Telematique, water and fire.

More on the Xen Cloud Platform

The Reg's Timothy Prickett Morgan has posted Xen packages build-your-own-cloud kit and it adds some needed clarity to the upcoming Xen/Citrix announcement.

Simon Crosby's quoted as stating the goal of delivering to market a standardized stack for a cloud-based deployment of the Xen hypervisor. Prickett Morgan makes the point that it's an open source vertical platform, but clearly should not be considered a turn-key solution.

The Xen Cloud Platform does not include tools for creating, provisioning, monitoring, or managing a cloud. Rather, it is a complete infrastructure virtualization stack that companies building clouds can standardize upon.

The article goes on to point out that it's not only 'free' but hackable open source. It brings up the issue that GPL-based open source licensed code has an interesting loophole ... Since a service vendor's revised/enhanced/hacked code is not being re-distributed (but used solely for the provision of services), the license does not require the licensee to return the enhancements to the open source community. What isn't clear from the article is the licensing regime under which XCP will be offered.

Another point of clarification is the distinction Citrix is making between XCP and the Citrix Cloud Center (C3).

And this future product will be distinct from the Citrix Cloud Center (C3), formerly known as XenServer Cloud Edition, that Citrix pitched last year and tweaked when it started giving away XenServer for free this past February. ...

The Xen Cloud Platform is not C3, but it will include some storage management, chargeback, and other features that Citrix created for C3 or the Essentials for XenServer tools that are necessary for cloud providers. The cloud stack includes the Xen hypervisor, with support for either Linux or Windows instances inside of its virtual machines. The stack also includes a domain 0 Linux installer for the Xen hypervisor that is pulled right from the kernel.org site where the Linux kernel lives. ... Citrix will open source storage features it has created to link into disk arrays to do volume management, snapshotting, cloning, and such, and chargeback and other features to cope with usage tracking will be added to the stack as well by Citrix.

Of major interest is the approach to a distributed virtual switch infrastructure. The article notes that XCP will include the Open vSwitch that's available under the Apache 2 license., and is supported by the Citrix XenServer 5.5 hypervisor. This is not yet a full OSS solution, and Citrix will be under pressure to either release to open source some of their virtual switch technology, or Open vSwitch will need to light a fire.

Finally, the support of DMTF's OVF is reiterated.

Cloud Computing

Attention Span 09.05.10

Happy Mothers Day!

Annelidous

... It is a framework on which to build, use, and deploy an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. Companies may use it to build public or private clouds.

It can be used as a simple proxy between two IaaS management APIs, as a library for IaaS management frontends, or as a complete IaaS solution. It is protocol agnostic, meaning that it can provide various frontend and backend IaaS management APIs for a wide range of compatibility with existing public and private virtual infrastructures.

Attention Span 2009.05.05 (morning edition)

Happy Cinco de Mayo!!

Hackers Break Into Virginia Health Professions Database, Demand Ransom

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.

Hitachi Data Systems Enables Integrated Server-to-Storage Virtualization

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT : ) and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced a new end-to-end server-to-storage virtualization initiative to drive efficiencies across virtualized environments. To support this strategy, Hitachi Data Systems also announced two important business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for virtual environments...

US needs 'digital warfare force'

The BBC seems to have 'picked up' this theme. First there appeared a story about creating a botnet as an offensive weapon, posited by an un-official source (an ex-USAF officer). Now this story. This has the feel of a 'drum beat'. Someone, somewhere is going to break a story, or someone is letting out an 'official' version of a story. I noted the last line of the story: 'The US administration is due imminently to publish the results of a 60-day review on cyber-security ordered by President Obama.'

The US has set up specialised detachments dealing with IT problems

The head of America's National Security Agency says that America needs to build a digital warfare force for the future, according to reports.

Lt Gen Keith Alexander, who also heads the Pentagon's new Cyber Command, outlined his views in a report for the House Armed Services subcommittee.

The right not to get caught

A report on the Open Rights Group event held recently in London, at which Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross discussed privacy in an age of electronic visibility.

