Archivo mensual: julio 2012

Cloud computing

Fun with Neologism in the Cloud Era

Having spent the last several blog posts on more serious considerations about cloud computing and the new IT era, I decided to lighten things up a bit.  The term “cloud” has bothered me from the first time I heard it uttered, as the concept and definition are as nebulous as, well a cloud.  In the intervening years, when thoroughly boring my wife and friends with shop talk about the “cloud,” I came to realize that in order for cloud computing to become mainstream, “it” needs to have some way to translate to the masses.

Neologism is the process of creating new words using existing or combinations of existing words to form a more descriptive term.  In our industry neologisms have been used extensively, although many of us do not realize how these terms got coined.  For example, the word “blog” is a combination of web and log.  “Blog” was formed over time as the lexicon was adopted.  It began with a new form of communicating across the Internet, known as a web log.  “Web log” become “we blog” simply by moving the space between words one to the left.  Now, regardless of who you talk to, the term “blog” is pretty much a fully formed concept.  Similarly, the term “Internet” is a combination of “inter” (between) and “network”, hence meaning between networks.

Today, the term “cloud” has become so overused that confusion reigns (get it?) over everyone.

Cloudable – meaning something that is conducive to leveraging cloud.  As in:  “My CRM application is cloudable “ or “We want to leverage data protection that includes cloudable capabilities”

Cloudiac – someone who is a huge proponent of cloud services.  A combination of “Cloud” and “Maniac”, as in:  “There were cloudiacs everywhere at Interop. “  In the not too distant future, we very well may see parallels to the “Trekkie” phenomena.  Imagine a bunch of middle-aged IT professionals running around in costumes made of giant cotton-balls and cardboard lightning bolts.

Cloudologist – an expert in cloud solutions.  Different from a Cloudiac, the Cloudologist actually has experience in developing and utilizing cloud based services.   This will lead to master’s degree programs in Cloudology.

Cloutonomous –  maintaining your autonomy over your systems and data in the cloud.  “I may be in the Cloud but I make sure I’m cloutonomous.”  Could refer to the consumer of the cloud services not being tied into long term services commitments that may inhibit their ability to move services in the event of a vendor failing to hit SLAs.

Cloud crawl – actions related to monitoring or reviewing your various cloud services.  “I went cloud crawling today and everything was sweet.” Off-take of the common “pub crawl,” just not as fun and with no lingering after-effects.

Counter-cloud – a reference to the concept of “counter culture,” which dates back to hippie days of the 60s and 70s.  In this application, it would describe a person or business that is against utilizing cloud services mainly because it is the new trend, or because they feel that it’s the latest government conspiracy to control the world.

Global Clouding – IT’s version of Global Warming, except in this case the world isn’t becoming uninhabitable, IT is just becoming a bit fuzzy around the edges.  What will IT be like with the advent of Global Clouding?

Clackers – Cloud and Hacker.  Clackers are those nefarious, shadowy figures that focus on disruption of cloud services.  This “new” form of hacker will concentrate on capturing data in transit, traffic disruption/re-direction (i.e. DNS Changer anyone?), and platform incursion.

Because IT is so lexicon heavy, building up a stable of Cloud-based terminology is inevitable, and potentially beneficial in focusing the terminology further.  Besides, as Cloudiacs will be fond of saying… “resistance is futile.”

Do you have any Neologisms of your own? I’d love to hear some!

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Rightscale, Google, EMC/VMware Keep Things Exciting

A few months ago, I reckoned that 2012 was Year One for the cloud. My logic was that most writers, analysts, and marketers get over-excited early on by technology developments and trends, so that when said development or trend truly arrives it seems to disappoint.

I guess my thought was similar to that wretched Gartner hypecycle, except without the fine analytics and other big science involved.

Mostly, I didn’t want people to think we’re in a lull, now that the original excitement has worn off, when in fact we’re in the midst of a very exciting year for cloud computing. These past few days have shown this to be true.

First, let’s not overlook Rightscale’s latest development, a new integration with Google’s new Compute Engine. Santa Barbara’s “Cloud Blue” is running this program in beta for now, an expected tactic given that “GCE” is only a few days old. Rightscale has emerged as one of the top two (and perhaps the top) company in the field of cloud management, and is a key driver to what it calls multi-cloud development. To me, multi-cloud means real-world cloud.

