Cloud challenges include hype, federation and identity

Cloud computing is still only about halfway up the first upswing of the “hype curve”, says Datacom senior consultant Peter Shephard, and hype could be the biggest enemy of its long-term evolution.
##CONTINUE##
Asking his own question “Is cloud computing a new dawn or a false hope?” Shephard, speaking to a New Zealand Computer Society audience last week, said he inclines towards optimism.

“It’ll only be a false hope if we fall prey to the inflated and unrealistic expectations.” As long as the prospective user has a realistic expectation of what it can do for them and an appropriate perspective on cloud computing for their particular business situation, “then I don’t believe it’s a false hope.”

The classic “hype curve” signals a steep downslope of disillusionment after the initial enthusiasm followed by more realistic evaluation and productive use drives the volume of use up a gentler gradient. Cloud computing, he says, is bound to suffer some of that roller-coaster.

As far as a “new dawn” is concerned, Shephard points out, the concept of computing as a utility, to be used as much or as little as required, like an electricity or water supply, is at least as old as the 1960s, “The computer utility will become the basis of a new and important industry,” said distinguished computer researcher John McCarthy (now at Stanford University) in 1961.

“So it’s a new dawn at the end of a long night,” Shephard says.

A number of factors are coming together to encourage a move into the cloud, he says; the emergence of many software-as-a-service applications is complemented by the attitude of mind generated by service-oriented architecture; to think of computing in terms of the services it provides rather than the technicalities of its provision.

There is certainly “big vendor buy-in” he told the NZCS audience, displaying a screen full of the best-known industry names that have planted their stake in the field.

Shephard sees cloud computing as a “great leveller” allowing startups and other small companies to use services which only big companies have previously had access to. Cloud computing is also potentially of great importance to the New Zealand economy.

As well as smoothing humps in capital expenditure for a single company, there are opportunities for “federated” computing, where different systems exchange data and collaborate in the cloud, he says.

However, verifying identity in the cloud, when this has traditionally been a function associated with particular computers or fixed groups of computers or services is a challenge, Shephard says.

To have a fixed identity on the internet that you could use and verify in multiple places would have great potential. A number of vendors are working on the problem.

-----------------------------
BY Stephen Bell Wellington
Source：COMPUTERWORLD

© Fairfax Media Business Group
Fairfax New Zealand Limited, 2009.

Lightning takes down Amazon cloud

Online book seller and cloud-computing provider Amazon.com has blamed the latest outage to hit its Elastic Compute Cloud service on a lightning strike at one of its data center.
##CONTINUE##
In a statement posted on the forums section of Amazon's Web-services site, the online retailer addressed concerns from some US customers who said their use of the EC2 service had been disrupted at around 6:30pm US Pacific Time on Wednesday. "A lightning storm caused damage to a single Power Distribution Unit (PDU) in a single Availability Zone. While most instances were unaffected, a set of racks does not currently have power, so the instances on those racks are down," the company said in a posting on the site.

The disruption lasted around four hours, during which time Amazon asked any affected customers to use alternative parts of the network. "Users with affected instances can launch replacement instances in any of the US Region Availability Zones or wait until their instance(s) are restored," Amazon said.

The company later attributed the outage to a problem on one "availability zone" and that the outage was localized. "We would like to reconfirm that this issue was limited to the single Availability Zone where this power issue occurred, and that a very small percentage of instances in that AZ were affected; this was not a generalized service issue," Amazon said.

Despite acknowledging that Amazon had dealt with the issue fairly efficiently, one user was concerned that a single lightning strike was able to bring down the service, if only in a limited way. "I was under the impression that your architecture had more resiliency built into it. Yes we can use multiple availability zones to help with a single point of failure, but I thought that even within a single availability zone there was not a single point of failure for hardware/power," the user posted to the Amazon forum.

The EC2 service provides customers with virtual access to Amazon's computing infrastructure, using virtual machines that can be created using the Xen virtualization platform. First launched in a limited beta in August 2006, the EC2 service went fully live in October 2008.

Not including the latest issue, the service has suffered two major disruptions during that time in February 2008 and October 2007. In June 2008, Amazon's main retail site suffered an outage which the company blamed on the complexity of its own systems.

A series of outages that have hit other online or cloud computing services including Google's Gmail and other applications over recent months have led some critics to question whether the cloud approach to computing is really capable of providing the resilience required by enterprise users.

In mid-May, Google services were hit by an outage which apparently affected one in 10 of its users. In January this year, software-as-a-service (SaaS) pioneer Salesforce.com experienced an outage that disrupted all its customers for approximately an hour.

-----------------------------
BY Andrew Donoghue
Source：ZDNet

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

IBM cloud chief: Private clouds a fit for test and development

A private cloud network that uses virtualization to provision new resources can dramatically improve efficiency.
##CONTINUE##
Enterprises are embracing private cloud networks to improve the efficiency of test and development organizations, IBM cloud computing software chief Kristof Kloeckner says.

Test and development systems are generally not highly utilized, he notes. IT provisions servers and storage for specific purposes, but then doesn't reclaim them when that purpose has been fulfilled, leading to a shortage of resources. Secondly, procuring servers and setting them up takes longer than users would like.

Therefore, a private cloud network that uses virtualization, service automation technologies, and a self-service interface to provision new resources can dramatically improve efficiency, Kloeckner said in a recent interview.

"We've talked to virtually dozens of companies that have sizable test and development organizations, who say, 'I realize I have resources that are underutilized, and that aren't managed properly. Can a private cloud help me improve utilization, improve my processes, and drive down capital expense?'" Kloeckner says.

While many experts expect private clouds to be used more in production roles as enterprise grow comfortable with the technology, Kloeckner says test and development is a good starting point.

Kloeckner, officially the CTO for enterprise initiatives and vice president of cloud computing platforms at IBM, notes that Big Blue is trying to provide many of the provisioning and service automation features needed in private clouds through its Tivoli software group, as well as products like the recently announced WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance.

"We introduce virtualization, we introduce service automation, and we introduce self-service access to the resources," he says.

Instead of test and development teams submitting a request for new physical hardware, a private cloud strategy lets them call up a service portal and find a catalog of preconfigured, virtualized test systems. Under the covers, the system automatically provisions the storage, operating system, and middleware needed to make the test environment run.

When building private clouds, clients typically want to reuse existing hardware in a more efficient manner, rather than buy new systems, Kloeckner says. For x86 shops, the key virtualization technology must be acquired from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, or another vendor. But IBM does provide virtualization for mainframes and Unix servers.

While the phrase "private cloud" is new, the problems solved by the approach have been recognized for several years. But virtualization, service automation and self-service technologies are only now becoming sophisticated enough to adopt the approach en masse, according to Kloeckner. Moreover, financial pressures are greater today, forcing IT shops to reevaluate inefficient processes.

-----------------------------
BY Jon Brodkin
Source：Network World

©1994-2009 Infoworld, Inc.

Virtualization and Cloud -- Not Necessarily Soul Mates

Data center infrastructure shifts are often both dramatic and unpredictable until they are well under way. In recent months, it has crystallized that we are embarking on a post-client/server world that is more than just vapor.
##CONTINUE##
Virtualization and cloud computing are together redesigning the landscape of the data center.

This, of course, is far from the first time that has been said. With the increased penetration of virtualization and cloud computing, the technology is well out of the concept stage and into fruition.

This is not a zero sum game, however. Not all data centers will shoot their data into the cloud. The client/server architecture followed and eventually eclipsed the mainframe, and it is not hard to imagine cloud doing the same thing. At least twice a year, someone sounds the death knell for mainframes, yet today, more than 50 years after they were put into production, they're alive and kicking. In an ironic cyclical-like twist, mainframes are even finding their way into the cloud.

Perhaps the key proof-point of the winds of change though is the infrastructure that is building up around cloud. VMware, for starters, has hitched its virtualization wagon firmly to the cloud. vSphere, its latest major undertaking, is all about a cloud infrastructure.

One thing to bear in mind, however, is that although virtualization and cloud are often tied together, they are not necessarily fused.

