Digital Walkabout

AT&T Unveils Network-Based 'On Demand' Computing for Companies of All Sizes

http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/11/16/at-t-unveils-network-based-on-demand-computing-for-companies-of-all-sizes.aspx

AT&T Unveils Network-Based 'On Demand' Computing for Companies of All Sizes

AT&T today announced AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service(SM), its latest innovative global cloud-based service, designed to give companies of all sizes simple on-demand access to scalable computing capacity.

Using technology from VMware and Sun Microsystems, AT&T's Synaptic Compute as a Service provides companies with a self-service approach for using IT solutions that are reliably delivered by AT&T over its highly-secure world-class network cloud.

Customers can use the service to quickly address demands for variable computing processing power and expand capacity to scale with their business requirements. In turn, AT&T delivers computing processing capacity that can scale to meet a business's immediate demand, along with management of the network, server, hardware and storage.

"As companies increasingly move to cloud-based environments, AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service provides a much-needed choice for IT executives who worry about over-building or under-investing in the capacity needed to handle their users' traffic demands," said Roman Pacewicz, senior vice president of Strategy and Application Services, AT&T Business Solutions.

"AT&T is enabling customers to extend their internal IT environments to the cloud by using their unique strengths in global network capabilities to offer cloud services that are compatible with customers' private VMware environments," said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware. "We are excited to contribute our technology to enable this and to work with AT&T in our VMware vCloud(TM) initiative that is focused on integrating and connecting private and public clouds, using the VMware vSphere(TM) virtualization platform and the VMware vCloud API."

AT&T is also working closely with Sun to use the Sun Cloud Open Cloud Platform, Sun Cloud APIs, cloud reference architecture and design expertise to create an environment to make it easy for developers to build and deploy value-added services.

"Sun is committed to helping our customers and partners deliver public and private clouds that are cost effective, open and interoperable," said Dave Douglas, senior vice president, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems. "AT&T's network and operational excellence coupled with Sun's Open Cloud Platform and Sun Cloud APIs delivers a revolutionary cloud offering. We're excited to be working with AT&T to bring an enterprise-class, highly scalable offering that delivers choice and flexibility to market."

AT&T will introduce the service in the fourth quarter of 2009. The service will be deployed in the U.S. and will be accessible by customers connecting to the Web anywhere. In time, AT&T plans to add the service to select global IDCs to meet customer demand internationally.

Other service features:

• A Web portal to order, provision and manage server capacity, or to program the APIs.
• The convenience to pay only for the capacity used and receive a monthly bill that can, if desired, be paid with a credit card.
• Multiple storage options including disk capacity for each virtual server's operating system and space to share files between virtual servers, as well as the ability to connect to AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service.
• Round-the-clock monitoring of the Synaptic Compute as a Service platform by AT&T support teams.
• A service level agreement that covers availability of the platform that runs the customer's virtual servers.
• No upfront fees, no long-term obligations and no termination fees.

AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service is the latest addition to the AT&T family of Synaptic Services to be delivered in little more than a year. AT&T's Synaptic portfolio is part of its umbrella strategy to drive innovation across enterprise networking and computing environments through hybrid public and private cloud platforms. The AT&T network is the lynchpin for integrating these technologies, and delivering enterprise class network-based security and application management capabilities. In addition, AT&T believes its "infrastructure as a service" platform over time will accelerate the deployment of applications generated by developers working within the AT&T network cloud.

By unifying -- also known as "federating" -- with the AT&T service, customers will be able to seamlessly manage all their IT resources across the enterprise and develop applications all from one location and move application workloads where and when they are needed. Customers will be able to handle their business needs all in the same way whether they will be running internally in their own datacenter or in AT&T's cloud.

With AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service, customers can program their application to routinely expand capacity during a block of days each month to handle their firm's book closing. Transportation firms can increase computing power daily for processing driver schedules, route changes and other logistics. Companies can program the service to respond to spikes in Web traffic from holiday sales or events, sports programs, short-term campaigns, emergencies and more. Also, IT architects can use the service to build environments for safely testing new applications, or installing system upgrades without impacting the entire enterprise.

For more information on AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service go to http://www.synaptic.att.com.