Compute Engine itself was a huuuge announcement, as it appears it will provide competition of the highest order to Amazon Web Services when it comes to offsite, outsourced, third-party, please-call-it-anything-but-public cloud.

But that’s so last week. The latest news comes out of the Boston area, with news of an executive shuffle and rumored spin-offs at VMware. The shuffle puts Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger – one of the good guys of the industry – in charge of VMware, presumably charged with restoring more of an iron grip on the virtualization market (impossible) and continuing to move the company upstack (more possible). Former VMware CEO Paul Maritz moves onto the EMC mother ship as a maybe, could-be successor to CEO Joe Tucci when he retires 20 years from now.

The bigger news for cloud is the alleged spin-off of the CloudFoundry PaaS platform. The company will be an independent brand, I guess, yet still integrated into EMC.

What’s really happening here is EMC – dissatisfied with being thought of as a mere storage company, yet unwilling to sully its dominant storage brand – building a vertically integrated IT products and services company that wants to compete directly with IBM, HP, and Oracle. The company’s sitting on $6 billion in cash, not a lot when compared to HP ($8b), IBM ($12b), Oracle ($30b), and Microsoft ($52b). Tough to see how it will do so in the short term.

I’ve heard ritual talk of the consolidations to come in cloud computing, but it seems we’re far from that. Companies are being acquired here and there, but the bigger story is what’s being rolled out. Speaking of which, let’s keep our eyes on Redmond and see if any love will be given to Hyper-V and if Windows 8 will revive Microsoft as a mobile player, and by extension, as a cloud-computing leader.

Year One is shaping up to be an exciting year.

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Cloud Computing: CiRBA 7.1 Now Available

Console, enabling IT organizations to optimize capacity decisions, VM placements and resource allocations for AIX-based IBM PowerVM environments. This latest version allows customers to leverage the same technology they use to optimize VMware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments to manage virtualized AIX infrastructure.
According to Andrew Hillier, CiRBA CTO and co-founder, “It becomes an analytics challenge, and the key is to strike the optimal balance of efficiency and risk given the infrastructure capabilities, the requirements of the workloads being hosted, and the policies governing the relationship between the two.”

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Cloud Key Management – Addressing Data Encryption in the Public Cloud

Cloud computing is gaining more and more traction across enterprises and SMB organizations. Its many benefits and cost structure provide an attractive alternative to the traditional data center, but at the same time cloud data security, cloud encryption and cloud key management remains top concerns. Thought leaders and analysts agree that cloud data encryption is a fundamental first step. But when looking at the fine print, a more complicated situation is revealed.
We commonly identify 3 approaches to cloud key management; all have their pros and cons. The first approach is to use the encryption as provided by your cloud provider, the pros are obvious – it’s easy to deploy and manage and it transparently integrates with your cloud data layer – but the cost is high – you trust your cloud provider with what should be your best kept secret – your encryption keys. Data security expert Rich Mogul had described it well on his blog. The second approach is to trust a third party with your encryption keys. This approach eliminates some cloud flexibility advantages as encryption is no longer integrated to your cloud, and still carries the same risks as before – you trust a third party with your keys. The third approach involves implementing a key management server back in the physical data center. While this approach is indeed secure, it eliminates many cloud advantages, and forces you back to your data center, when what you wanted is to migrate to the cloud.

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Best Practices in Cloud Security

Last week one news item that attracted media attention was the hacking of some nearly 450,000 passwords from Yahoo Service called ‘Yahoo Voice’. The communications on the incident state that, SQL Injection is the primary technique adopted by hackers to get the information out of databases and publish them.
As per further communications, we find the affected company taking more precautions to ensure that security is their highest priority. These events will also generally shake the Cloud Adoption at the enterprise level, where always the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the minds of CIOs may increase due to these incidents.
However the following are the best practices and guidelines that should be adopted by any enterprise when adopting hybrid cloud computing and a one-off incident should not dampen their road map to hybrid computing adoption.

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How to Survive in the Cloud (Infographic)

With Microsoft’s announcements at this year’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), it is evident that change is coming to all enterprise software resellers. To better prepare for the inevitable transition to the cloud, here is an infographic that provides an overview of what it was like to sell an on-premise solution compared to what it will be like to sell «in the cloud».