As Jeff Byrne, senior analyst and consultant for Taneja Group noted in an e-mail to InternetNews.com, "Most hosting and other large service providers are now using virtualization to create scalable cloud infrastructures, but some notable exceptions, such as Google, are not."

VMware, for which virtualization is a priority, is also far from the only player in this space. Other players may prove to be less attached. On Monday, Asigra unveiled its Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery platform. Asigra has been in the cloud space since before anyone even knew (or cared) what cloud was, Executive Vice President Eran Farajun told ServerWatch. On Monday, the company unveiled its nontherapeutic cloud backup platform. While Asigra has long been in the cloud backup space, Farajun is quick to point out that it is not a cloud dealer.

Until two years ago Asigra dealt mostly with physical systems running Windows and Linux. Today, it is typically called on to protect virtual servers, for which the agentless nature of its product is well-suited. Unlike most of the other offerings, which were designed for tape, Asigra uses a protocol designed to go directly into the sources. This allows backup to keep pace with exponential data growth.

With this latest version of the software, Asigra is enabling users to leverage the public cloud, build a private cloud or integrate both into a hybrid data protection model with the flexibility to alternate between the two approaches. It is targeting both the MSPs that build the public clouds and the large enterprises that build their own clouds.

While that doesn't sound all that different from vSphere, bear in mind that the Hybrid Cloud Backup and Recovery platform is designed with backup and recovery -- not operations -- in mind, so in that regard Asigra is not competing directly with VMware. It is, however, competing with the traditional heavyweights. IBM, CA and Symantec remain dominant.

Farajun believes the incumbency of their technologies may prove to be their Achilles Heel. These solutions were designed for a client/server architecture, and they are unable to meet customers' needs in a cloud environment.

No infrastructure is complete without hardware. Most likely in an effort to capitalize on the buzz and move as many boxes as possible, the hardware vendors, seem to be tying the two together. HP Tuesday unveiled its Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) ecosystem. Included are some new products as well as some products HP was already selling, and much customization.

The new product line is designed for organizations where "the business-technology link is direct and strong," to their core business, John Gromala, director of product marketing for the industry standard servers group at HP, told ServerWatch.

In other words, companies running very large data centers (thousands of server nodes at a minimum), and rely on the data center as a way to make profit, whether through Web 2.0, cloud computing or high-performance computing (HPC) apps.

It is still unclear to what degree virtualization will be part of the equation, both for HP customers and others.

-----------------------------
BY Amy Newman
Source：ServerWatch

Amy Newman is the managing editor of ServerWatch. She has been covering virtualization space since 2001, and is coauthoring a book about virtualization that is scheduled for publication in October 2009.

Copyright 2009 WebMediaBrands Inc. All Rights Reserved.

5 cool cloud computing research projects

Next week's HotCloud conference on cloud computing in San Diego will boast a slew of fresh research into this hottest of IT topics. Here's a glimpse at the work to be showcased at the event (PDFs of some research papers will not be available until the week of June 15 at the HotCloud site):
##CONTINUE##
Nebulas

Researchers from the University of Minnesota have outlined a way to use "distributed voluntary resources -- those donated by end-user hosts -- to form nebulas" that would potentially complement today's managed clouds from companies such as Amazon, IBM and Google. Nebulas could address the needs of service classes that more traditional clouds could not, providing more scalability, more geographical dispersion of nodes and lower cost, the researchers say. Possible users would include those rolling out experimental cloud services and those looking to offer free public services or applications.

Unlike famed volunteer-based computing resources such as SETI@home (now BOINC), nebulas would need to support more complex tasks. Challenges needing to be addressed would include managing highly distributed data and computational resources and coping with failures. "We believe that nebulas can exist as complementary infrastructures to clouds, and can even serve as a transition pathway for many services that would eventually be hosted on clouds," the researchers write in a paper titled "Nebulas: Using Distributed Voluntary Resources to Build Clouds."

(University of Minnesota researchers have a separate project dubbed "Virtual Putty" that sounds intriguing as well. It focuses on the reshaping of virtual machine footprints to satisfy user needs and ease VM management for resource providers.)

CloudViews

Amidst the hype surrounding cloud computing, security issues are often raised, such as those involved with multiple customers having their data and applications sharing the same cloud resources. But researchers at the University of Washington also see lots of opportunity in the fact that Web services and applications will be so closely situated. CloudViews is a Hadoop HBase-supported common storage system being developed by the researchers "to facilitate collaboration through protected inter-service data sharing." The researchers say in a paper called "CloudViews: Communal Data Sharing in Public Clouds" that public cloud providers must facilitate such collaboration -- in the form of data driven, server side mashups -- to ensure the market's growth through development of new Web services.

Trusted Cloud Computing Platform

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have outlined a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform that "enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon EC2 to provide a closed box execution environment that guarantees confidential execution of guest virtual machines." Such a platform would assure customers that service providers haven't been messing with their data and would enable service providers to secure data even across many VMs. The researchers, in a paper titled "Towards Trusted Cloud Computing," acknowledge that details of how cloud providers set up their data centers is held pretty close to the vest, but base their system on an open source offering called Eucalyptus that they suspect is similar to at least some commercial implementations. A prototype based on the design is this research team's next step.

Private Virtual Infrastructure (PVI) and Locator Bot

Also addressing the security and confidentiality issues surrounding cloud computing is University of Maryland, Baltimore County researcher John Krautheim. His proposal is aimed at better sharing the risk responsibility between the cloud provider and customer, giving the customer much more control than is typically the case. "A method of combining the requirements of the user and provider is to let the clients control the security posture of their applications and virtual machines while letting the service provider control the security of the fabric. This provides a symbiotic security stance that can be very powerful provided both parties hold up their end of the agreement," Krautheim writes. He adds that this setup calls for big-time trust on both sides (including support for a virtualized Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, for storing cryptographic keys), since they'll need to share security information between themselves and possibly with others. Components of this approach will include having a method for shutting down VMs if necessary and monitoring/auditing from within and outside the PVI, Krautheim writes in a paper titled "Private Virtual Infrastructure for Cloud Computing."

Trading storage for computation

One way to make cloud computing more efficient and cost effective might involve rethinking the way data is stored. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, NetApp and Pergamum Systems are looking at the trade-offs between storing data, including data that might not be called on that often, and simply recalculating results as needed. In a paper titled "Maximizing Efficiency By Trading Storage for Computation" the researchers write: "Recomputation as a replacement for storage fits well into the holistic model of computing described by the cloud architecture. With its dynamically scalable, and virtualized architecture, cloud computing aims to abstract away the details of underlying infrastructure. In both public and private clouds, the user is encouraged to think in terms of services, not structure."

Determining the best way to store and retrieve data requires a cost-benefits analysis based on insights from both the cloud operator and the data user because "neither has a completely informed view," the researchers write. They argue that the nature of cloud computing, with its dynamically allocated computing resources, could lend itself to storing information about the whereabouts and origins of data and then just recomputing results as needed. But they acknowledge that this sort of system would require forecasting where prices would be headed and figuring out things such as the cost of not being able to immediately access data.

-----------------------------
BY Bob Brown (Network World)
Source：CIO

Copyright 2009 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved.

Yahoo releases parallel software

Web search pioneer Yahoo officially released its source code for Hadoop, a parallel programming framework many see as the key ingredient for cloud computing services. The software could fuel a broad class of future Web-based applications, said an IBM executive at the second-annual Hadoop Summit.
##CONTINUE##
Hadoop is an open source version of MapReduce, the set of proprietary algorithms Google uses to run data-intensive applications such as Web search across large clusters of PC-based servers. Yahoo is a key a contributor to the open source project that attracted a packed house of more than 700 developers to the event here.

Yahoo is standardizing on Hadoop for a broad range of internal uses such as optimizing search results, the placement of Web content and ads and machine learning algorithms to filter spam in its email service. The company claims to be the world's largest production user of Hadoop with the code running on more than 25,000 server nodes.

"We've had a lot of requests for exactly what we are running with what patches, so here it is," said Eric Baldeschwieler, vice president of Hadoop development at Yahoo. "We think this will be good for the ecosystem," he said.

