computing on SWiK

VCs Back Tools to Look Inside the Cloud

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:01:20 -0700

Enterprise software, which has gone from running on the computer to being hosted in a corporate data center, is now moving out to nebulous pools of servers called clouds. As computing clouds become part of the corporate information technology environment, making sure software hosted in the cloud is delivered as quickly and efficiently as possible will become increasingly important.

Whether it’s an external cloud such as those offered by Amazon.com or an internal cloud operated by a Wall Street investment bank, connecting the applications running on those pools of compute power to the employees using them is going to be an integral part of a company’s wide area network, or WAN. And that has venture firms taking a fresh look at an already mature industry known as WAN optimization.

There’s nothing terribly exciting about making sure the pipeline that delivers applications between various corporate branch offices and data centers keeps moving and the software gets delivered as quickly as possible, but it’s a multibillion-dollar area of spending for corporations intent on squeezing every bit of efficiency from their broadband connections. Players in the WAN optimization market include Riverbed, BlueCoat, and Packeteer, which BlueCoat agreed to buy back in April, as well as Citrix, Cisco and Juniper.

Despite the relative maturity of the market, venture dollars are still coming in, with two fundings in August alone. On Aug. 18, Ipanema Systems, whose tactic of selling to service providers could be used to offer WAN optimization to providers of computing clouds, said it raised $7 million from Noble Ventures. About a week later, Expand Networks said it raised $8.5 million from Intel Capital, one of several rounds of funding the company has raised since its 1998 formation. On Wednesday, Expand purchased software provider NetPriva, a move that will deepen Expand’s visibility into data networks.

Both Expand and Ipanema are smaller players, says Tracy Corbo, an analyst with Gartner. She says these firms have niche products but aren’t likely to take a lot of market share away from the existing vendors. Meanwhile, there is also venture interest in creating and finding startups that might use the building blocks of WAN optimization as a launchpad for better cloud utilization and pricing. As Ryan Floyd, a general partner with Storm Ventures, says, “There are opportunities in this space for connecting two types of compute clouds and using WAN optimization to ensure reliability so outages don’t happen.”

What’s so interesting for venture firms (and eventual corporate customers) is the type of knowledge some WAN optimization startups have on hand. That visibility into a network and the servers running applications make it possible to track the delivery of cloud-based services and offer service-level agreements. Many offer compression that could reduce the costs of delivering data from a cloud. For consumers it means Twitter may become more reliable while for corporate users, it means one less strike against cloud computing. It’s also why Expand bought NetPriva and why David Asprey is starting a new company called Cloud Nines.

Asprey plans to launch within six months and doesn’t yet have venture backers, but as a veteran of Citrix, Akamai and Exodus, he’s familiar with some of the problems facing cloud providers. “The reason people care so much about WAN optimization now is that cloud computing is coming up, and clouds remove the barriers and policies an IT department has in place. So now visibility of the network traffic has become very important,” Asprey says.

Being able to measure the availability and costs associated with delivering every byte of data will benefit corporate users, but it should help the providers of clouds squeeze the lowest costs and most utilization out of their networks as well. Google has talked about such network-aware pricing, as have other service providers. Given that providing the basic pools of servers that comprise a computing cloud is a fairly low-margin business, finding pricing models that can take into account cheaper routes for data is a compelling way to shave costs.

Since you have to be able to see the network — a capability some of these WAN optimization firms have — in order to determine the best way to traverse it, expect older players to try to enhance their visibility across the network and newer players to try to usurp their dominance with a cloud-specific model.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

Sync iPhone to Google Calendar

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:02:17 -0700

Disco - Massive Data, Minimal Code

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:59:20 -0700

Disco is an open-source implementation of the Map-Reduce framework for distributed computing. As the original framework, Disco supports parallel computations over large data sets on unreliable cluster of computers. The Disco core is written in Erlang, a functional language that is designed for building robust fault-tolerant distributed applications. Users of Disco typically write jobs in Python, which makes it possible to express even complex algorithms or data processing tasks often only in tens of lines of code. This means that you can quickly write scripts to process massive amounts of data. Disco was started at Nokia Research Center as a lightweight framework for rapid scripting of distributed data processing tasks. This far Disco has been succesfully used, for instance, in parsing and reformatting data, data clustering, probabilistic modelling, data mining, full-text indexing, and log analysis with hundreds of gigabytes of real-world data.

