Telematique, water and fire.

iPhone Activation and the First Words from the Wise

This afternoon I took a spin through my feed reader and discovered that Apple (and AT&T) have revealed the various plans to be made available for the iPhone.  But, what really knocked my socks off was the activation procedure.  I know that numerous rumors have been circulating about activation through the iTunes store, but I admit that I'd written them off to just that -- rumors.  Then I took a look at the video tutorial.  This, folks, is really impressive.  

Dan Farber has posted a collection of the initial public reactions from the "independent" pundits.  I think it's very instructive.  The verdict: at one and the same time, it's got flaws and failings, and it's also astounding and worthy of the hype.

» iPhone reviews: Not perfect, but worthy of the hype | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Yesterday I wrote about Steve Jobs making an all-in bet on the iPhone. Now the first reviews are in from those seeded by Jobs with the device. The verdict was universal, at least among the three reviewers (who don’t want to be viewed as contributing to the hype, but were clearly enamored of Jobs’ latest creation)–not perfect, but a breakthrough product. It now looks like Jobs’ bet will pay off.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, AT&T, activation

Virtio - A Generic Virtual I/O Layer?

This article in ComputerWorld caught my attention. I've now checked out Rusty Russell's blog, and have started to dig into the work he's doing to create a single abstraction/mechanism for handling virtualized I/O devices. However, I note that, while the CW article would have us believe that virtio is imminent, Rusty's most recent blog post would lead me to a less optimistic conclusion.

I don't claim to understand (yet) what this would imply for the next generation of VMs or (in particular) physical storage systems that must be effectively virtualized. But it's pretty clear to me that this greases the skids for the industry to move on to the "next phase" in the evolution of virtualization -- (please, let's not start calling it Virtualization 3.0). To get a sense of his thinking and the various approaches he's taking, see this post.

Software promises to simplify the use of rival virtualization systems

Paul "Rusty" Russell, an Australian programmer who has contributed key components to the Linux kernel, recently submitted a virtual I/O system that could allow competing systems such as VMware, Xen and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) to use a single mechanism for handling virtualized I/O devices.

"This attempts to implement a 'virtual I/O' layer which should allow common drivers to be efficiently used across most virtual I/O mechanisms," Russell wrote in a post submitting the code to a Xen developer list.

In a blog post (see below), Russell said the "virtio" layer was a logical next step, given the proliferation of virtualization systems. Xen is a relative newcomer to the market, while KVM appeared even more recently. ...

Rusty's Bleeding Edge Page

So my work with trying to create a generic virtual I/O layer continues, ... The moral here is that Linux driver infrastructure is optimized for real hardware: interrupts, status registers, DMA and such. If you're designing an I/O mechanism and you do something "alternative" your drivers won't fit the infrastructure: they'll be foreign-looking and complicated, and possibly buggy and sub-optimal as well.

Technorati Tags: virtio, virtual i/o, virtualization

Technorati Tags: virtio, virtualization

An Interview with MySQL's Architect

An interesting interview in ComputerWorld with mySQL's architect.  Good discussion of REST and the use of Amazon's AWS services (EC2, S3, SQS) in conjunction with and as a storage engine for MySQL.

MySQL's architect discusses open source, database in a cloud, other IT issues

When I look at your Web site, I see some pretty unusual storage engines for MySQL. You can use a Web site as back-end storage or even memcached for memory-backed storage. Do those engines have any practical application? Or are they more in the nature of sample code?

Technorati Tags: AWS, MySQL, REST

How Obvious is the eGenera Patent?

While I've been holed up in conference presentations on virtualization, I completely missed the fact that Egenera has been awarded a patent on an N+1 tiered disaster recovery solution. I came across the news through the following post by Joe Foran. I have to agree that this one should be reconsidered in light of the recent ruling on patents and "Obviousness". While definitely written with an unapologetic point of view, this post is a good read and worth the time.

Why the eGenera Patent is Dangerous — Server Virtualization Blog

...The short of it - You have multiple boxes on a network that are mirrors of one another. One fails, another takes over its role. There’s usually hardware or software in-between that keeps things synchronized and detects the failure. This part of the patent is worded to be host-, network- and processor-inclusive, which would be obvious because most clusters are situated on networks, don’t necessarily need to run the same processors, and are hosts. The “big” improvement is in the use of the term “site” - where the product is meant to restore an entire data center’s configuration. In the press release, this means that if you have four data centers and one disaster site, if any one data center fails, the disaster site takes on the complete configuration of the failed site (i.e., all nodes, network configurations, etc.). This is a huge step forward in disaster recovery, but it’s not patent-worthy because there are a zillion ways to do this.

