Monday 15 March 2010
Cloud
Microsoft Corp has partnered with Executive Yuan’s Networked Communications Program (NCP) to co-develop Asia’s first cloud computing center in National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu to get benefit of local engineering talent.
Microsoft said that, “Since this will be a 10-year project, no initial investment amounts have been allocated yet”.
Other than funding, Microsoft will provide resources such as the Windows Azure cloud computing operating platform, as well as a general cloud computing environment, in order to foster innovative Internet communications-related technologies.
Tsai added, “As the world’s No. 1 ranking country in terms of hardware development for motherboards, notebooks, servers, wireless local area networks, liquid crystal displays and others, there are so many opportunities to link Taiwan’s hardware prowess with software R&D to complete this information technology ecosystem, especially at a time when cloud computing is taking off,”
The expanded services give enterprises the option to outsource the management of mission-critical applications to Host.net without making a capital investment in their own servers, significantly reducing costs by sharing network resources. The new service, available immediately, utilizes existing Fairway Consulting Group infrastructure including best-of-breed virtualization technologies. Key Fairway executives have also joined Host.net, providing virtual computing expertise as well as paving the way for development of new joint services. Fairway has provided compute, storage and desktop virtualization services to the SMB and enterprise markets, including Fortune 500 clients, since 2004.
The demand for cloud computing is exploding because of the economics. We have been planning to expand our services to include virtualization for some time,” said Jeffrey Davis, co-founder and CEO of Host.net. “Acquiring Fairway Consulting Group enables us to ramp up quickly, leverage our 50-city footprint, and offer robust, cost-effective cloud computing capabilities that have been road-tested by some of the country’s most demanding companies. We were already using Host.net’s colocation services. It made sense to join forces,” said Jeffrey Slapp, co-founder, president and chief architect of Fairway Consulting Group and now Vice President of Virtualization Services of Host.net.
The draft NIST definition, perhaps the best we have at this point, states that “Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. One of the key value propositions for cloud computing is the transfer of expense from the capital (CAPEX) to the operational (OPEX) column. Private clouds can still deliver some of the other benefits of cloud computing, especially for the largest organizations. Private and hybrid clouds can also serve as a gateway, allowing enterprise IT to become familiar and comfortable with cloud computing paradigms in a controlled environment.
This might seem foolish to the average person, or even the travel departments of medium-sized businesses, but the substantial expense might be offset by the convenience or increased productivity of private aviation. Cloud computing is similar: The average individual or organization will probably derive maximum benefit from sharing a public cloud infrastructure, but this should not preclude certain special cases where a private cloud will be called for.
Yahoo! like most companies operating mainly in the online space; has a big dependence on data centers which are far from cheap to run. With that in mind the company has announced a new data center project that it claims is, “one of the greenest, most energy-efficient data centers in the world”. If you listen to the details you can see why that may actually be true. The new data center will be located in Lockport, New York with the bulk of the energy it requires to run coming from the huge renewable energy source that is the Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power is put to good use too as the construction will not require the use of air conditioning meaning 90% of the power goes to the servers. More typical data centers only use around 50% of the power for the servers.
Being able to run a data center without air conditioning meant thinking about the design of the building a bit differently. The structure will be called the Yahoo! Computing Coup because it looks like a building chickens would live in. The roof will go to a high point and the walls are louvered allowing the cooling to occur 100% through outside air. As well as the announcement of a new data center Yahoo! also outlined plans to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the company by 40% by 2014. Yahoo! aims to achieve such a significant drop mainly through improvements to its existing data centers, but also by rethinking how to utilize servers more efficiently, seeking out clean energy to use, and taking advantage of cloud computing where possible.
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.
Origin Storage, the storage systems integration provider, reportedly said the company does not find the repeated security breaches in Twitter surprising. The company said that such attacks will be expected as many IT staff and managers are being pushed into adopting cloud computing services on a fast track basis. Twitter recently has been the target of various security attacks. First, the so-called “Month of Bugs” phenomenon exposed the vulnerabilities in third-party Twitter applications and then, the Koobface worm hit the site, causing the social network to temporarily suspend any accounts it discovered spreading the worm. Recent reports suggested that a computer hacker has gained access to confidential documents of Twitter and some of its employees, and then forwarded the material to other servers. According to Twitter, the attack did not compromise user accounts, except for a screenshot of one person’s Twitter page.