... This was perhaps one of the key take away points of the evening - the contemporary concept of privacy hasn’t been around that long, being mostly a middle class 20th century contrivance, so should we be really all that shocked/bothered that the concept is being changed as new social norms emerge?

An Open Letter

From Adventures in Open Source, and open letter to MSFT, HP, IBM and ORCL with tongue firmly implanted in cheek. The unfortunate aspect of this letter is that it seems to actually be a 'course of last resort' for small ISVs who have labored to create proprietary software and have failed to gain traction.

Think of it as “fauxpen source“. Take some product that is pretty much end of life, sanitize it a bit and release it as open source. Call everything else “enterprise extensions”. Update your website and suddenly you are an open source company. Or, you can just acquire an open source company (I’m looking at you, Oracle) and be assured of a piece of the coming windfall.

Attention Span 2009.05.02

What caught my attention today... actually, I tried to stay OFF the web today, and focus on writing. So, not too much:

Number Crunching Made Easy

Newsweek calls out the use of the OSS emanating from Argonne. Globus' Nimbus makes the mainstream press.

The cloud is already making high-performance computing more readily available to researchers in the developed world. The Nimbus project at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has developed open-source software that can launch a virtual supercomputer within minutes on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Earlier this month, nuclear physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York used the service to rush through a set of new simulations on data from the lab's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider—set up to give a glimpse into what the universe may have looked like in its first few moments—rather than waiting weeks or months for a slot to open up on the lab's big computers. The innovation could have a profound effect: simplifying and speeding up research in everything from renewable energies to drug testing.

Neo4j - the graph database

This, to me, sounds so appropriate for a number of projects I've been contemplating. I'm hoping that the skills curve is not so steep that I can't chip away at it.

Neo4j is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables. A graph (mathematical lingo for a network) is a flexible data structure that allows a more agile and rapid style of development.

You can think of Neo4j as a high-performance graph engine with all the features of a mature and robust database. The programmer works with an object-oriented, flexible network structure rather than with strict and static tables — yet enjoys all the benefits of a fully transactional, enterprise-strength database.

Cloud Computing

Attention Span 2009.04.30 (Morning Edition)

What caught my attention today this morning:

Is Social Media a Hostile Work Environment

There is a very real danger in making the use of social media an “official” part of a person’s role within the organization without guidelines and expectations. When one chooses to interact via social media they bear the responsibility. They can follow and unfollow at will, and they can always decide it’s too hostile for them and choose not to interact.

Beyond Using Open Source

Coté at Redmonk recaps a recent presentation given at the Free Open Source software License Insight Conference in Korea. It's a great consolidation of the issues involved in corporate use of OSS, but more importantly makes the point that corporate "use" is best accompanied by corporate "contribution."

For an organization, open source offers the chance to of not only lower costs, more open communities to draw from, and, in the best case, innovative software. Ultimately, moving beyond simply “using” open source into being involved with and supporting open source affords the organization a better chance to share control over the ongoing life of software it depends on. This translates into more overall control of an organization’s own destiny, which is clearly a highly desirable outcome for any strategic decision, such as becoming more involved in open source.

Surgient revs fake server headache pill

In my continuing search for virtual systems management vendors that are succeeding in the current environment, Surgient continues to show up as one of the few pure VSM plays that's doing well.

..the Surgient tool has grown up into a self-service kiosk of sorts for physical and virtual servers that takes away a lot of the headaches of - and for some, perhaps the paychecks of - system administrators who have to set up, test, and deploy iron (physical or virtual makes little different) to run applications.

Akamai: We're a Cloud Provider, Not a CDN  

During yesterday's first-quarter earnings call, Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM) CEO Paul Sagan might have signaled a shift in describing the company as a cloud computing provider, moving away from dreaded term "CDN" (content delivery network).

According to the transcript of yesterday's call you'll find only about 10 mentions of "delivery" or "content delivery," some of which are tied to the description of what other competitors have to offer. But do a search for "cloud" or "cloud computing" and you'll see that Sagan mentioned those terms 14 times.

