ReadWriteCloud

Heroku Data Clips Make Sharing Results from Postgres Queries Simple

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:28:30 -0800

Heroku has added a data clips feature to its Heroku Postgres databases. What's that, you ask? According Heroku's Matthew Soldo, data clips are a "convenient way to share data inside a database."

Basically, the feature lets users of Heroku Postgres share a result of a SQL query via a URL. The results can be viewed in the browser, or downloaded in several standard formats.

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What's the point of the feature? Rather than sharing a static snapshot of a query, this allows users to see a live result of a query at any given time. (Data Clips can also be locked to a specific time, if preferred.) So, for example, this might be useful to share up-to-date statistics on current inventory or sales results.

The example given on the Heroku blog combs through Wikipedia entries and finds people in the English articles with the term scientist or artist.

Note that this is not a feature that's available via upstream PostgreSQL. Soldo says that the feature is built on top of Heroku's Web based administration tool. "Because PostgreSQL doesn't have a built-in webserver, this feature wouldn't be possible on the standalone database."

The feature is immediately available to users of Heroku Postgres. Note that clips do have a few limits. Results are limited to 10,000 rows and the clips will not refresh more than once every 60 seconds.

This looks like a pretty nifty feature. Is this compelling enough to consider using Heroku Postgres instead of a self-hosted PostgreSQL database, though? Would be curious to hear what other folks think about it.

Discuss

The Rebirth of the Desktop PC as the Thin Client: HP

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0800

The original concept of the thin client device, which Hewlett-Packard helped pioneer, was to strip the PC down to just the minimum hardware needed to serve as a decent enough remote access terminal, while moving the compute power to the data center. But with new private cloud architectures enabling businesses to shift computing power between processors as needed, suddenly there's a trend toward fattening the thin client.

Yesterday, HP announced the replacement of two components in its thin client product line with some hardware components that would actually turn a few heads if they were released as ordinary desktop PCs. The first adds one of AMD's newest Fusion processors with built-in GPU, and the second marks the latest step in the comeback of one of a much-loved brand among system builders.

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HP's new t610 series thin client, which replaces the t5740, adds AMD's dual-core 1.65 GHz Fusion G-series processor. AMD calls it an "APU" rather than a CPU/GPU. It was introduced at about this time last year and made its way into the high end of HP's value line of Pavilion laptops. It's the presence of this not-so-ordinary APU from the mobile world that is enabling HP to exploit this thin client form factor in ways it couldn't before.

"This will be the only thin client in the world with a thermal management capability," says Allen Tiffany, HP's thin client marketing manager, in an interview with RWW. "The box itself is rated to 40 degrees Celsius [104° F], so it can already withstand some very harsh operating environments. However, customers being customers, every now and then they do something out of spec."

Tiffany and I shared some horror stories to that effect, me with the tale of a bank branch that duct-taped its thin client boxes under their desks in the gap between the front drawer and the backboard (which then overheated, charring the wood), Tiffany with the story of customers who drop their thin clients in locked filing cabinets and leave the power cords hanging out from the front.

Now when the ambient temperature exceeds 40° C, he tells me, the t610 will begin a process of stepping down the CPU's operating level until it's back within a safe operating range.

"Doing this allows us to best provide for ensuring the components have a very long life cycle," says Tiffany, "and we don't do any damage to the device by putting it into an excessively hot environment." The fact that the t610's dual Wi-Fi antenna are both self-contained also encourages customers to expose it to the open air, rather than hide it in the desk drawer with the Halloween candy.

The slightly wider space in the so-called "flex chassis" of the t610 Plus (left) gives space for one PCI-Express expansion slot (see what I mean about the desktop PC transition?). It also enables a quad-head display connector, which will make the device right at home in a financial management setting.

One more desktop-like feature that got my attention was the inclusion of a Trusted Platform Module, enabling the t610 to serve as a trusted component in a government setting where full session encryption is vital. Although IBM had been working on a TPM for Linux-based thin clients at least as early as 2005, this is probably the first commercial implementation on a Windows-based thin client.

Tiffany adds the t610's BIOS will also meet NIST's guidelines for BIOS protection (April 2011 edition as PDF here). So clearly HP is making a play for the government and public services markets, where the rapid migration to private cloud architectures has already shifted compute power to the server.