Disco

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:56:51 -0700

Disco

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:57:16 -0700

rPath Burns EC2 Appliances in a Web Portal

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:02:23 -0700

Back in July, we looked at how cloud computing may force appliance vendors to change the way they build products. Now rPath, which makes release management tools for virtual appliances, is announcing support for EC2 on its rBuilder portal, a web site that lets users turn software into virtual appliances and publish them to clouds and virtual environments with a few clicks. It’s an impressive step in web-based release management for virtual environments, but rPath’s road may be bumpy.

Virtual appliances are bundles of software and “just enough operating system,” as rPath chief evangelist Marty Wesley puts it, to make them run. Software destined for an appliance comes in the form of distributions (such as Red Hat’s RPM format) that contain the code and related libraries. rPath’s tool first teases apart these distributions and identifies their components.

Armed with a list of what needs to go into the appliance, the tool then tailors it to the target cloud or virtual machine. “We grab the contents [of the distribution] and add them to a cart,” said Wesley. For example, if the appliance is destined for VMware, rPath adds code specific to that environment; for EC2, it leaves out the kernel and requests EC2 credentials. Finally, the system publishes the results to a variety of environments.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based startup is filled with Red Hat alumni, including CTO Erik Troan, who authored the Red Hat software packaging system RPM. rPath is seeing modest growth from its enterprise offering, claiming 58 customers since its launch in 2006, many of whom are large enterprises or ISVs who want to ship VM-ready versions of their software. The company has taken in a total of $25 million in funding, with a $15 million round completed this April, and has 25 engineers. Both CohesiveFT and FastScale are competitors, although they don’t support as many target environments; JumpBox, meanwhile, makes pre-built appliances for many popular applications.

But rPath is at a crossroads. If it wants to own the enterprise release management cycle, it needs more than just Linux RPM distributions. Here, Microsoft is just around the corner with its suite of virtualization, operating systems, and applications.

On the other hand, if rPath wants to focus on clouds with its catalog of appliances, it needs to move beyond individual machines and into scalable, multimachine application clusters. Wesley says the company is already pursuing this, but cloud management firms Elastra, 3Tera and Enomalism have a head start, offering management, scaling and licensing tools for virtual machines.

Whatever the bumps ahead, rPath’s portal and new EC2 support is a reminder of just how easily and quickly companies can move applications into an on-demand environment and free software from its underlying platform.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

OpenNebula :: start

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:57:18 -0700

A Lightweight SQL Database for Cloud and Web in Launchpad

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:57:26 -0700

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fourth Edition)

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:59:24 -0700

XSL Transformations (XSLT)

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:59:24 -0700

OSCON 2008 - O'Reilly Conferences, July 21 - 25, 2008, Portland, Oregon

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:56:41 -0700

cush

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:42:59 -0700

Cloud User Shell (cush) is a multi-call executable (like BusyBox) that combines many useful cloud computing utilities into a single utility, bringing cushy, RESTful cloud control to the command line.

It follows Unix principles, seamlessly blending cloud resources into existing working environments. In addition to bringing basic HTTP verbs (get, put, post, delete) to the shell, it allows URLs to be ‘dereferenced’ and software pipelines of server side software to be created.

Most people will create a link to cush for each function they wish to use and cush will act like whatever it was invoked as, but it can also be called directly and passed the command as the first parameter.

That Dell-Facebook News…More Like Non-News

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:11:50 -0700

Last week, Dell’s PR team was busy emailing us about a joint announcement they were going to make in tandem with Facebook. They were going to announce a partnership, they said,

…around the next generation of Cloud Computing. In addition to the joint announcement, the companies will also be discussing their perspectives, insights and future plans surrounding the Cloud Computing space.

