The Virtual Clouds

The
Announcement
Clouds

Recently there have been a spate of announcements by
both new and established players in the Cloud Computing
industry. This presentation is an attempt to review the
offerings.
The review may have some errors, as it is still really at a
0.4 version stage.
I have kept the tone lighthearted in places to ensure that
I do not lose the audience-The presentation is intended
for a global audience in different time zones.

Cisco Unified Computing System
In Brief: Data Center in a Box. Configure thousands of virtual servers, with iPhoneEsque ease. Integrated compute, storage and
network management. A Blade Server that supports up to 384 GB of memory. BMC Software allows creation and migration of
thousands of virtual servers. Upto 320 servers can be managed using the software.

What did Cisco Announce?: Cisco announced an integrated environment which integrates a blade server, storage and
network fabric. It also announced a blade server that is based on Nehalem processors; It is not yet another blade server in my opinion.
It is based on technology that Cisco bought in a spin-in. It allows support for much larger memory banks, and can thus support servers
with much larger datasets. Consider databases/OLAP applications that process much larger datasets, or application servers that
support much larger heap sizes, or application level caches(like GigaSpaces)that are much larger in size. It is not an also ran blade
server, as is being claimed by the competition. Currently, setting up a datacenter is a manual and tedious process. Cisco simplifies this
process using BMC Management software and hardware that integrates virtualization, storage and network virtualization.

Highlights of Remarks by John Chamberlain: “Cisco does not announce point products”
Cisco sees the Unified Computing Initiative as a long term strategy with which it will unite storage, virtualization and computing needs.
They have certainly put a good package together: Networking cards optimized for performance and virtualization; A blade server that
uses Nehalem effectively, and more importantly integrates new technology that allows much larger amount of memory; as well as a
Software Solution that makes constructing a Data Center quite simple.

Interesting points from Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior: After the warning shot over the bow, came the
olive branch. Padmasree Warrior(like me an alum of IIT Delhi) , was given a difficult task: Explain product features with clarity(which
she did extremely well) , even while downplaying that this is igniting a turf war with HP. “Cisco has not announced a new product. It
has announced a Common Architecture linking data resources, Virtualization products and storage. Burden of Systems Integration is
still on the customer. Constructing a datacenter with integrated storage, networking and compute resources is a manual complex
process, that many customers do not know how to do well.”(Paraphrased remarks) Padmasree Warrior was given the thankless job of
downplaying the vision outlined by John T. Chamberlain. Her cry for peace and love among industry players is appropriate, but sounds
almost plaintive, given the broadside from HP(see next page)

The Announcement Cloud 2

Virtualized Storage, Network and Computing. Cisco has unified the triumvirate of the Data Center to create a DataCenter in a box.


Competition Reaction: HP: “Cisco should launch its blade server in the museum”
“Following the Cisco launch, HP sent a strongly-worded response to the media raising a number of criticisms of Cisco’s approach with UCS. The release said it was
“appropriate that Cisco launch(ed) their server in a museum” as the notion of unified compute, network and storage as a system was debuted with the first
blades five years ago. It also questioned if you would “let a plumber build your house,” claiming Cisco’s “network-centric” view of the data centre is
incomplete, and dubbed UCS as “Cisco’s Hotel California” claiming a lack of standards compatibility.”

My Comments: I disagree with this assessment of the blade server. By supporting much higher levels of memory(see here) , it
may be possible to do so much more than with the HP Blade Server. Everything can run faster with much higher amount of memory-
from database servers to Java Application servers with larger heap sizes. I would love to post an update, if HP were to give me data
about why their blade servers can also support equivalent amount of memory, and a roadmap for their launch.

The more substantial response: “Cisco is providing a vision with their UCS approach they’ve pre-announced, but to us that’s a vision
HP is delivering on today,” said Christianotoulos. “It’s a vision for them, but for us it’s a reality today with Adaptive Infrastructure from
HP.” At the end of the day, while competitors come and go, Christianotoulos said HP has been a leader in the server segment for 20
years and remains focused on reducing cost and complexity in the data centre, regardless of competition from Cisco or others.
Has it been a long winter in Sunny California? Or maybe it is due to lack of enough love from Wall Street: But it appears that HP needs validation too. “To be
dead honest, the Cisco news is a bit of a compliment for us, I believe,” said Matt Zanner, worldwide director of data center solutions for HP Procurve, the
networking division of HP. HP laid out a new open networking concept with a new family of switches in January, which provides “strong validation that we are
headed in the right direction as well,” Zanner said.

