Final Post on the Databases in the Cloud Blog

Well, this will be the final post on this blog. I have been neglecting it anyway. The good news is that I want to pick back up on cloud blogging but I wanted to tie it to my new site, DatabaseWisdom.com. That site has a blog so I created a new blog with the same look and feel but covering cloud topics instead of database topics.

The new blog is cloud computing info (more generic than databases in the cloud). The URL is http://clouddb.info/.

A final note, in addition to the blog, I am writing a Cloud Computing With Amazon book. It will be available on amazon, mobipocketbooks (ebook site) and may other bookstores within the next month. I will be posting an html version, viewable for free, on http://databasewisdom.com/

I will also post updates about the book at http://clouddb.info/

Take care and I hope to see you on the new blog.

LewisC

Technorati : blogging, moving

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

AT&T Plays in the Cloud

I have said quite a few times that Cloud Computing is more like a phone company than it is like electricity. A phone company can offer various services and will change from provider to provider. Electricity needs to be the same for everyone (at least within a region).

Today, AT&T announced the move to the cloud: AT&T Launches Global Utility Computing Service. According to this article from GridToday, AT&T announced it's new AT&T Synaptic Hosting, a managed network, security and storage business for businesses. They are build 5 "super data centers" to have a total of 38 data centers, world-wide.

A core feature of AT&T Synaptic Hosting is its next-generation utility computing platform. This enables the service to deliver a complete hosting solution with features that use the AT&T network to manage applications, compute resources on servers and store data. AT&T Synaptic Hosting also provides designated account support all backed by a single end-to-end, service-level agreement that is unique within the industry.

This looks like the beginning of something. Maybe telephony will morph to VOIP and the big bells will, with their tremendous computing power and dedicated networking, become the home of the cloud. Just because Amazon and Google started it, doesn't mean they will do it best or last the longest. This is the kind of thing the major communications companies need.

"Today's announcement is yet another example of AT&T's commitment to deliver next-generation services and solutions to companies worldwide," said Ron Spears, group president, AT&T Global Business Services. "The AT&T global network, combined with our powerful computing platform, is driving the convergence of networking and hosting services in ways that are allowing companies to deliver end-user applications whenever and wherever they are needed - while paying only for the capacity actually used.

The official Web site of the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) is powered by AT&T Synaptic Hosting. Teamusa.org is the USOC's new feature-rich Web site that connects fans of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams with America's athletes on their journey to the Olympic Games. The site features stories on U.S. Olympians and Paralympians and Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, athlete blogs and social networking tools.

And they wouldn't be the phone company if they didn't offer a menu of options and add-ons.

In addition to utility computing features, AT&T Synaptic Hosting offers the following:

• A broad selection of dynamic storage and security features that enterprises have come to rely on to protect their data and assets.
• The ability to use AT&T's BusinessDirect customer portal to easily manage capacity, complete maintenance and monitor network service and performance of their virtual IT environment.
• Personalized support from teams of designated hosting and application specialists who are experienced in the business and technical needs of the clients.
• Application monitoring and reporting capabilities that work with most client software available in the industry today.
• One end-to-end service level agreement that covers the customer's entire environment.

You can bet there will be more to come from AT&T.

LewisC

Technorati : att, cloud, computing, utility

IBM is Building $400 Million Data Centers for the Cloud

According to GridToday, IBM is spending $400 million on two new cloud data center in Tokyo and North Carolina. The big news from this is that IBM is shooting for a very green data center.

In North Carolina, they are renovating an existing building and reusing 90% of the existing components. They plan on the center being 50% more energy efficient than the industry average. The site will originally be 60,000 square feet of raised flooring and will modularly expandable. The center will be open sometime in 2009. IBM received $750,000 in local and state economic incentives for building the center.

The Tokyo center will be a customer facing center that will help companies and universities use and implement cloud computing. This is IBM's ninth cloud computing center worldwide. Japan is a very mature and complex technology corridor. Due somewhat to the maturity, the systems may be old and inflexible. IBM will be helping Japanese companies adapt to cloud computing.

"To develop high skilled human resources in IT field, it is necessary to create latest IT environment in education place," said Hiroto Yasuura, Dean of Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University. "Kyushu University is very interested in cloud computing technology, which can provide an on-demand IT environment to our students and teachers. We have been working with IBM, the pioneer of this field. Kyushu University will continue to take advantage of cloud computing technology more actively."

IBM, rather than being a cloud provider, is looking to be the cloud consultant. I imagine they will also eventually release a private cloud with their own software.