The initial code available on Yahoo's Web site is an alpha version of release 0.20. It includes a scheduler letting multiple users share a cluster via separate queues. In its production systems Yahoo currently uses Hadoop 0.18.3.

"The .18 branch has a lot of components with funny licenses that have been pushed out of .20, so this is obviously a more appealing offering," said Baldeschwieler.

Work is already beginning on a .21 release which aims to be the last to have any major changes in applications programming interfaces. "We hear about backwards compatibility all the time, so we need to make sure we don't break running apps on a cluster," said Baldeschwieler.

"Hadoop is setting the context for a new set of apps [the average business] couldn't get access to or were too expensive to write but now have a bright future," said Rod Smith, a vice president for emerging Internet technologies at IBM.

End users want to conduct custom Web searches, apply analysis to the results and conduct follow-on searches in repeated loops in areas ranging from financial analysis and medical research to retailing and fraud detection, Smith said. "Google has whetted people's appetite for customizable search," he added.

IBM is developing proof-of-concept tools for such apps that could run on more typical business computers with a few dozen nodes. The IBM effort, called M2, employs Hadoop as a back-end engine for a suite of browser-based analytical and visualization tools.

"We think tools like this will be helpful in collecting and extracting content and letting users run operations on it over and over again," Smith said. "But so far this is still cookie dough—it's not baked yet," he said.

Hadoop already has spun out seven new open source projects, only two of which are more than a year old, said Owen O'Malley, a software architect for grid computing at Yahoo. "When we started [in early 2006] this was a prototype that ran on 20 nodes as long as you said nice things to it every day," O'Malley said.

Executives from Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo said yesterday Hadoop is a key piece of a future open source software stack they hope to build to enable cloud computing. The software is also in use by companies including Facebook, Hulu, News Corp., Ning and Veoh.

-----------------------------
BY Rick Merritt
Source：EE Times

Copyright © 2009 TechInsights, a Division of United Business Media LLC All rights reserved.

Cloud Computing Goes Global

Three far-flung research organizations have joined the cloud computing test bed run by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo. The locations of these new converts--in Russia, South Korea, and Malaysia--provide more evidence that cloud computing is quickly becoming a global phenomenon.
##CONTINUE##
HP, Intel, and Yahoo announced their Open Cirrus cloud computing test bed last year with a goal of promoting collaboration among businesses, government agencies, and colleges and universities. More than 50 research projects are now plugged into Open Cirrus. The newcomers are the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea, and MIMOS in Malaysia.

Earlier this week, I talked to Willy Chiu, VP of IBM's Cloud Labs and high performance on-demand solutions. Chiu and team have built IBM cloud labs in China, Japan, Korea, Ireland, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Vietnam, in addition to in the United States. As a result, many of IBM's early cloud computing customers are based in those countries.

While much of the leading-edge work on cloud computing is happening in the United States--where Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Sun, IBM, and other leading tech vendors are introducing cloud services and capabilities at breakneck pace--businesses in other parts of the world are discovering the cloud, too. Here's a quick recap of some of what's going on around the globe, courtesy of IBM and the HP-Intel-Yahoo triad.

Russia: Three groups within the Russian Academy of Sciences are using Open Cirrus. The Institute for System Programming plans to conduct research in the area of system programming; the Joint Super Computer Center will run biological, nanotech, 3D modeling, and other apps in the cloud; and the Russian Research Center's Kurchatov Institute will apply cloud computing to large-scale data processing.

South Korea: The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute will use Open Cirrus for R&D with massive data sets.

Malaysia: MIMOS plans to develop a national cloud computing platform to deploy services in Malaysia.

Vietnam: Vietnam Technology and Telecommunications is using an IBM cloud center to provide training, consulting and support.

China: The Wang Fu Jing department store chain, one of China’s largest retailers, is using supply chain management and other IBM cloud services for its network of retail stores. Separately, the city of Wuxi is using an IBM cloud for testing and development.

IBM customers and partners also have projects underway in Qatar, South Africa, East Africa, and Japan, ranging from oil discovery to pharmaceutical research. Of course, companies in Europe are on the cloud adoption curve as well, as local service providers, Amazon, and others offer a growing number of options for keeping data local in compliance with European law.

As cloud computing expands around the world, it's interesting to see what opportunities companies are pursuing and what problems they're looking to solve. At the same time, look for early adopters to encounter new challenges in the areas such as security, data governance, and interoperability.

-----------------------------
BY John Foley
Source：InformationWeek

Copyright © 2009 United Business Media LLC, All rights reserved.

Getting the Links Straight Between Cloud Computing & SOA

Want to know what gets my blood pressure up? It's when there's both a huge shift in thinking around how we should do computing, namely cloud computing, and at the same time, there's a bunch of information out there that causes confusion. As cloud computing hype spikes to a frenzy, so does the number of less-than-intelligent things that I hear about it and its relationship to SOA.
##CONTINUE##
We've got a herd mentality in IT. We're always chasing the next paradigm shift, which seems to come along every five years, claiming that whatever the last paradigm shift was had "failed" and that's why we're looking at something new. However, these hype-driven trends are often complementary, and so the real power is in figuring out how known approaches fit with what's new, and not look to replace, but how to build on the foundation. The best case for that scenario has been how SOA benefits cloud computing, but few understand how and why.

The confusion continues. Stacey Higginbotham, a commentator for GigaOm, remarked that an HP presentation on cloud computing was "depressingly similar to the idea of service-oriented architecture." She noted that "HP offered clouds as merely a means to deliver IT as a service inside the enterprise." However, she was disappointed because "...most of HP's detailed talk of clouds in the first webinar was depressingly similar to the idea of service-oriented architecture."

I'm not trying to pick on Stacey. I see and hear a lot of this kind of stuff out there, and confused people make for more confused people. I suspect that many of the people who sell cloud computing are selling its replacement aspect and not focusing on how to leverage cloud computing into an architectural context. This is dangerous thinking that will quickly get many a naive enterprise into trouble.

The trouble here is that those in IT have a tendency not to understand new concepts in the context of the old, such as how cloud computing is leveraging most of the concepts and patterns around SOA. That's not "depressingly similar."

Let's get this straight: SOA is an architectural pattern, simply put the ability to create an architecture around the notion of many services that are bound together to create and re-create business solutions. Cloud computing is a set of enabling technologies as a potential target platform or technological approach for that architecture.

Thus, to say they're similar is the functional equivalent of saying that an approach to creating automobiles is "depressingly similar" to electric cars. It doesn't make sense. One is the way of doing something, while the other is a potential outcome. SOA doesn't go away. It's not replaced. It's architecture. Cloud computing is a potential outcome of that architecture, thus cloud computing needs architecture, and vice versa.

The core issue, I think, is that we like to oversimplify things when things aren't simple. While we attempted to solve SOA by tossing technology at the problem, we quickly found that SOA was something you do, not something you buy. The same risks are here with cloud computing. Those who toss things outside of the firewall onto the platforms of the clouds without architectural context, such as leveraging SOA, will find themselves in trouble.

We have too many people attempting to lead thought or provide commentary in the cloud space who have no context, and so have a tendency to oversimplify how this technology is leveraged or how it works in enterprise architecture and SOA. And I'm going to call them out when I see it happen.

-----------------------------
BY David Linthicum
Source：SYS-CON

Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.

Group targets open source cloud computing

HP, Intel, Yahoo detail efforts on software stack
##CONTINUE##
Executives from Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo are calling for developers to create an open source software standard for cloud computing. They showed their work on the effort—some of it still at a very early stage—at a gathering of researchers creating a test bed for cloud services.

The trio joined with three academic research institutes to form the Open Cirrus group in July 2008, each dedicating computer servers with a total of 1,000 cores to form a distributed network of systems as a research platform. On Monday, three more research groups joined the effort—the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and MIMOS, a R&D arm of Malaysia's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

"We want to rally the larger research community around the vision of this open source cloud services stack," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research at the first annual gathering of the partners here, echoing calls of a group of 38 vendors in March.