Update: HP thinks that this move actually proves that they have been ahead of Cisco in laying out the unified Computing System vision. Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:
HPQ) -- which, along with IBM, is likely to be most affected by Cisco's announcement -- all but took credit for the vision Cisco laid out Monday. The company
announced its ProCurve One system, a combined server and switch with its own partner ecosystem, in January. quot;What we heard pretty much validated where
we're headed,quot; Matt Zanner, HP ProCurve's worldwide director of data center solutions, said in an interview. quot;The whole idea of collapsing different
infrastructures, that's a tenant HP's been claiming for quite some time.quot;

How did Goldman Sachs, stock market and the financial institutions react? Goldman Sachs was enthusiastic. It added Cisco to the “Conviction Buy” list.
“Fresh off Monday’s fanfare around its server introduction, Cisco (CSCO Quote - Cramer on CSCO - Stock Picks) was placed on Goldman Sachs’ conviction buy list
Tuesday with a price target of $18. In a somewhat apt switch, Goldman dropped Hewlett-Packard (HPQ Quote - Cramer on HPQ - Stock Picks) from its list last
week. The shift coincides with Cisco’s bold and somewhat risky strategy to attack H-P’s network server turf.”


Why has Cisco pre-announced this product? The speculation is that this is to stop customers from signing contracts with competition.
Customers who do want to benefit from Nehalem, and the new Cisco Blade server technology, are well advised to wait for the UCS
launch this summer. Some may say that unless a product is actually launched, it is impossible to decide whether it is “vaporware” or
not.
Our takeaway: It is definitely not a point innovation, nor is it a revolutionary invention.

Cisco USC is definitely not a point innovation, neither is it a revolutionary invention. The cost savings promised by Cisco, could
potentially be matched by others. Veteran competitors like HP may be able to create better blade servers, and put together equivalent
products using other networking gear. Cisco has definitely taken a lead in the emerging convergence of storage, virtualization and
computing power.


Microsoft Cloud
In Brief: I think it is the first serious Cloud Framework that has solid Enterprise capabilities: Microsoft Office, EXchange, Sharepoint
Portal Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It also is the first Cloud Framework that offers a full fledged relational database out-of-the-
box. Comparable offerings from Amazon would have to be consturcted by combining existing
Microsoft has a well publicized cloud computing inititiative. It is called “Azure” Cloud computing initiative. It was announced with much
fanfare and applause at the Professional Developers Conference(the word applause appears 15 times- I will save you the trouble of
counting. )

The applause is justified: I think it is the first serious Cloud Framework that has solid Enterprise capabilities: Microsoft Office,
Exchange, Sharepoint Portal Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It also is the first Cloud Framework that offers a full fledged
relational database out-of-the-box.

It also supports an Elastic Compute Framework as well as a durable message bus. For storage, there is a choice of a simple Table/Blob
storage as well as a sophisticated relational database that runs on top of Microsoft SQL Server.

The relational database in the cloud offers a clear differentiator over the other clouds. Overall, Azure is the first framework that
Enterprise developers can relate to. Java based Enterprise frameworks are still not available in the cloud as an out-of-the-box
service. If Microsoft succeeds with this, this could be the way by which it is able to make increase its marketshare in the Enterprise
market.

It is the first Cloud Computing Framework that has most of the “thimbles” that an Enterprise Developer expects- such as a Portal,
Relational Database etc.

“Microsoft Fabric” offers Fault tolerance and disaster recovery. With any of the offerings from other vendors when creating a private
cloud, we will have to create this on our own.


Sun Cloud
In Brief: Sun announced an entry into the Cloud computing space, promising that “Behind Every Cloud you will see the Sun” . By allowing Private on-
premises clouds, Sun could persuade mainstream rather than cutting-edge IT organizations to move to the world of Cloud Computing.