HP's other thin client introduction this week, more in the value space, is the t510 (right). It replaces the existing t5500, and marks the next step forward in the comeback of former system builder favorite Via Technologies. Via's niche today is the low-power space, so the t510's dual-core Eden X2 U4200 processor may not always turn heads. But it enables Via's ChromotionHD 2.0 graphics technology, which is optimized for playing back 1080p full-motion video - and that's something to see.

Tiffany confirmed that both t510 and t610 are both certified Citrix Ready, which means they're verified to work well with Citrix' Xen-brand application virtualization. The next step up in Citrix' certification system is HDX Ready, which Citrix announced last October. That tier is for devices that can utilize Citrix' HDX streaming, which lets thin clients serve as both superior graphics workstations and videoconferencing terminals. The HP manager said he expects both models to obtain HDX Ready certification soon.

He also reminded us that all HP thin clients will continue to come pre-installed with HP's Embedded Device Manager software, which premiered last December. This way, any thin client can serve as an administration station for the entire branch office.

Discuss

AT&T Becomes One of the Larger vCloud Participants

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0800

Last week, after VMware introduced businesses to the idea of an automated cloud service portal called vCloud Integration Manager (vCIM) that could give private cloud consumers a way to become public cloud providers, the question was: How many small-to-medium enterprises would jump on board? Interrupting the answer to that question today is AT&T - arguably still one of the world's largest public corporations - which has itself become a vCloud customer in a retooling of its Synaptic cloud services to include VPN access.

It's a move that could not only help AT&T gain parity, or something approaching it, compared to cloud giant Amazon, but could also help even the stakes between VMware and Citrix in the one field where the latter's Xen has a market share advantage: the private cloud.

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The story of AT&T's cloud rollout begins in 2006, with the acquisition of what was then considered a "business management service" called USi. That company had been working on cloud infrastructure initiatives.

In August 2008, AT&T began rolling out the first cloud services based on those initiatives, under the Synaptic banner. At the time, the company claimed Synaptic would effectively invent the genre of cloud computing. When asked to differentiate Synaptic from other cloud services offered by Amazon and others, the company told my reporter at the time that, unlike its competition, AT&T would be offering hosting and storage on an unprecedented kind of "pay-as-you-go" model, something like an on-demand cable TV program.

What became painfully obvious was that a golden opportunity circa 2006 had become an also-ran play when extended into 2008. The following year, Amazon introduced its first VPN service, which when you look at it from a wider-angle lens was actually its portal into a hybrid cloud. Not really a VPN by the original definition, but perhaps a "virtual VPN," its premise was to enable customers to determine how much compute and storage resources should reside on-premise, and how much may be extended into the public cloud, and vary that ratio as necessary.

This morning, AT&T announced what it's calling a "VPN-based cloud," which actually refers to the remote access portal enabled through the integration of VMware's vCloud. It is vCloud which will open a path for existing VMware vSphere customers to migrate their resources quantitatively into AT&T's space without having to re-design their data centers.

In this diagram provided last week by VMware of vCloud Integration Manager, the top row contains components that may now be provided by AT&T, among others.

During an interview last week, VMware Senior Director for Cloud Services Matthew Lodge described how customers who already utilize vCloud Director for managing private cloud infrastructures (released in 2010) would be able to provision cloud-based services offered by a vCloud-participating data center, bringing their compute, storage, and network power into their service pools. Today's announcement effectively puts AT&T Synaptic in that category. The hope is that this enables an homogenous platform between the public and private clouds that can effectively be managed through a single portal.

We asked Lodge last week whether vCIM would be capable of effectively aggregating service pools from multiple vCloud participants. Such a feature might give AT&T's new service at least a toehold into hybrid environments where other providers already have a head start. Lodge responded no, not with this current version, though such functionality is being considered for a future release.

VMware is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

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BitNami Goes Beyond AWS Cloud with Application Library

Joe Brockmeier — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:30:00 -0800

BitNami announced today that they're going to be offering ready-to-run images of popular open source stacks for a wider range of public and private clouds. Previously, BitNami's cloud images were only available for Amazon Web Services (AWS), but the company is now providing images for Eucalyptus, OpenStack, VMware vCloud and others.

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For those not familiar with BitNami, the company provides ready-to-run packages of popular open source applications or development environments. For instance, SugarCRM, Drupal, Alfresco and Liferay are available as pre-configured images for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. The company also provides pre-configured stacks of Ruby on Rails, Django, etc. BitNami also provides virtual machine images for running on VMware.

BitNami moved into cloud hosting with AWS last February. Now they're offering public cloud and private cloud offerings that give "one-click" deployable images and integration into other cloud platforms.