Cloud services are essentially unused parts of large data centers rented out to host third party applications. Amazon, Google and Microsoft have announced cloud service offerings, but each uses some of its own proprietary software to implement them.

An open source stack could prevent the spread of proprietary offerings and spur innovation like the so-called LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/Python did for Web 2.0 developers, Chien said.

"The LAMP open source stack was given credit for creation of a whole raft of Internet startups and tech innovation, and I think the same could prove true for an open cloud stack," Chien told the gathering of about 50 researchers hosted at HP headquarters.

"A million processors could be the province of a handful of companies in five years, or they may be broadly available to academic and startup communities and other businesses whether they be telecoms or entertainment companies," he said.

Commercial cloud services make their own brands of application frameworks available to users today. But they do not release the kinds of virtualization and monitoring tools, storage file systems and job schedulers they use to execute and manage those applications, Chien said.

The Intel researcher characterized as very fragmented the current variety of existing software tools for cloud computing.

"It's very hard to put together a clean, robust stack," said Chien. "We spend a lot of time in the industry building shims or glue to hold these pieces together," he said.

The software is mature enough to make decisions about a standard stack now, he said, answering a question from one researcher. "We're in a landscape where a number of players are moving forward, and I don't expect their stacks to remain static," he said.

Sketches of an open cloud stack

Chien outlined elements of a possible open source stack based around Hadoop, an open source version of Google's MapReduce software used by Yahoo and others for distributed computing. The Open Cirrus stack also could include a low-level hardware abstraction layer from HP called Physical Resource Set (PRS), a virtualization layer from Intel called Tashi and several other emerging pieces.

Presentations on the software projects made it clear some are still at an early stage of development.

PRS aims to be a platform for allocating and managing hardware resources between data centers, running below the level of virtual machines. It could be used in cases where developers want to avoid the overhead of VMs or enforce policies about sharing between data centers, said Kevin Lai, an HP Labs researcher.

HP has an early version of the code running on the CentOS using XML remote procedure calls and is developing a version for Ubuntu. Several key features are still in development including a capability to support variable pricing levels and integration for Hadoop.

In addition, PRS is currently based on a proprietary ILO protocol HP uses to manage data centers. Lai said it should be ported to a more open IPMI protocol in the future. In addition, researchers from HP and Intel agreed they need to work together to integrate PRS with Tashi.

Michael Ryan, an Intel researcher described Tashi as a virtualization layer for large data sets that aims to run across separate data centers that house both computers and storage systems in close proximity.

Tashi automatically generates and manages virtual machines in response to user application code. Intel has Tashi running on about 80 nodes of the systems it has linked to the Open Cirrus network.

Although many technical details are unresolved, executives made clear the business rationale for the open source effort.

"We want to raise the level of abstraction our developers work at so they can focus on applications-level innovation," said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo. The Web company's main aims are "improving speed of innovation in analyzing data and getting new products to market," he added.

Shugar declined to specify how many servers Yahoo manages, a closely guarded secret for many Web companies. But he did say the company supports 500 million unique users per month, hosts hundreds of petabytes of storage and can handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second across tens of data centers it operates worldwide.

"We are interested in projects that make use of all nine data centers [Open Cirrus will be] making available," Shugar said.

"That's a very big deal because our social apps need to traverse the globe," he said. "Someone may write data here that needs to go to five different places and then get updated from somewhere else on the globe," he added.

The shift to global applications services "has big business model implications for IT vendors" and will influence everything from hardware interconnects to data structures and app design, said Russ Daniels, chief technology officer for cloud services strategy at HP.

Intel's Chien speculated that Google alone may operate as many as two million servers today, up from estimates of half a million just two years ago. Market researchers project cloud services could consume a quarter of computer servers by 2012, creating a market estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars, he said.

"Whatever cloud computing is—and there is some debate on the definition--it seems it does matter," Chien said.

-----------------------------
BY Rick Merritt
Source：EE Times

Copyright © 2009 TechInsights, a Division of United Business Media LLC All rights reserved.

Cloud or Fog? Two-Thirds of UK CIOs and CFOs Not Yet Sold on Cloud

While Cloud Computing is Not High Priority, Demand Remains Strong for Online Software and Service Delivery Among UK Enterprises.
##CONTINUE##
Sixty-seven per cent of Chief Information Officers and Chief Financial Officers in UK enterprises say they are either not planning to adopt cloud computing (35 per cent) or are unsure (32 per cent) of whether their company will adopt cloud computing during the next two years, according to a major new report from managed hosting (http://www.ntteuropeonline.com/) specialists NTT Europe Online.

NTT's 'Cloud or Fog?' (http://www.ntteuropeonline.com/cloud_computing.html) report, which polled 200 CIOs and CFOs at large UK businesses, found that decision makers placed cloud computing at the bottom of their top ten strategic investment priorities for the next 12 months. Many were still grappling with the concept - 46 per cent of respondents felt definitions of cloud computing remained unclear.

Despite this, 60 per cent said their organisation was more likely to invest in software and services delivered online as a result of the recession. Eighty-five per cent of CIOs and CFOs are looking for more flexibility in their software licensing agreements and 68 per cent said they will avoid long term IT contracts - benefits widely acknowledged to be delivered by the cloud computing model.

"Decision makers at large UK companies clearly see the benefits of investing in online delivery of software and services however many are unconvinced about taking the plunge with a cloud computing model in the next two years," said Rob Steggles, Marketing Director Europe at NTT Europe Online.

"Unfortunately cloud has become a technical sell rather than a business and operational discussion, which is where the value really lies. There is certainly demand for online software and service delivery within a secure hosted environment or using a 'private cloud' infrastructure, but in a practical sense the classic shared cloud computing model seems not to be on the board's agenda."

Seventy-seven per cent of respondents said their organisation was not using cloud computing, citing security, concept immaturity and uncertain reliability as the primary reasons for not adopting it. To consider a move to a cloud computing model, 40 per cent of CIOs and CFOs would demand between 10 and 20 percent cost savings to justify the investment.

While the UK executives said their top three strategic IT priorities in the recession were IT security, servers and storage, and network infrastructure investment, the NTT 'Cloud or Fog?' report far from rules out future investment in cloud computing. Forty-five per cent of CIOs and CFOs said they believed cloud computing was not just hype, and 44 per cent of those businesses using or planning to use cloud computing said they expected to invest between 6-15 per cent of their IT budgets on cloud computing (http://www.ntteuropeonline.com/) in the next two years.

For those using or considering investing in a cloud computing model, the systems most preferred to place in the cloud were content management systems, sales/CRM applications, and those applications deemed 'non-business critical'. However, many cloud computing adopters felt financial and accounting systems should never be put into the cloud (55 per cent).

Commenting on the findings of the Cloud or Fog? report, Daniel Marion, ICT Senior Manager at UEFA Media Technologies said: "The fact this report reveals some confusion over definitions of cloud computing doesn't surprise me. The term is used to market a wide variety of very different products and services and it can be difficult to get past the complexity of the technical specifications and focus on the business benefits. However, the operational case for IT, software and services delivered online is compelling and we will continue to look at ways in which these types of services offer value to our organisation."

-----------------------------
BY Cloud News Desk
Source：Ulitzer

Copyright © 2009 Ulitzer, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.

Control the Cloud

The cloud computing business model is a threat to traditional information technology, but for end users, it carries a risk of "lock-in."
##CONTINUE##
While cloud computing is useful for short term, scalable projects or batch processing, it is still not widely adopted by enterprises yet, James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester told delegates at the analyst group's annual European IT Forum, hosted in Berlin.

In a session on cloud computing, Staten referenced a number of case study examples of cloud computing in the enterprise.

The New York Times is the "poster child" for how enterprises are engaging cloud computing, said Staten. The newspaper kept its archived article, pre-1922, on microfiche and as a jpeg file, but the articles were not available online and could not be searched. The paper wanted to make them available, but the project was not one that would create any revenues for the paper.

The paper's IT department said reverting all these articles, some 4TBs of data, into PDF files would use up server and storage resources and take more than a week.

The newspaper group turned to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which was able to batch process the 4TBs of data in less than 24 hours.