[Update] Bob McNeil of Egenera, whom I met on Tuesday and the IDC Virtualization 2.0 conference in San Francisco, pointed out to me that Joe Foran had the company name wrong. It's Egenera, not eGenera. He also points out that the patent was more than six years in the making and covers quite a lot of IP.

Technorati Tags: eGenera, DR, disaster recovery

Technorati Tags: disaster recovery, DR, eGenera

More on the Stateful - RESTful Debate

TechTarget has a couple of good articles, and the transcript of a conversation between advocates of Stateful and RESTful web services (respectively).  The transcript is a little bit hokey, but worth reading.

The ServerSide Interoperability Blog » Stateful Web Services - They really work!

About a month ago, I wrote a blog entry here discussing stateful web services, and how EJB3 more or less removed the commonly used J2EE hack, in using the serialized EJB2.1 Stateful Session Bean Handle as a session token of sorts. I mentioned how JAX-WS added support for a WS-Addressing-based stateful SOAP endpoint - the first truly “automated” and SOAP-compliant manner of providing sessions in SOAP. Now… we have sample code! It really is dead-simple, a testament to the WSIT group (Project Tango), working between Sun and Microsoft to make JAX-WS and the Windows Communication Framework in .Net 3.0 play nicely. ...

Neward and Trenaman consider REST, or The Great and Complete SOAP vs POX Debate

How far can you go with GET, PUT, POST, DELETE? Much of the programming world asks the question. Here in one place are the complete collected episodes from Ted Neward’s and Adrian Trenaman’s recent conversation on the matter of SOAP and POX. ...

Technorati Tags: SOAP, POX, web services

The Symbiosis of SaaS and Soft Appliances

Phil Wainewright starts out characterizing the packaged software appliance as a competitive offer to SaaS.  But, toward the end of the piece, he opens up the argument to say that "... SaaS vendors shouldn't see software appliances as competition.  Indeed ... managed appliances will probably become part of most SaaS vendor's infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers." 

While this is true, Phil's missed an important point:  SaaS vendors are the direct beneficiaries of "soft appliances", since they are an excellent means of implementing and deploying SaaS on a "virtual data center."  That is, the SaaS provider will employ infrastructure on demand, packaging their multi-tenant offers as soft appliances that can be provisioned as customer demand warrants.  Companies such as 3Tera make a strong case for (and hopefully a good business from) precisely this scenario. 

The bottom line is that SaaS has much to gain from embracing packaged software appliances, as both an infrastructure for on-demand service and as an on-site adjunct to their network-resident services.

» SaaS and the packaged software appliance | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

... Put all of these considerations together and you can see that appliance packaging — especially of open-source platform components — is a way of eliminating a lot of the problems associated with conventional software; but without moving entirely to a vendor-hosted SaaS model. “This is independent of the delivery model,” says Dietzen. “This is about cutting the cost of owning and running the software.”

So there’s a sense in which appliances are not so much a part of the SaaS model as competition for it. The appliance model provides many of the benefits of SaaS without forcing customers to store and access their data outside of the firewall. With a product like Zimbra, where the most intensive use is within the organization in any case, and where integration to other on-premise facilities such as telephony equipment is often important, it is often very difficult to argue for off-premise deployment anyway because that simply adds unnecessary cost and network latency. ...

On the other hand, there are many more applications that run much better off-premise because they involve a lot of interactions beyond the firewall anyway. So I think SaaS vendors shouldn’t see software appliances as competition. Indeed, as I hinted at the outset of this article, managed appliances will probably become a part of most SaaS vendors’ infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers. This assertion is especially credible if you count client-side platforms such as Silverlight, Apollo, Google Gears and so on as part of the managed appliance spectrum.

Technorati Tags: software appliance

Hosting 2.0 - How it's starting to shape up.

As I've been researching hosting services and virtualization, I came across a good post by Sal Cangeloso in which he expresses his personal interest in the topic, why it continues to intrigue him, and a short list of companies he's reviewing.

arghyle » Blog Archive » Hosting 2.0

People are still offering the traditional shared/dedicated accounts, but there are other options. Personally I hate to deal with hosting, but I am fascinated with what I see becoming available, many of which solve the problems I have had with a dedicated solution, eliminate the need for shared hosting, and challenge the traditional ways we have understood scalability. Personally I am most interested in grid/cloud computing and virtualization options. While they are not the best for all applications they not only reflect great advances in technology but also the future of web hosting.

Technorati Tags: hosting, virtualization

Virtualization and Security

In a recent post, I noted that I didn't quite understand how someone could hihack a hypervisor.  Well, I do now.  I've listened to Phil Windley's conversation with Greg Ness of Blue Lane Technologies, and then followed up with a little additional reading on their site.  This is definitely worthwhile listening for those with interest in  server virtualization and the virtual appliance "movement."