Analyzing The Cloud

Mike Schaffner of Forbes on the affinities for cloud computing that naturally occur within small- to medium-enterprises (SMEs) and the possible diseconomies for large enterprise pointed out by the McKinsey 'Clearing the air on cloud computing' report. It's still an over-simplified argument, and definitely does NOT take into account the distinction between cloud services and internal cloud computing.

(Will) Forrest (of McKinsey & Co.) contends that the labor savings of going to the cloud are not as significant as perceived as it relates primarily to "touch labor" roles of the data center. This analysis is basically a traditional "make vs. buy" supply chain analysis, and therefore, it is not surprising that some large enterprises could have equal or better economics by keeping the data center in-house.

If you agree with Forrest's analysis, it would be logical to expect cloud computing to make inroads within SMEs but not large enterprises. This is the exact same conclusion we came to earlier but from an entirely different approach.

Cloud Security Needs Its Rainmaker

George Hulme assesses the announcement of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), picks a few nits, may have even picked a few legitimate fights.

If you think it's tough managing identities, devices, malware, exploit attacks, mitigating software vulnerabilities, and conducting meaningful audits today -- you haven't seen anything yet compared to what's coming with the hyper-connected nature of data, people, infrastructure, devices, and applications in "The Cloud."

Explaining and selling this important fact to business leaders, IT vendors, service providers, and convincing corporations that they're better off to pay a little now for much better security -- than to pay much more later on for much less security -- is perhaps the CSA's most important and ambitious task.

I ask you to join the debate on Twitter hashtag #csaguide

Power corrupts. Imaginary power corrupts obsoletely

What he said...

Could it be that Twitter has become the gin cart of our time - not in all cases, but in enough to constitute a kind of methadone for TV addicts? Just a thought.

My point, however, isn’t about TV or Twitter, or SEO, or obsessive posting for its own sake. It’s about being constructive. Because I think life is a constant series of choices. Either we put our shoulder to a wheel, or we just take a ride. Either we build something, or we just occupy a space.

What's Mad Cloud Disease (MCD)?

People are found sitting in a meeting and starting to mumble strange words like scalability, capex, opex, Amazon, EC2, S3, EBS, SimpleDB, AppEngine, Salesforce, or Azure.

Beware, those men and woman are infested with a newly discovered illness: the Mad Cloud Disease (MCD)

Cloud Computing

Clouds and F/OSS

Stephen O'Grady, one of the indominable Redmonk analysts, has a great response to a recent interview of Richard Stallman as reported by the Guardian. 

Over the past few days, the noise generated by the interview, in which Stallman refers to cloud computing as "stupidity" and "marketing hype" has been reminiscent of religious arguments or ideological debates on free market economics in the US Congress. 

However, I'd really have to recommend O'Grady's thoughtful treatment of the issue, and his (deservedly respectful) response to David Berlind about Free Software / Open Source Software.  O'Grady correctly (IMHO) establishes the notion that F/OSS has a huge impact on SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings.  In part, it's because the vendors of proprietary softare, platforms and infrastructure have been happily minting money based on a classic computing and product economy (vs. a service economy).  In part, it's because the F/OSS arguments really DO hold for technologies in which there exist reasonably well defined reference implementations ... operating systems, web servers, application platforms, data base management systems ... that lend themselves to standardized interfaces or by virtue of market dominance (like MSFT's Exchange) have become a de facto standard. 

I'd recommend watching the likely exchange between (and around) O'Grady and Berlind.   It's likely to be well worth the attention.

tecosystems » Is the Cloud Stupid?

All of which begs the question of whether or not cloud computing is a clear and present danger to either or both of the free software or open source movements. From his comments, it seems reasonable to deduce that Stallman does so regard it. As does one of the smarter journalists you’ll meet: one David Berlind.

Personally, I disagree. To quote Austin Milbarge, for once I am in complete agreement with my partner: far from marginalizing F/OSS, the cloud may well prove to be its most significant benefactor.