“Move over, Amazon. The leading provider of cloud services is about to get some serious competition from Sun Microsystems, which
made its entrance into cloud computing Wednesday with plans to offer compute and storage services built on Sun technologies,
including OpenSolaris and MySQL.”

Sun’s Cloud offering includes: Storage based on ZFS- Sun’s distributed file system and an “Enterprise Stack” based on mySQL+ GlassFish
Application server. Unlike Microsoft Azure or Amazon EC2, the Sun Cloud can be created onsite. This will allow customers to create
their own clouds based on the Sun API. The Sun’s storage API is portable with Amazon S3 service. Sun’s cloud is based on the robust
pedigree of its proven technologies in the area of Networking and storage, the strong Open Solaris Operating System. It will use the
technology acquired from Q ware to do management.

I think customers will like the idea of creating Private clouds using the Sun Technology. I am disappointed that they have not bundled
an ESB product like Mule or WSO2 with their Cloud offering- but may be that is what an independent cloud provider needs to do. I
think that having the Intalio stack preconfigured in the cloud, may make BPM in the cloud irresistible.

I think Sun’s move of allowing companies to create their own on-site Private cloud is very clever. A lot of companies for legal and
emotional reasons simply cannot allow their infrastructure to be hosted elsewhere. They will be very happy however to create their
own clouds. I see this as a great opportunity.

Where does this leave Azul Systems? I think a vendor could bundle Azul’s Appliance with the Sun Cloud to create a private cloud offering. The new blade servers
from Cisco and competing servers from HP will allow large number of virtual machines to be created on the same blade server, however I still think that the Azul
Compute appliance with its pauseless GC and large heaps still has a major role. I expect Value-added-resellers and other hosting providers to build on top of the
Sun Cloud to create extremely competitive Cloud Computing offerings. For example, an offering could include JBOSS application server(s), with mySQL database
and WSO2 ESB. Another offering could include mySQL database for Operational datastore and Vertica for data analysis and OLAP.

I have been trying to figure out what the “Creative Commons” license is? Does anyone know, what it means in practical terms?


Could the Sun Cloud be the tipping point?
In Brief: Sun announced an entry into the Cloud computing space, promising that “Behind Every Cloud you will see the Sun” . By allowing Private on-
premises clouds, Sun could persuade mainstream rather than cutting-edge IT organizations to move to the world of Cloud Computing.

The Wallstreet Journal article “Internet Industry is on a Cloud” does not do Cloud computing any justice at all.

Value proposition of Cloud computing is crystal clear. Averaged over 24 hours, and 7 days a week , 52 weeks in a year - many –not all -
servers have a CPU utilization of 1% or less. The same is also true of network bandwidth. The storage capacity on harddisks that can
be accessed only from a specific servers is also underutilized. For example, harddisk capacity of harddisks attached to a database
server, is used only when certain queries that require intermediate results to be stored to the harddisk. At all other times the harddisk
capacity is not used at all. Isolated pools of computing, network and storage are underutilized most of the time, but must be
provisioned for that hypothetical peak capacity day, or even a peak capacity hour. What if we could reengineer our Operating Systems,
network/storage management as well as all the other higher layers of software to work in a way that we are able to treat hardware
resources as a set of “Compute Pools”, “Storage Pools” and “Network Pools”? Numerous technical challenges have to be overcome to
make this happen. This is what today’s Cloud Computing Frameworks are hoping to achieve.

Existing software vendors with their per Server and per CPU pricing have a lot to lose from this disruptive model. A BI provider like
“Vertica“ hosted in the cloud, can compete very well with traditional datawarehousing frameworks. Imagine, using a BI tool few
months in a year, to analyze a year’s worth of data, using temporarily provisioned servers and rented software. Cost of an approach
like this can be an order of magnitude less than traditional buy, install and maintain approach.

