Sunday 14 March 2010
Database in the Cloud
Joyent, the leading vendor in Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing, announced today that it is taking the proven performance and reliability of Sun Microsystems’ MySQL database to a whole new level by offering optimizations to the Joyent Cloud for MySQL. Joyent and Sun’s database group have teamed up to create Virtual Appliance templates for MySQL.
Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL is configured to maximize the open source database’s performance on Joyent’s powerful, secure and stable virtualization technology. Performance benchmarks (http://www.joyent.com/mysql) demonstrate that Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL can deliver 3 times the number of Transactions per Second than comparable deployments of XEN-based clouds, such as Amazon’s EC2.
“Running Read-Only tests, our internal benchmarks show that a 1GB Virtual Appliance for MySQL in the Joyent cloud can perform 1,245 transactions per second with 8 threads,” said Jason Hoffman, Joyent CTO and Founder. “A more expensive 7.5 GB large instance on Amazon EC2 only manages 425 transactions per second with the same 8 threads.”
Joyent has made it easy to launch a Virtual Appliance for MySQL as a single instance or as part of a Web-scale architecture.
“MySQL is pre-installed and optimized on the Joyent Cloud,” said Hoffman. “From the minute you get your login credentials, you are ready to go: deployment could not be easier. Dual-Master or Master-Slave configurations will also soon be available as pre-defined architectures.”
The Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL is available based on a typical cloud model. Users can scale up and down when they need to — and pay for only the infrastructure they use. There are no contracts to lock-in users. Additionally, the Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL Enterprise is fully supported by the MySQL database experts at Sun.
“MySQL is the most-used database in today’s Cloud environments,” said Rich Nigro, MySQL Managed Hosting Business Manager, Sun Microsystems. “We are delighted to see that Joyent is making this dedicated MySQL offering available to users of the popular Joyent Cloud.”
The Joyent Cloud has many customers benefiting from MySQL, and there are several case studies of how the optimized implementation has driven application performance, operational stability and value.
“Context Optional provides scalable solutions for brand marketing across social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter,” said Rafi Jacoby, Director of Engineering at Context Optional. “We’ve built and deployed viral applications for Kraft, Toyota, McDonald’s, MTV/Viacom, and many other Fortune 500 brands using MySQL running on the Joyent Cloud. We’ve been impressed with performance and uptime, with several databases having run more than a billion queries with no downtime.”
MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, communications networks, and commercial software. At http://www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with premium subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.
About Joyent, Inc.
Joyent is a vendor of ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), a.k.a Cloud Computing. Joyent provides a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to buying and running your own IT infrastructure, while still providing all the security, cost stability, and enterprise-grade performance of a dedicated private data center. The Joyent Cloud is built using the company’s unique networking and virtualization technology, the Joyent Accelerator. Joyent’s shared hosting, virtual appliances, free developer programs and Cloud Computing products leverage the Joyent Accelerator to provide our customers with unparalleled Cloud Computing performance and value.
Joyent was founded in 2004 with a seed investment from co-founder and CEO David Young and Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel. Since then, Joyent has grown organically and has been completely funded by revenue. Joyent’s customers include LinkedIn, Major League Baseball, Gilt.com, Facebook, and 20,000 other companies ranging from small development shops to large Fortune 500 enterprise users. Joyent powers 25% of the daily application traffic on Facebook. www.joyent.com
The program works with IBM and Google on their Cloud Computing University initiative, and is designed to look at the infrastructure requirements to make leading-edge cloud computing system which many believe will power the next generation of the World Wide Web. The scope of this project is enormous. Just reading the synopsis of what will be studied is impressive enough, let alone the actual research behind it. And the cloud computing nature of the project relates to the extremely large data sets that are being generated today. These include total website data and materials which can be mined for usable information, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, along with shopping trends seen on major online retailers.
The universities receiving money include: Carnegie-Mellon, Florida International, MIT, University of Wisconsin, Yale, Purdue, UC-Irvine, UC-San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC-Santa Barbara, University of Maryland-College Park, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Utah. Corporations include IBM and Google on their “Cloud Computing University Initiative”, which serves as a type of spear-head group for the project’s goals and focuses results on industry-oriented needs. The National Science Foundation has published a flash video which, in a news-style interview format with University of Maryland’s Mihai Pop, assistant professor of computer science, explains the process.
The Cannes organizers have added new categories in recent years, like design and PR, to keep up with these changes. But I believe we’ll soon need new categories to honor marketing programs that are technology driven. Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in IT circles, but it should be equally discussed among marketers. It’s another technology trend that’s already having a tremendous impact on consumers. And where consumers go, marketers need to follow. Cloud computing is fueling intense interest as a way to reduce technology costs within organizations.