Consider, for a moment, that the F/OSS’s impact on the PC has been, desktop marketshare-wise, neglible. And that while successful in the server market, it is hardly dominant. Yet in the cloud, F/OSS is at present the rule, rather than the exception.

Amazon? Built on Xen, hosting only (to date) open source operating systems (Linux and, in alpha, OpenSolaris). Google App Engine? Only the folks in Moutain View what, precisely, it’s composed of, but there’s little question that the foundation is open source. The language (Python) and the primary framework (Django), meanwhile, are as well. And so on. Some of the success of F/OSS within the cloud is doubtless attributable to the specific players. By Ray Ozzie’s own admission, Amazon - a shop with deep experience in open source technologies - simply took the cloud market far more seriously than did Microsoft. If the roles were to be reversed, the makeup of the cloud might look radically different.

But the foundational role that F/OSS plays within the cloud ecosystem cannot be entirely attributed to the players. Licensing - or the lack thereof - played its part, as did the technology itself. For many would-be cloud providers, F/OSS is simply the best tool for the job.

Citrix - XenSource sets the sales strategy

Opening up markets has been VMware's job and their strength.   Citrix-XenSource will need to be more than a me-too in server and desktop virtualization if it has any chance of coming in as a winner. One of the ways it might differentiate itself is in the focus it puts on the mid-tier enterprise market and on the SMBs.  It makes sense to deliver their product in OEM form and to develop the VAR strategy that targets precisely these sectors.  It's not that they'll be left alone to mine those markets. They'll need to differentiate their offer (as well as support their channels with a LOT of muscle).  The question in my mind is how they'll best deliver that differentiation.  Seems to me that open source technology that  supports XenSource would be among the most fruitful.

Citrix recruits OEMs, VARs to fuel open source virtualization growth

Citrix will release "a couple of announcements hopefully before the end of the year" detailing which major vendors will preinstall Citrix's XenExpress OEM Edition hypervisor on their servers, according to Matt Haynes, Citrix's director of sales strategies, channels and field marketing. "That OEM strategy will be part of our go-to-market strategy," he said.

The alliances may not move XenSource -- an open source virtualization developer Citrix acquired in August -- into parity with VMware Inc.'s market-leading software, but they should narrow the competition, Haynes said.

The agreements will be similar to the one VMware announced at last month's VMworld, under which VMware's ESX Server 3i hypervisor will be integrated with server hardware from Dell Inc., Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, NEC and others.

...

Citrix is also crafting a channel strategy to complement its technology and OEM push, Haynes said. Its goal over the next 18 months is to add 1,600 channel partners globally to sell the XenSource XenEnterprise version 4 open source virtualization software.

Technorati Tags: Citrix, XenSource

More on Utility Computing Standards

The conversation about which I wrote has been getting appropriate attention and more people with credentials weighing in.

James Urquhart points to utility computing market's need for "a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers."

To which I say: Amen. He then (correctly, IMHO) questions the ability of the virtual appliance concept by itself to be the answer. I got on a soapbox yesterday regarding a standard representation or description of VM assemblages. Were that available, it would go quite a distance to addressing the problem James points out.

For added goodness, Bert and Simon have commented on the post, summarizing their respective points of view. Simon's comment succinctly sets the context by stating that the creation of a non-proprietary standard and encouraging its adoption through open source availability is "...based upon the assumption that you have an engine with allows for portability between one CSP (common service provider) and another." This is the precondition I wish I'd stated as well as he has.

To return to my point: The engine to which he refers will require an accepted standard of description or, perhaps, of prescription. What's needed is a uniformly understood representation of VM assemblages: the application level components (VMs or physical servers), the network's components and the connections that lash them together as a functioning system. A standard limited only to VM description and representation of individual active units is necessary but not sufficient to meet the goal.

Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: utility computing

Recently, I have been telling anyone who will listen that this nascent utility computing market is still searching for a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers. I like the concept of a virtual appliance, but we need a (non-proprietary) standard, or we need another portability mechanism besides VMs.