Since it conflicted with some of my other commitments, I couldn’t go. I am actually glad I didn’t go, for it turned to be much ado about nothing. According to a post on the WSJ’s blog, the only piece of news that came out of the event held at the top of a posh office tower in San Francisco was that Facebook has 10,000 servers — and not all are made by Dell. Dan Farber has a more elaborate report but essentially it says the same, except it also has Dell re-hashing the news that Dell is now working with Salesforce.com, replacing Sun. Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger, according to the WSJ, said the company was:

… tired of all the high-cost features companies pack into servers – on a slide, he pointed to extra USB ports and unnecessary graphics capabilities as examples. Most server makers are selling what, in automobile terms, would be the equivalent of a Lexus “at a Toyota price,” he said. What Facebook wants “is the Scion product at the Scion price.” He said Dell seems to be ahead of other server makers in selling inexpensive servers that reduce power and cooling requirement.

So essentially Dell is offering stripped-down, cheaper computers that may be consuming less power! Dan Apparently the company has been doing that for a long time, as per their founder. So how this redefines cloud computing, I don’t understand. What it seems like is an attempt by Dell to add some Facebook pixie dust and finish it all up with the latest, hottest lipstick shade, called “cloud computing.” I gotta be honest, a certain impromptu toga party definetely had more news value.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

ZFS: the last word in file systems.

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:06:32 -0700

Learn How To Develop For The iPhone - NETTUTS

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:01:05 -0700

Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:07:24 -0700

New technologies tend to follow different trajectories of hype, hope, and despair as they are discovered by different groups of people and finally adopted (or ignored) by consumers. Gartner actually goes ahead and charts this hype cycle for different technologies. Its latest hype cycle for 2008, shown above, is making the rounds. (It was released in July, but is just now reaching the upward trajectory in its own cycle). According to Gartner’s view of the world, the visibility of new technologies peaks early as initial excitement gains steam. This phase is followed by a “trough of disillusionment” in which inflated expectations hit reality. But as technologies prove themselves, their visibility begins to grow again at a more measured pace.

Of course, not all technologies go through these phases. Some just drop of the face of the Earth never to be heard from again; some wander around for years and don’t hit their hype cycle until later in life, and some build visibility at a steadier pace. But it is still a useful visual metaphor, especially for high-profile technologies that do exhibit these traits.

So where are we in the hype cycle exactly? Some technologies still moving towards the “peak of inflated expectations” include cloud computing, microblogging, and 3-D printing. Public Virtual Worlds, RFID, Web 2.0, and Wikis are troughing. And emerging into the “slope of enlightenment” are Tablet PCs (oh, yeah) and location-aware applications (thank you, iPhone).

What else belongs on the hype cycle, and where would you put it?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Protect Your Kids Online Using Open DNS :: Mysticgeek's Realm

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:05:50 -0700

Hadoop: When grownups do open source | The Register

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:09:49 -0700

Computer Science: Publication: em Where do I begin? A problem solving approach to teaching functional programming

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:04:59 -0700

What Linux Will Look Like In 2012

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:05:03 -0700

Multics

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:05:07 -0700

SoundStretch Audio Processing Utility

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:05:03 -0700

SoundStretch is a command-line program that performs SoundTouch library effects on WAV audio files.

What Linux Will Look Like In 2012 -- Linux -- InformationWeek

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:09:29 -0700

An Overview of Cryptography

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:22:59 -0700

Elliotte Rusty Harold

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:12:25 -0700

19 Most Essential Open Source Applications That You Probably Want To Know - Opensource, Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:05:26 -0700

Is the Cloud Right for You? Ask Yourself These 5 Questions

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:06:02 -0700

Is cloud computing right for you? For the fledgling startup, the appeal of the cloud is obvious. Given how easily an entrepreneur’s vision can be stymied by a lack of technical and operations expertise, leveraging an Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine could provide the only viable option.

But what about large enterprises that not only have an in-house technical staff to do their bidding, but existing data centers and deep pockets? Stacey has already identified issues with some cloud providers, such as security, reliability and portability. However, assuming they are all resolved, are there compelling reasons for large enterprises to even be interested in cloud services? And if so, under what conditions?