On the green front, IBM is investing $1 billion in R&D efforts to increase the efficiency of data centers. IBM has several huge data centers world wide. I've used the Dallas center, remotely, to prototype a large BI system I developed several years ago. At their center, I had access to a 32 CPU P595 with 512GB of RAM and an EMC san. That was just one of the many systems available for customer prototypes.

The center will partially be powered by alternative power sources (although IBM hasn't yet said what kind). The center will use virtualization as much as possible which will further save power. In the winter months, the center will use a free cooling system to allow the center to cool itself naturally. Very cool.

This is just another sign of the growing maturity of cloud computing. I'm glad IBM is investing so heavily in the cloud.

Technorati : cloud, data center, ibm

Dell Tries to Trademark "Cloud Computing"

Someone needs to smack Dell. I was reading Yahoo news and ran across an article about Dell. It says that Dell has applied to trademark the term "cloud computing". What a bunch of jerks.

They have made it past the notification of allowance phase and is at the opposition phase. That means that companies can complain and and let the USPTO know of their objections. I hope plenty of companies do file an objection. This is really what is NOT needed right now in the cloud.

I don't see how the USPTO can even allow this claim of a trademark. I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure cloud computing as a term was around long before Dell even thought of entering the cloud hardware market. This is a lot like non-open source companies trying to take over the open source moniker.

Technorati : cloud, computing, dell, stupidity

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

The Computers of Tomorrow

Is Cloud Computing a new idea? As a matter of a fact, it is not. Is comparing cloud computing to the electric utilities a new concept. As a matter of a fact, it is not. What does this sound like:

ANALOGY WITH ELECTRICITY

The computing machine is fundamentally an extremely useful device. The service it provides has a kind of universality and generality not unlike that afforded by electric power. Electricity can be harnessed for any of a wide variety of jobs: running machinery, exercising control, transmitting information, producing sound, heat, and light. Symbolic computation can be applied to an equally broad range of tasks: routine numerical calculations, manipulation of textual data, automatic control of instrumentation, simulation of dynamic processes, statistical analyses, problem solving, game playing, information storage, retrieval, and display.

Does that sounds like Nick Carr's analogy with electricity? "Symbolic computation" - When's the last time you heard it said like that?

How about:

THE INFORMATION UTILITY

The concept of an information-processing utility poses many questions. Will the role of information utilities be sufficiently extensive and cohesive to create a whole new industry? If so, will this industry consist of a single integrated utility, like American Telephone and Telegraph, or will there be numerous individual utilities, like Consolidated Edison and the Boston Gas Company? Will the design and manufacture of computing components, terminal equipment, and programming systems be accomplished by subsidiaries of the information utility, as in the telephone industry, or will there be a separate industry of independent private manufacturers, like General Electric and Westinghouse in today's electrical equipment industry?

This sounds an awful lot like utility computing. Something just isn't right though. An information processing utility? American Telephone and Telegraph? Is that AT&T? GE and Westinghouse?

Perhaps the most important question of all concerns the legal matter of government regulation. Will the information utility be a public utility, or will it be privately owned and operated? Will some large companies have their own information utilities, just as some companies today have their own generating plants?

That also sounds like the cloud computing that has been growing at Amazon and Google. Those are sort of like the questions people are asking. Who will own the cloud and how homogeneous will it be. And re-read that last sentence.

The high cost of capital equipment is a major reason why producers of electricity are public utilities instead of unregulated companies. A second reason is the extensive distribution network they require to make their product generally available. This network, once established, is geographically fixed and immovable. Wasteful duplication and proliferation of lines could easily result if there were no public regulation.

This above paragraph is so true. Check out the following paragraph:

Barring unforeseen obstacles, an on-line interactive computer service, provided commercially by an information utility, may be as commonplace by 2000 AD as telephone service is today. By 2000 AD man should have a much better comprehension of himself and his system, not because he will be innately any smarter than he is today, but because he will have learned to use imaginatively the most powerful amplifier of intelligence yet devised.

Did you read that? "by 2000 AD". The article I have been quoting from was written for the Atlantic Monthly in May 1964. This article was written two years before I was born.

This article just blows my mind. The companies are different, the primary industries have changed. The vision is amazing to me. Talk about an accurate extrapolation of the computer industry.

There are a couple of items here that I love.

Dr. Bush himself was only extrapolating from the technology of the time in these particular predictions.

That's the author of this article, Martin Greenberger, complimenting an earlier author on his foresight. Congratulations to you Mr Greenberger. You hit it dead on.

nor did he bank on the perfection of electronic logic, magnetic cores, and transistors.

heh. That one makes me smile. "the perfection of electronic logic, magnetic cores, and transistors", oh if only he know how "more perfect" it could get.

