Kibitzing about the Cloud: Ellison goes off

September 28, 2009

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.”

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Mark Shuttleworth on the Cloud, Ubuntu on Dell and more

September 24, 2009

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:

Some of the topics Mark tackles:

  • The release yesterday of Dell’s Mini netbook with Ubuntu Moblin Remix – Developer Edition. (More details on the release from the Dell blog.)
  • Mark’s keynote yesterday at Linuxcon and the themes of cadence, quality and design.
  • His kerfluffle with the Debian community around release schedules.
  • The cloud-related goals for next month’s Ubuntu 9.10 release, Karmic Koala:
    • To be able to deploy your own cloud across 5-10 servers in 15 mins to an hour
    • Be able to enable private clouds that are completely EC2 compatible
    • Ability to create a library of virtual appliances that will deploy on EC2 or private clouds
  • The announcement earlier this week of the 10.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release named “Lucid Lynx.”
  • Mark’s thoughts on Windows 7 or as he calls it, “the wonderful Service Pack for Vista.”
  • How long until profitability.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud goes big in Japan (or at least at KDDI)

September 17, 2009

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.

Pau for now….

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Posted by Barton George

Talking to Ken O. about Egenera, the cloud and Dell

September 14, 2009

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.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Tamer: Right Scale’s CEO Michael Crandell

September 9, 2009

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…

Extra-Credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

CEO of GoGrid: IT economy to shrink (big time) over next 10 years

September 3, 2009

The CEO and founder of GoGrid, John Keagy, made an interesting assertion at Cloud World/Open Source World: over the next decade, the IT economy will shrink from $1.5 trillion to $500 billion.  I thought this was an interesting statement so I followed up with him after his talk and we sat down for a quick interview:

Some of the things John talks about:

  • GoGrid plays in the Infrastructure on demand space and has been doing so since 2002.
  • They work with partners in the layers above infrastructure and don’t have plans to venture north.
  • The IT economy shrinkage will be driven by automation and reduced capex (commodity hardware is a big component of this)
  • Right now its hardly a competitive market in the IaaS space (“its GoGrid and a bookstore”) so you can expect to see prices drop as the competition heats up.
  • If you’re not doing your test and development and QA in the cloud, your not engaging in best practices.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell makes list of top 10 vendors shaping the Cloud

September 1, 2009

I was perusing John Willis’ list of links yesterday and I came across a cool piece done by Datamation.com entitled, 85 Cloud Computing Vendors Shaping the Emerging Cloud.

No turning back

The article which supplies short profiles of 85 cloud players, isn’t wishy-washy about what it believes is the inevitability of the cloud model.  While it feels there will both a backlash against cloud-mania as well as a well publicized disaster the article states:

Still, the bad news won’t kill the cloud. We can’t ever go back to enclosed datacenters. The cloud is simply easier, faster and more flexible.

“Who says Dell is just a hardware firm?”

Dell comes in at number 10 on the list of the fab 85.  One of the big focuses of the Dell section is Dell’s Datacenter Solutions Group (which I am a part of):

…the company launched DCS – Data Center Solutions – to target an audience of businesses that need help configuring a cloud-based datacenter. DCS handles everything from optimization to project management to global consulting. Who says Dell is just a hardware firm? Referring to DCS, Dell CEO Michael Dell toldBusinessweek in 2008 that, “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers. Now it’s a several-hundred-million-dollar business, and it will be a billion-dollar business in a couple of years—it’s on a tear.”

It also keys in on some of Dell’s recent acquisitions in this space:

Dell has made a number of acquisitions to build out the software side of its cloud offering, including Everdream (desktop management software), Silverback Technologies (remote monitoring) and Message One (email management). The goal, it appears: provide one-stop shopping for businesses that want to build an automated datacenter running commodity boxes, all optimized for the cloud. That is likely a lucrative strategy.

If they think this is cool stuff, wait until they see what we have planned :)

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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