IT Conversations: Greg Ness

... Greg Ness of Blue Lane Technologies joins Phil and Scott to discuss the special security issues that virtualization creates.

Ness makes it clear that IT professionals must quickly re-learn old habits, particularly with the increasing popularity of virtualization. He reviews the theoretical differences between traditional security issues and those under VM and also gives some of the technical problems caused by those differences.

Technorati Tags: hypervisor, VM, security

VCs Still have a role in new application software companies

Phil Wainewright continues on the theme of financing SaaS. I agree that, presently, many SaaS companies can get started with very little outside financing, and that many don't and will never need institutional money from VCs. But it's an over simplification to say that this applies to all SaaS, and imply that it will always be so.

The SaaS software we're now enjoying has been developed in a fashion very much like the software generated by the "three-guys-in-a-garage" operations of the early 1980s. The amount of capital required to put out a new software title at that time was pretty minimal. A couple of PCs, a cheap compiler (probably from Borland), and a lot of sweat.

What gives SaaS the ability to deliver new apps so quickly and with such low initial investment is a combination of
- (really good) open source software, without which much of SaaS would be very labor intensive and require major investment in licenses or personnel.
- use of infrastructure that's available "by the drink" (like Amazon's AWS services S3 and EC2), which reduces the first cost (capital investment), and permits a reasonable approach to scalability, so long as the application is architected with scale in mind.
- end-user tolerance for the "one size fits all" multi-tenant application with limited ability to customize
- end-user tolerance for reliability and availability that's less than enterprise class (i.e., the eternal "beta" release)
- and, quite frankly, rather narrow, niche offerings.

What's likely to change?
- consolidation of the smallfry and the formation of the juggernauts (Salesforce comes to mind).
- serious demand for IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers, that may require venture funding. The giants (Amazon, Google, or maybe Sun) are offering reasonably priced infrastructure on demand. But all of them have their limitations and constraints. Not every SaaS will have the up-front capital required to build out their own data centers. So, where will they go for this?
- development efforts required to ruggedize SaaS offers, complete with SLAs that meet the requirements of a more demanding, enterprise customer base.

The amount of money needed by these companies will not reach the astronomical levels of years past, and probably favors the smaller venture firm that doesn't need to immediately put tens of millions to work as quickly as possible. But, I can't and won't believe that somehow SaaS is the deathknell for application software investing by the venture community. SaaS ventures will definitely rely on VCs, if only indirectly on their investments in the infrastructure on which SaaS must run.

» Do SaaS ventures need VCs? | Software as services | ZDNet.com

... In other words, a properly run SaaS company is not a risky enough proposition for venture funding. VCs want to invest in companies that have a higher risk factor than most good SaaS players, which allows them to extract a greater share of the equity in return for providing funds. Their reward for taking on this risk is the ‘hockey stick’ growth of a handful of good bets, which provides enough return to make up for the failures.

Technorati Tags: SaaS, venture capital

Technorati Tags: SaaS, venture capital

Amp'd: More MVNO bad news

Amp'd, one of the edgier and "cooler" MVNOs, has taken a pretty serious hit.  The article in the WSJ points out the difficulties of bringing predominantly "web" content to the third screen.  As the article points out, "While the number of U.S. cellphone users has been steadily growing, relatively few of them regularly use cellphones to watch TV and listen to music."  Thus, the high spend on marketing and customer acquisition. 

The questions here are:  Does "getting out of the wireless business" and into developing original content for cellphone users make sense?  Is the company's core competence creating original content, presumably for the mobile handset user?


Amp'd Mobile Files Chapter 11 - WSJ.com

Start-up wireless carrier Amp'd Mobile Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Friday night after it ran out of cash and failed to raise additional funding in time to meet debt payments. With its filing, Amp'd Mobile becomes the latest of several wireless ventures to stumble in the effort to bring video, music and other content to cellphones.

Amp'd Mobile offers a wide range of videos, music and games to distinguish itself from other wireless carriers. But it is fighting over a relatively thin slice of the wireless market. While the number of U.S. cellphone users has been steadily growing, relatively few of them regularly use cellphones to watch TV and listen to music.
...

Amp'd Mobile's Chapter 11 filing also came after a protracted board fight over the company's direction and additional funding, according to a person familiar with the situation.

It has attracted $360 million in funding from some of the largest media and technology companies and well-known venture-capital firms, as well as hedge funds and private-equity firms.

While Amp'd Mobile is growing fast, it requires significant capital for marketing and customer acquisition. A few investors questioned if the company should get out of the wireless-service business and focus on developing original content for cellphone users instead.

Technorati Tags: MVNO, Amp'd