger shows have been attended by fewer people their virtualization peers. Several of my cloud-focused colleagues have even noted that some shows end up with the same vendors pitching to each other over and over again.
Without a doubt, this is simply an indication of the current stage in which we find ourselves in the long evolution from internal data centers to cloud-centric operations. The ratio of interest will change (or, more appropriately, converge). But if you want to get into the head of most IT tech geeks today, you need to address the subject of virtualization first, then acknowledge cloud computing as a future target.
The best evidence I can personally attest to are the breakout sessions and panels in which I've participated. I have been giving two basic talks this summer, one focused on cloud computing's future ("Achieving the Intercloud"), and one about the journey from virtualization to cloud computing. Without a doubt, sessions with the term "virtualization" in the title have seen the best attendance, whether measured by room capacity or interaction after the talk.
Transitions ahead
What does that mean to the average cloud enthusiast? Well, for one thing, it remains important to see cloud computing as a transition--an operations model that requires addressing technology and cultural issues before widespread adoption. The good news here? Current trends in virtualization, automation, and early cloud offerings are forcing most of those issues to be faced head-on.
It also highlights how much work is ahead of us in helping those responsible for application operations see the value in cloud environments. This education will be greatly accelerated this year, thanks to the amazing work that customers large and small are doing, especially in public clouds. However, it will also require technologies that address the concerns that many have about moving virtualized workloads into someone else's infrastructure.
I'm betting that at this time next year (or the following year, at the latest), most of the convergence of virtualization and cloud interest will have happened, with the exception of the continued interest that service providers and enterprise data center operators will have in the physical infrastructure and management systems needed to provide cloud services.
It will be harder and harder to tell the difference between a talk discussing how to manage an application running in a virtual machine and one discussing how to manage a cloud workload. Many management vendors will demonstrate tools that manage virtualization (such as VMware vSphere) and public cloud services (especially Amazon's EC2 and S3) at the same time, with the same interfaces. Long lines will be form for topics that will have little to do with who owns the infrastructure or how it is paid.
At that point, the decoupling of physical infrastructure management and virtual workload management will nearly be complete--and the cloud-computing DNA will really begin to take over.
That's a bit misleading, as the interest in cloud computing is often taken out of context, and when you bring virtualization into the picture, that interest seems to remain exploratory rather than strategic.
Amazing innovation is happening in both public- and private-cloud offerings, and the overwhelmingly positive response to cloud computing--in particular to Amazon's top-notch Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, and related offerings, as well as Google Apps and the first generation of software-as-a-service superstars, such as Salesforce.com.
But the critical truth--that interest in virtualization technologies currently outweighs interest in the cloud-computing model--has been evident at trade shows I've attended over the the last several months targeting subjects ranging from networking to next-generation data centers to cloud computing itself, and it has hit home here at VMworld this week. The bottom line is that virtualization is where the money is this summer; cloud computing isn't.
Technology trends follow the patterns described by the science of complex adaptive systems. There is constant change and mutation, and there is a feedback loop that encourages stronger innovations to survive and grow while killing weaker ones, yet somehow, the system maintains a working balance that doesn't get too chaotic to manage or too ordered to allow innovation.
As with any complex adaptive system, traits that eventually come to dominate the system tend to start small: a single mutation, or the introduction of a small number of invasive foreign entities, for example. In the case of the "invasive" cloud computing model, the "DNA" is strong.
Amazon Web Services proves that you can get your infrastructure over the Internet. Salesforce.com proves you can run your business relationships through a browser. Both public and private clouds introduce flexibility and efficiency into IT services.
Cloud-computing bellwethers
Cloud computing is definitely in your future, in one form or another. It probably already plays a strong role in your day-to-day computing experience. That said, when you measure audiences at technology trade shows such as Cisco Live and Interop, you see where the real interest of the everyday IT professional is. At VMworld, the audiences at virtualization-related sessions have been consistently larger than those at cloud-centric sessions.
Recent cloud-only conferences have remained quite small--typically in the tens or hundreds of participants--in comparison to their brethren, and cloud-focused sessions at larger shows have been attended by fewer people their virtualization peers. Several of my cloud-focused colleagues have even noted that some shows end up with the same vendors pitching to each other over and over again.
Without a doubt, this is simply an indication of the current stage in which we find ourselves in the long evolution from internal data centers to cloud-centric operations. The ratio of interest will change (or, more appropriately, converge). But if you want to get into the head of most IT tech geeks today, you need to address the subject of virtualization first, then acknowledge cloud computing as a future target.
The best evidence I can personally attest to are the breakout sessions and panels in which I've participated. I have been giving two basic talks this summer, one focused on cloud computing's future ("Achieving the Intercloud"), and one about the journey from virtualization to cloud computing. Without a doubt, sessions with the term "virtualization" in the title have seen the best attendance, whether measured by room capacity or interaction after the talk.
Transitions ahead
What does that mean to the average cloud enthusiast? Well, for one thing, it remains important to see cloud computing as a transition--an operations model that requires addressing technology and cultural issues before widespread adoption. The good news here? Current trends in virtualization, automation, and early cloud offerings are forcing most of those issues to be faced head-on.