And finally, to set it in perspective. When this was written,

Tens of thousands of computers have been perfected and successfully applied in the past two decades

"Tens of thousands". How many is that now? 10s of billions? This article is 44 years old. I am just amazed.

LewisC

Technorati : analogy, cloud computing, next big thing, utility computing

Cloud Computing Journal

I stumbled across the Cloud Computing Journal published by sys-con today. Not much there at the moment. It's almost like a parked domain with a bunch of ads. I guess that's not fair, I can find 3 stories already: Cloud Computing: Introducing the Pyramid, Cloud Computing - The Jargon is back and an advertorial for Cloud Computing Journal.

The first is another "what is cloud computing article" and the second is a "what does the term cloud computing mean" article. Well, there are actually blog entries not articles, per se. If you search the web, you will find posting about "what is a cloud" out number "here's how to use the cloud" posts by about 100 to 1.

To break that trend, my next entry will be a useful entry about actually using the cloud. But first, I have to go read what the cloud is. ;-)

LewisC

Technorati : cloud computing, magazone

Will Cloud Computing be a $100 Billion Market

Do you think Cloud Computing will hit $100 billion? When? Merrill Lynch thinks it will pass $100 billion and by 2011 it will be worth $160 billion in combined business value and advertising. They also expect that cloud computing will be the next wave of investment for venture capitalists.

Merill Lynch figures right now that 10 companies are the big boys. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. They see VMWare and Citrix as major players which I don't quite see. They own the vitalization market but cloud computing is a lot more that virtual servers. What they both need to is develop the next generation private cloud offering. That's where I see the the Fortune 1000 going.

The article has a quote from author Nick Carr. He wrote the Big Switch which is about utility computing.

"I think for a lot of the traditional companies whether it is software companies like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, or hardware companies like Dell or EMC, it's going to be a very tough transition to go from the old world to the new world."

I have to agree with that. I think Microsoft is more on the ball on this one than any of the others mentioned. They're working on Mesh, SDDS and the Office Live stuff. Oracle can't even figure out how to license for a VM much less for the cloud. EMC started a move with Mozy. I can see EMC partner with someone like Akamai and put out a second generation cloud. Dell will be hurting.

All I know is that the next few years will be very interesting in this space. I'm just hoping I will be able to stay in it. Job changes might be moving me back to a pure Oracle world (which isn't a bad thing, it's just not the next big thing).

Technorati : careers, cloud computing, investments, venture capital

5 Reasons to Embrace Cloud Computing

Yesterday, I wrote about 5 Reasons to avoid Cloud Computing. Today I am turning that around.

1. Scalability - Scalability is *THE* marketing buzz for cloud computing. To be able to dynamically add storage and computing power as needed, is a huge benefit to any business that needs scalability. Take note of that, not all businesses need that kind of scalability. If you are not presenting a web presence with a likelihood of viral acceptance, you probably don't need this kind of scalability.
   
2. Time to market - This is goodness for any business. You have your plan, your software, your domain name, whatever and you're ready to go. Now you need to buy hardware, configure the hardware, find space for the hardware, get power to the hardware, staff up maintenance for the hardware.... Or, press a button on a web page, have your web guy load the application and be on your way. Obviously I exaggerate. That's close though.
   
3. R&D - have an idea? Fire up a cloud image and try it out. Doesn't pan out? Throw it away. You're only out a few dollars. No pesky unused hardware sitting around cluttering up your data center. Need a development or test instance? Press a few buttons on a web page, presto! Pay as you go. Scheduling dev and test hardware has now become painless for large organizations. Data refreshed? Thing of the past. Boot up a couple of images, load them up with data, throw them away when finished.
   
4. Upfront Costs - Pay as you go is a wonderful thing. For most pieces of the cloud you will either pay per use or you will sign up for a subscription. I prefer pay as you go as I am a techie type and I only need it to do development or proof of concepts. Subscriptions work out well for businesses as it's still very low up front and costs are very predictable in the long run. Like "rent to own", pay as you go and subscriptions usually cost more in the long run. But like leasing, pay as you go does provide some guarantees for hardware.
   
5. Buzzworthiness - Hey, if your widget doesn't run in the cloud, it is so 20th century. You thought web 2.0 was big? Used to be. Naw it's all about being SaaSy! Seriously, for at least the next few years, just being associated with cloud computing will get you additional bang for the buck. This applies to small/new players. If you have some stability, don't trade that for cloud computing just yet.

LewisC

Technorati : cloud, cloud computing, cloud database, cumputing