Pricing depends on the type of customer. BitNami CEO says that cloud hosting providers would have a volume-based pricing with a "minimum commitment." Private cloud customers would have an annual subscription. The subscriptions include updates for the software as well as configuration support (for the images, not the applications).

I'm a bit surprised that more companies aren't offering this sort of service. Are you looking at BitNami, or have tried it? Would love your thoughts.

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Nimbula 2.0 Provides Complex Cloud Orchestration

David Strom — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:36:24 -0800

We have been big fans of Nimbula since the company launched a few years ago with its hybrid cloud management tools. Today they announced their latest version, which adds new functionality and orchestration features. It will directly support VMware's ESXi hypervisor and Cloud Foundry services, making it easier for customers to orchestrate the provisioning and monitoring of cloud-based applications.

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The idea is to deliver Amazon EC2-style features but behind a corporate firewall.

You can read more about the details of the Nimbula Director v2 release here. The 2.0 version is in beta and expected to be available next month, and will be free for existing users and up to 40 cores, with a fee-based service for larger installations.

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Brian Stevens on Red Hat's Involvement with OpenStack

Joe Brockmeier — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:30:00 -0800

Red Hat has been involved with OpenStack development for some time. Unlike the bulk of companies involved, however, Red Hat has gone about its work quietly and without "officially" joining the effort. Red Hat still isn't saying exactly what it hopes to get from OpenStack contributions, but Brian Stevens did divulge a bit about the company's involvement.

Stevens is Red Hat's CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. Right now, he says Red Hat has no "confirmed" product plans for OpenStack but the company is "just finding additive ways where we can get involved in the community and help move OpenStack forward."

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Even though Red Hat isn't saying what its intent for OpenStack is, Stevens says that OpenStack is "highly complementary" to other projects and products in Red Hat's portfolio.

With the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0, we provide a community-backed solution (through the oVirt project) for enterprise-scale virtualization, which includes capabilities such as live migration, high availability and dynamic scheduling with support for both virtual servers and virtual desktops (VDI) in a single open platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated KVM, when combined with OpenStack, forms an interesting foundation for building enterprise or public IaaS clouds.

Our upcoming CloudForms solution will provide IT governance and lifecycle of application management across hybrid clouds including vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and providers like AWS. Architecturally CloudForms sits above the IaaS layer.

Stevens also says that Red Hat is already seeing "early stage interest" in using OpenStack with RHEV and "in some cases are providing consultative support for our customers."

Joining OpenStack?

RackSpace and the OpenStack community are currently thrashing out a plan to create a foundation around OpenStack. I asked Stevens if the company was involved in those discussions. Stevens says that the company has "publicly expressed some of our thoughts on how the governance for OpenStack could be modified to allow for, in our opinion, a meritocracy-based model that could result in an even more vibrant community."

Stevens says that Red Hat would like to see a "lightweight and open" foundation, of which "there are many successful models in existence that could be emulated." He pointed to the LibreOffice community, Apache/Hadoop, GNOME, and the Linux kernel community as examples of well-run communities.

Since Red Hat is already doing the hard part of actually contributing to OpenStack, why not actually take the step of joining officially? Stevens says that it's more efficient.

"The way OpenStack has set things up, official joining is not a prerequisite to getting involved and helping," says Stevens. "So instead of a press release, we chose to just roll up our sleeves. In some cases we find it more efficient to get involved in the actual technologies than in some of the commercial and marketing elements of open source efforts."

Stevens says that it's "early days" for OpenStack, but says that it's "another example of collaborative open source development driving cloud innovation."

The next OpenStack release is due on April 5th. It will be interesting to see which companies have put in the most to the Essex release, and how it turns out.

Discuss

Keep Track of your AWS Expenses With Cloudyn

David Strom — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:02:00 -0800

With the number of individual Amazon Web Services now seemingly approaching infinity, it makes sense for third parties to get into the act of trying to keep track of what you are actually spending and whether you have over-provisioned your services. Enter Cloudyn.com, an Israeli based company that announced its services this week.

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The idea is to have a dashboard similar to what you see below (mine isn't very interesting, sorry, I have taken down all of my machines at the moment) where you can track your projected annual costs, which accounts you have on AWS and what your running instances of your virtual machines are costing you and other trends. Yes, this information is all available from AWS directly, but perhaps not in as prettified format. And of course, you can probably predict that Cloudyn won't stop at AWS but will include other cloud-based providers eventually, which makes a lot of sense. Besides this dashboard, there are plenty of other analytics available, including specific downsizing recommendations. If you have a large and complex sprawl of AWS instances (unlike me), this might be useful to you.