It also highlights how much work is ahead of us in helping those responsible for application operations see the value in cloud environments. This education will be greatly accelerated this year, thanks to the amazing work that customers large and small are doing, especially in public clouds. However, it will also require technologies that address the concerns that many have about moving virtualized workloads into someone else's infrastructure.
I'm betting that at this time next year (or the following year, at the latest), most of the convergence of virtualization and cloud interest will have happened, with the exception of the continued interest that service providers and enterprise data center operators will have in the physical infrastructure and management systems needed to provide cloud services.
It will be harder and harder to tell the difference between a talk discussing how to manage an application running in a virtual machine and one discussing how to manage a cloud workload. Many management vendors will demonstrate tools that manage virtualization (such as VMware vSphere) and public cloud services (especially Amazon's EC2 and S3) at the same time, with the same interfaces. Long lines will be form for topics that will have little to do with who owns the infrastructure or how it is paid.
At that point, the decoupling of physical infrastructure management and virtual workload management will nearly be complete--and the cloud-computing DNA will really begin to take over.
Cloud computing: Amazon, Salesforce.com and Rackspace
Posted Sep 1st 2009 2:30PM by Steven Halpern
Filed under: Amazon.com (AMZN), salesforce.com inc (CRM)
"The term cloud computing is nothing particularly new or complicated; it simply means that instead of having software on your home, office or notebook computer, you run applications over the Internet," explains Gregg Early.
In Personal Finance says, "It's the way of the future as computing becomes increasingly mobile." Here, he looks at a trio of plays on this trend: Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), and Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX).
"I would point out that I'm writing this article on Google Docs. This document is stored on a Google server farm, not on my office computer.
"When I want to access this document -- from my house, office, laptop or mobile phone -- I simply go to my Google account and it shows up. This kind of computing has gone from quixotic concept to ubiquitous reality.
"From a business standpoint cloud computing is compelling because it means a business doesn't have to buy software or licenses for each of its employees or hire additional IT staff to maintain and upgrade software packages or train staff on how to use them.
"Some cloud computing giants got there as a happenstance to their original business models. Amazon.com, for example, is known as a leading online retailer.
"But because it had to build up enormous amounts of data storage for all its records and then began to build relational databases among its customer profiles, an entire new business sprung up.
"Amazon can 'sell' its excess storage capacity and also works with businesses on their marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) protocols.
"Now Amazon-the-online-bookstore is also Amazon-the-cloud-computing-storage-vendor-and-management-consultant-to-online-businesses. It's this kind of adaptive business acumen that we like so much about this company.
"Another pioneer in this space is Salesforce.com, a CRM and sales site that's removed the software from your desktop and stuck it in the cloud. Sales teams can now coordinate and interact while on the road from any computer, wherever they are.
"It's also much more cost effective for business to go with a cloud CRM provider. And in this kind of economy, you have to leverage every dime.
"A new player that's generating a lot of buzz is Rackspace. Two web developers were sitting around a Wendy's in 2004 talking about the clustering, load-balancing, and virtualization.
"They analyzed what the large enterprise customers were using to stay online. They set out to bring that sort of redundancy and scalability to web applications, regardless of whether it was for an individual or business.
"By 2005 the company was off and running. Basically, it rents cloud space to businesses and individuals--and it's the world's leader in hosting.
"It delivers websites, web-based IT systems, and computing as a service. This is where the online world is trending and where long-term growth opportunities are huge."
Steven Halpern's TheStockAdvisors.com offers a free daily overview of the favorite stock picks and investment ideas from the nation's leading financial newsletter advisors.
Filed under: Amazon.com (AMZN), salesforce.com inc (CRM)
"The term cloud computing is nothing particularly new or complicated; it simply means that instead of having software on your home, office or notebook computer, you run applications over the Internet," explains Gregg Early.
In Personal Finance says, "It's the way of the future as computing becomes increasingly mobile." Here, he looks at a trio of plays on this trend: Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), and Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX).
"I would point out that I'm writing this article on Google Docs. This document is stored on a Google server farm, not on my office computer.
"When I want to access this document -- from my house, office, laptop or mobile phone -- I simply go to my Google account and it shows up. This kind of computing has gone from quixotic concept to ubiquitous reality.
"From a business standpoint cloud computing is compelling because it means a business doesn't have to buy software or licenses for each of its employees or hire additional IT staff to maintain and upgrade software packages or train staff on how to use them.
"Some cloud computing giants got there as a happenstance to their original business models. Amazon.com, for example, is known as a leading online retailer.
"But because it had to build up enormous amounts of data storage for all its records and then began to build relational databases among its customer profiles, an entire new business sprung up.
"Amazon can 'sell' its excess storage capacity and also works with businesses on their marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) protocols.
"Now Amazon-the-online-bookstore is also Amazon-the-cloud-computing-storage-vendor-and-management-consultant-to-online-businesses. It's this kind of adaptive business acumen that we like so much about this company.