I think Sun’s private cloud offering may be the tipping point that will persuade mainstream rather than cutting edge IT organizations to
switch to a cloud approach. With a private cloud, one could share compute, network and storage resources amongst a set of business
units, or even affiliated companies. You can read a comparison of existing cloud offerings here:

PS: Why do many servers have an average utilization of 1% or less. Consider an IT shop with dedicated set of servers per application
policy. For an application rolled out 8 years ago, the average utilization when in use was perhaps 15%. With today’s technology
the average utilization when in use will be 5%. The average across 365 days, 24 hours, can certainly be below 1%. Numerous
Enterprise applications have encountered declining usage over the years, and that is another reason average server utilizaton can be
quite low.

The Amazon Cloud
In Brief: The oldest Cloud Computing Framework. Offers only Infrastructure-as-a-Service out-of-the-box. Various companies like
IBM allow J2EE and database applications to be ported or run-as-is. Early applications have been in the multimedia.
Amazon has the oldest cloud computing framework. According to some, It started with a simple idea, that for at least 10 months in a year, the servers it has are
idle. The actual history appears to be that it was built as Infrastrcutre-as—a-service for internal use. Each Amazon page is constructed with 200 to 300 fine
grained services. However, it has become the leading Cloud Framework with over 500,000 developer accounts. All emerging cloud frameworks are compared
against the Amazon Cloud.

Amazon Cloud features are: Elastic Compute for Computing, S3 Storage for storing arbitary amount of data(maximum object size is 5 GB), SimpleDB simple
database for database access and querying, and Simple Queue for messaging. CloudFront is a low latency frontend to the Internet.

Many small and medium sized websites seem completely satisfied with the capability of the Amazon Cloud. Numerous relational databases, application servers
and applications like Business Intelligence have been hosted on the cloud.

Amazon approach to scalability has been to create few hundred services that run on independent infrastructure. Each Amazon page is constructed from upto 300
or more services. Amazon does not have a coarse grained data service layer from which it constructs derived fine grained services. Thiis approach is perhaps
necessary to ensure scalability. The flip-side is that an Amazon style Cloud implemented using a framework like Eucalyptus may create unmanageable Service
sprawl for an application like an Enterprise Portal. Enterprise Portals can have thousands of portlets, each with a very different UI. This is a very different
situation than a B2C site like Amazon.

The base Infrastructure offered by Amazon(SimpleDB+Storage+SimpleQ) seems quite limiting to a number of Enterprise developers. Many Enterprise developer
may find the limitations of Amazon technology quite paradigm shifting. The limitations of the Amazon technology, are more in the area of availability egular
Enterprise Applications. However a different perspective might be: What business issues that are long pending on the wishlist can I solve using the Amazon
Services? If you have worked in a large company, you might have run into this problem: How do I share a large file- such as a new build or a presentation across
the entire enterprise-while ensuring availability across VPNs and multiple geographies, and not overloading corporate networks. This simple problem is quite
surprisingly unsolved(or solved unsatisfactorily) in many large enterprises. It will be a very simple problem to solve using the Amazon S3 Service. When you
compare the cost of implementing in the cloud, versus implementing internally the benefits of Cloud computing become quite clear. In other words, even the
base Amazon Cloud infrastructure can be a very powerful way of solving numerous long pending Enterprise Business Issues.
A Cloud hosted Business Intellegince Service from Vertica may be another example of long pending IT wishlists getting resolved through Cloud Hosting. On the
other hand, Enterprise customers would like to see their IT and SOA Stack hosted in the cloud, by an external vendor. Prepackaged Clouds would make Amazon
EC2 much more desirable.

There are no performance benchmarks for applications like Enterprise Portals and core ERP applications hosted in the cloud. Amazon is known to throttle
network bandwidth between servers.

The Google Cloud
In Brief: Google’s vision of the Cloud seems to be based on the idea of having highly scalable compute nodes that run a framework based on BigTable.
Google’s vision of the Cloud seems to be based on the idea of having highly scalable compute nodes that run a framework based on
BigTable. It requires using Python as a language. I was hoping to see Google make its Search Engine, Translation, Google Maps and all
the other functionality available as a service. The features offered in the Google AppEngine are quite powerful- Some very good
websites have been built using the GoogleApp Engine- and they are showcased here.