So far the company has actually delivered more than a million dollars in aggregate savings in cloud costs across its beta customers, averaging 42% reductions according to their announcement. That merits a closer look for sure.

The Cloudyn service is free to try out before it moves out of beta in May. Once you sign up it takes a few days for them to look over your usage patterns and generate a meaningful report.

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Nginx Continues Growth, Adds Commercial Offerings

Joe Brockmeier — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:30:00 -0800

According to the Netcraft Web Server Survey for February 2012, Nginx was "the only server to experience a non-negligible market share increase this month" by picking up 0.27 percentage points. Good news for the upstart Web server, just as the brand-new company behind Nginx takes the wraps off its commercial packages.

Nginx has had quite the growth spurt over the past year. In February of last year Nginx had 7.57% of the market, or about 21 million domains hosted with Nginx. Microsoft had 20.04%, or about 57 million. Apache was at 60.10%, with more than 171 million domains.

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Fast-forward to this February, and Nginx has grown to 9.89% of the market surveyed by Netcraft. The overall market has grown considerably, as well – Nginx now has about 60 million domains. Microsoft has dropped to 14.38% of the overall market, with just over 88 million domains, and Apache has reclaimed some of the market and sits at 64.92% or more than 397 million domains. To put that another way, in the last year (according to Netcraft) Nginx has picked up nearly 40 million domains, while IIS has picked up about 31 million.

From the Netcraft February 2012 Web Server Survey

That's not too shabby for a project that has a tiny developer team and a mere $3 million in funding so far

Commercial Offerings

The first set of commercial offerings from Nginx are three support tiers that range from $1,100 a month to more than $6,600 a month. The starter package, Essential, includes support for up to 10 servers and covers two incidents per month with a resolution time of 96 hours (or less). It includes no phone support, optimization assistance, or feature development options.

For companies that are depending on Nginx, there's the big daddy package that starts at $6,600 a month or $70,000 a year. It has 24x7 support, covers an unlimited number of servers and an 8-hour response time for "severe" issues. Customers also get 12 hours of support calls per year, optimization assistance and can even get developer time to implement features (at an extra fee, of course).

All plans come with emergency bug fixes, updates, software updates and security fixes.

So far, the commercial entity hasn't diverged from the open source Nginx offering. It will be interesting to see if the company also starts offering proprietary add-ons for Nginx or if they stick with a support-only model. Given the rapid adoption of Nginx, it seems likely that the company will be hearing from quite a few businesses that want a support contract.

If you're using Nginx, I'd be curious to hear how smoothly your deployments have gone and if you've run into any major issues that would have benefited from support.

Discuss

Red Hat's GlusterFS Appliance for Amazon Now Totally Virtual

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:30:00 -0800

One thing you don't quite get accustomed to in reporting developments in cloud technology is how even the virtual things become virtualized. Last December, Red Hat released a software storage appliance based on the GlusterFS software-based NAS system that Red Hat acquired in October. That product is a way to apply the same methodology that GlusterFS customers used to build network-attached storage pools completely from existing storage.

That product had been described as a "virtual storage appliance" - in fact, it was given that name in Red Hat graphs we used. Today, Red Hat announced the, um, virtual version of that, for use in pooling elastic storage from Amazon Elastic Block Storage.

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Here's the full and complete name of the product now: Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services. Although there will probably continue to be folks who call it "Gluster for Amazon."

"After the acquisition, we essentially rebranded the virtual storage appliance for Amazon Web Services for Red Hat," says Tom Trainer, Red Hat's software product marketing manager, in an interview with RWW. "The basic premise here is that we deliver inside Amazon Web services NAS in the cloud."

Trainer tells us his strategy in competing against object store technologies such as CAstor will be to emphasize ease of transition and ease of management for data centers' existing file structures. Since Amazon's EC2 storage structure is POSIX-compliant, and Linux-based data centers are also POSIX-compliant, he characterizes deploying a massive database in Amazon's cloud via the new Red Hat Virtual Appliance as more of a relocation than a transmutation.

"If you're not rewriting your applications, then you have been reliant upon a physical appliance in the data center to package up those files, turn them into objects, and push them to the cloud," explains Trainer. "And in most cases, those objects that are being pushed to the cloud are for backup or archiving. The problem therein lies is, they're providing a bridge but they're not really solving the widespread dilemma that users have had, in being able to port their applications directly into the cloud."