Other high-profile companies investing in cloud computing include: Starbucks, BT, CapGemini, the Indy500, Eli Lilly and Harvard Medical School. "Why invest in a super computer that you don't need all the time, or run servers at 90 percent utilisation," said Staten.

Despite the New York Times' success story, and the fact that more enterprises are testing cloud computing for some smaller projects, Staten said that cloud has not quite reached the status of wide-spread enterprise adoption yet. Rather, start-ups, smaller businesses and the gaming and entertainment industry are becoming big users of cloud computing.

For gaming companies, cloud is ideal because they can launch a multi-player game, even if they don't know how popular it will become or how long it will last.

"If the application scales to a million users, then the gaming company is getting paid at the user base grows. Cloud aligns revenue with investment, so you can invest just in time, rather than upfront to match forecasts," said Staten.

Staten said the Amazon EC2 service costs around 10 cents per CPU hour, but offers more flexibility for peak loads than traditional hosting.

Clouds are ideal for short-term, high-demand applications. The critical value in cloud computing is "elasticity to supply peak demand without long-term commitment" said Staten.

But clouds may not suit long-term projects, because there is a danger that the application will be locked to the cloud, Staten warned.

"You can be locked onto the cloud. It is also hard to move an in-house application onto the cloud, and once you've moved them on to the cloud, you can't move them back," he said.

However, Staten warned CIOs to endorse one or two cloud computing projects, because if enterprises outlaw cloud investment, "developers will go under the covers and use clouds anyway".

-----------------------------
BY Siobhan Chapman, Computerworld UK
Source：PCWorld

© 1998-2009, PC World Communications, Inc.

Verizon Business Unveils 'Computing As A Service'

The company's CaaS users will be able to access a real-time self-service portal to manage physical and virtual servers, network devices, storage, and backup services.
##CONTINUE##
Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Business said it's working with partners VMware, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) to develop a cloud-based computing-as-a-service offering with strong security requirements for enterprise customers.

The Verizon Communications unit, which announced the CaaS service earlier this week, uses its global IP infrastructure and data centers to provide computing services on a day-by-day basis. The company said CaaS can be utilized for both Web-based and corporate applications running over its MPLS-based private network or its public IP network.

Verizon said the service is available immediately in the United States and Europe. It will be rolled out in August in the Asia-Pacific region.

"We are ushering in a new era of computing, one that offers enterprises security, resiliency, and scalability on demand with a whole new level of flexibility and a low cost structure," Nancy Gofus, Verizon's senior VP of global product development, said in a statement. "Today's smart enterprise knows that technology is a business enabler rather than the end goal."

Noting that its CaaS customers will be able to access a real-time self-service portal, Verizon said customers will be able to manage physical and virtual servers, network devices, storage, and backup services. Customers can use Verizon's Enterprise Center to manage all of their Verizon services through a single portal.

The company suggested that the CaaS service will give midmarket companies an edge to compete with larger companies because of the additional computing firepower that CaaS places at their disposal.

Attuned to the critical need of enterprises to address security issues, Verizon Business said its Cybertrust Security Management Program enables the company's data centers to be audited for physical security. The company observed that it has built security features into its CaaS offering that include secure connections to customer-provisioned resources.

-----------------------------
BY W. David Gardner
Source：InformationWeek

Copyright © 2009 United Business Media LLC, All rights reserved.

The Case Against Private Clouds

Over the past few weeks, I've examined the role of private clouds in cloud computing. In posts one and two, I discussed the functional services that comprise a private cloud, both from the infrastructure as well as the application management perspective. Last week, I discussed the case for private clouds -- why they are the most likely way mainstream IT organizations will implement cloud computing.
##CONTINUE##
This week, I want to take the contrary position -- why private clouds are not the future of cloud computing, and, in fact, will prove too daunting for IT organizations.

First, one of the main reasons posited for private clouds is that they enable IT organizations to repurpose existing infrastructure. But is that really true? The key to automating the bottom half of the chart -- the infrastructure portion -- is to use equipment that can be configured remotely with automated measures. In other words, the equipment must be capable of exposing an API that an automated configuration system can interact with. This kind of functionality is the hallmark of up-to-date equipment. Unfortunately, most data centers are full of equipment that does not have this functionality; instead they have a mishmosh of equipment of various vintages, much of which requires manual configuration. In other words, automating much of the existing infrastructure is a non-starter.

Worse, even if the data center equipment is mostly of recent vintage, additional investment will be necessary. Add-on equipment to manage networking and storage will be required for cloud capability. Absent sufficient investment to ensure every part of the kit is automation-ready, the goal of end-to-end automation that is cloud computing will fall short. That is to say, more capital investment is going to be required to get to the Nirvana of a private cloud. And in these economic times, where IT is slashing budgets, an initiative that calls for more investment is not really practicable.

Second, what most vendors aren't saying right now is that, even if you're ready and capable of supporting incremental capital investment, a private cloud is not an easy-to-assemble arrangement like something from Ikea. Far from it. In order to make all the pieces ready to work together and be provisioned in a holistic fashion, a great deal of manual work is required. Each of the vendors offers a range of professional services designed to help IT organizations get their cloud up and running. Left unsaid is the fact that creating a private cloud requires great slathers of expensive consulting. So on top of the additional hardware costs, there will be additional fees for the vendor's personnel to "help you take advantage of your existing infrastructure."

All in all, the ambition to leverage existing infrastructure to create a low cost private cloud may be a chimera -- a misguided vision of achieving vast improvement with little additional investment. Far more likely is vastly lowered marginal costs achieved by the investment of large amounts of capital and consulting.

Another thing that becomes clear if you look at the private cloud chart, is that there are lots of services that either don't exist today, or, if they do exist, are accomplished via manual processes. Just to take one example, policy. This is the function that determines whether an individual has the authority to request IT resources -- a new server, storage, etc. Today, that is hashed out at some kind of project meeting, or an architectural review board, or something of the like. The infrastructure representative takes notes that a new system needs to be set up, leaves the meeting, sends one or more pieces of e-mail (or convenes another meeting) and ultimately, a new collection of compute resources is available. This is communicated back to the requesting party via an e-mail or, just as likely, in the next sitdown meeting. Finally, the requestor can get to work.

In a private cloud, the rules for who has authority to request resources must be captured in rules that can be checked during an automated request for resources. That is, someone fills out a Web form requesting compute resources, and the request flows in an automated fashion through a number of steps, one of which is a check to see whether the requestor has the authority to obtain resources.

All of this illustrates a fundamental fact about private clouds: For them to operate effectively, a huge number of informal and manual processes must be changed. Put bluntly, the operating assumptions of IT -- the culture -- require transformation, which makes the challenges of upgrading the equipment look small. The cost of human capital, embodied in processes and executed by emotion-laden individuals, each with their own motivations, dwarfs that of physical capital. The inertia to be overcome is enormous. There is no question that the benefit of cloud computing is tremendous -- but at a cost of organizational upheaval, that benefit comes at too high a price.

Speaking of which, that brings us to our third issue -- the disruption. Remember, all of this capital changeout and process disruption occurs in a setting of working systems. Every major IT organization has hundreds, even thousands, of applications running, and the mind boggles at the amount of disruption imposed by the need to reconfigure all of the hardware the systems run on, not to mention the disruption imposed on everyday working processes by the move to automation.

One of the first rules of IT is not to mess with stuff that's working if at all possible. Only a brave -- or foolhardy -- CIO willingly invites disruption in order to putatively improve things. The more likely -- and more rational -- response is to leave what's in place alone, and create a segmented section of the data center devoted to a cloud environment. That section initially can be dedicated to low-risk uses like test/dev, internal Web-based apps, and so on, which can prove out whether there is real value in cloud computing.

The real challenge will come a year or so later, when the undoubted benefits of cloud computing are manifest. Then the CIO faces the question -- impose disruption on the existing infrastructure or not? On the one hand, there's obvious value in the agility and scalability of the cloud. On the other, all those existing apps in the existing infrastructure have managed to operate for months or years without cloud capabilities, so do they really need it?