Origin Storage said that this latest Twitter hack seems to be the result of a guessable password of a company co-founder on the Google Apps service. The company said that using strong password policies forces the users to go for difficult passwords. In a recently published report, the company stated that take-up of encryption amongst organizations is improving, but there is a big question mark over the encryption used being powerful enough to beat the crackers. Recent reports have shown a growing number of organizations are adopting data encryption in the wake of a litany of data breaches, losses and thefts in the last 18 months.
Virtualization is not an end point, but an enabler of a more flexible and efficient compute environment - ok get that too. Ultimately virtualization must enable IT to contribute to better business results. What about other parts of the IT infrastructure beyond servers, clients and applications? Are we evolving to having islands of virtual clients and servers connected via a static network infrastructure? See this post in Archimedius for more on this theme. Not to be left behind in the dust of server virtualization, network interconnects are also marching toward being enabled in dynamic virtual environments. Case in point is HP’s recent introduction of its Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology, a new component in HP’s Virtual Connect architecture. Flex-10 enables you to add 4x more NICs to each server blade without more hardware. In addition to supporting oodles of connections and NICS, Flex-10 provides the ability to dynamically adjust bandwidth for each network connection on the fly. With HP Flex-10 technology, you choose how many NICs are on each server and can adjust the bandwidth of each NIC in increments of 100 Mb.
Rather than going to multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to host your applications, VMware Inc. wants you to build a private, cloud-like infrastructure in your own data centre. But with the in-house skills and costs required to make it happen, virtualization experts argue that VMware’s vision is far away from becoming a reality. Last September, the virtualization giant unveiled Virtual Datacenter OS, a set of services that allows IT managers to ”pool all types of hardware resources — servers, storage and network — into an aggregated on-premise cloud,” according to the company. This will enable users to abstract the underlining physical infrastructure from the applications and give VMware customers the ability to offer SaaS on their own premise.
The leaked documents included a forecast of Twitter’s projected annual revenues in 2013. It was one of more than 300 internal Twitter documents that TechCrunch, the online news site said it had been sent by an anonymous hacker. The documents were taken from an account that a Twitter employee held at Google Apps, an online service that replicates many of the features of standard PC software but relies on users storing their data on Google’s own servers. Google and Twitter, both of which rely heavily on internet users’ confidence in the security of web services such as this, were quick to deny that the leak had exposed any deeper flaws in the use of online applications, known as “cloud computing.
However, the embarrassing leak from Silicon Valley’s most closely watched start-up has highlighted a common security flaw that has become a concern to other companies whose employees submit confidential corporate information to “cloud” services. Google defended the security of its applications but also took the opportunity to encourage regular users to revisit its site and update their settings to make them more secure. The growing use of online applications has played into the hands of criminals seeking sensitive information, who increasingly use password recovery tools to hack into personal online services accounts.
When the cloud dissipates, there’s no ray of sunshine for customers that rely on cloud services. Announcement of Google’s Chrome OS plans were met with plenty of discussion about what it might mean for the future of computing. The OS is essentially a lightweight version of Linux designed to run the company’s Chrome browser to access Google’s cloud computing services, such as Gtalk, Gmail, Google Docs, and more. There are numerous benefits of using such cloud services like data persistence across multiple machines. Once power was restored, though, it took some sites several hours to come back fully. It was the second such power outage for the company’s Dallas data center in just over a week, though it’s not particularly common; as TechCrunch noted, the last time the company had a major outage was in November 2007. However, the recent incidents illustrate the problem—there are still risks associated with using the cloud.
Many of the IT pros who are evaluating cloud services name reliability as a major concern with cloud services, and have been doing so in the Ars forums and in closed-door sessions for over a year now. Many of these folks are at large companies and are used to having control over and responsibility for all of the servers that the business uses, so the idea of putting parts of their business on rented, “black box”-style cloud services makes them uneasy.