One charter customer he described specifically eschewed the use of a bridge or an appliance for changing the data structure, even if the effects of those changes were abstracted and the result looked like an ordinary storage pool. It wanted a one-to-one transfer, especially since its applications were geared for Amazon EC2 instances. "Now they're building their development apps in the cloud, and running it just as if it ran in the data center," he says, "but not buying the additional compute servers and mass hardware appliances that they traditionally purchased, and then had to keep for three to five years to amortize it over time. They've taken their cap-ex and physical software licenses, and moved it to an op-ex environment where they're only paying for services and time."

So if a new customer wants to deploy a clustered file server with two EC2 instances and 150 TB of storage, the Red Hat appliance will attach that much EBS to those instances as part of its automated installation procedure. "We stripe our whole file system across all of that, and we benefit from parallelization of the I/O," Red Hat's Trainer explains. "That helps to compensate for and overcome a lot of the performance issues that users have faced in trying to build something like a file server within Amazon. What they run into is the mass network bottleneck that could exist within a public cloud."

Once this customer began moving its own customers' resources into Amazon's cloud through Red Hat's appliance, Trainer reports it could then completely renegotiate new terms with those customers, reducing their costs in turn.

Earlier today, Amazon announced a big price drop for its S3 storage service, weighted towards its lower-capacity users. S3 is an object store, unlike EC2 which utilizes virtual devices.

Discuss

The Disintegration of PaaS

Sam Charrington — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:02:00 -0800

In PaaS Makes Progress in 2011, I argued that the previous 12 months had been pivotal to the advancement of platform-as-a-service. As a result of this fast-paced evolution, the PaaS of 2012 is quite a different beast than that of just a couple of years ago. While this second-generation PaaS differs in many ways from initial forays in the field, one of the most important distinctions is that this new PaaS has been disintegrated, or at least made more modular.

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Before you run off thinking I'm advocating the destruction of PaaS platforms, please realize that I am not. Rather, I'm referring to the shift away from monolithic, one-size-fits-all PaaS systems towards more open, loosely coupled platforms that makes it easy to consume code and services provided by third parties.

Early PaaS offerings, circa 2007-2009, were conceived of as all-in-one affairs. In fact, a big part of the value proposition that providers envisioned was its delivery via proprietary services and custom APIs that developers would use in their applications. Examples include App Engine's data store and Memcache services, the Force.com data store, the distributed cache and storage systems we built at Appistry and many more.

The fact is, the early players in the space had little choice but to roll their own. At the time, there were critical gaps in the market that needed to be filled in order for developers on PaaS platforms to be able to deliver rich, scalable applications. Fortunately for PaaS users, this is no longer the case for most application-level services.

Sam Charrington is the principal of CloudPulse Strategies, an analyst and consulting firm focusing exclusively on cloud computing, big data and related technologies and markets. He can be followed on Twitter at @samcharrington.

REST Assured, We've Got Git

In order to build modern, scalable, connected web applications, developers must have access to a wide variety of third-party components and services upon which to build. With the proliferation of open source and SaaS services, these are now readily available on the open market. While both open source and SaaS predated the earliest PaaS offerings, in recent years the advent of GitHub and the popularity of REST-based Web services has played a significant role in expanding the selection of building blocks available to developers.

GitHub, by dramatically lowering the barriers to collaborating on and sharing open source projects, has become an "App Store" of sorts for developers, and is home to over one million projects. Likewise, the popularization of Roy Fielding's REST model for web service APIs has simplified developer access to the many application- and app-infrastructure-oriented SaaS services now available. It's now possible to store files, query and analyze data, send emails, create maps, subscribe to messages, encode videos, and much more, just by sending simple HTTP-based commands. (If you've never visited the ProgrammableWeb API Directory, the selection will blow your mind.)

This Cambrian explosion of high quality components and services has made web application development a much more productive affair for developers. And because the market has removed the burden of providing these low-level building blocks, those PaaS providers ready to embrace openness stand to gain great advantage.

Modular PaaS is Better for Providers, Too

While the end-user benefits of an open approach to PaaS, namely increased choice and reduced lock-in are apparent, the advantages of a modular approach to PaaS are two-sided, benefiting providers at least as much as users. This is because, as a PaaS provider, it's simply too hard to deliver both a solid application platform and the services that plug into it. For most businesses, such a thing would spread their development resources too thinly, even if they had the necessary domain expertise, which most don't. In addition, because the open source and SaaS genies have left their bottles, trying to do it all puts the provider at odds with their customers.