It's quite possible that the long-term cloud strategy vis a vis the data center will be to leave it as is and use external resources -- whether an cloud-capable outsourcer (inevitably referred to by trendy cloud cognescenti as a CSP) or an external cloud provider like Amazon, Microsoft, Google or their brethren. Gradually, over time, as the systems running in the data center are replaced by new ones running in some cloud environment, the square footage of the internal center will shrink, until all that is left are critical systems that, for one reason or another, can't be moved outside.

So there you have it -- the con case against private clouds. While the instinctual response by many IT organizations is to assume that a private cloud is the obvious, nay only, way forward, it should be clear that migrating a typical IT environment to a private cloud is not trivial. It may be, as the saying goes, a bridge too far. Certainly, one should not lightly assume that the logic of private clouds is obvious and unassailable.

Next week I'll sum up this series of postings on private clouds and try and provide some guidelines, or action steps, that IT organizations should pursue toward this initiative.

-----------------------------
BY Bernard Golden
Source：CIO

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.

Cloud Computing Seminars HyperStratus is offering three one-day seminars. The topics are:

1. Cloud fundamentals: key technologies, market landscape, adoption drivers, benefits and risks, creating an action plan

2. Cloud applications: selecting cloud-appropriate applications, application architectures, lifecycle management, hands-on exercises

3. Cloud deployment: private vs. public options, creating a private cloud, key technologies, system management

The seminars can be delivered individually or in combination. For more information, see http://www.hyperstratus.com/pages/training.htm

Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.

Copyright CXO Media Inc., 2009. All rights reserved.

What Shape Is Your Cloud?

Key Points
• When choosing a cloud provider, start with the services that you are looking to fulfill and the reasons you are looking to outsource in the first place. Do some research on the services you need so you can buy them on your terms.
##CONTINUE##
• Make sure that the cloud platform you choose does not require you to configure your applications so that they only work on that platform.

• Look for clouds that provide access to world-class IT infrastructure that you can purchase in small, inexpensive, bite-sized pieces, rather than having to settle for second-class infrastructure because it makes economic sense.

According to industry experts, the “cloud” hanging around the enterprise isn’t going away anytime soon. Many small to midsized enterprises are turning to the cloud for at least a portion of their computing needs, but some do not know where to start when choosing the best cloud provider for their business needs. It’s not uncommon for an enterprise to purchase a product based on a company’s reputation, but because cloud computing is a new solution, cloud providers do not have long track records; thus, there is no way to tell if a provider will deliver. We talked with industry experts to come up with tips and advice that data center and IT managers can use to pick a cloud provider.

Cloud Reasons

Josh Roebuck, sales and marketing associate at Joyent (www.joyent.com), says SMEs are turning to cloud providers for their computing needs for many reasons. Roebuck notes, “It’s better, cheaper, and faster. First of all, there are no long-term contracts. And the cloud allows you to focus on your core business, not running a data center, and also allows you to test ideas and bring ideas to market more easily, quickly, and with less sunk costs.” Roebuck says the cloud also offers a more energy-efficient approach to computing and matters to your “green bottom line.”

Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid (www.thinkgrid.co.uk), says he can describe in a few words why SMEs are turning to the cloud: “Cost (it is much cheaper per user

than managing in-house), reliability (these cloud infrastructures are huge and can provide resilience and business continuity off the bat), and ease (just click a button and it’s deployed).”

Cloud Shapes

Lovell says when choosing a cloud provider, start with the services that you are looking to fulfill and the reasons you are looking to outsource in the first place. Lovell comments, “Cloud computing is really just a word for hosted services. There are a lot of providers giving away storage of CPU processing power, but only a few are translating this into actual services. As an SME, you should do some research on the services you need so you can buy them on your terms.”

Asking fundamental questions can help, says Roebuck. "First," he says, "it's important to be clear on why you are choosing cloud hosting and what problem you expect it to solve or what added benefit you expect it to provide.” Roebuck says it’s also important to be clear on what you mean and understand by ‘the cloud’ or cloud computing. For example, do you need SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), or IaaS (infrastructure as a service)?

Barry Lynn, chairman and CEO of 3Tera (www.3tera.com), says if your services have a lock-in, don’t waste your time. Lynn elaborates, “Some cloud services can hold you hostage. You get your applications on their cloud and it can be very difficult to get them off if you are not happy with the service. Make sure that the cloud platform you choose does not require you to configure your applications so that they only work on that platform. And make sure your provider has multiple physical locations so that if you have to, you can move your application.”

Lynn says most importantly, though, look for clouds that provide access to world-class IT infrastructure that you can purchase in small, inexpensive, bite-sized pieces, rather than having to settle for second-class infrastructure because it makes economic sense. He says cloud computing is not simply running your applications on someone else’s hardware. “It is the ability to encapsulate applications so that they can run anywhere (on any idle, available hardware), and you only consume and pay for the resources you are using, while always having enough resources available when you need them.”

Cloud Delivery

The key to making sure your cloud provider will deliver, says Lynn, is in the SLA (service-level agreement). He explains, “Ask them if they guarantee performance and availability. Ask them what their limitations are with regard to operating systems, middleware, databases, infrastructure, etc. If they have many limitations, go somewhere else.” Lynn says it’s important to ask how easy it is to port an existing application into the cloud: “If you have to make changes to your existing code to run it in the cloud, the moment you decide to move out, your application will need to be changed again.”

Roebuck says it’s important to be clear on what kind of expertise and resources you have in-house and what you expect the cloud provider to offer. He asks, “Are you looking for managed, semimanaged, or unmanaged hosting? You also need to ask questions like: Does the provider offer software to help manage the environment? Does the provider specialize in one particular programming language, or do they have broader experience and expertise? Are you looking for long-term application hosting or running batch jobs that may need to scale up for a matter of hours?”

Lovell says the key for a great cloud delivery is the reliability and support around the services you are purchasing. He elaborates, “It’s important to pick a provider that can provide high service levels (guaranteed), 24/7 support, and has experience in the areas you are looking at. Case studies or reference customers are a must. I think the key thing is to read through the jargon when choosing services. Understand what you need and why you are doing it and get the provider to explain how they are going to meet these goals.”

Here To Stay?
We asked Barry Lynn, chairman and CEO of 3Tera (www.3tera.com), and Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid (www.thinkgrid.co.uk), if the cloud is here to stay. Lynn comments, “Yes, cloud computing is real and it’s here to stay. Cloud computing, defined as abstracting applications from their physical resources and enabling dynamic scalability up and down, vertically and horizontally, is the future of IT and will, over time, replace traditional IT and data centers as we know them today. If you are talking to other vendors, they may have different answers, but after three years on the market with a real product, and with over 300 happy customers, mostly SMEs, data center operators, and hosting providers, we have all the proof points for the future of cloud computing as the next generation of IT and data center operations. Of course it will take time until it is vastly adopted.”

Lovell concludes, “It has already been around for a good decade or more, just under different guises. So yes, I think outsourced ‘off-premise’ services will continue to grow as they have done. Whether cloud computing as a term sticks, I think it probably will, given the amount of momentum it already has.”

-----------------------------
BY Chris A. MacKinnon
Source：PROCESSOR

Copyright © by Sandhills Publishing Company 2009. All rights reserved.

Where architecture meets cloud computing

Pat Stingley, who is well known in the government cloud computing space, has been sharing his own thoughts on "cloud architecture,” including his initial thinking on the topic. Pat and I have been speaking at and sitting on panels at some recent cloud computing for government events. I spoke with Pat yesterday, and he wanted me to assist in distributing his thinking for public comments; he also mentioned this is his work as an individual thought leader. However, if you’re following the government cloud computing movement, which is growing rapidly, you already know Pat Stingley. He says:
##CONTINUE##
I have been working very hard trying to identify just what cloud computing is. At this point, my working definition for cloud computing is [twofold.] From an engineering [perspective] the cloud is a computing architecture characterized by a large number of interconnected identical computing devices that can scale on demand and that communicate via an IP network. From a business perspective it is computing services that are scalable and billed on a usage basis.

My key takeaway from this was: So where is the cloud? Have we boiled it off?

