Opinions

Seven Warning Signs Your Company Won’t Survive

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST

In these difficult times are you doing enough for your business? Will you bring excuses to the next board meeting or can you justify and demonstrate that you have taken control of your business' performance. Companies with flawed pricing strategies are easy to spot: they are never the market leader, they always struggle, they are always the runner up, and they have revolving doors at the executive suite. Fortunately, you have a choice and this article will guide you towards a better fate and a higher chance of surviving the current economy.

Maybe Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Makes Cloud Computing Too Easy

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:45:00 EST

With just a few clicks you, too, can create a cloud computing environment. But if you’re like a lot of organizations, you may not know what to do with it after that.

The latest version of Ubuntu Server (9.10) includes the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is actually powered by Eucalyptus. The ability to deploy a “cloud” on any server running Ubuntu is really quite amazing, especially given the compatibility of Eucalyptus with Amazon and the plethora of application images available for nearly immediate deployment. It supports both a public and private option, and a hybrid model, and comes replete with management tools designed to make building, deploying, and managing your own personal, private cloud a breeze.

Private clouds offer immediacy and elasticity in your own IT infrastructure. Using Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, you can experience the benefits of cloud computing behind your firewall. Deploy workloads and have them running immediately. Grow or shrink computing capacity to meet the needs of your application.

Too awesome, right? Well, yes and no. It is, apparently, not an answer to how do I build a cloud that would-be cloud computing adopters need, but rather how do I use a cloud? Consider the following query:

I noticed while installing the new version of Ubuntu server yesterday that there is a cloud cluster and node option for deployment. I read through the tutorial on how to set up the cloud, but how does one use the cloud, private or otherwise?

The question comes from a very technically savvy network engineer who, according to a recent survey by web-hosting provider Peer 1, is not alone in asking this question. In the independent study conducted for Peer 1 39 percent of the over 200 IT decision makers surveyed said that their lack of knowledge is preventing them from adopting cloud computing. Security and lack of control also ranked high (24 and 21 percent, respectively) but still fall short of the apparent lack of knowledge regarding cloud computing as an obstacle to adoption.

USING “THE CLOUD”

The answer to the question “how does one use the cloud, private or otherwise” turns out to be both simple and complex. Perhaps at this point it would be a good idea to back up and talk generalities and concepts. Knowing what you have, after all, may help in understanding what it is one does with it.

A cloud computing environment is primarily an architectural framework for automatically managing compute resources in a way that ensures the scalability and reliability of applications. To use cloud computing anything you need to deploy an application into it. Those applications are generally packaged into “images” in a virtual machine format: AMI (Amazon Machine Image), VMWare, Xen, and Microsoft Hyper-V are all options available in general, though EUC appears to have “standardized” on AMI. (We’ll leave that discussion for another day)

It is the virtual image that is deployed into the cloud computing environment, and it is the virtual image that is managed by EUC. Inside the image your application(s) is running, and when the compute resources assigned to that image – not the application, but the image – are in danger of being completely consumed UEC (or appropriate cloud computing management framework in public implementations) will automatically start another virtual image containing your application, assuming there are available compute resources in the “cloud cluster”.

So, a cloud computing environment is comprised of nodes on which images are deployed. Each image runs one (or more, though usually one) application. End users interface with the applications and cloud computing users interface with all the nuts and bolts. It is the management of those nuts and bolts that Ubuntu makes look so easy with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Mouse click easy, in fact, based on the detailed instructions offered on Ubuntu’s site. So now you’ve got a “cloud” deployed, what do you do with it?

Once the base framework is in place you deploy images of applications.In the case of UEC you either download, select, or bundle an image of an application and then push it into the cloud via the UEC management interface. From there, UEC (or any cloud computing environment really) should take care of automatically scaling that application up or down based on compute resource need. Obviously scaling up requires that you have more than one “node” in your “cloud cluster” or that you’re taking advantage of UEC’s integration with Amazon.

So one use, the primary use, is to deploy applications and ensure scalability. But you can also use cloud computing environments to deploy images of infrastructure solutions such as virtual appliances that provide security or load balancing or logging or a plethora of enterprise-focused functionality. You could use UEC or any other cloud computing environment for testing, development, design of new architectures; use it to evaluate new application products and implement proofs of concepts in an environment that closely simulates your production environment.

