US Military Forges ahead into Cloud & Open Source

May 28, 2010

Following on my entry from yesterday,  here is something pretty cool I learned while doing research on what’s happening in public sector cloud computing:  Forge.mil

From their FAQ they explain:

Forge.mil is a DISA-led activity designed to improve the ability of the U.S. Department of Defense to rapidly deliver dependable software, services and systems in support of net-centric operations and warfare.

What really surprised me was the emphasis they place on “early and continuous collaboration” and their embracing of open source software.  In fact, in an October 16 memo, the DoD’s deputy CIO, reiterated the fact that open-source software “meets the definition of ‘commercial computer software,’” and can “provide advantages” given DOD’s need to “update its software-based capabilities faster than ever.” (source: Wyatt Kash’s article)

Here are some high level stats on Forge.mil’s usage since it started last year:

  • 4,000 Registered users
  • 170 hosted projects
  • Produced more than 500 software releases

The service itself is broken into two cloud-based offerings — SoftwareForge and ProjectForge.  Here are the highlights:

Software Forge
  • A free service, open and community source DoD software
  • Default is open view access
Project Forge
  • For fee, non-community source
  • Default is private
  • Originally limited to Army & Navy but on Jan 13 it was made available to other military branches and DoD civilian employees and contractors
  • Two flavors:
    • ‘On Demand’: multitenant, good for 100 users
    • ‘Private’: single tenant, can brand, 100+ users

Who knew?!

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Federal Cloud Computing, two steps forward?

May 27, 2010

Over the past week I have presented Dell’s thoughts and capabilities around cloud computing to several different groups from the U.S. military.  In preparation for these talks I did some research into what’s happening in the wild and wonderful world of federal cloud computing.  Here are a couple things that I found particularly interesting:

Psych!

In the past I have used the General Services Administration’s cloud RFQ  issued last July, as an example of how the government is boldly sallying forth into the cloud.  Turns out that in February they withdrew the RFQ saying basically that too much had changed since the RFQ was issued and that they need to regroup and get a solid view of the customer and market landscape before writing a new one.

Speaking of snags, Apps.gov which was launched last September as “an online technology supermarket for federal agencies” has not been the success that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra had hoped for.  According to the WSJ, “concerns about compliance with security requirements and terms of service have prompted many agencies to bypass Apps.gov.”

But wait, there’s more

The above being said, the US government has a ton of cloud projects its working on.   To get smart on the littany of efforts, check out the State of Public Sector Cloud Computing report that Vivek Kundra issued last week.

Stay tuned for my next entry that will talk about how the Military is “forging” ahead.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Big Data in the Windy City

May 20, 2010

The Aqua building, catty corner from my hotel

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended the TDWI (The Data Warehouse Institute) world conference in Chicago.  The show was a mix of courses and exhibit space.

I went to learn about the BI/Data warehousing segment and scout in preparation for the next conference in August.

Why BI?

My interest in the space comes from the fact that two of the three first partners in our Cloud Partner program are in the Data Warehousing and analytics space: Aster Data and Greenplum.  Both these partners are leveraging highly scaled-out architectures to crunch data.

While there, besides checking out the 24 companies on the exhibit floor, I attended three half-day classes: Developing your BI tool strategy, Cool BI, the latest innovations, Extending BI to support online marketing and Web 2.0.

For other newbies like myself, here are some notes from the first course.

My Notes: The layers of the BI Lifecycle stack

BI Suites:

  • What they do : Query, report, analyze, visualize, alert (front end to the chain)
  • The Big 4:  IBM (Cognos), SAP (Business Objects), Oracle (Hyperion), Microsoft
    • They all bought small players who excelled in the space
    • Usually offer the suites as part of a complete BI lifecycle stack
    • Two of the remaining independents are Microstrategy and SAS

Data Management

  • Data warehouse/mart databases and storage
  • Usually in a RDBMS but also in a dedicated OLAP database
  • Examples: Aster Data, Greenplum, Neteeza, Teradata

Data Integration (aka ETL)

  • They extract, transform and load info from the layer below into the layer above.
  • Examples: Informatica

Operational Apps/Systems

  • Planning, ERP, CRM etc
  • Orders, Invoices, Shipping, Web clicks

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

NetworkWorld Review of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud

May 18, 2010

Tom Henderson and Brendan Allen of ExtremeLabs published a great walk-thru of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) last week in NetworkWorld.  Canonical, the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, is one the first members of our Cloud Partner Program and we will soon be offering UEC running on top of our PowerEdge C line accompanied by reference architectures.

