Digital Walkabout

Cisco engages FCoE for Cloud Computing

http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_12-3/ipj_12-3.pdf

 

Later parts of this article provide good insight into emerging datacenter infrastructure and standards activity around FCoE.

Defining Cloud Computing – The Lewis Carroll Way

Defining Cloud Computing – The Lewis Carroll Way  `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said,   in rather a scornful tone,   `it means just what I choose it to mean --  neither more nor less.' `The question is,' said Alice, `whether you  can make words mean so many different things.' `The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty,  `which is to be master -- that's all.' Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. `They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs: they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!' `Would you tell me please,' said Alice, `what that means?' `Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. `I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.' `That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone. `When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, `I always pay it extra.'

White House unveils cloud computing initiative

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10353479-52.html

As an example of what's possible with cloud computing, Vivek Kundra pointed to a revamping of the General Services Administration's USA.gov site. Using a traditional approach to add scalability and flexibility, he said, it would have taken six months and cost the government $2.5 million a year. But by turning to a cloud computing approach, the upgrade took just a day and cost only $800,000 a year.

Three Initiatives:

1.    The first major element of the initiative is the brand new Apps.gov  site, a clearinghouse for business, social media, and productivity applications, as well as cloud IT services. To be sure, the site isn't fully functional yet. In fact, a brief survey of it resulted in a series of error messages. But it's evident that the administration hopes that for many agencies, the site will eventually be a one-stop shop for the kinds of services that to date have required extensive IT spending, and Kundra said he believes that some at the Department of Energy has already been using the site for some of its needs

2.    The second element of the effort, Kundra said, will be budgeting. For fiscal year 2010, the administration will be pushing cloud computing pilot projects, reflecting the effort's priority and hopes that many lightweight workflows can be moved into the cloud. For fiscal 2011, it will be issuing guidance to agencies throughout government.

3.    Finally, the initiative will include policy planning and architecture that will be made up of centralized certifications, target architecture and security, privacy, and procurement concerns. Kundra said every effort will be made to ensure that data is protected and secure, and that whatever changes are made are "pragmatic and responsible."

Presenting on "Real Life Clouds" at IDF2009

 

I will be presenting on "Real Life Clouds: Best Practices and Enabling Technologies", at the 2009 Intel Developer Conference (IDF). The session will be held at 16:15, Wednesday, September 23rd, in Room 2008 at Moscone Center West, together with Lakshmi Talluru and Rekha Raghu from Intel's Software Services Group.

 

The session covers Intel's efforts with Cloud providers to optimize their client and data center architectures and operations, and to deploy new technologies to enable the Rich Services Cloud services. In this session we will do a technical deep dive on several examples, including:

• Security technologies for multitenant hosting

• Resource isolation techniques for secure clients

• Resource monitoring requirements for differentiated Quality of Service

• Optimizations to achieve higher performance

 

I will also be demonstrating these technologies at the IDF Technology Showcase, in the Public Cloud Server Zone.

 

If you are attending IDF2009, feel free to come to my session to learn more about Rich Services Cloud, and do drop by the Server Zone to see it in action.

Rich Client Videos on the Intel vPro Expert Center

Josh Hilliker shot two videos where I presented on Rich Services Cloud with Intel Technology. In each of these I use Financial and a Document Editor applications to illustrate the benefits and power of the Rich Services Cloud.

Financial dashboard app: http://bit.ly/1sgpbk 
Document Editor app: http://bit.ly/3Whr4

Key takeaways:

• Cloud != Traditional browser-based apps - Cloud is a superset of these, most compelling of which are Rich Services Cloud apps. Users, IT and vendors understand this well, and are aggressively pursuing Rich Services. Balanced compute is clearly the future of Cloud.
• Cloud != Public Cloud - Clouds can be Public, Private or Hybrid.
• The Rich Services Cloud model and architectures enable a comprehensive solution to consumer, SMB and enterprise requirements for applications requiring anything more than basic compute capabilities.
• Cloud applications are growing increasingly hardware-aware. This means they are able to target hardware capabilities, whilst not pinning themselves to the hardware or the OS. Why is this important? Because in order to realise WORA, developers need to target display resolutions, form factors, and processing capabilities.

Many thanks to Josh and team.

VMware open sources vCloud API

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/vcloudapi

The vCloud API is an interface for providing and consuming virtual resources in the cloud. It enables deploying and managing virtualized workloads in internal and external clouds as well as interoperability between clouds. The vCloud API enables the upload, download, instantiation, deployment and operation of vApps, networks and Virtual Datacenters. 

 

Microsoft Research Project Released to Help Performance of Web 2.0 Applications

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/doloto/  

Microsoft’s new Web 2.0 performance technology, Doloto, “is a system that analyzes application workloads and automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications. After being processed by Doloto, an application will initially transfer only the portion of code necessary for application initialization. The rest of the application's code is replaced by short stubs -- their actual function code is transferred lazily in the background or, at the latest, on-demand on first execution.”

RedHat's DeltaCloud Interoperability Framework

http://press.redhat.com/2009/09/03/introducing-deltacloud/

Deltacloud provides:

•    A REST API (simple, any-platform access)

•    Support for EC2, RHEV-M; VMWare ESX, RackSpace coming soon

•    Backward compatibility across versions, providing long-term stability for scripts, tools and applications

One level up, Deltacloud Portal provides a web UI in front of the Deltacloud API. With Deltacloud Portal, your users can:

•    View image status and stats across clouds, all in one place

•    Migrate instances from one cloud to another

•    Manage images locally and provision them on any cloud

VMware entering "top-up" Cloud market, challenging Amazon

http://news.techworld.com/virtualisation/3200814/vmware-to-take-on-amazon-over-pay-as-you-go-cloud/?email

The ability to metre per usage is a critical piece of the Cloud puzzle. This appears to be the first of many entries into this space, yet VMwarre is rather competitive for hosting service providers, as it reduces the gap and eliminates the need for servcie providers to develop custom solutions.

Cloud storage on the cheap

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

From the blog:

"At Backblaze, we provide unlimited storage to our customers for only $5 per month, so we had to figure out how to store hundreds of petabytes of customer data in a reliable, scalable way—and keep our costs low. After looking at several overpriced commercial solutions, we decided to build our own custom Backblaze Storage Pods: 67 terabyte 4U servers for $7,867."

This box hosts 67TB of storage. Interestingly, it has only 4GB of RAM. Even more interestingly,  it doesn’t use a server motherboard. Instead it uses a *desktop* motherboard (Intel BOXDG43NB LGA 775 G43 ATX Motherboard); and it uses a simple high-end dual core desktop processor (Intel E8600 Wolfdale 3.33 GHz LGA).