But the same dynamics can fuel savings in marketing costs by enabling brands to shift to a new, ongoing dynamic with consumers, one that doesn’t rely on the costly media expenditures of our campaign-centric advertising world. Let’s start with some simple definitions. When we speak about “the cloud,” we’re referring to any kind of Internet-based service that allows its users to upload, store and share personal “stuff” online. If you upload a video to YouTube, that video is in the cloud. If you upload a photo album to Flickr, those photos are in the cloud. If you sign up for Facebook or MySpace,
The final barriers to technology adoption are cost and simplicity, and the cloud has an answer to both. On the cost side, netbooks are lowering the bar of affordability for people and entire societies that could not previously afford the power of technology. On the simplicity side, everything you do in the cloud is accessed through a Web browser or a mobile application. There is absolutely no reason why brands can’t get into this game. At its core, cloud-based marketing is powered by a simple idea: be useful to your customers and they in turn will be loyal to your brand. The cloud is a massive engine of technological utility, with myriad ways to be useful to customers.
AJAX, rich internet applications, enterprise mashups, social media and Web 2.0 find their new place in the Cloud. “Facebook established itself as the new and improved tool for Myspace users and Ulitzer will establish itself as the new, much improved, dynamic, and three dimensional version of Wikipedia with live content,” said Fuat Kircaali, founder of Ulitzer, Inc. “Ulitzer is an original and unique tool for readers who seek quality content on any subject, and written by the leading authorities in their fields. ” Ulitzer is designed to replace Wikipedia with Its three-dimensional live content offerings and dynamic topic structure.
Initiating content coverage on any topic or launching a magazine at Ulitzer.com is designed to be as easy as boiling an egg and doesn’t take much longer. To become a Ulitzer author, anyone can fill out a simple author profile and submit for editorial review and approval. Once you’ve been handed the keys, you will be able to associate your future Web presence to whichever topic or topics suit you best. Ulitzer is a brand new way of creating, delivering, and consuming content on the Web. Anyone can create topics, magazines, and subject-based portals on Ulitzer, pre-populate them with over one million articles available, and launch a new Ulitzer topic in minutes.
To update your existing SYS-CON author profile, simpy log in and request your temporary password to be emailed to you. If you have any difficulty in obtaining your temporary password, please contact editorial (at) sys-con.com for assistance. Once assigned, these Topics will always be available to you. Every time you complete a new item, just return to the Topics tab and click on which of the six Topic sites (including all of them) you want the items to appear on. Requests are subject to approval but you do not usually have to wait more than a couple of hours, tops.
structure-2009
“Cloud Computing is growing at any incredible pace, and we at GigaOM believe it is a long-term opportunity on a vast scale,” says GigaOM Network Founder Om Malik. “The industry needs to embrace the technology shift that is happening and make plans to take advantage of its potential. We have designed the Structure 09 conference as the forum to get those plans in place and for customers to act fast as the future unfolds.”
Structure 09 has become the must-attend cloud computing conference of the year. Produced by leading technology journalist Om Malik, Structure 09 offers a focused, single-day format. “We don’t just talk about cloud computing once a year,” says Malik “It’s a part of our ongoing editorial coverage on GigaOM every day. This conference deepens the conversation within a live forum.”
Cloud Computing is growing at any incredible pace, and we at GigaOM believe it is a long-term opportunity on a vast scale
The industry needs to embrace the technology shift that is happening and make plans to take advantage of its potential. We have designed the Structure 09 conference as the forum to get those plans in place and for customers to act fast as the future unfolds.
We don’t just talk about cloud computing once a year
It’s a part of our ongoing editorial coverage on GigaOM every day. This conference deepens the conversation within a live forum.
We can’t say too much yet as we are refining details, but we will be announcing a major initiative for our partners that we hope will ignite the cloud industry and it’s evolution. Unveiling it at a workshop at Structure 09 was the natural choice
The conference returns to the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco on June 25, 2009. The conference will be keynoted by two pioneers in the world of “infrastructure on demand” - Marc Benioff and Paul Sagan. Senior leaders from IBM and HP will give “Mini-Notes” that look at how their corporate might will influence the cloud computing industry’s evolution. Paul Sagan, CEO of Akamai, will reveal how Akamai continues to innovate in an industry it helped birth a decade ago. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, will share his insights on what drove Salesforce.com to become the first SaaS (Software as a Service) company to pass the billion-dollar revenue mark.
A strong base of innovators supports the anchoring speakers. Structure 09 is proud to have Michael Stonebraker, a pioneer of database (RDBMS) systems, participating and also welcomes luminaries such as Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, and Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, back to share their thoughts on the progress of the industry since their keynote addresses at last year’s sold-out event.
In a unique panel, Jonathan Heiliger, VP of Technical Operations at Facebook, moderates a panel of his industry peers, who handle some of the biggest web infrastructures on the planet - Yahoo!, Google, LinkedIn and MySpace — and asks them to share their learning and best practices from the industry’s cutting edge.
Together, the speakers and audience will comprise experts from the critical topics in cloud computing and Internet infrastructure today: SaaS/PaaS, virtualization, next-generation data storage, cloud computing, broadband and operational issues rising from the adoption of cloud computing.