If you’re not familiar with UEC, which leverages the open source Eucalyptus private cloud platform, here is a quick backgrounder:

Basically, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud can be deployed on internal hardware to run job/batch applications. The idea is to initially allocate storage, then rapidly build multiple virtual machines to process data, collect the data, then tear down the infrastructure for re-use by a subsequent purpose.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud provides internal cloud control methods that closely mime what can be done on Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure. Its tools can be used to process recurring jobs or one-shot distributed applications, like DNA analysis, video rendering, or database table reformatting/reindexing.

Walk this way

The Review, which is a concise 3 and a half pages, steps you through:

  • Getting started
  • Installation*
  • Setup/configuration
  • Image Bundles
  • Usage/Monitoring

*My favorite line from this section is: “Installation was very simple; we inserted the Ubuntu Server CD, selected Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, and drank energy drinks.”

If you’re interested in learning about UEC this article is a great place to start.

Extra-credit reading

If the above whets your appetite, you may want to dig into the following:

(The last 3 items I grabbed from Dustin’s Blog)

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Datawarehouser Greenplum — Talking to President and Founder, Scott Yara

May 7, 2010

When I was out in the Bay Area for our launch I stopped by data warehouse and analytics player Greenplum.  Greenplum is one of the first three members in our Cloud Partner program (the other two are Canonical and Aster Data.)  I sat down with Greenplum’s President and founder Scott Yara to talk about the company and where they’re going:

Some to the topics Scott tackles:

  • Whats happening in the world of data.
  • How Greenplum began with the open source PostgreSQL database platform and over the last 7-8 years have refactored it and built a massively parallel database kernel engine.
  • How it works:  Greenplum takes the data and physically distributes it across all the Database segments and operates on the data in parallel.  This parallel approach allows Greenplum to process data 10-100x faster than conventional databases.
  • Who is using it: Skype, Fox Interactive, NTT docomo, Deutsche Bank, retailers, large healthcare companies.
  • The enterprise data cloud initiative – Setting a new type of analytics infrastructure that takes advantage of virtualization and the latest in general purpose and multi-core systems and is centered around self-service principles.
  • While a lot of folks are excited about writing apps to the iPhone, the platform that Scott and crew gest really excited about writing to are 2 socket Nehalem servers with a bunch of disk drives behind them.
  • How someone would go about getting started with Greenplum.

Extra Credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell’s “Custom Tailor” to Internet Stars turns three — Expands to serve the next 1000

May 4, 2010

A few weeks ago, Dell’s Data Center Solution (DCS) group celebrated its third birthday.  This team — which acts as a “custom tailor” to some of the world’s biggest internet stars — services businesses who require a vast amount of computing horsepower to run data-intensive applications.  In addition to major internet players, DCS’s customers include financial services organizations, national government agencies, institutional universities, laboratory environments and energy producers.

At the recent Dell enterprise launch we announced the expanding of our DCS efforts beyond the 30 customers we have been working with in our “classic” business.   Leveraging the knowledge and experience we have gained working with the biggest of the big we have created a portfolio of products and solutions to address “the next 1000.”

To get an idea of where DCS has come from and where its going check out the video above that DCS marketing director Andy Rhodes created pre-launch to help our sales force.

Some of the topics Andy tackles:

  • What is “hyper scale,” who uses it and how big is the market?
  • Why was DCS established in the first place and the high-touch nature of its customer relationships.
  • How do we take what we’ve learned working with a small group and take it to the next 1000 customers?
  • How does the hyper scale inspired PowerEdge C line differ from the traditional PowerEdge line and what markets are they targeted at.

Extra credit Reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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