By building and offering an open platform able to easily consume third-party components and services, and by cultivating a thriving ecosystem of the tools' providers, second-generation PaaS vendors can improve their own chances of success while creating a better world for their users.

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How to Become a Cloud Service Provider in About a Day: VMware

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:00:00 -0800

Businesses are finally realizing there's a way to recoup some of their costs for building out their private cloud infrastructures. It's hybridization, but in the opposite direction: taking their residual compute power and storage capacity and making it public, reselling it back upstream.

This morning, VMware is introducing a kind of cloud service assembly tool called vCloud Integration Manager (VCIM) that enables businesses to gather their available resources together, from both private pools and participating public cloud resellers, and then present them to their own customers as cloud services. Suddenly, unused capacity is not a cash drain but a potential cash cow.

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Clouds as two-way streets

VCIM is an automation tool for businesses that already use vCloud Director to control their services. It presents a fairly simple window for provisioning classes of cloud services for various customers, and tailoring services to each one. The screenshot above shows the Resellers tab, whose principal intent is to enable administrators to supplement resources from public cloud resellers. But as VMware's senior director for cloud services, Matthew Lodge, tells RWW, it can also go the other way.

"The purpose here is to allow service providers to securely delegate the selling and provisioning of cloud services to partners and to the channel," says Lodge. The left pane identifies the various resellers with which your vCloud is aligned; the right pane shows the packages your business is offering via the chosen reseller on the left, with "minus" flags for packages that are not presently viable. A capacity quota appears on the right column of that pane, so you can avoid situations where a reseller overloads you with too many customer requests.

"The beauty of this is, resellers can instantaneously provision their own customers. They don't have to open tickets, make phone calls, go back to the service provider to get the customer up and running. They can just do it themselves... [VCIM] is designed for the kind of situation where, like with any other cloud service provider, you've built up a multi-tenant cloud," he explains. It's quite easy with this tool, he adds, to apportion the part of this cloud that is in-house, and the remainder that gets resold.

You also can set up the terms of sale on a per-customer basis, including offering a customer a trial service - perhaps free - of limited service over a short period, such as 30 days.

We asked Lodge whether VCIM makes it feasible for a CSP to automate the aggregation of capacity - perhaps in excess or overrun situations - from multiple resellers, effectively bringing in capacity on an emergency basis? That's not a VCIM feature yet, he tells us, though it could be implemented in a future version.

The cloud-making API

Equally as innovative as this reverse-hybrid scenario is VMware's inclusion of an API, essentially opening up the provisioning process to entirely different classes of programs - Lodge offers CRM as one example - that may need to provision cloud capacities on an ad hoc basis.

"Your typical CRM system, or customer portal, has a notion of a set of products that you would order for customers, and that you can manage - it'll be the database of record for all your custom data, for example. Your CRM system knows what customers can order, but it doesn't know how to provision them inside of vCloud Director, and it doesn't know particularly all of the technical parameters that vCloud Director needs in order to instantiate a service. That is the gap we're filling with vCloud Integration Manager."

By way of the API, an external front end can provision a customer with sets of products that have been assembled in VCIM (above). From there, VCIM follows the steps outlined here for building that customer's virtual data center with the chosen parameters. "Because this is API-based, you can integrate with the resellers' CRM systems." adds VMware's Lodge.

"We're moving beyond your basic software that sets up a cloud," he remarks. "We're now solving some more business-related issues: How do we increase the speed at which service providers can turn out new customers? How do we reduce their operational costs by automating more of the process? How do we help them create new routes to market using channel partners? And at the same time, resellers are looking to deliver on hybrid cloud. They want to be able to sell hardware and software for installation on-premises for their customers, but they also know they're going to need to have a public cloud component going forward."

VMware is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.

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Amazon Bucks Storage Trend: Drops S3 Pricing

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:30:00 -0800

Amazon is looking to continue its rapid growth for S3. While hard drive costs are staying steady or going up due to limited supply, Amazon is actually dropping pricing for S3 storage.

The pricing changes were announced on the AWS blog yesterday. The first tier of storage starts at $0.125 a month per GB for the first 1TB of storage, then pricing drops to $0.11 per GB/month up to 50TB, and so on. Note that there's no change in pricing past the 4,000TB+ tier, so really heavy users of S3 (like Dropbox) aren't really going to see a lot of pricing relief from the change.