HP acquires 3Com, challenges Cisco

Hewlett-Packard reached an agreement to acquire 3Com, for $2.7 billion in a deal that will help improve H.P.’s business in China, expand its network gear business, and position it to challenge the market leader in networking, Cisco Systems.

Under chief executive Mark V. Hurd, Hewlett-Packard has been beefing up its network equipment offerings to compete more aggressively against Cisco to sell data-center gear to corporations. But so far, H.P. has mostly supplied smaller equipment used in office networks, both wired and wireless.

Per Ann Livermore, EVP at HP, they had been "missing networking for the core of the data center.... That’s where Cisco is strong, and before, HP couldn’t attack that.”

That move came shortly after Cisco linked up with EMC and VMware in a partnership which tightly integrates storage alongside easy-to-manage virtualized data-center bundles called V-Blocks.

The 3Com acquisition broadens the networking technology HP can fold into its data-center offerings. "Our extensive product line and innovative technology together with HP's breadth and scale will expand our global opportunity," said 3Com CEO Bob Mao.  

Red Hat releases Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Virtualization Manager for Servers

REVH (Redhat Enterprises Virtualization Hypervisor) is a stripped down version of RHEL 5.4, with the following characteristics (partial list):

   Support for Intel VT / EPT and AMD-V / RVI

   Support for up to 64 physical CPUs (up to 256 core)

   Support for up to 1TB physical RAM

   Support for up to 16 vCPUs

   Support for up to 64GB vRAM

   Support for memory overcommit (page sharing only, depending on Linux Kernel Same-page Merging)

   Support for physical NICs bonding and multipath I/O

   Support for NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel

   Support for RHEL (from 3 to 5) and Windows (2003, 2008 and XP) guest operating systems. 

For Windows guests Red Hat offers paravirtualized (network and block) drivers based on the VirtIO standard, which are certified by Microsoft thanks to the SVVP certification.

Red Hat reports that KVM can handle up to 600 virtual machines within a single host.

 

REVMS supports the following capabilities:

   Virtual machines live migration (across NFS, iSCSI and FC shared storage)

   Virtual machines high availability.

   Virtual machines dynamic resource management.

   Hosts maintenance mode (when the host is put in maintenance REVMS uses live migration to move virtual machines elsewhere)

   Hosts power management (the System Scheduler can use live migration to relocate the VMs on low activity hosts and power down the unnecessary servers)

   Virtual machines thin provisioning (the REVMS component called Image Manager allows to over commit storage

   Virtual machines snapshots (snapshots can be scheduled and used as recovery points)

   Virtual machines templates

   Role based access control and support for Microsoft Active Directory for the management console

   APIs 

 

More details are available here:

http://www.virtualization.info/2009/11/red-hat-releases-enterprise.html

Google Spanner

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/23/google_spanner/

 

Google’s massively global infrastructure now employs a proprietary system that automatically moves and replicates loads between its mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise.

The distributed technology was first hinted at — in classically coy Google fashion — during a conference this summer, and Google fellow Jeff Dean has now confirmed its existence in a presentation (PDF) delivered at a symposium earlier this month.

The platform is known as Spanner. Dean’s presentation calls it a “storage and computation system that spans all our data centers [and that] automatically moves and adds replicas of data and computation based on constraints and usage patterns.” This includes constraints related to bandwidth, packet loss, power, resources, and “failure modes”.

Dean speaks of an “automated allocation of resources across [Google’s] entire fleet of machines” — and that's quite a fleet. Google now has at least 36 data centers across the globe — though a handful may still be under construction. And as Data Center Knowledge recently noticed, the goal is to span a far larger fleet.

According to Dean’s presentation, Google is intent on scaling Spanner to between one million and 10 million servers, encompassing 10 trillion (10¹³) directories and a quintillion (10¹⁸) bytes of storage. And all this would be spread across “100s to 1000s” of locations around the world.

 

“What we are building here...is warehouse-sized compute platforms,” Gill said. “You have to have integration with everything right from the chillers down all the way to the CPU.

Hybrid Clouds emerge - Unisys

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/unisys-unveils-software-running-private-clouds-442?source=IFWNLE_nlt_daily_2009-11-02

Unisys announced Monday software and services that will enable organizations to deploy and run their own internal private clouds, as part of its strategy to offer customers a variety of cloud computing options.

