MS Live Mesh - Remote Desktop Meets the Cloud

You might not think of remote desktop as a cloud tool but MS has added cloud storage to remote desktop and called it Live Mesh. I have been using it recently and it is pretty nice. I use VNC fairly extensively and, when I'm not using VNC, I tend to use SSH. Well, I heard about this Live Mesh thing and decided to download it and give it a try. It is currently a beta product but I haven't had any issues.

My first thought on using it was that it was a clone of gotomypc. I'm not a user of gotomypc so I can't say for sure but it looks that way. The big difference is that gotomypc doesn't have a free version or online storage. I think the integration, storage and synchronization services are what make Mesh a unique tool.

Being an MS product, you might expect there is no Linux support. You would be right. There is MAC OS/X support though and Windows Mobile is on the way. I would be a lot more excited if they planned to support blackberry. But, it is still a great way to stay in touch with my desktop, laptop, work computer and the non-linux database servers in my lab.

This is what my home desktop looks like from the Live Mesh Desktop:

You can access a live mesh remote desktop from any computer that can run IE. The computer you are connecting FROM does not need to be running Live Mesh at all. Just log into your account at livemesh.com and login. You can then connect to any device in your mesh.

When you log in via a browser, you get a device screen where you see all of your devices and can connect to new ones. Your device names are not the actual hardware identification. You get to give them friendly text names.

If you open your live desktop, you can create folders to store data in the cloud. You currently get 5GB of storage for free,. You can create multiple directories and automatically sync those directories to the devices of your choosing. As an example, I created a Documents directory. Anything I put in that directory is automatically propagated to my work computer, my laptop (BIGDOG) and to one of my database servers (which has partially become my son's computer).

This is my Live Desktop:

I haven't really noticed any speed differences between the IE connection and the Remote Desktop tool. I prefer to use the remote desktop but I can't really say why. Here is what my db server looks like, first in IE and then in the remote desktop tool:

IE:

Remote Desktop:

If you notice in some of the above shots, Mesh windows have a side window with tips and information. I snipped that window out of some of these shots. It's kind of annoying but usually provides helpful information. I could see in the future, if this becomes a pay service, that ads might be placed there to support a free version.

This is the text of the help window when connected to a remote desktop:

So that's pretty much live mesh. It offers synching and free storage (more than mozy even) as well as a remote desktop that is accessible from a browser. I think this just shows how much cloud computing will be integrated in everyone's life and not just in business.

LewisC

Technorati : desktop, live, mesh, microsoft, remote, storage

VMWare Enters the Cloud

VMWare is the virtualization king and I have been wondering when they would chose to enter the cloud competition. Until now, it's pretty much been Amazon's game to win or lose. According to this article, VMWare is opening a data center in Washington state. The new data center will be 189,000 square feet, of which VMWare will use over 100,000 square feet of it. That's a nice size data center.

An interesting side note os that VMWare is not the first to build a data center in the area. Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, Ask.com and base partners also have, or are building, data centers in the area. The article attributes that to cheaper electricity from the local dams generating hydro power.

Technorati : cloud computing, vmware

Cloud Tools: Cloud Studio

Amazon ships a handful of tools to use EC2 and S3. There are some freely downloaded scripts that make life a bit easier. Personally, I want to use a GUI. I use SSH enough when I connect remotely. If I'm in Windows, I want a windows tool.

Today I downloaded Cloud Studio from Cloud Services, Ltd. Cloud Studio is an free S3 browser with a little bit of EC2 support. It's a version 1.0 product so you can't expect too much. According to the site:

Cloud Studio is a visual tool designed to make the development of applications for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) more convenient. Developers (or someone responsible for applications deployment) can effortlessly create and destroy instances, manage security groups, keypairs, and allocate and assign IP addresses.

User can choose to run Cloud Studio as a traditional standalone application, or to use it as an extension to Eclipse IDE, which is currently one of the most widely used application development environments featuring support for Java, C/C++, PHP, and other programming languages.

The interface is extremely easy to use. It has a three pane window. Upper left is an AMI browser, upper right is a pane with a set of tabs showing configuration information. The bottom pane is the most useful with an instance monitor, an S3 browser and a progress tab (that shows outstanding tasks).

The instance monitor show any currently running instances. If you right click on an instance, you can terminate or reboot it. You can also associate an elastic IP to the instance.

The S3 browser is the most functional in the program. At the right is a drop down list and a series of icons. The drop down list lets you select a top level bucket. The icons, in order, allow you to get file properties, create a new bucket, delete a bucket, upload a file and refresh the screen. The final two icons are on all the panes and allow you to minimize or maximize a pane. If you right click on a file, you can choose to download the file.

That's about it. It's a very simple program but it does exactly what it advertises to do. I like it. I'll be trying other tools as I find them but for now, Cloud Studio is a part of my cloud computing toolbox.

LewisC

Technorati : aws, cloud computing, cloud storage, ec2, s3

The Storage Cloud, Currently

InformationWeek has a good article, Behind The Storage Cloud. This article gives something of the plumbing behind the available storage in the cloud. Something they didn't talk about in that article are the limitations I have been running into using the cloud.

For infrastructure providers like Google or Force.com, who are offering a PaaS (Platform as a Service), the storage is built into the application. If you chose them to develop your application, that works out fine. However, if you are looking for archiving or storage scaling (grow storage as you need it), it's not so good.

Amazon offers a different kind of storage. S3 is a web based storage system. It's like a bucket for data. It's the biggest bucket you'll probably ever see, but it's just a big bucket. When you create a new directory, you're creating a smaller bucket in the big bucket. The namespace for the bucket is global. That means that your smaller bucket can't have the same name as someone else's bucket. That's a huge limitation.

Another issue with S3 is that it is a web service and not a block device. That means you can't directly attach it and use it as a file system. You need to make API calls. Even from within EC2 (Amazon's Cloud Computing Environment), S3 is only accessible through the API using PUT and GET style commands. Amazon is working on allowing EC2 to attach directly and there are other projects working on the same thing, PersistentFS being one of them.

I haven't found a good, cloud based attachable storage yet. I think Amazon, when they make S3 attachable will be the first (although that might only be attachable from within EC2). What is currently available is a plethora of archival solutions. For home usage, I don't think anything beats EMC Mozy. For $4.95/month, you get unlimited storage for one PC. It's slow to add new files (at least for me it is), but overall, I don't think any of its competitors really compete. I tried two others previously and decided to go with mozy for its price/feature ratio.

For business archival, I don't know that I would recommend Mozy. It's not that I would recommend against them, I just think there are better options. Off site, tape backups are still cheap and reliable. For the SMB market, burning a DVD once a week might even be enough. Just depends on your workflow and volume of data.

As a side note, it would be fairly easy to write a custom application to automatically backup changed files to S3. At less than 20 cents per month per GB, that might be a fairly reasonable solution, especially if you frequently need to access the archived data. I might even write a free giveaway to do just that. Just a POC kind of thing.

Technorati : amazon, cloud computing, cloud databases, ec2, force.com, google, mozy, persistetnFS, s3, storage