Technorati Tags: utility computing, virtualization, standards

Technorati Tags: Standards, Utility computing, virtualization

Utility Computing, Competition and Standards

In the reading I've been doing recently regarding virtualization and utility computing, I came across Simon Warley's blog. One of his recent posts caught my eye for a number of reasons.

The first is his taxonomy of the utility computing market. Until reading the piece, I had (lazily) characterized the market as comprised of the SaaS and IaaS (infrastructure as a service) sectors. By adding the FaaS (framework as a service), I believe that he's done us all a favor. However, I'm now tempted to get granular on everyone and introduce another segment. (More on that later.)

The second reason for calling attention to the post is his rationale for the use of open source as the operational means of achieving standards. A part of me agrees, and another sends up flares. Perhaps the use of the term "open source" isn't as crisp as I need it to be in this case. I'd like to think this through a bit in order to find the my point of view.

I have to agree wholeheartedly that the objective is the formation of a competitive utility computer market, with competition based on price, quality and capacity.

Bits or pieces?: Competition, not greed, is good.

Utility computing concerns taking the idea of utility energy provision and applying it to the world of IT, so that companies buy computing resources in much the same way that they buy electricity - charged according to metered usage.

This market is growing, and will continue to grow in three distinct areas :-

SaaS (Software as a Service) : where entire applications are provided on a utility basis.

FaaS (Framework as a Service) : where an application development and deployment environment or framework is provided on a utility basis.

HaaS (Hardware as a Service) : where raw virtual machines are provided on a utility basis.
...

Update: This will teach me not to post too quickly, which I did before reading through the very interesting dialogue between Simon and Bert Armijo of 3Tera. Bert's submitted comments to the original post and in his own blog here.

I understand both positions. I have "done time" in the formal standards organizations. (Remember OSI? X.400? X.500?) I've also spent a good portion of the past five years in the thick of open source and standardization with the creation of Univa Corporation, a company dedicated to delivering HPC infrastructure based on commercial distributions of and enhancements to the open source Globus Toolkit.

I believe that the crux of the gentlemen's disagreement shows up in this metaphor from Simon:

Agreed, virtualisation is a technology which can be used but it is not utility computing.

However, what you have created is not just virtualisation but the equivalent of Jar files for infrastructure at the HaaS level.

There's an argument that in delivering the "Jar files for infrastructure", what's now called for is the equivalent of the Jar manifest, a formal, standard description of the contents and possibly the recipe for lashing together the assembly of VMs and their contents. Through description standards adopted by and understood by the utility providers, customers have that freedom to "emigrate" from one to another. But I'm not convinced that the actual implementations of infrastructure ... the virtualized network infrastructure in particular ... needs to be open source software. In this regard, I tend to side with Bert.

Where I depart from Bert's argument is when he characterizes 3Tera's AppLogic as maintaining "... the existing infrastructure model of load balancers, NAS, firewalls etc ... that lets you define infrastructure for your app exactly as you would have built it before..." Exactly? I don't believe that's quite the case. The designer of a newly defined assemblage of servers and its underlying networks (physical and virtual) can begin "fresh" to create an extensive and impressive configuration in an AppLogic-based virtual data center. But, the vocabulary used is that of a specially defined, constrained set of load balancers, NAS, firewalls etc.

I'd claim that the network on which the virtualized servers and appliances at the SaaS and even at the FaaS layers has not been sufficiently virtualized, not exposed as a sufficiently rich abstraction layer nor even described in a standard manner. There does not yet exist the layer of abstraction and vocabulary by which one could, as Bert claims, "... take their existing images and move them to traditional colo. No lock-in." If there were, I'd be able to use those same descriptions of infrastructure to efficiently move a "legacy" configuration from a corporate data center or a traditional colo to an AppLogic-based utility or another utility service's HaaS/FaaS (such as Amazon's AWS).

Technorati Tags: utility computing, SaaS, markets

Technorati Tags: markets, SaaS, Standards, Utility computing, 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