The private cloud offering addresses the requirement of organizations that prefer a private cloud for mission-critical applications that use sensitive data, so they can retain greater control over their own and their customers' information, Rich Marcello, president for Consulting and Integration Solutions at Unisys Technology, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.

In a poll of customers conducted in June by the company, 72 percent said security was their biggest concern about moving workloads to the cloud. Although there is no technical reason for this, some customers are still not convinced that an external cloud is reliable or robust, and are likely to move in stages, Marcello said.

The new Unisys Secure Private Could Solution, which will be available from next month, follows the company's introduction earlier this year of technology and services for a managed cloud service on shared IT infrastructure that is hosted by Unisys. The company also plans to launch next year a hybrid cloud that combines private and public cloud capabilities.

Customers will be able to run many of their applications unchanged in a private cloud, and Unisys is also offering these companies services to help move their workload into the cloud, Marcello said. Customers can also use their own hardware, or buy hardware from Unisys, he added.

Organizations of any size can set up their private clouds with an up front investment of $50,000 for the management server, software, and services, Marcello said. The software will include provisioning, virtualization, and management software that provides for features such as a self-service portal, he added. Ongoing maintenance will involve extra fees for hardware and software support and updates.

Unisys' Stealth technology, that cloaks data through multiple levels of authentication, encryption, and bit-splitting into multiple packets, is also available for private clouds though at an extra price, Marcello said. He did not however expect customers to deploy Stealth on private clouds, as they would have their own firewalls and other security mechanisms in place. Stealth is a key component of Unisys' managed cloud service.

Unisys has also announced that its managed cloud service will support new platforms including Microsoft's .Net, IBM Websphere, and Oracle software platforms from this month, so that customers can move their applications that were developed on these software stacks unchanged to the cloud. When the service was launched earlier this year it supported only Java, Marcello said.

The company has also added disaster recovery as a service for customers of its managed Secure Cloud Solution. This new service provides business continuity and disaster recovery services on a subscription basis, it added

 

Pulling Power out of Thin Air

The Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform, a project of Intel Research Seattle with significant input from students and faculty of the University of Washington, is a project looking to leverage the capabilities of RFID tags, but also supporting sensing and computing, so as to harvest the power it uses from the reader's emitted radio signals. WISPs have been used to sense quantities such as light, temperature, acceleration, strain, liquid level, and to investigate embeddeded security. Most of the work on WISP so far has involved single WISPs performing sensing or computing functions. 

Feature of WISP:

Up to 10ft range with harvested RF power

Ultra-low power MSP430 microcontroller

32K of program space, 8K of storage

Light, temperature and 3D-accelerometers

Backscatter communication to reader

Reader to WISP communication (ASK)

Real-time clock

Storage capacitor (to sense without reader)

Voltage sensor (measures stored charge)

Extensible hardware (to add new sensors)

HW UART & GPIO for external connections

Works with select EPC Class 1 Gen 2 readers

WISP software to sense and upload data

Reader application to drive WISP

Industry standard development tools

Access to hardware design and source code 

The next phase of WISP work will likely involve the interaction of many WISPs, and thus allow an exciting exploration of a new battery-free form of wireless sensor networking.

Read more at: http://www.seattle.intel-research.net/wisp/

Intel and EMC Atmos for High Performance Storage Clouds

Intel announced that it's working with EMC to offer a very low power hardware-and-software building block for those looking to float Private Storage Clouds, slated for debut in the second half of next year. The product will be based on EMC's Atmos software platform, but Intel VP of End User Platform Integration Prasad Rampalli says that with certain hardware and software optimizations, they've dropped power levels by 15 per cent "at the rack level" - without losing performance.

"How do we ensure that when you run a specific application on a specific server, it's using just the amount of resources needed to consume the lowest amount of power? We believe that it requires software like what EMC has with Atmos that works harmoniously with what the hardware provides," Intel's Prasad said. "What we're doing is giving EMC's software more knobs and dials for them to use."

According to Prasad, these knobs and dials can save you $1.5m across a 100,000-server data center. Over the next six months, Intel and EMC will pilot their hardware-and-software combo with select users.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

Amazon Web Services is releasing Relational Database as a Service (RDS) - whilst AWS has a storage cloud (S3), Compute Cloud (EC2) and a non relational Database Cloud (SimpleDB), until now, they have not offered Relational Database capabilities as a service. This has been one of the greatest demands by AWS users - given this and competition from Microsoft's SSDS, they have delivered. 