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According to Amazon, it's about a 12% reduction in costs for customers with about 50TB of data, and a 13.5% drop for customers with about 500TB. Note that there's no change to the request pricing, which is assessed based on the number of requests to work with objects in S3 storage. Data transfer prices are also unchanged.

This makes Amazon far cheaper than Rackspace, for example. Rackspace Cloud Files pricing starts at $0.15 per GB, and $0.18 per GB for outgoing bandwidth.

The price changes take effect as of February 1st, so customers will be getting the better pricing retroactively through the beginning of this month.

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The Ups and Downs of the "America-Proof" Cloud: CloudSigma

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:31:20 -0800

If it's a feature your customers are asking for, it's difficult not to want to provide it. Although one of the benefits of public cloud computing is the ability to provision computing and storage resources from anywhere in the world on-demand, enterprises in Europe are wary that if their cloud-based assets are migrated to servers residing in the U.S., then they could (even if they never have yet) be subject to inspection by U.S. law enforcement authorities, even though the assets themselves are not American.

It's still the most controversial provision of the U.S. Patriot Act, signed into law in October 2001. Because of this, European cloud customers specifically request that their service providers (CSPs) block any live migration to U.S. servers. And because it's such a frequent request, CSPs including Zurich-based CloudSigma are offering what they call "Patriot-proof" clouds as a feature.

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"I think it's largely a theoretical risk. I don't believe the U.S. Government is rampantly going around, getting data off of U.S. subsidiary-operated clouds," admits Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma's chief technology officer, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "But also, I think people do have a genuine concern, because the penalties are quite strict."

Disconnect

There's now raw data to verify the suspicion that European CSPs restricting all or some of their cloud services to geographies outside the U.S. - or even just to Europe - is costing Europe valuable investments and prestige. Last year, according to data from U.K.-based telecom analyst firm Informa, the Middle East/Africa region nearly pulled even with Western Europe in the number of operators offering viable cloud services. The rate of growth for European cloud services is among the lowest on the planet.
Prior to the Informa data's release, European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding asked her country's CSPs to refrain from making these offers, saying the free flow of data between nations is essential to healthy trade and a vibrant economy. But as CloudSigma's Jenkins tells us, some European CSPs actually don't have a choice. In Germany, for example, cloud customers may be subject to criminal sanctions if their cloud deployments expose personally identifiable data (PID) to any agency outside Germany.

"The reality is, there's a disconnect between the U.S. position and the European position at the moment," remarks Jenkins. "And the problem is that companies are in a position where essentially they comply with European law, but then they would break U.S. law if they work with a U.S. company, or vice versa. It's a big mess, and for sure, it needs clarifying."

Despite Comm. Reding's calls for CSPs to open up, Jenkins says the E.U. already has very clear laws mandating them to protect citizens' personal data - laws which are unlikely to ever be changed. Those laws state service providers must notify users and seek their permission before transferring their PID to any third party. This is the case, he says, not only for cloud service providers but conventional co-location providers as well.

Jurisdiction

Jenkins says CloudSigma has designed its IaaS servers to be separable by the customer when necessary. Although CloudSigma does have a U.S. subsidiary, there is not a free flow of data between its American and European servers. "We've done that deliberately to allow customers in Europe to say, 'I'm only using a European cloud, therefore I'm not exposing myself to U.S. jurisdiction.' Likewise, the U.S. company can [choose to] only use the U.S. cloud, and only expose themselves to U.S. jurisdiction because we're a U.S. company in the U.S... Our aim is to make it easy for the customer to understand what jurisdiction they are exposing themselves to."

For CSPs that provide PaaS and SaaS, the CloudSigma CTO points out, this level of compartmentalization is not so easy to achieve. Data replication is common in order to ensure resilience and service reliability, so it's conceivable that replicated data may cross jurisdictional boundaries. There will be no way, he predicts, for Google to be able to guarantee its Gmail or Google Apps customers that their data will never fall under some particular, questionable jurisdiction - say, China.

But how CloudSigma lets its IaaS customers approach the jurisdiction problem is during the account creation phase. This way, a customer who may need to operate services in Shanghai can easily be informed as to the possibilities of oversight by Chinese authorities. "It's not an anti-U.S. or pro-Europe question, 'Can I control who has access to my data?'" Jenkins says. "Our job is to try to make it as transparent and as controllable as possible, so a company can go open an account in a specific location, and that's their home jurisdiction. Then they can opt into other cloud locations as they see fit."