In order to decide, the enterprise needs to ask these five simple questions:

1. Is demand constant? If demand is constant, dedicated resources in an enterprise data center are fine. Smooth, constant workloads mean that a fixed pool of servers can chug away 24/7, meeting utilization targets.

Unfortunately, very few enterprise applications have this kind of profile. Consider a retailer that does 80 percent of its annual business in the month following Thanksgiving Day. Fixed capacity engineered to peak would only be fully utilized during those four weeks, compared to utilization of slightly more than 2 percent during each of the other 11 months. In other words, its investment would go virtually untouched for more than 90 percent of the year. Try selling that to the finance committee. A cloud, on the other hand, can provide dramatic cost savings by offering access to scalable resources on a pay-per-use basis.

2. Is growth predictable? Even if demand isn’t constant, if growth is predictable, it can be managed in an enterprise data center. By building in lead times, one can place orders for additional capacity and rest easy that it will arrive in time, even by snail-mailing paper purchase orders for servers that get delivered by slow ships.

But when growth is unpredictable, the pay-per-use model of the cloud makes “cloud-bursting” — that is, leveraging cloud services to handle spikes — a more cost-effective option. Plus, with fixed capacity, it’s easy to make one of two fatal errors: Being overwhelmed by surprise demand can easily lead to poor performance or no service, resulting in the loss of both revenue and reputation. On the other hand, investing in capacity that remains idle can bankrupt a small company.

3. Can demand be shaped? Users today expect instant gratification, even from free services. While some demand can be shaped and smoothed – either by avoiding it, deferring it, or incenting it, via sales, promotions, queuing, congestion pricing, or variable pricing for yield management — some can’t.

If spiky demand can’t be shaped, on-demand scalability is indispensable. After all, how popular would Google be if a search request returned, “We’re kinda busy right now. How does next Tuesday around 2 pm work for you?”

4. Where are the users? If users are concentrated in a particular locale, they can be serviced by a single nearby data center (or two, for business continuity), but not if they’re scattered around the globe.

The only way to engineer today’s rich Internet application for a global community is to leverage a network of dispersed web, content and application servers. While building lots of data centers all over the world might have seemed like a good idea for enterprises a few years ago, a better option today is to consolidate enterprise data centers while simultaneously leveraging a cloud service provider with a global footprint.

5. Is the application interactive? There are still many applications out there that aren’t highly interactive, such as seismic analysis, circuit simulation and equity portfolio optimization. For them, geographic dispersion could be a negative, due to an inability to effectively partition the compute tasks into loosely coupled components.

However, for the tidal wave of emerging Web 2.0, AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, proximity to a service through geographically dispersed cloud resources is key as the client portion of the app has to make frequent round-trips to the server — in some cases on every keystroke. And for applications such as multipoint video collaboration, reducing hops and propagation delays between end points and cloud-based bridges is essential to creating a natural experience.

So for enterprises with smooth and predictable demand created by accommodating users who are willing to walk back across the street another day to process their batch jobs, clouds may be unnecessary.

But for enterprises pursuing emerging, shifting and uncertain global markets, with global supply chains or virtual enterprise partners and variable and unpredictable workloads coming from demanding users who want engaging, interactive interfaces, the cloud could be the right — perhaps even the best — option.

Key Question Enterprise Data Center Better Cloud Services Better Key Cloud Benefit 1) Demand 2) Growth 3) Fungibility of Demand 4) Users 5) Applications

Constant	Variable	Scalable and On-Demand
Predictable	Unpredictable
Deferrable or Promotable	Not Shapeable
Concentrated	Dispersed	Globally Dispersed to Reduce Latency
Batch	Highly Interactive	Globally Dispersed to Reduce Latency

Joe Weinman is Strategic Solutions Sales VP for AT&T Global Business Services. The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of AT&T.

InfoQ: CohesiveFT's Elastic Server On-Demand - Easy Server Provisioning

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:05:32 -0700

Elastic Server On-Demand: Home

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:05:31 -0700

Emacs Tips and Tricks by Gurmeet Singh Manku

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:04:50 -0700