I first met Dave Nielsen when I attended the Austin Cloud Camp back in April of this year. I bumped into to him again at the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara at the beginning of last month. He was putting on another cloud camp and checking out the expo. I sat down with him and got him to tell me all about the phenomenon that has become cloud camp.
Some of the topics Dave tackles:
Cloud Camp’s un-conference format and how attendees drive the agenda and topics.
Where Dave got the idea and what his background is.
How it all began back in June of ‘08 with the first cloud camp in San Francisco and then quickly jumped across the pond and then back to the Windy City. (There have been 50 cloud camps in 16 monts, half in the US and the other half in Europe and Asia)
Every city is different. To help the cities less familiar with the un-conference format, an “un-panel” was added.
I’m currently here in Las Vegas attending Gartner’s Data Center conference. It’s day two and I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the sessions so far. In particular I thought yesterday’s keynote was very good and I wanted to share my notes from the talk.
The presentation was entitled, “Infrastructure and Operations: Charting a course for the coming decade” and was delivered by David Cappuccio. In his talk, David walked us through the “10 Trends to watch carefully.”
Last week I headed out to the Big Apple to attend Interop/Web 2.0 and present Dell’s cloud vision/strategy to customers. I was also able to grab several interviews at the co-located shows.
I’ve posted the first video featuring Azure evangelist Keith Pijanowski but have a couple more coming up: Roger Klose, Sr Director of Citrix’s Datacenter & Cloud Division and Joe Weinman, VP of ATT’s Business Solutions. Joe also moderated a panel that my boss, Andy Rhodes was on: Never Buy a Server Again: Should You Move Everything to On-Demand? (Here’s a write up on the panel that appeared on zdnet.)
I decided to walk the 20 blocks from Penn station to my hotel. It was a fantastic night, Times Square was alive and I even stopped for a slice.
Interop/Web 2.0 were held in everyone's favorite, the Javits Convention center
The Network is dead, long live the Network. Art installation on the show floor.
At the cloud expo in Santa Clara earlier this month I ran into Rick German, CEO of Stoneware, Inc. I had previously heard of Stoneware since they are partnering with Dell on a cloud offering for education but I knew that was just one area in which they played. I sat down with Rick and learned about all they did.
Some of the topics Rick tackles:
Helping customers to build their own private clouds within their data centers and enabling them to plug in their own windows and webhosted apps (plugging public cloud apps into the data center). Taking orgs from client-centric to web-centric.
Delivery via a virtual web desktop accessed from a plethora of browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
Stoneware’s 10-year history and how the advent of “cloud-o-mania” has helped or hurt them.
What to look for from Stoneware in the year ahead.
I’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/ Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure.
Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all those Dell servers were powering
Some of the topics Keith tackles
How it works: You develop on premise (the cloud environment is emulated on the developer’s desktop) and then upload your code to the cloud where you have all the services, resources and compute power needed to run your app. You then manage all your code and storage areas via a portal.
Azure is ready to use but Microsoft wont charge for another 2 mos. The last free month the customer will get a bill of what it would cost if they had had to pay.
What’s coming to Azure in the future, some examples:
Right now you have SQL Azure database in the cloud but they will build out the SQL Azure brand so that it has many of the same capabilities that customers are used to on premise.
When .net 4.0 becomes available they will have a work flow service
Will have synchronization services (SQL Azure sync) so customers can have a database in the cloud and one on premise and sync them.
With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.
Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:
Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.
A couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM. When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud.
Some of the topics Adam tackles:
Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it.
The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle portfolio and is slated for release in 2010.
The Cloud as a higher level of automation on top of virtualization, compared to what traditional virtualization has provided.
Where Oracle will play in the cloud space (hint: think private).
The Oracle assembly builder that Adam was showing off at the show.
Given Larry’s views on cloud computing, is “cloud” a dirty word at Oracle?
At the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara last week I was able to grab some time with Rob Walters, director of product management at Houston-based The Planet. Rob, who has an atypical Texas twang, talked to me about how The Planet has been dipping its toe in the cloud waters and how it is soon planning on taking the plunge.
Some of the topics Rob tackles:
The Planet began its foray into cloud computing over a year ago by partnering with Nirvanix and providing a storage cloud for back-up and archive.
They have spent the last 9 months working on a cloud compute offering which will launch in Q1.
The Planet will look to offer the cloud capabilities to their dedicated hosting customers. They will use the concept of virtualization which these customers understand and appreciate to create an understanding of the cloud, a concept that these customers are still a little leery of.
Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku. Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers. Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:
Some of the topics Oren tackles:
Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists. That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead
This week I made the trek out of the Lone Star state and headed west to the Bay Area. I spent the first day in San Francisco where I took our sales folks through my cloud presentation and then had meetings with a few members of the press. Here is the outcome of a couple of those meetings:
From the city I headed down to Santa Clara and the Cloud Computing Expo. I don’t think I saw a single customer at the event but I did run into a bunch of interesting companies in attendance. With my trusty Flip Mino I even recorded a bunch of interviews that I will be rolling out in the days to come. Here’s the list
On Friday I grabbed lunch with Geoff Tudor, SVP of business development and co-founder of Nirvanix . After they cleared the plates I talked to Geoff about what Nirvanix does and where he saw cloud storage heading.
Some of the topics Geoff tackles:
Providing cloud storage for the enterprise from five data centers around the world that are pooled and presented as one large global file server.
The Nirvanix “secret sauce”: the file virtualization layer that sits on top of pooled/virtualized commodity storage.
How Nirvanix’s offering is different than Amazon’s S3 (hint: one’s targeted at enterprises and one’s targeted at developers)
Customers such as the NASA/ASU library which is the largest cloud storage use ever and stores images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera.
Security and how Nirvanix addresses customer’s concerns.
Yesterday Gartner distinguished analyst Tom Bittman, who covers cloud computing and virtualization, posted some thoughts and observations from the Gartner Symposium in Orlando.
Private Cloud-o-maina
Based on Tom’s observations, private cloud (however defined) seems to have captured the hearts and minds of IT. Before he began his talk on virtualiztion he did a quick poll asking how many in the audience considered private cloud computing to be a core strategy of theirs. 75% raised their hands. While not overly scientific, that’s a pretty big number.
Little Miss Appropriation
The logical next question one may ask is what do people mean when they say “private cloud.” According to Tom the three most common ways private clouds are being (mis) described are:
IT defending its turf: Shared services that were being re-labelled as private clouds (but without a self-service interface, or much automation at all)
Vendors defending their products: Old products being re-labelled as private clouds in a box (I described most of these as “lipstick on a pig”)
Advanced server virtualization deployments: Although few have a true self-service interface, the intention is certainly there
So it looks like there is quite a bit of misappropriation of the term. However, as we previously learned, just because there is hype and misuse of terms, doesn’t mean there isn’t value in the concept of “private cloud.” The question is what is that value?
Tom sees private cloud’s value as a means to end and concludes his post by saying
The challenge with private cloud computing, of course, is to dispel the vendor hype and the IT protectionism that is hiding there, and to ensure the concept is being used in the right way – as a stepping-stone to public cloud… [italics mine]
(I’m not your) Stepping Stone
This is where I disagree. I believe that while private cloud can be a path to the public cloud, it can also be an end unto itself. Unfortunately (or fortunately) we will always have heterogeneous environments and in the future that will mean a mixture of traditional IT, virtualized resources, private clouds and public clouds. In some case workloads will migrate from virtualizaiton out to the public cloud but in other cases they will stop along the way and decide to stay.
IT will become more efficient and more agile as the cloud evolves but there will be no Big Switch (see above illustration), it (IT) will need to manage a portfolio of computing models.
Just a little while ago Steve Shankland posted an article from the front lines of the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando. The article is based on a presentation given today by Gartner addressing the top 10 trends that will be coming in IT in 2010.
And what found itself moving up two spaces from last year and claiming the top spot? Cloud computing.
Gartner’s cloud advice, notes Shankland, is
…companies should figure out what cloud services might give them value, how to write applications that run on cloud services, and whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company’s firewall.
(On a side note, it’s interesting to see that last year’s leader virtualization has been tri-sected into: Client Computing, Reshaping the Data Center and Virtualization for Availability)
Back on top
Being at the top of a Gartner chart is nothing new for Cloud Computing as you can see in this Hype Cycle from a couple of months ago:
So I guess the moral of this story is, just because something is over-hyped doesn’t mean its still not important. Ignore the cloud at your peril
Pau for now…
Endnote: A word from our sponsor
If you happen to be at the Gartner event and you want to see Dell’s take on the cloud, check out Tim Mattox’s presentation tomorrow at 3:30 – 4:30: Leveraging the Cloud to Reduce your IT costs.
Jimmy Pike is the director of systems architecture for the Data Center Solutions group here at Dell and self-proclaimed “head geek.” Using a tool case with its insides stripped out, part of an old inbox and a bunch of off the shelf components he has created the world’s first portable “data center.” (All for the princely sum of ~$2,000)
This former toolkit now holds:
Two dual-socket servers featuring 2.5GHz Intel processors
One server running Windows ‘03 acting as the DHCP and domain server and the other running Red Hat linux.