Cloud computing is ultimately just a new way to deploy and manage applications and their supporting infrastructure that is more efficient than traditional methods without sacrificing performance or reliability. You use “the cloud” by deploying applications into it, and letting it do the rest.

At least that’s how easy it’s supposed to be. Whether or not that’s true in practice is a completely different story…

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Ubuntu,Eucalyptus,cloud computing,cloud,Amazon,VMware,Hyper-V,xen,virtualization,application delivery,infrastructure

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Everyone Should Be Skeptical About Cloud Service Providers

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

As we plummet down into Gartner's "trough of disillusionment", the cloud skeptics are making their voices heard. Although my professional focus is at the forefront of the cloud storage wave, I can not disagree with the content of articles with sensational headlines like "Cloud Storage: It's Strictly For Airheads" and "Why Cloud Storage Use Could Be Limited in Enterprises". The authors are doing exactly what everyone should be doing: Questioning the viability and suitability of cloud storage in the enterprise. The truth is, although I'm not the "cloud police", not all managed storage services are created equal. In fact, lots of them are, to put it bluntly, not worth much. Many cloud backup and archiving services use bare un-protected disk drives to store data, have no redundancy built into the system, and try to scrape up every cent by using home-brewed hardware. This is especially true in the consumer space, where bargain-basement (or even free) pricing has driven a race to the bottom in terms of quality. No business should use junky consumer solutions.

Moving to the Cloud: How Hard is it Really?

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

Many IT managers would love to move some of their applications out of the enterprise data center and into the cloud. It's a chance to eliminate a whole litany of costs and headaches: in capital equipment, in power and cooling, in administration and maintenance. Instead, just pay as you go for the computing power you need, and let someone else worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.

My Thoughts on Ulitzer

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Ok, so, here are my thoughts on Ulitzer... As a blogger, I focus on traffic and I spend quite a lot of time optimizing my SEO. Since the target audience of my articles is much greater than the reach of my blog, Ulitzer is actually helping me increase my content reach. Moreover, Ulitzer does it in a very fair way since links back to my posts or other locations are without the evil "nofollow" providing a nice SEO boost. It also gives me some good metrics that are very useful data point on the effectiveness of my blog article. And last but not least, it allows my article to appears in news.google.com, which is a very nice channel extension. So, all of these to say that while Utilizer might be seen as a competing channel to bloggers, I think that bloggers should realize the tremendous value it could bring to their blog. I think to materialize this value to bloggers, some sort of WordPress plugin would be very useful. I think that allowing bloggers to show and combined Ulitzer/SYS-CON stats, comments, Tweets/ReTweets with their blog posts would be a killer feature. Another approach would be to expose a simple REST API (just HTTP JSON gets) and do a sample Wordpress plugin showing developers how to integrate Wordpress with Ulitzer. Anyway, just some random thoughts.

CA Should Offer the CEO Job to Ken Cron

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:00:00 EDT

The round of applause that greeted the suggestion that Ken Cron be promoted from Interim CEO to full CEO of Computer Associates International (renamed as CA as one of the first action items by John Swainson) left a smile on the face of Chairman Lewis Ranieri at the company's annual shareholder meeting in 2004. Ken had one of the toughest jobs any CEO can imagine: that of following Sanjay Kumar and Charles Wang. Yet under Cron's leadership CA's net income returned to the black after three consecutive years of losses and under very difficult circumstances.

Corporate Management: Complexity Is Risk

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EDT

Have you noticed how people that are neck deep in complexity almost always ask for a standardized solution? And they supposedly do this to regain oversight.

And in reverse; have you noticed how people that have everything neatly packed in small modular boxes almost always ask for some highly customized guerilla tactic – which inherently adds complexity?

Well, no matter how you answer both of these questions, you might know that they are really part of another phenomenon, namely they are about risk.