"Another pioneer in this space is Salesforce.com, a CRM and sales site that's removed the software from your desktop and stuck it in the cloud. Sales teams can now coordinate and interact while on the road from any computer, wherever they are.
"It's also much more cost effective for business to go with a cloud CRM provider. And in this kind of economy, you have to leverage every dime.
"A new player that's generating a lot of buzz is Rackspace. Two web developers were sitting around a Wendy's in 2004 talking about the clustering, load-balancing, and virtualization.
"They analyzed what the large enterprise customers were using to stay online. They set out to bring that sort of redundancy and scalability to web applications, regardless of whether it was for an individual or business.
"By 2005 the company was off and running. Basically, it rents cloud space to businesses and individuals--and it's the world's leader in hosting.
"It delivers websites, web-based IT systems, and computing as a service. This is where the online world is trending and where long-term growth opportunities are huge."
Steven Halpern's TheStockAdvisors.com offers a free daily overview of the favorite stock picks and investment ideas from the nation's leading financial newsletter advisors.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
'Grid computing Red Hat' lands elephant on VMware cloud
Hadoop for the future
By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author
Posted in Servers, 31st August 2009 10:02 GMT
Free whitepaper – The total economic impact of NetQoS Performance Center
Cloudera - the star-studded Silicon Valley startup that commercialized the epic number crunching of the open source Hadoop project - is now offering a version of its stuffed elephant distro for use on VMWare's imminent vCloud.
Inspired by research papers describing Google’s proprietary software infrastructure, Hadoop is a means of crunching epic amounts of data across a network of distributed machines. And it's named for the yellow stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of its founder, Doug Cutting, who joins Cloudera this week after a stint at Yahoo!
Cloudera has already tweaked its distro for use on Amazon's on-demand infrastructure service, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and now the company has cooked up management scripts for deploying a Hadoop cluster on vCloud, the infrastructure cloud setup that VMWare announced in September.
"What we've changed are the management scripts around the core Hadoop platform so that they allow you to very easily start up a Hadoop cluster within the vCloud environment," says Amr Awadallah, Cloudera's chief technical officer. "It's very similar to the management scripts we offer for Amazon EC2."
No, you can't actually use the vCloud at the moment. Third-party hosting providers are set to offer sky-high compute resources based on VMware's setup sometime in the first quarter. But VMware has already released the vCloud API, and this is what Cloudera has coded to. The startup is running demonstrations of its vCloud-friendly distro this week at VMworld in San Francisco.
To be clear: Cloudera is not offering a Hadoop service on Amazon EC2 or the VMware cloud. It's offering a distro you (the user) can setup on these public infrastructure clouds - or inside your own data center. And since you can use the vCloud design to setup your own private infrastructure cloud, Cloudera's new management scripts may prove useful even if you don't go the public cloud route.
And in Red Hat-like fashion, Cloudera provides support as well.
If it's a ready-made Hadoop web service you're looking for, you can get that from Amazon itself. Amazon Elastic MapReduce sits Hadoop atop EC2 and the company's simple storage service (S3). But Cloudera will tell you that when run on EC2, its distro out-Amazons Amazon.
By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author
Posted in Servers, 31st August 2009 10:02 GMT
Free whitepaper – The total economic impact of NetQoS Performance Center
Cloudera - the star-studded Silicon Valley startup that commercialized the epic number crunching of the open source Hadoop project - is now offering a version of its stuffed elephant distro for use on VMWare's imminent vCloud.
Inspired by research papers describing Google’s proprietary software infrastructure, Hadoop is a means of crunching epic amounts of data across a network of distributed machines. And it's named for the yellow stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of its founder, Doug Cutting, who joins Cloudera this week after a stint at Yahoo!
Cloudera has already tweaked its distro for use on Amazon's on-demand infrastructure service, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and now the company has cooked up management scripts for deploying a Hadoop cluster on vCloud, the infrastructure cloud setup that VMWare announced in September.
"What we've changed are the management scripts around the core Hadoop platform so that they allow you to very easily start up a Hadoop cluster within the vCloud environment," says Amr Awadallah, Cloudera's chief technical officer. "It's very similar to the management scripts we offer for Amazon EC2."
No, you can't actually use the vCloud at the moment. Third-party hosting providers are set to offer sky-high compute resources based on VMware's setup sometime in the first quarter. But VMware has already released the vCloud API, and this is what Cloudera has coded to. The startup is running demonstrations of its vCloud-friendly distro this week at VMworld in San Francisco.
To be clear: Cloudera is not offering a Hadoop service on Amazon EC2 or the VMware cloud. It's offering a distro you (the user) can setup on these public infrastructure clouds - or inside your own data center. And since you can use the vCloud design to setup your own private infrastructure cloud, Cloudera's new management scripts may prove useful even if you don't go the public cloud route.
And in Red Hat-like fashion, Cloudera provides support as well.
If it's a ready-made Hadoop web service you're looking for, you can get that from Amazon itself. Amazon Elastic MapReduce sits Hadoop atop EC2 and the company's simple storage service (S3). But Cloudera will tell you that when run on EC2, its distro out-Amazons Amazon.