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Education, High Performance Computing, HPC, Indiana University, Linux, Memphis University, Penguin Computing, University of Delaware, University of Virginia

Penguin Computing Offers HPC Compute Clouds Built for Academia, Research

Penguin Computing today announced partnerships with multiple universities to enable easy, quick and unbureaucratic on-demand access to scalable HPC compute resources for academic researchers.

“Penguin Computing has traditionally been very successful with HPC deployments in academic environments with widely varying workloads, many departments competing for resources and very limited budgets for capital expenses, a cloud based model for compute resources makes perfect sense,” says Tom Coull, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Software and Services at Penguin Computing. “The new partnerships help academic institutions with a flexible cloud based resource allocation for their researchers. At the same time, they present an opportunity for IT departments to create an ongoing revenue stream by offering researchers from other schools access to their cloud.”

Penguin has implemented three versions of academic HPC clouds:

Hybrid Clouds – Which are a local ‘on-site’ cluster configured to support the use of Penguin-on-Demand (POD) cloud resources as needed on a pay-as-you go basis. Local compute resources can be provisioned for average demand and utilization peaks can be offloaded transparently. This model lowers the initial capital expense and for temporary workload peaks excess cycles are provided cost effectively by Penguin’s public HPC cloud. Examples of hybrid cloud deployments include the University of Delaware and Memphis University.

Channel Partnership – Between Universities and Penguin Computing, allow educational institutions to become distributors for POD compute cycles. University departments with limited access to compute resources for research can use Penguin’s virtual supercomputer on-demand and pay-as-they-go, allowing them to use their IT budget for operational expenses. When departments use the university’s HPC cloud, revenue can supplement funding for IT staff or projects, increasing the department’s capabilities. This model has been successfully implemented at the California Institute for Technology in conjunction with Penguin’s PODshell, a web-service based solution that supports the submission and monitoring of HPC cloud compute jobs from any Linux system with internet connectivity.

Combination Hybrid / Channel – The Benefits of the first two models have been successfully implemented at Indiana University (IU) as a public-private partnership. Penguin leverages the University’s HPC facilities and human resources while IU benefits from fast access to local compute resources and Penguin’s HPC experience. IU can use POD resources and provide compute capacity to other academic institutions. The agreement between IU and Penguin also has the support of a group of founding user-partners including the University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan who along with IU will be users of the new service. The POD collocation offers access through the high-speed national research network internet2 and is integrated with the XSEDE infrastructure that enables scientists to transparently share computing resources.

“This is a great example of a community cloud service,” said Brad Wheeler, vice president for information technology and CIO at Indiana University. “By working together in a productive private-public partnership, we can achieve cost savings through larger scales while also ensuring security and managing the terms of service in the interests of researchers.”

For more information about Penguin Computing’s HPC compute resources, please visit www.penguincomputing.com.


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Cloud Computing: Rackspace to Extend Open Ecosystem of Cloud Technologies

Rackspace Hosting on Wednesday announced that it has upgraded its Cloud Tools Marketplace to enhance the customer experience for accessing the ecosystem of cutting-edge applications, tools and solutions.
John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, noted that «the Cloud Tools Marketplace provides an ideal customer experience by making it easier for them to identify the most appropriate technologies to use with their open cloud deployment.»
Through the Cloud Tools Marketplace, developers and enterprise IT professionals building on the open Rackspace Cloud, as well as first generation Cloud Servers, can evaluate more than one hundred industry leading technologies to deliver advanced capabilities for their environments hosted at Rackspace.

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Counting the Cost of Cloud

IT costs were always a worry, but only an occasional one. Cloud computing has changed that.
Here’s how it used to be. The New System was proposed. Costs were estimated, more or less accurately, for computing resources, staff increases, maintenance contracts, consultants and outsourcing. The battle was fought, the New System was approved, the checks were signed, and everyone could forget about costs for a while and concentrate on other issues, such as making the New System actually work.
One of the essential characteristics of cloud computing is «measured service.» Resource usage is measured by the byte transmitted, the byte stored, and the millisecond of processing time. Charges are broken down by the hour, and billed by the month. This can change the way people take decisions.
«The New System is really popular. It’s being used much more than expected.»

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