Amazon RDS is but a MySQL 5.1 database instance that is exclusively for a particular user and can be accessed via a single API call. The user gets all the capabilities of MySQL database with an additional ability to scale up based on the needs. It rids the customers of any need for time consuming database administration tasks. The patches are applied automatically with the database backed up automatically with a possibility for the user to set the retention period. 

Amazon RDS is priced similar to Amazon EC2. There are costs involved with usage of database instances, persistent storage up to 1 TB, costs for I/O requests, costs for backup storage and data transfer costs. The smallest instance costs 11 cents per hour and one can scale up to quadruple extra large instance of 68 GB of memory, 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each), 64-bit platform. 

After resisting the demands for a relational database for a long time, Amazon has suddenly jumped into the game. It is suspected that Amazon RDS seeks to preempt Microsoft's announcement about the public release of the Microsoft Azure SSDS later this month at PDC '09. For some time, Amazon has not been keen to releasing Windows based instances as a part of their EC2 offering; when it became clear that Microsoft will announce their Public Cloud "OS" at PDC '08, Amazon pre-empted the announcement with their own Windows based EC2 instances.

The announcement will also pressure the Y-Combinator startup FathomDB, which offers Database as a Service on Amazon EC2. Amazon RDS should also serve as a klaxon for companies building their entire business upon gaps in the Amazon ecosystem. It is interesting to note that this is not unique to the Amazon ecosystem alone, but can happen to any vendor whose offerings rely entirely on one vendor's ecosystem.

Moire on Amazon RDS:

 http://aws.amazon.com/rds/

“Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.”

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/10/introducing-rds-the-amazon-relational-database-service-.html

“RDS usage is charged by the DB Instance hour. As noted above, there are five instance sizes and corresponding hourly rates. You'll also pay 10 cents per GB per month for your provisioned storage and 10 cents for every million I/O requests. You get backup space to store 100% of your provisioned storage at no additional charge, with additional space priced at 15 cents per GB per month. The usual AWS charges for data transferred in and out of the cloud also apply.”

http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/10/26/amazon-relational-database-service/

“What AWS does is keep your RDS instance backed up and running, plus give you automation to up-size (and down-size). You can create snapshot backups on-demand from which you can launch other RDS instances and AWS automatically performs a nightly backup and keeps transaction logs that allow you to do a point-in-time restore.

The way I think of an RDS instance is as a virtual appliance or a special-purpose server. You really get an EC2 instance with an EBS volume running a specific version of MySQL plus automation for backups and resizing the storage volume. The API is designed such that additional versions of MySQL and other databases can easily be added in the future. Just like a regular server, each RDS instance lives within an availability zone and access is controlled through a security group (plus the mysql authentication). I haven’t had the opportunity to run some performance tests, but I would surmise that it’s not too different from DIY running mysql on a regular instance.”

Why Microsoft sees its future in [Rich Services] Cloud

From health care systems to cellphones, Steve Ballmer wants Microsoft "to invent everything that's important on the planet."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/business/18msft.html?th&emc=th

Microsoft is very much aware that they are facing a present where the traditional desktop OS and traditional thick desktop apps (i.e. Office) are being squeezed and a future where these lines will have less relevance. Without a path forward -  MS Online (the first full Cloud app suite for SMB/Enterprise - essentially MS Office in the Cloud with Rich Services clients) and to make "Cloud run better on Win7" - Microsoft is looking at a bleak future with diminishing revenue streams. 

The greatest threat the Cloud poses is not to rich client hardware - there will continue to be a solid place for notebooks and high-powered mobiles (e.g, ultraportables, which differ from netbooks in that they are designed to provide top-end-quality richness in a netbook sized form factor). Yet whilst the new world of Cloud is opening new opportunities for HW manufacturers and OEMs alike, it is making the game harder to play for the old school OS and desktop apps. Users want the agility that Rich Services Cloud provides - any device, any where - rather than the binding client-server model that traditional desktop apps provide. Likewise, IT wants to leverage the centralised management and administration of Rich Services Cloud; continued cost pressure is forcing them to abandon the high-end maintenance model associated with traditional OS and desktop apps.  

