Telematique, water and fire.

BEA Delivers a Short Stack

When Java was a young meme, making its way through the collective consciousness of the technology community, there was often talk about the ultimate arrival of a "pure" Java OS ... one OS to run them all.  It never happened, for a number of good reasons.

With the stability and capabilities of this generation of virtual machine environments (VMEs), application platforms that rely on a full featured JVM only have the possibility of slimming down by eliminating the OS altogether, relying on the VME hypervisor and the built-in capabilities of Java.  There are a handful of application platforms for which this might work, but if BEA's successful with this one ...  watch out!!

BEA Says No OS Necessary With WebLogic Server Virtual Edition -- Virtualization -- InformationWeek

Losing the operating system has several benefits. Many OS services are already duplicated by Java or the hypervisor, and BEA estimates that cutting the OS can reduce consumption of system resources such as memory and CPU cycles by 25% to 50%. It also simplifies management, as WLS-VE knows it's being virtualized and so can more easily map software processes to the hardware it's running on. Performance can improve, as a complete OS doesn't have to be loaded whenever a virtual machine is started.

Still, though WLS-VE shipped in July, its Liquid Operations Control management system won't be available until December. Performance claims haven't yet been proved and will depend on using hardware with virtualization support baked in--without it, VMware simply takes the place of the OS.

Technorati Tags: Java, BEA

Ray Ozzie Clarifies Microsofts Cloud Computing Intentions

This past week, Ray Ozzie, CTO and CSA at Microsoft, made an interesting presentation to the financial analyst community.  In this outing, he made a great deal clearer MSFT's intentions and inclinations with respect to utility computing.  In the course of the presentation, he identifies the three layers of Microsofts utility offerings to come:  the Global Foundation Services comprising huge data centers running commodity technology, the Cloud Infrastructure Services and the Live Platform (the "application layer" or most easily recognized as SaaS). 

It's the Cloud Infrastructure that interests me.  If, as Ray and others have said, this layer is offered up as "Infrastructure as a Service", it potentially opens a huge door into inexpensive, on-demand computing for IT organizations that depend on Microsoft, as well as OTHER operating systems and applications. The success of such an offer depends, in my view, on the ability of enterprise IT, particularly the small and medium size enterprise that relies so heavily on Microsoft products, to use the IaaS utility as an adjunct resource, providing on-demand resources at extremely low price, with very quick provisioning, and high reliability and resilience.

[Thanks to Isabel Wang for her pointer to the text of the presentation and her analysis.]

MSFT Financial Analyst Meeting: Ray Ozzie

The next layer above that is our cloud infrastructure services layer. And this is the most fundamental software level of the services infrastructure. You can think of this as a utility computing fabric upon which all of our online services run. You know, among other services, this fabric has an efficient and isolated virtualized computation layer. It has application frameworks that support a variety of app models that are designed for horizontal scaling. And it has infrastructure that manages the automatic deployment and load balancing and performance optimization of the apps that it's managing running on its infrastructure.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, IaaS, utility computing

WADLing toward RESTful services

In the on-going dialogue between the RESTIANs and the Splat-ians (as in... WS-* which is often pronounced "double-yew ess splat"), there's apparently a proposal called Web Appliaction Description Language (WADL) that designed to provide descriptors for REST services.

WADL: The REST answer to WSDL

...

For SOAP Web services, descriptors based on Web Services Description Language (WSDL) form a fundamental piece of their actual design, mainly on account of the underlying complexity present in the actual service. In these scenarios, a descriptor not only serves the purpose of formally describing all the business logic it can fulfill, but it also aides in the creation of helper classes -- often called stubs -- used to build service clients.

Enter WADL, a similar description language to WSDL, but strictly targeting the requirements of RESTful services. REST started of simple enough, as live URL's on major portals which returned structured data to querying clients, but as interest has grown in this alternate approach to Web services, so has the scope and size of the business processes it attempts to fulfill, making descriptors a natural addition. ...

Technorati Tags: REST, WS-*, WADL, WSDL

Clone? Split Personality? Confusion.

Over the course of the past week, I've noticed references to Rich Miller about topics I'm likely to write about, but don't remember having posted.  The first thought... Have I been blogging in my sleep?  Am I leaving my short-term memory at the door?

No.  It's an inevitable result of having a common name.  It's happened before, and will certainly happen again.  This time it's Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge.  Rich is a noted technology journalist who's had the good judgement to be interested in the next generation data center.  I've only recently found his site, and enjoy reading it.   It will go on my site's blogroll in the next day or so.


Technorati Tags: utility computing, data center

Email and the Five Conversations

Isabel Wang has an interesting post on her blog in response to Google's announcement of their Postini acquisition.  (BTW: Congrats again, Tim!)  In it, Isabel makes the point that email (like many of the newly arrived interpersonal and group messaging technologies) is a means to an end.  She then references Matt Howard's (and SMBLive's) concept of the 5 Conversations, of which I wasn't aware until now. 

Worth the read and the follow up to 5 Conversations.

isabel wang's blog: Email is not a killer app!

...But email is NOT a killer app (let alone THE killer app)! Instead, what SMBs really want is a coherent, 360 degree solution for managing their front- and back-office operations. As SMBLive CEO Matt Howard puts it, running a business is all about maintaining 5 conversations: you use office productivity apps to organize your own ideas, collaboration platforms to share information with colleagues and partners, transaction and contact management tools to keep track of current vendors and customers, sales/marketing/networking services to connect with new ones...

While email can play a role in these interactions, it's a means rather than an end. A means whose usefulness may one day end. As Dennis Howlett writes on ZDNet: "I see a combination of Twitter and Facebook as having the potential to replace 90% of the email I receive while improving my personal productivity." ...

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

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

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