It offers a DataStore, MemCache, Mail , URLFetch and Images as a service. This is an impressive set of services. However, what if
every Google service was made available as a Web Service? One could then compose- “mashups” out of the powerful features Google
has. For example, one could take “News” about Venezuela and have it translated in Spanish, inlcude images and maps, as well as
share this using a specially created website.

The number of transactions per second seems quite limited- according to some users. (This is not confirmed. )
“Compared to other scalable hosting services such as Amazon EC2, App Engine provides more infrastructure to make it easy to write
scalable applications, but can only run a limited range of applications designed for that infrastructure.

App Engine’s infrastructure removes many of the system administration and development challenges of building applications to scale
to millions of hits. Google handles deploying code to a cluster, database sharding, monitoring, failover, and launching application
instances as necessary. While other services let users install and configure nearly any *NIX compatible software, AppEngine requires
developers to use Python as the programming language and a limited set of APIs. Current APIs allow storing and retrieving data from a
BigTable non-relational database; making HTTP requests; sending e-mail; manipulating images; and caching. Most existing Web
applications can’t run on App Engine without modification, because they require a relational database.
Per-day and per-minute quotas restrict bandwidth and CPU use, number of requests served, number of concurrent requests, and calls
to the various APIs, and individual requests are terminated if they take more than 30 seconds or return more than 10MB of data. “
Overall, the vision of this Framework as a public Cloud did not seem very clear. On Amazon EC2, one can create an infrastructure that
has a relational database and an application server. It is therefore possible to be treat Amazon EC2 as just the base Infrastructure, and
build sophisticated services on top of it. This does not seem to be supported by Google at the moment.


The Eucalyptus Cloud
In Brief: Undistracted by its reputation as a “Party school”, a group of visionary UCSB researchers have created an Open Source
version of the Amazon Cloud. The ability to create an Amazon like cloud, even while maintaining control like in the DataCenter
makes this Framework very compelling. The work and analysis of Prof. Wolski radiates brilliance, and Sun’s recognition of his
work, by bringing him on stage at a recent confernce further builds the reputation of his team. This is the team to watch for.


The IBM Cloud
In Brief: IBMs vision of the cloud is based on the notion that it must satisfy the demanding requirements of its toughest and most demanding Enterprise
Customers.
Details of IBM’s Cloud initiative have been quite sparse. I went through a couple of whitepapers. One is titled: “IBM’s Vision For The New Enterprise Data Center
A breakthrough approach for efficient IT service delivery” .

IBM sees Cloud Computing as a way by which existing technologies like mainframes, application servers and databases are hosted on the cloud. This is
dramatically different than the view of the mainstream Cloud Computing community.
IBM’s WebSphere Stack and database(to be confirmed) is now certified to run on the Amazon Cloud.
IBM has technologies like “Tivoli Provisioning Manager” which allows dynamic provisioning of resources. But I do no think the price points achieved through IBM
technology will approach anywhere close to what it will cost to host the same application on a public cloud like the Amazon Cloud.
IBM could have some major announcements though: They think that most existing public cloud vendors do not understand the complexities and realities of
Enterprise IT- a view that I certainly endorse. IBMs whitepapers give some interesting figures about scalability challenges for Cloud Computing vendors of
tomorrow.
Changing applications and business models: A major shift has taken place in the way
people connect—not only between themselves but also to information, services
and products. The actions and movements of people, processes and objects with
embedded technology are creating vast amounts of data, which consumers use to
make more informed decisions and drive action.
By 2011, it is estimated that:

• 2 billion people will be on the World Wide Web
• Connected objects—cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines—
will reach one trillion
In 2007, there were 3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide—and that number is
estimated to grow to 4 billion by 2010.
• Between 2003 and 2006 stock market data volumes rose by 1750 percent in
financial services markets alone.
• Data volumes and bandwidth consumed are doubling every 18 months with
devices accessing data over networks doubling every 2.5 years.
Overall, I think IBM has a good understanding of the complexities and the scale of Enterprise Cloud Computing, however they do not have a product or offering
that seems as clear as well defined as the other Cloud Frameworks.


The IBM Cloud
Customers.

tomorrow.



The Virtual Clouds

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