The Difference Between Web Hosting and Cloud Computing

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:15:00 EDT

Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a cloud computing environment, and traditional web hosting scenarios. On a really high level, he's got a valid point : With Azure you can develop your application offline locally and then when you're done you can publish it to a remote host. To the casual observer, this looks exactly like what you might do with a web hosting company that provides space on an IIS box and let's you use ASP.NET and maybe even a little SQL server database.

Is Microsoft as Free as Open Source?

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Jon has a point; Microsoft’s restricted (i.e., Express) editions are as free as the open source alternatives. This is undeniably true, since the purpose of many software vendor’s “Express” edition is to compete against open source on price. However, the difference is that with open source you get the full-powered editions. For example, Linux (e.g., CentOs), Xen (for virtualization), PostgreSQL/MySQL, Apache, Java, Tomcat, AspectJ, Lucene, Hibernate, and Eclipse are all robust, full-featured, and powerful technologies available for free to developers. The variety and the quality of product available from the open source community are just astonishing.

The End of IT 1.0 As We Know It Has Begun

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 03:45:00 EDT

You may wonder whether it’s too early to make the call given the lack of interoperability standards, security concerns, and common definition of cloud computing. Well, the IPTV space shares many of the same similarities – emerging technology, emerging standards, emerging adoption, varying definitions, and yet the call was made in that space. Cloud computing is a shot across the bow for the giants of the IT industry. They are on notice. Certainly, some will make the transition, slowly, at the speed which the overall market develops or slower, as they have no incentive to drive the market and rapidly cannibalize their existing businesses for a less lucrative business model even if it is more cost effective, flexible, and efficient for most of their clients.

Computers Are Just Tools; Computer Science Is About People

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:00:00 EDT

In some sense computer science is like geometry. When the art of measuring crop fields was under development by the ancient Mediterranean’s it was most naturally coined geometry – literally meaning measurement of the Earth. Geometry was slowly developed by many scholars to solve a wide range of practical applications. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, forecasting expected crop yields, division of land into parcels, and even to build some of the Seven Wonders of the World as present in classical antiquity.

Zen and the Art of Network Architecture

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:00:00 EDT

"...I'll have one with everything." That is the possibly recognizable punch-line to an old joke about the Zen master ordering a hot dog. I am borrowing this as a theme for the on-going transformation of network architecture. Any successful design must follow the functionality required by the end-user. People want to be able to access information, entertainment, work, and all their friends whenever and wherever they happen to be at the time. While we love to talk about Triple-Play, Quad-Play, and Any-Play, we still see (for the most part) operators building on from a foundation of either Fixed-line, or Cable, or Mobile-wireless. With the pending arrival of the fourth generation of cellular radio technology, the Mobile Operator will be able to provide bandwidth and service experiences on par with their Fixed/Cable brethren. But we still have not seen the real shift in thinking which is to take the Zen approach to network design; "One with Everything".

IT Lessons from the King of Pop

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:45:00 EDT

CIOs and IT professionals can take a few pages from the Michael Jackson playbook. By looking at some of the best practices the King of Pop used to change the face of music, IT managers might find inspiration to change perceptions about IT in their organization.

Is Cloud Computing Like Teenage Sex?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:00:00 EDT

It was once said back in the early ‘90s that “Client/server computing is a little like teenage sex – everyone talks about it, few actually do it, and even fewer do it right. Nevertheless, many people believe client/server computing is the next major step in the evolution of corporate information systems."

Are Admins Developers Too?

Thu, 14 May 2009 09:00:00 EDT

My brother (yes, it does run in the family) has a degree in computer science which, by most definitions, makes him a developer. That’s the focus of most computer science focused degree programs, much to the chagrin of the myriad other IT-focused specialties like networking, security, and operations. Interestingly enough, he worked his way through college as a sysadmin and his first job out of college was as a sysadmin. And now he’s doing a little of both. That’s not unlike my own experience in which I often did “dual duty” as both sysadmin and developer, depending on where I was and what the organization needed.