Last Friday I got together with Michael Cote of Red Monk and John Willis of Canonical for a podcast. We met up at a nearby coffee shop and chatted about a whole bunch o’ stuff.
You can listen to the actual podcast on Cote’s blog.
Dell’s cloud building business, focused on a small group of hyper-scale customers (Azure and Facebook being a couple I can name), delivering a high volume of highly customized machines for these customers.
Some of the learnings we’ve gained with working with this group.
Our intent to take this effort to a much wider group of customers and offer complete cloud solutions made up of hardware, third party software, a reference architecture and services.
At last year’s Oracle financial meeting, Larry Ellison went on rant on the over-hyping of the term “cloud computing:”
I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
Well its been a year later and the abuse of the term cloud has gone from bad to worse. As a result, when Mr. Ellison appeared at the Churchill Club last week and the question of Oracle’s possible demise at the hand of the cloud came up, he became a bit animated. Enjoy!
(I love Ed Zander’s bemusement and reactions)
A man of few words
Of note is Larry’s succinct definition of cloud computing: “A computer attached to a network.” And its business model? “Rental.”
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and the head of Canonical, the commercial entity behind the popular linux distribution, is currently making his rounds in the States. Yesterday he was quite busy, taking the stage at both the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco as well as at LinuxCon up in Portland Oregon.
Today he popped by Dell here in Austin to chat. I grabbed him for a few minutes right before lunch. Here is the result:
I was scrolling through my blog reader and came across a post by Dave Rosenburg that piqued my interest: “KDDI chooses 3 Terra for cloud infrastructure.” Having lived in Japan many moons ago I’m always interested in getting updates on whats happening in tech over there and since this involved the cloud, I was doubly piqued.
Gaijin Clouds gathering
Turns out that KDDI, the number 2 telecom provider in Japan (which makes them pretty humongous) has not only become a cloud provider as of late but have gone with gaijin technology to do so. KDDI’s recently launched “KDDI Cloud Server Service” is powered by 3Tera’s Applogic cloud compute platform. According to the 3Tera press release:
Initial offerings include virtual systems and virtual private data centers run at the KDDI Telehouse domestic data centers. This allows KDDI to offer both Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as a-Service solutions, where customers can run their existing applications on the IT platform or use KDDI’s prepared applications to significantly lower their initial investment and operational costs.
As Dave points out in his blog, its interesting not only to see a Japanese company embrace the cloud but using outside technology to do so.
KDDI has made a big step forward, it will be interesting to see what the uptake is like.
Fun facts to know and tell: The word for cloud in Japan (kumo) is the same word for spider (kumo). Now the characters used for both are different and the Japanese use the English word “cloud” when talking about cloud computing but still, I’m looking forward to getting the chance to present on cloud computing in Japan and make some bad pun involving the two. Corny? Yes, but that’s how I roll.
Last but not least in my series of video’s from last month’s Cloud World/Open Source World I present to you Ken Oestreich, VP of Product marketing at Egenera. I grabbed some time with Ken to learn about Engenera, the cloud and how they’re working with Dell.
Some of the topics that Ken tackles:
While a hypervisor abstracts software, Egenera’s PAN manager abstracts the “plumbing” e.g. NIC cards, switches, host bus adaptor cards etc.
PAN manager allows you to consolidate networks, fail-over entire machines and, in the case of disaster recovery, recover and reproduce entire compute environments.
Egenera is working with Dell in the form of the Dell PAN system to provide agility in your infrastructure.
This Infrastructure as a Service system can be used inside or outside your firewall.
What developments Ken is most excited about in the upcoming year.
I’m getting down to the end of the videos I recorded last month at Cloud World/Open Source World and I’ve saved some of the best for last. My penultimate interview is with Michael Crandell, CEO of Right Scale.
Right Scale, based in sunny Santa Barbara California, makes a cloud management platform that provides greater control over the cloud and makes it easy for companies to begin to migrate applications to the cloud or start building new ones there. See what Michael has to say…
Some of the stuff Michael discusses:
Right Scale focuses on three things: 1) Automation, 2) Providing a library of cloud ready solutions, 3) doing all this in an open and transparent way that allows portability among cloud platforms.
How Right Scale came to be. Their founder was teaching a class at UCSB about how to build an ecommerce site. Amazon granted him some free compute time to use in his class. He realized he needed a framework for managing and monitoring the classes usage, he also realized there was a business to built around this idea…
Where Right Scale will be putting its efforts in the up coming year:
Supporting more cloud platforms as the come online
Increasing their partner program and their cloud-ready solutions
Increasing support for enterprise level editions and features e.g. security and compliance, user control, billing, metering…
Posted by Barton George 
Posted by Barton George 
Posted by Barton George 