My answer is to circle back and say that the cloud is an architecture and a way of paying for services in an on-demand fashion, not the set of services themselves. While many of the services in the diagram above could be provided by employing the use of a cloud architecture, they can (and often are) deployed in non-cloud architectures as well.

What’s important about Pat’s framework is how much of cloud computing is defined by architecture, including SOA. Therefore, you need an overarching architecture to determine the proper use of all components, including those delivered in the cloud. In essence, the use of architecture spans both on-premise and cloud.

As cloud computing continues to gain traction, the tendency will be to view cloud computing as a set of new enabling technologies that have direct tactical value. However, cloud, as Pat puts it, is an architecture. By looking at it this way, you’ll see the value well beyond the hype and any short-term tactical advantage.

-----------------------------
BY David Linthicum
Source：InfoWorld

©1994-2009 Infoworld, Inc.

Bringing Cloud Computing to SOA

There’s no shortage of opinions on how cloud computing and SOA are related. Just plug the phrase into your favorite search engine and you’ll have a day’s worth of reading. What you are likely to find are articles discussing how SOA led to cloud computing, how a good SOA is a prerequisite to leverage cloud computing, or how to leverage cloud computing in your SOA. I’ve spent quite a bit of time reading these types of articles and listening to experts talk about SOA and cloud computing, and that got me to thinking. How can companies bring the cloud experience to their SOA?
##CONTINUE##
In order to do this, a company may set out by creating clouds of their physical infrastructure, storage, or networking capabilities, which are all worthy pursuits. However, I believe the best way to cloud-enable a SOA is to deal with the heart of the SOA, the services. In short, to bring the cloud to SOA the goal should be to create a cloud of services. This is of course easier said than done, but as a general outline it would be a two step process:

1. Virtualize the services
2. Manage the virtualization

When we look at cloud computing in very plain terms, solutions usually constitute a set of virtualized resources and capabilities that allow those resources to be managed. Virtualizing the services in a SOA is a logical first step then toward moving to a cloud-enabled SOA. There are solutions in the marketplace today, the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance being one, which provide users a virtual packaging that includes an operating system, service infrastructure, and service. In effect, the service becomes a virtualized resource, thus enabling the next very important step in bringing the cloud to a SOA.

Virtualization alone does not a cloud make, so after users successfully virtualize the services in their SOA, capabilities to manage such virtualization need to be put in place. The capabilities I’m speaking of here bring cloud-like characteristics to the service virtualization. These include the ability to create, deploy, dynamically allocate, and track usage of these virtualized services. This results in an elastic cloud and one in which usage across the cloud can be tracked to facilitate the utility pricing model so often associated with clouds.

Once both service virtualization and management of that virtualization are in place, the result is a cloud of services. In my opinion, clouds of services are more valuable than clouds of things like hardware, storage, and databases because the cloud is brought to the resources that are much closer to the end-user. Further, once a cloud of services has been established, it’s not much of a stretch to use the same techniques to bring the cloud all the way to the applications comprised of such services. This may be the most valuable cloud of all since it is the asset that a company’s end-users come in direct contact with.

-----------------------------
BY Dustin Amrhein
Source：SYS-CON

Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.

A Small Business's Guide to the Cloud

When putting your systems in the cloud, a few options are available depending on exactly what you want to put there and for how long. Although each vendor offers essentially the same service-a place to move your computing efforts away from your own infrastructure-they break down the pricing in a number of ways. Make sure you take into account your specific needs to find which cloud suits your company best.
##CONTINUE##
Amazon

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides an environment to run computing resources while keeping the control over the data in the user's hands and emphasizing pay per use. As users' requirements change, EC2 allows for easy scaling of capacity. Pricing is per terabyte per month, which decreases a few cents as the data amount increases.

Users build their own Amazon Virtual image to include customizable features such as an operating system, starting and ending usage dates, security and network access controls, APIs or other management tools and the number of locations.

Google

App Engine allows you to build your own virtual application to run Web applications on Google's servers in either Java or Python environments.

Resources used by the applications, such as bandwidth and storage, are free for up to 500MB of data plus the CPU and bandwidth needed to serve more than five million page views a month. Once users surpass the free limits, prices are per gigabyte only for the extra resources used. Usage limits can be set so you never use more than what you are willing to pay for.

Features include dynamic Web serving, automatic scaling and load balancing, storage sorting, APIs for authenticating users and more.

Skytap

Virtual Lab supplies users with a ready-made platform on which to operate their applications and virtual machines without needing to build virtual machine images. As such, it gives users instant gratification for moving servers to the cloud, especially those requiring temporary usage of computing. Users are able to customize features of the platform, such as access and assets, through a provided management tool.

The services target development and testing environments. Subscriptions for limited use of the self-service lab management application start at US$500 per month. For additional fees based on usage of storage and data transfers, users can select an unlimited capacity option.

VMware

vSphere 4 is a virtualization operating system providing the capability to move physical infrastructures into the cloud. By moving all physical data centers, companies not only save money on computing and energy-related costs but also have one silo for storage and resource management. Pricing starts at $166 per processor or $995 for three physical systems and varies depending on the edition purchased.

Depending on the size of the company, different versions are available and include different features, such as vMotion management tools, VMsafe security APIs and data recovery, among others.

-----------------------------
BY Jarina D'Auria , CIO
Source：PCWorld

© 1998-2009, PC World Communications, Inc.

Bringing the Cloud to SOA

There’s no shortage of opinions on how cloud computing and SOA are related. Just plug the phrase into your favorite search engine and you’ll have a day’s worth of reading. What you are likely to find are articles discussing how SOA led to cloud computing, how a good SOA is a prerequisite to leverage cloud computing, or how to leverage cloud computing in your SOA. I’ve spent quite a bit of time reading these types of articles and listening to experts talk about SOA and cloud computing, and that got me to thinking. How can companies bring the cloud experience to their SOA?
##CONTINUE##
In order to do this, a company may set out by creating clouds of their physical infrastructure, storage, or networking capabilities, which are all worthy pursuits. However, I believe the best way to cloud-enable a SOA is to deal with the heart of the SOA, the services. In short, to bring the cloud to SOA the goal should be to create a cloud of services. This is of course easier said than done, but as a general outline it would be a two step process:

1. Virtualize the services
2. Manage the virtualization

When we look at cloud computing in very plain terms, solutions usually constitute a set of virtualized resources and capabilities that allow those resources to be managed. Virtualizing the services in a SOA is a logical first step then toward moving to a cloud-enabled SOA. There are solutions in the marketplace today, the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance being one, which provide users a virtual packaging that includes an operating system, service infrastructure, and service. In effect, the service becomes a virtualized resource, thus enabling the next very important step in bringing the cloud to a SOA.

Virtualization alone does not a cloud make, so after users successfully virtualize the services in their SOA, capabilities to manage such virtualization need to be put in place. The capabilities I’m speaking of here bring cloud-like characteristics to the service virtualization. These include the ability to create, deploy, dynamically allocate, and track usage of these virtualized services. This results in an elastic cloud and one in which usage across the cloud can be tracked to facilitate the utility pricing model so often associated with clouds.

Once both service virtualization and management of that virtualization are in place, the result is a cloud of services. In my opinion, clouds of services are more valuable than clouds of things like hardware, storage, and databases because the cloud is brought to the resources that are much closer to the end-user. Further, once a cloud of services has been established, it’s not much of a stretch to use the same techniques to bring the cloud all the way to the applications comprised of such services. This may be the most valuable cloud of all since it is the asset that a company’s end-users come in direct contact with.

-----------------------------
BY Dustin Amrhein
Source：SYS-CON

Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.

Cloud Computing: Recapping a Week of IT Events

I started this past week in Las Vegas attending the two-day Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop where a crowd of 200-300 people converged to learn about the rapidly evolving cloud computing phenomena from a cross-section of speakers from established players and virtual start-ups.
##CONTINUE##
This might not seem like a lot of attendees, but it was about ten times as many people as those who attended the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) track of Interop. And, the cloud crowd grew even bigger at the end of the first day of the Summit when an ‘unconference’ CloudCamp was held which featured a variety of ‘birds-of-a-feather’ style discuss groups fueled by plenty of oversized cookies.