SCHEDULE OF TOPICS ANNOUNCED
We have just finalized our programming schedule for Structure 09. Full details available here: http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/schedule/?a=pr1
The Myth of the One-Size-Fits-All Cloud
As enterprises begin to evaluate cloud computing, some are asking if the current model of commodity servers and virtualization meets their needs. Is there money to be made creating specialized clouds for industries that require highly specific computing tasks, from video trans-coding to fiscal transactions and medical records?
From Databases to Dataspaces
Web-scale computing is creating a physically distributed infrastructure, which has led to the emergence of distributed data storage and processing layers like Hadoop, HyperTable and Couchdb. The new database paradigms will force us to rethink some of our existing practices, but they’ll also offer many benefits and opportunities.
Better Broadband: Enabling the Cloud Era
We’re building huge Cloud Computing cities, but are we neglecting the already clogged broadband highways between them? As internal data center networking speeds start to exceed 40 Gbps, the pipes that connect those clouds to the outside world and each other will hit their limits. This panel examines what stress fractures we may see initially, what technology can do about it, and who will ultimately pay for it.
Private Enterprise Clouds: As A First Step Towards Cloud Computing
Enterprises aren’t yet able or ready to migrate their applications to public clouds. Public cloud infrastructure can’t run existing enterprise applications without requiring a rewrite. Yet the lure of usage-based resourcing is strong. The solution? Build your own cloud with your existing infrastructure investment as a first step. This panel will contrast vendor visions about how internal systems can work in unison with external cloud platforms. A must attend for those looking to find solutions or opportunity in the migration path to cloud services.
On The Shoulders of Giants
Innovation occurs when you push at the edge of reasonable practice. When your job is to manage some of the worlds largest infrastructures, with demands that test the limit of technology and budgets, innovation is your only option. Keepers of six of the largest collections of boxes, bits and bandwidth on the planet will share their successes with current technology and their desires for and opinions on the future.
Building The Perfect Host for Web Apps
When a hosting platform is built from boxes and bandwidth, it is built with a vision of usage in mind. When a startup codes the next big hit app, it has preconceived notions about what load challenges it’s platform will cope with. With cloud computing, do things change drastically? This panel brings together three of the most innovative infrastrcuture hosting companies and three rising web app startups to outline what each wants from the other and what new opportunities can be generated from the missing elements.
Click here to see the detailed program agenda: http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/schedule/?a=pr3
An important part of the event’s value comes from the sponsors who create custom workshops for the event so that the audience can take away practicable knowledge and face time with some of the names making waves in the Cloud Computing market - this years roster of sponsors is anchored by Peer1 whose commitment to the Structure 09 debate is demonstrated through their lead sponsorship and their creation of a workshop for the audience. “We can’t say too much yet as we are refining details, but we will be announcing a major initiative for our partners that we hope will ignite the cloud industry and it’s evolution. Unveiling it at a workshop at Structure 09 was the natural choice,” says Robert Miggins of Peer1.
‘Hurry. Buy your ticket today and lock in your participation. Last year we sold out. Tickets are selling fast and we expect a sold-out conference. Buy your ticket now!’ http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/?a=pr3
About PEER 1:
PEER 1 is a leading provider of online IT hosting and one of the only companies to offer all three major hosting lines–Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, through its ServerBeach brand, and Co-location–under one roof. Each of these solutions are backed by PEER 1’s legendary SuperNetwork™, which spans 13,000 miles across North America and Europe. PEER 1’s IT infrastructure strength provides the ideal platform for testing new technologies and greatly supports continued innovation in the market.
About The GigaOM:
GigaOM is the premier destination site for technology industry insiders, movers and shakers, and early adopter consumers. It is widely considered the authoritative site for discovering what’s new, relevant and interesting in the dynamic world of technology. From exclusive product launches to award-winning analysis and commentary, GigaOM’s coverage influences business and technology sectors with its reliable, well-researched and professional reporting — and its signature intelligence, candor and irreverence.
About The GigaOM Network:
The GigaOM Network is a leading provider of publications and events for the technology and entrepreneurial markets worldwide. Founded by award-winning journalist Om Malik, The GigaOM Network is an online publishing company whose network of news sites reaches more than 2 million readers worldwide and provides news and insight on the developments disrupting the world of technology. The GigaOM Network includes seven award-winning sites: GigaOM covers the business of broadband, VoIP, infrastructure, mobile and wireless; WebWorkerDaily covers the future of work in a web world; NewTeeVee covers the business of online video; Earth2Tech covers the business of green technology; OStatic is a web application, news site and community looking at open-source solutions for business; jkOnTheRun offers news and insight on mobile devices; and TheAppleBlog is a leading source of information for Apple users. The GigaOM Network also produces industry-leading events, including annual conferences: Structure, Mobilize, NewTeeVee Live and Green:Net.
Contact:
Surj Patel
GigaOM
Phone (503) 345-3333