KVM May Become the Choice For Linux Centric Virtualization

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:19:00 EDT

Not that it makes too much difference in the short term, but in the long term this may mean that KVM, which is included directly in the Linux Kernel may very well become the de-facto choice for linux centric virtualization. What makes this even more important is lately it seems that Linux & virtualization in general is at the heart of most major cloud computing initiatives. It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Virtualization: Microsoft's Hyper-V Should Support Other Linux Distros

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 10:45:00 EDT

In what is a big mistake, in my opinion, Microsoft has chosen to only support Suse Linux in Hyper-V. If they want to truly compete with VMware and other virtualization companies they are going to have to open this up. This does not mean you can not run other distros, however it will not be supported by Microsoft. In today's corporate world that is a death nail for most companies.

How Open Is "Open"? – Industry Luminaries Join the Debate

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 EST

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

Ubuntu and BEA Workshop Studio

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 14:30:00 EDT

I work in Building 2 on the 4th floor of BEA's Corporate offices. I had moved into a new office, when I noticed a box of CDs on the filing cabinet near my office...

Guest Editorial — Is the Red Hat-JBoss Deal Good for Everyone?

Fri, 12 May 2006 11:00:00 EDT

Red Hat's announcement last month that it was buying JBoss has been the hot topic for almost anyone involved with Open Source. It's too early to tell exactly what the ultimate outcome will be.

Oracle Linux – Novell or Red Hat? (Hopefully Neither!)

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 06:15:00 EDT

'Spending good money to get into other rapidly commoditizing businesses... seems a waste,' comments Stephen Walli in this commentary on Oracle's reported desire to deliver an entire stack of technology to customers by buying/creating a Linux distro.

i-Technology Opinion: No Way Has Innovation in Open Source Reached Its Limit

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 05:00:00 EST

'Linux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaply - but can it do anything new?' That's the question asked by Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, in an article in The Economist this week - one of the least useful articles purportedly about Open Source that I can remember reading in the past three years.

The Ubuntu Experience

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:00:00 EST

Ubuntu Linux is a new experience for me. Having used only Red Hat's Fedora Core, I was anxious to try out the recently released Ubuntu 5.10 (available from Ubuntu's Website at www.ubuntu.com). I was not disappointed. After waiting approximately 45 minutes to download the 617 MB ISO file, I quickly burned it to a CD and rebooted my computer. Within a mere half an hour, Ubuntu was successfully installed on my system.

The Holy Grail of Networking

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 15:30:00 EST

Recent studies show Linux taking a large and growing share of the global data center market, as well as making incipient gains on the desktop. Traditional IT deployment, however, doesn't tell the whole Linux story - this open source OS is also making impressive inroads in less-visible embedded applications. On this front Linux has come to dominate design-wins in communications, consumer electronics, and other ubiquitous applications, going from upstart to leader in less than four years.

Memory Is Just Like RAM...Volatile

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 14:00:00 EST

Human memory and Random Access Memory (RAM) share one thing in common: they are both very volatile. This basically means that once the power sources feeding the memories are terminated, the memories disappear forever (at least in the case of human short-term memory; more on that in a bit).

Sun Is Missing the Boat

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:00:00 EST

Forgive me for being a Scott McNealy fan, but I really can't help it. Scott and the crew at Sun have done a great job over the years producing what I consider to be really good products. Scott has also provided much-needed entertainment in the form of some very quotable quotes (who was there for his presentation that started with a single cloth-covered box that could run all of the OSes that Microsoft sold? When he uncovered the box it was an overhead projector - classic McNealy).

AJAX Tipped To Play Major Role in the Shape of i-Technology to Come

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 05:30:00 EST

AJAX, LAMP, Virtualization, SaaS, Open Source, SANs, Web 2.0, Blog consolidation, InfoSec, BitTorrent, Googlecrash, Adobe, IE7, SOA, REST, Single Sign-On, SemWeb, iComm, Structured Blogging, VPMNs, VoIP Phones, Semantic Technologies, Ruby on Rails, spam/phishing, VoIP, and WiFi: welcome to SYS-CON Media's roundup of i-Technology predictions.

Richard Stallman Corrects Misunderstandings of the GPL

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 11:15:00 EDT

Don Rosenberg's review of Larry Rosen's book, Open Source Licensing, did double-duty as a platform for FUD about the GNU GPL. The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL for short) was not the first free software license, but was the first to embody the concept of 'copyleft': the requirement that all modified and extended versions of the program be free under the same license.