Microsoft, if it wants to maintain shareholder value and secure a place in this new world, has to adapt to the reality of the Rich Services Cloud, and both Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie have recognised this. They have bet Microsoft's future on the relevance of Rich Services Cloud. Whilst Microsoft will look at a diminution of their revenue streams from the "cash cow" days of Windows OS and Microsoft Office, their role in a world that includes KVM-type platforms (such as the WinXP KVM in Win7) and Rich Services Cloud apps (such as MS Online) will continue to have relevance. In embracing further value-added apps that utilise the Rich Services Cloud model, Microsoft may find its next "cash cow" in vertical suites. Whether this works for the depends upon whether they can make a splash early on with MS Online, and show that it can engender innovation in office productivity (i.e. compete very favourably with Google Apps), whilst providing the better usage models and user experiences. 

Why Microsoft/Danger represents Traditional Browser-based Cloud #FAIL

The very public and spectacular Microsoft/Danger/Sidekick failure has been a rallying cry for those who detract as well as over-simplify Cloud Computing. A large part of the discussion has focussed on the fragility of CC services and storage, and the over-hying of CC. However, this reaction is itself anti-CC hype, failing to truly understand the implications of the failure. A recent blog entry from Dan Dilger provides a reasoned analysis that should provide a cautionary tale against:

• Assuming "if you build it, they will come" (referring to wishful-thinking RAS), 
• Shrug-and-grin, fluff SLAs (referring to "SLAs" which essentially state "caveat emptor" and "we are not responsible [for anything]")
• Traditional Browser-based CC is sufficient (with no viable service redundancy, which would increase DC costs considerably, expecting "always connected" modes for basic functionality makes little sense. 

The T-Mobile Sidekick interacts with the Danger cloud services Microsoft operates in the same manner as a Traditional Browser-based Cloud app. It expects to always be connected to Danger's Cloud, so the device does not durably cache or otherwise store any of your data locally. When the device is power-cycled, the database is with an empty database and reloads all data from the service when it is able to reconnect.

Dilger uses iPhone as a foil for the Sidekick. The iPhone represents the opposite extreme - the device that utilises a Client-Installed, Network-Accessed Cloud application - ITunes - and the MobileMe Cloud service to sync data between the MID, a netbook/notebook/desktop device, and the Cloud. Data is durably cached and stored on the iPhone, which together with the local storage repo (the netbook/notebook/desktop device storing a copy of your content) and the Cloud, provides not only the ability to use the iPhone disconnected, but an additional level of redundancy. 

I see a better path which lies between these two extremes. This path involves more efficient utilisation of client resources and SLAs that can be taken seriously. The former would not have every install of iTunes redundantly storing all music files on the clients, rather targeting each netbook, notebook, or desktop for a level of storage, or allowing one to treat a series of their personal clients as an on-premise cloud. Likewise, content can be streamed from one's nearest storage rather than locally stored. Synchronising every file across each device is not the most efficient model. Yet some local storage and processing is necessary to make the content useful, since devices are never always connected, and the quality of that connection and location vary widely. 

The latter would provide for a level of redundancy and data protection that users have come to expect from CC. Although there are a number who would attest that they "trust" providers with 2 9s reliability, or that they are comfortable with providers taking liberties with their data as they are providing them with a "service", the same people react more viscerally to outages and failures, painting these as a CC #FAIL. The both of these extremes are daft: 2 9s reliability leaves one's data RAS to the winds of fortune, and the failure of 2 9s Cloud services does not equate CC #FAIL. Users of CC need to take it upon themselves to understand their providers' SLAs and, rather than wait for a failure to occur, either demand greater rigour or move to services which do. The continued exodus from Flickr is an example of this. If the "service" has no responsibility for what's stored therein, and anyone can delete users' data, what is the use of the "service"? Sharing must enjoy a degree of reliability, otherwise, the "service" offers nothing substantial that provides an advantage over traditional sharing forms. 

Rather than ignoring the Microsoft/Danger #FAIL, or using it to detract from CC as a whole, I see the failure as exposing the fallacy of Traditional Browser-based thin architectures, and calling for greater balance between devices and the DC for CC.