Friday 12 March 2010
2009 OpenSource World
Conferences Brought Together Open Source, Data Center and Cloud Computing Communities to Showcase Emerging Technology Products and Innovations
OpenSource World 2009
Next Generation Data Center
CloudWorld
The 2009 OpenSource World™, Next Generation Data Center™ (NGDC™) and CloudWorld™ conferences, held August 12-13 at the Moscone Center West, came to a successful close today, IDG World Expo, producer of the events, announced.
The three conferences drew in more than 2,000 attendees over the two days, which included five keynote presentations and more than 85 sessions across 13 tracks, such as Virtualization, Cloud Infrastructure, Open Source in Mobile and Security. The Solutions Showcase featured more than 60 leading vendors, including Adaptive Computing, CA, Inc., DELL, GoGrid, HotLava Systems, IBM Corporation, ixSystems, Inc., OpSource, Rackspace Cloud, RagingWire, thawte, Inc. and Zmanda, Inc. Many of the exhibitors used the event to announce their latest product and service offerings, including Zmanda Inc.’s ZCloud,, an open API that will radically simplify the development of Backup-to-Cloud applications, and ixSystems Inc.’s iX-Green Neutron line of environmentally friendly servers optimized for high-performance applications.
“The overwhelming response from the CloudWorld attendees and vendors helped make the inaugural CloudWorld event a tremendous success,” said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, conference chairman for CloudWorld and managing director at THINKstrategies, Inc. “CloudWorld proved to be a great complement to the co-located OpenSource World and Next Generation Data Centers events.”
For more information on OpenSource World, NGDC and CloudWorld, please visit http://www.opensourceworld.com. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Sales Manager Amy Bonner at abonner {at} idgworldexpo(.)com or (508) 424-4892.
About OpenSource World, Next Generation Data Center and CloudWorld
OpenSource World focuses on innovative solutions in real-world environments using open source, open standards and open architecture as part of an integrated IT infrastructure. Next Generation Data Center is the only strategic IT event focused on the complete end-to-end solution for the 21st century data center and the new technologies from which these data centers are being built. CloudWorld, debuting this year, will bring together the buyers and sellers of Web-centric software, infrastructure and services designed to drive acceptance and deployment of cloud computing in the data center.
About IDG World Expo
IDG World Expo (www.idgworldexpo.com) is a leading producer of tradeshows and events for professionals and consumers seeking world-class education, strategic business relationships, and access to industry-leading products and services. IDG World Expo’s portfolio of conferences and events includes Macworld®, Electronic Entertainment Expo® (E3 Expo®), Next Generation Data Center™ (NGDC™), OpenSource World™, and CloudWorld™. IDG World Expo is a business unit of IDG, the world’s leading technology media, research and event company.
Contacts
IDG World Expo
Cindy Hart, 508-424-4825
chart {at} idgworldexpo(.)com
Sourcefire, the cyber security house famous for Snort, the open source network intrusion prevention and detection system, has set up a Virtual 3D Partner Program so cloud computing companies and OEMs can leverage its new Virtual 3D Sensor and Virtual Defense Center appliances. The Sensor appliance, for instance, lets cloud vendors protect customer information residing in the cloud. Sourcefire says the appliances can inspect traffic between virtual machines, while making it easier to deploy and manage sensors at remote sites where resource may be limited. Partners can implement Sourcefire’s solutions on existing customer hardware or within a cloud infrastructure for increased protection.
Sourcefire VP of biz dev Matt McCormick says that “While security is a top concern for every organization, many require solutions that can be placed on existing hardware or in the cloud.We are enabling partners to easily provide customers with value-added protection without requiring new hardware investments.
What may be less obvious is the extent to which internal “private” clouds are in the open source camp. At a session at O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) this week titled “Private Clouds — Why They Matter,” there was a robust discussion regarding internal cloud computing plans. While few of the attendees had large-scale internal clouds in production, several had some operating cloud infrastructure running in-house, and many claimed to be actively evaluating the technology. To be fair, some of the session attendees were from companies such as SaaS providers or software developers — though their comments were clearly directed toward use of cloud technologies for internal applications (rather than their public Web sites). However, there were several traditional end users there as well.
It quickly became clear that many of these internal private clouds were not just using open source (Linux, MySQL, etc.); they were built on open source. Eucalyptus was most often cited as the base platform for building private clouds, and this was true even when VMware was an organization’s primary virtualization environment.
The Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, a day-long virtual forum hosted by Red Hat, will gather together open source cloud computing developers for a day of technical presentations that cover the capabilities and challenges facing the development, management and deployment of open source cloud computing configurations. It is generally agreed that open source software is already taking a leadership role in the world of cloud computing, but much work remains to be done. Today, we’ve posted the presentation agenda for the forum. The day will comprise a dozen short, high-impact presentations, enabling attendees to gain an appreciation of the breadth of ongoing development with open source clouds. We hope that the forum will act as a catalyst for open source communities to work together and grow, and encourage participation in the development of open source cloud computing. The forum will be held in an online webinar format, with all presentations recorded and available for playback.
Despite what some vendors might tell you, the use of open source software will be a fundamental element to the future of public and private cloud computing infrastructure, according to The 451 Group. Speaking at Red Hat Inc.’s Open Source Cloud Computing Forum Webcast on Wednesday, the New York-based research firm said open source and cloud computing could actually be a match made in technology heaven. Significant advantages include the reduced barriers to entry, open data standards and APIs, and flourishing support communities. For companies like Red Hat, ISVs have to more fully embrace moving apps that enterprises need to the public cloud, according to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. For the future, the company wants to see a higher degree of compatibility between external cloud providers, zero cost of entry and exit for users moving to cloud-based environments, better data mobility, the elimination of ISV licencing obstacles, and an overall reduction in complexity for on-premise cloud installations.
The Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. success stories were also echoed by Aslett, who said both public cloud platforms benefited from low cost licencing and flexibility, as well as the ability to empower their developers. Other benefits that open source will bring to private cloud environments include lowered barriers to adoption, de facto interoperability standards, SLA-based subscription pricing, flexible licencing, and the ability to choose whether or not you want to contribute your source code modifications, ut while open source has certainly shaped the foundation of cloud computing and its biggest success stories, some industry watchers have argued that the cloud model threatens to introduce a new layer of complexity for organizations, whether they are taking advantage of public clouds or building out private clouds.
A National Science Foundation grant project developed largely by graduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara has resulted in Eucalyptus Systems, a three-month-old startup which has produced new open-source cloud infrastructure software that is a key component in Ubuntu’s upcoming 9.10 edition, Karmic Koala. Ubuntu is a popular Debian Linux-based open source operating system created by developer and Canonical Ltd. founder Mark Shuttleworth in 2004 that has been used increasingly in enterprise IT systems. Eucalyptus is an open-source software platform for developing on-premise private and hybrid clouds using a system’s existing hardware and software infrastructure, with no modifications. This is a little tricky to explain, so read this carefully: Karmic Koala [all Ubuntu releases are named after animals] is now in alpha testing and scheduled for general release in October 2009. Karmic Koala is the operating system of Ubuntu’s new cloud-building package called Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, which includes Eucalyptus. Canonical released a preview edition of the UEC in April.
Canonical is making no secret of the fact that since Eucalyptus enables enterprises to test, deploy and experiment with their own private, in-house clouds, it competes squarely with Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) API. “The Eucalyptus project enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware,” Shuttleworth wrote in his introduction to Karmic Koala in the Ubuntu users’ email list. “During the Karmic [Koala] cycle, we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs.
In-memory data grids store information that applications need in memory across a pool of servers, instead of reading it off disks, resulting in major performance gains. The Coherence product is one of the more mature in a space occupied by offerings from IBM as well as smaller companies like GigaSpaces and a number of open-source projects. Microsoft is also developing a system dubbed “Velocity.” o date, such systems have breathed rarefied air, mostly supporting large-scale Web sites and high-throughput transactional systems, such as stock trading applications. The in-memory data grid market in total generated less than US$100 million in revenue during 2008, according to Gartner, which prefers the term “distributed caching platforms.
But some observers believe that in-memory approaches to data management could eventually gain serious traction in cloud-computing deployments. The technologies would help applications that weren’t originally designed for elastically scalable infrastructure systems like Amazon Web Services to run more effectively, albeit “via some re-engineering,” Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini said in a recent report. Beyond vendor trepidation, other factors stand in the way of broader customer adoption, such as the complexity of deploying and managing the systems and limited support from systems integrators and ISVs, according to Pezzini.
The Cloud Manifesto document appears to describe design principles and guidelines for system interoperability in cloud computing. Many industry leaders are positioning Linux/Unix operating systems and Open Source technologies as the platform for cloud computing. IBM, Sun, Google, Amazon, and RedHat are all developing and supporting Linux-based cloud solutions. Microsoft is likely upset not because they were left out of the design discussions but because this important future technology is being focused on a platform that Microsoft once publicly stated to be irrelevant in the technology marketplace. It goes without saying that Microsoft is viewing a variant of Windows Server as the best platform for cloud computing, and the lack of an invite just may be an indication that large sectors of the industry do not share that view.
When these discussions take place I hope Microsoft is open to the idea that many chairs at the discussion table will be filled by vendors and developers who believe Linux is the future of cloud computing. Microsoft has already decided that cloud computing should operated on Microsoft platforms. The problem is that Linux may have just found a niche that Microsoft wasn’t expecting, and if so, Mr. Martin’s frustration bears evidence to their concern.
Now held three times a year - in New York, Prague, and Santa Clara - the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service. The event is co-located with our 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo. Yahoo! is running the largest Hadoop clusters in the world - 25K+ servers, analyzing billions of Web pages, multiple petabytes of storage and billions of records per day. The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop is a publicly available source release of Hadoop as it’s tested and deployed at Yahoo!’s massive clusters.
This session will explain what the distribution is, why Yahoo! is sharing its investment in testing Hadoop, and how it benefits the larger cloud ecosystem. It will cover major use-cases for Hadoop @ Yahoo! and provide a glance into the exciting plans moving forward around Hadoop and related open source technologies. YS-CON Events announced today that Eric Baldeschwieler, VP Hadoop Software Development at Yahoo!, will be presenting at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (http://cloudcomputingexpo.com) in Santa Clara, CA
Yahoo! is bringing large-scale supercomputing to the academic research community through its newly launched M45 project. Named after a well-known open star cluster, M45 is a 4,000-processor supercomputer that’s one of the fifty most powerful systems in the world. The goal of the project: help academic researchers tackle some of the most complicated computing tasks known to humanity. The media has showered attention on the M45 project. It has been featured in Scientific American, Business Week, and ZDNet, among other outlets.
Carnegie Mellon University will be the first academic institution to benefit from the computing cluster, which boasts 3 terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of storage, and a peak performance of more than 27 trillion calculations per second. To bring this massive raw computing power to users’ fingertips, the system runs a suite of open-source distributed computing software. The software features a fault-tolerant, distributed storage and computing platform called Hadoop, coupled with a user-friendly parallel programming environment called Pig.