Software Patents: "Programmers and Consumers Should Gather Forces," Says Richard Stallman

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 15:30:00 EDT

The defeat of the EU software patenting directive, writes Richard Stallman, only provides a breathing space, in which programmers and consumers should gather forces. This battle has implications far beyond the software field. Our years-long fight has shown how undemocratic the EU is. It is a system in which bureaucrats can make decisions that, practically speaking, the public can never reverse.

i-Technology Viewpoint: Silicon Valley Recovering Slowly

Mon, 30 May 2005 22:00:00 EDT

The weather's still good and the housing prices continue to climb. But the dot-com crash was far more severe than any previous dip in Silicon Valley's fortunes. Will a region that often takes itself too seriously ever be able to have fun again?

Apache, Open Source, and the Small Software Company

Mon, 30 May 2005 12:15:00 EDT

The Apache Software Foundation is one of many open source software organizations shaking the business world all the way down to its proprietary software toes. Along with Linux, the Apache HTTP Server has long been the consummate example of the power and quality of open source software. Its runaway success against Microsoft IIS illustrates that the better product can triumph over both monopoly and marketing dollars.

The LAMP "Cooperative"

Mon, 30 May 2005 12:00:00 EDT

When you consider the way LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, or Python) has evolved, you could draw comparisons to a very low tech but effective method of collaboration: the farmers' cooperative. Individual farmers on their own lacked the means to collect, negotiate, store, and ship their produce to market. However, by pooling their resources they formed a successful venture that allowed them to produce their crops, collectively negotiate prices, share expensive farm machinery, and provide a marketplace for buyers to receive their goods.

Opinion: Linux May Be the Main Life Support for Intel's Itanium

Thu, 19 May 2005 23:00:00 EDT

It's probably not likely that Itanium has much of a future unless Linux makes massive gains in market share over the next 5 years. 'If Intel truly believes in Itanium,' writes Paul Nowak, 'then they have to do away with Windows. Windows is not coming to Itanium. While killing off Windows is probably a pipe dream, even for a company with the resources of Intel, that's what would need to happen to bring the industry to the point where Itanium is running the most widely used code base.'

Bill Gates H-1B Remarks Miss the Mark

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:00:00 EDT

Bill Gates probably did not want to speak in front of politicians, and even warned his audience that he needed to be careful. So let's not be terribly hard on him. But...

What Does It Take to Move?

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

We're all familiar with the disruption and cost of moving. When I'm asked what it takes to motivate an organization to move to desktop Linux, my answer is simple, 'Migrating desktops is like moving to a new house. What would it take to get you to move your house or office tomorrow?' Their response always starts with 'It depends...'.

LinuxWorld Expo

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

The Birkenstocks and beards where mothballed this year as the new guard entered LinuxWorld Expo in button-down shirts and ties and the occasional Brooks Brothers suit. This year's LinuxWorld was all about business or at least that's the message IDG, the conference producer, tried to convey when it promoted the event held for the first time in Boston's Hynes Convention Center. The main hall was filled, with booths from Red Hat and Novell butting up against a pavilion staffed by IBMers in their familiar blue.

The Ideal Windows-to-Linux Migration

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST

Organizations spend a lot of money on equipment, on personnel to manage the equipment and on infrastructure to insure that the tools to do a job are available and can be run by their employees error-free.

Enterprise Linux Server Migrations: It Takes a Village

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Please forgive me as I dust off a cliché from the 1990s business press - the Business Ecosystem - which, despite its overuse, really is a good concept that can be effective when appropriately applied. Dictionary.com defines an ecosystem as 'An ecological community, together with its environment, functioning as a unit.' Porting this concept to business, you get something like: 'A community of businesses functioning together in a common operating environment to solve customers' problems.'

It's Time for Innovation on the IP Front

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

It's hard to believe that we have passed the 13th anniversary of Linus Torvald's humble introduction of 'just a hobby' Linux, first posted to the Web in October 1991. Torvald previewed the OS as a 'Minix-lookalike' and designed for the days when 'men were men and wrote their own device drivers.'

The Best of 2004

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

To start off the new year, several LWM editors have compiled a list of what they consider to be the best solutions of 2004 in their particular field of expertise.