As an example, Jenkins offered the case of a Zurich-based customer who wants to add failover and geographic load-balancing in the U.S. That customer will see a warning saying that her customer records will be replicated in the U.S. as well, and explaining the implications of that data falling under U.S. jurisdiction. If both jurisdictions are linked together as one service, the explanation will also add that authorities in either location may have access to customer data from the other. A multi-national company which has offices across the globe, he adds, may actually not have the luxury of choosing an IaaS service that's centered in Zurich.

This opt-in approach, he believes, gives his company an advantage insofar as Europe is concerned. The flip side is that it may be a disadvantage for CloudSigma in the U.S.

"For us, it would be a very advantageous thing to have a consistent approach, as well as for the cloud in general. I think overall, we're a net winner because we're on the European side and we could potentially benefit. But [on the other hand], in Switzerland we don't because it puts people off of the cloud in general, and that's a bad thing. It's something that's in the interest of European cloud providers to resolve... I think finding some middle ground would be beneficial, maybe some sort of framework that goes between the U.S. and Europe. Maybe there's a way to provide some oversight in Europe that would make the E.U. people happy, and then the U.S. would feel like they have some level of access to prevent terrorism. There needs to be some sort of balance... [that] doesn't break either system fundamentally."

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Alfresco Makes its CMS More Social

David Strom — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:02:03 -0800

Today, Alfresco today launches its Enterprise v4, perhaps the biggest update since they began operations. The new software comes with mobile and tablet apps, business app integrations and is loaded with social features that help users share, comment on and collaborate on content. The software is built around an open source content management system that is used by more than 2500 enterprises in 55 countries around the globe. They call it cloud connected content.

Like other social Intranet products, Alfresco users can like or follow particular content streams. Enterprise v4 has integrated connectors to Google Docs, Microsoft Office, QuickOffice, Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's iWork app. You can also publish your content to YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Pricing for an Alfresco Enterprise subscription starts at about $25k for the typical enterprise. You can download the new software here.

Sponsor

BMC the Latest to Join VCE's All-in-One Answer to Exalogic

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:00:15 -0800

On Tuesday, we introduced you to CA Technologies' Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock platforms, and if you're a frequent reader of ReadWriteWeb, you might still be wondering, "What's a Vblock platform?" It's an emerging contender in the out-of-the-box, full-service cloud server category from a company called VCE.

And if you're wondering how a relatively unknown company goes up against the likes of HP, Oracle, and IBM, the answer is by integrating hardware and software from specialists in their respective fields. Consequently, compute power and networking switches comes by way of Cisco UCS, storage capacity is supplied by EMC Symmetrix, and the virtualization layer is supplied by VMware. Yesterday, by way of a new strategic alliance, the VCE convoy added BMC Software's management software to this illustrious list.

Sponsor

"BMC is always focused on business service management - the management of services that sit above the infrastructure layer," explains Ken Berryman, BMC's senior vice president of strategy and corporate development. "We have a best-in-class set of solutions to do that, from orchestration through active management of operations. So when you think about what's really required to have a successful cloud project, it's not just enough to have the infrastructure block - the Vblock, which VCE produces. It's also mandatory to have the right level of management that fits above it, not only to take care of initial provisioning of whatever is operating in the data center, but to manage that over time."

The first stage of BMC's alliance with VCE, Berryman tells us, will see integration of VCE's existing infrastructure manager with BMC's Cloud Lifecycle Management, which includes automated provisioning of resources in scalable, virtualized "network zones." Imagine simpler, virtual networks where all the physical resources are pooled together, complete with virtual firewalls and load balancers.

From there, the two companies plan to implement BMC's ProactiveNet Performance Management Suite, which Berryman describes as "a set of capabilities that allow you to predict future problems, solve them before they occur, and proactively respond to operations issues." Next will come Atrium Orchestrator, which utilizes ITIL principles for change management in implementing workflows within the Vblock, enabling end-to-end control of virtual environments.

"That's the initial set of integrations," says Berryman. "Over time, we would expect more across the full portfolio of business service management solutions... That roadmap is something we will continue to expand, in response to direct customer demand. Certainly, we are able today to provide integrations across a broader set of the portfolio on a custom basis. But what we are attempting to do here is have a very standard, configured, out-of-the-box Vblock with the BMC solutions made for it, so it's easy to set up, deploy, operate, and manage over time your private or hybrid cloud."

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