The cloud computing theme also extended into the main-tent portion of Interop with the keynote sessions on the first day of the conference also focused on the topic. These sessions permitted Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), IBM (IBM) and SAP (SAP) to put their proprietary spins on the cloud computing idea which may have only created more confusion in the minds of the attendess about this amorphous concept.

While the level of interest in cloud computing was strong, the overall attendance at Interop was down due to the economy and lingering concerns about the swine flu. And, despite the attention cloud computing received in the conference sessions, there were few vendors demonstrating cloud computing capabilities on the show floor. Instead, it was a typical three-ring circus of technology box-pushers, card-trick magicians and over-the-top come-ons, including a vendor using a series of boxing matches to attract visitors to his booth.

I came away from the event with the firm impression that cloud computing has captured the attention of the mainstream of IT/network professionals who are the mainstay attendees of Interop. They recognize that cloud computing can have an impact on the way they acquire and utilize computing resources. They see it as a potential threat and opportunity in their infrastructure environment, and want to better understand how it works and how to maximize its benefits.

Even though the success of SaaS has spawned the broader cloud computing movement, many of the Interop attendees mirrored the broader population of IT/network professionals and chose to ignore the Interop sessions focused on the business implications of SaaS solutions.

The dramatic difference in attendance levels between the cloud computing and SaaS sessions also illustrates the great divide which has emerged in the minds of many vendors, analysts, press and event organizers who look at SaaS and cloud computing as separate despite the efforts of companies, like Salesforce.com, to brand them as one and the same.

Many of the SaaS vendors who continue to focus their marketing and sales efforts entirely on business decision-makers and avoid the IT department at all costs are pleased to have IT/network administrators distracted by the cloud computing hype. But, those who can’t circumvent the IT department are finding that the confusion and uncertainty surrounding cloud computing is compounding their sales and marketing challenges.

Sorting out the sales and marketing implications of these trends was the focus of a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) SaaS forum held this past Thursday at Sun Microsystems’ (JAVA) quiet campus in Burlington, MA. (It will be interesting to see if the Oracle (ORCL) acquisition breathes new life into the campus or results in it being divested and becoming more vacant.)

The forum drew around one hundred SaaS professionals and other interested parties seeking to learn more about today’s best practices for selling SaaS. The attendees learned that SaaS may be easier to develop and deliver, but is still hard to market and sell, especially in today’s economy. Why?

Because it takes a different approach than marketing and selling traditional, ‘legacy’ software. It takes greater customer-centricity, starting with the user interface design and extending through the ongoing support process. It takes a different marketing process, starting with messaging and continuing through every lead generation activity. And, it takes a different sales process, starting with training and including compensation and incentives.

The MassTLC forum did a good job of bringing together SaaS professionals to discuss these issues and challenges. It served as a catalyst to continue to build a bigger SaaS community in the New England area. But, it also illustrated that surviving in the SaaS market takes a series of successful steps that many vendors are still trying to discern.

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BY Jeffrey M. Kaplan
Source：Seeking Alpha

The Cloud-Computing Myth

There's always a new era of "network computing" around the corner, but we won't reach it soon.
##CONTINUE##
John Chambers, among others, has reignited a fervor around the prospects of "cloud computing."

Distributed computing has been championed on several occasions, perennially reemerging every five years or so but failing each time to overcome significant hurdles and operational risks before fading back into remission.

Let me save you some suspense, I believe the hype of cloud computing will once again taper off, even with advancements in Internet applications and improvements in connectivity the past few years. Bandwidth constraints and the growing cost of incremental traffic will partly be to blame (this is not a trivial hurdle; carriers grapple with an inability to charge by usage). The concept will also fail because of the complexity of maintaining and supporting so many remote devices and the costs of unavoidable outages; because part of a business' competitive advantage is its operational customization of off-the-shelf software; because of regulatory hurdles and restrictions not often considered part of the discussion.

Advantages: Nothing Cerebral here

The drivers behind the cloud computing movements have always been clear, especially from the Cisco perspective; if you increase data usage across the network, you sell more routers. Flow everything through the network and you can sell a lot more routers. Everyone benefits: More data flowing mean more servers, more backup, more fiber, more towers, more data centers ... you get the point. It helps enterprise information technology staffs who can better control what their devices are used for and remotely maintain them. It even helps the end user who can finally jettison some the device maintenance and upkeep that they so hate doing and often neglect.

So what's wrong with cloud computing?

Detractor 1: Cost of Connectivity

Revenues generated per dollar of infrastructure invested is falling at carriers. Having previously failed to push tier-pricing structures on customers (proportional to usage)--and with the growing strain from iPhone users hogging resources--carriers are reluctant to sell unlimited access to heavy users. New netbook plans where a user receives subsidized netbooks with service plans are popping up, with very limited bandwidth caps; the new base Verizon plan limits users to 250 Mbs of downloads a month before overage charges, compared with an average 900 Mbs of usage by your average smart phone user and about 3 Gbs for the average land line (Alcatel Lucent, CDMA Development Group, October 2008).

Cloud computing would take all applications and data and place them remotely. Anytime you accessed a video, a picture, Word, Excel, anything, you would need to do it remotely and generate much greater strain on the network. It is less and less likely, given the tight economic environment, the more restrained cap-ex budgets and the lack of tired-pricing acceptance, that carriers would encourage and subsidize such a high-usage model.

Detractor 2: Unavoidable Outages

Downtime is a real risk to business. If a consumer can't access the Web for several hours a couple of times a year because of outages, it is, while unfortunate, hardly the end of the world. Loosing that much productivity across a region or across your entire organization, however, is not acceptable.

Take the Google outage: Even with a very robust and redundant architecture supported by the best and most expensive purpose-built hardware out there, Google's network goes down occasionally. Think about your own experience with access and how many outages you experience on a yearly basis. Try to imagine a situation where you lose all access three, four, five times a year for three hours to two days. Consider local outages too: There are still some locations in Boston where I have a tough time getting uninterrupted access over the course of an hour or two.

Detractor 3: Not Sharing Secret Sauce

Many businesses consider their optimization of off-the-shelf software as part of their proprietary and competitive advantage. They spend many man hours optimizing products and configuring them to optimize their sales efforts, their manufacturing processes, their customer interactions, etc. I'm not sure how much of this secret sauce would be trusted to external software vendors also serving your competitors.

Detractor 4: Regulatory and Compliance Restrictions

The final detractor to cloud computing can be lumped into compliance and regulatory problems. These are rarely mentioned but present a significant hurdle.

Compliance and regulatory concerns have to do with where data are physically located and actually make little logical sense except for the fact that this is how the law is written. Government regulations require customer records, certain kinds of billing information and various types of other compliance information to be physically located in the same state or country as the customer or the regulator. Assuming a cloud computing environment in Europe, these requirements would necessitate a data center or a storage site in every country.

Obviously such an IT structure would not be feasible, as large organizations typically operate two or three primary data centers where information is consolidated around the world. Regulators don't particularly care about IT consolidation, virtualization or cloud computing. They require organizations to not only be able to quickly locate required information but also prove its location.

Try doing that in a virtualized cloud. Currently we see no signs that governments will ease these restrictions; if anything, given the realities of the last year, regulatory hoops at every level are likely to increase.

While it seems clear that high prices and a variety of constraints will dampen the rollout of cloud computing, I hate to stand as a naysayer to progress and innovation. After all, technology has a long history of tearing down barriers and overcoming significant hurdles. A positive takeaway, therefore, as we approach this vision, is the growing worldwide need for significantly more bandwidth and much bigger pipes. So run out and buy the base station and long haul, guys; the future should continue to be very bright for them. Given the cost of the network upgrades, we should prepare to pay more for the growing amount of bandwidth we consume as we stream videos and data either to our phones or computers.

Finally, at least until the next re-emergence of distributed computing, most of us will still need to carry around full-function PCs, so don't sell the PC component providers just yet.

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BY Avi Cohen
Source：Forbes

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