New Florence. New Renaissance.

Every Data Center as one Computer

The origins of Nebula One go back to Kemp’s days at NASA, which he joined in 2006 as director of strategic business development. In 2007, he became a chief information officer, making him, at 29, the youngest senior executive in the U.S. government. In 2010, he became NASA’s chief technology officer. Kemp spent much his time at NASA developing more efficient data centers for the agency’s various computing efforts. He and a team of engineers built the early parts of what is now known as OpenStack, software that makes it possible to control an entire data center as one computer.

Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, has three Nebula Ones, which it uses for research projects such as an effort to improve parking in big cities. Researchers at PARC have been analyzing huge amounts of data to create models that show when workers, delivery vehicles, and shoppers tend to use certain parking spots. The idea is to create parking spots with modifiable, electronic signs that can turn, say, loading zones into regular parking spots over the course of a day. “You need to spin up a large simulation, get the results, present them, and then sit back for a while,” says Roger Hoover, an engineer at PARC. With the Nebula One, an engineer can shut down one simulation and then start up a new project in a few seconds. Similar things are possible on Amazon.com’s EC2 service or Microsoft’s Azure, but those services can be expensive and slow when you must send large amounts of data back and forth via the Internet. “What we do just will not work on Amazon,” says Surendra Reddy, who leads the cloud technology work at PARC.

BusinessWeek

 

The Massive AWS implementation at Netflix

InformationWeek has a nice profile of Netflix's massive, global use of IaaS on Amazon Web Services, instead of building its own data centers.

It allows "Netflix to try using large data center resources, fail at it without paying a heavy penalty in unused gear because it was only rented by the hour, then try again. The ability to execute a rapid, iterative testing of ideas "[gives] us an ability to try things out, even more than our own data centers would,"

"Netflix found there was no performance advantage to using servers in Brazil, which were farther from Miami than AWS's East Coast servers. It reverted to serving South and Central American through its hundreds of servers in Northern Virginia because "it made sense to serve them out of U.S. East," said Cockcroft (ex Sun and eBay)

European customers, on the other hand, could be more efficiently served out of AWS's Dublin, Ireland, data center. AWS services in Dublin are slightly more expensive than those in U.S. East, but reducing latencies for customers was worth the increase, he said. Netflix launched a 1,000 virtual machine footprint in Dublin, using the same procedures and same APIs to which it was already accustomed. "Everything just worked," he said."

"And while it's commonly viewed that Netflix is dependent on AWS for vital services, Varia (of Amazon) said at the start that AWS relies on Netflix to educate it about meeting a large, demanding customer's needs. "Adrian and his team challenge Amazon Web Services in every way. They help us to make AWS better," he said.

More on Cockburn's own assessment of risk of dependence on AWS in this ZDNet post

Slide below from a Cockburn presentation at AWS Re:Invent November 2012 touches on one of the AWS outages

Seattle: Cloud capital of the world

Google plans a major recruiting effort to increase its Seattle-area engineering staff by as much as five times. There is already fierce competition among tech companies for talented engineers, and many of those with skills in cloud computing work at Google’s rivals in Seattle (at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure)

“We’re not the first in this rodeo, but we have the history of Google,” said Brian Goldfarb, Google’s leader of cloud platform marketing, who joined the company last year after a decade at Microsoft. “We have the best data centers on the planet. You can’t really give engineers a bigger, badder thing to work on.”

New York Times

Photo Credit from Google's Kirkland campus

Amazon’s EC2 Spot Instances

“Web Services division, whose server farms generate the processing power the retailer sells to heavy corporate data users on the cheap, has grown so large that the unit routinely finds itself with thousands of spare machines.

So the e-commerce giant created a supply-and-demand-driven market called Amazon EC2 Spot Instances that lets clients rent processors for as little as 10 percent of Amazon’s standard cloud-services fees. To use Spot Instances, companies bid for the rights to a certain number of servers. Winning bidders are billed by the hour, as long as the market price hasn’t risen above an upper bound they specify.

Researchers in genomics and drug design as well as online advertising increasingly use Spot to analyze terabytes of data, while companies such as Cycle Computing LLC, Princeton Consultants Inc., and Numerate Inc. have built businesses that track market prices for heavy data users.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Other use cases for Spot in this Amazon video

 

Dropbox – a “feature” for 100 million users

A CEO gushing about his own product does not impress, but some of the figures tied to Dropbox’s growth do. Each day, Dropbox customers store 1 billion files. The company more or less has to help duplicate a digital version of the Library of Congress every day. By comparison, Twitter has about 140 million people issuing 500 million or so tweets on a daily basis. “But at Dropbox, it’s not 140-character snippets,” says Houston. “It’s your tax returns and your most important stuff.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

The video below goes into the impressive architecture that has allowed Dropbox to scale.

Customer Experience-as-a-service

Mei Li of NetSuite is a very generous lady. Every time I see her, she offers me dark chocolates for my wife. On a diet, is my usual excuse. Last time I saw her, she gave me a gift card and said my wife would like it even better. As these things often work out, my daughter Rita used it to buy the nice top in the photo. And when I asked where she got it, she said “Ibex”. Where? “Dad, the store you gave Mom the gift card for”.

Ibex Outdoor Clothing  is a wool clothing company. Its site says “We’re a natural fiber company. A thoughtful design company. An excellence-in-product-development company. We’re a hiking-before-dawn company. A dogs-in-the-workplace company. A bike-to-work company. We’re also a community-supported-agriculture company, a cross-country-ski marathon company, a coffee-in-front-of-the-woodstove company.”

Just navigating their site makes you feel warm as the weather cools down.

It was Mei’s subtle way to introduce me to one of NetSuite’s growing commerce-as-a-service customers. Ibex uses NetSuite to manage customer interactions across smartphones, tablets, PCs and brick-and-mortar stores. The consistent customer experience across channels is a holy grail for most companies these days.

Additionally, NetSuite allows Ibex “30 to 40 percent faster order management and fulfillment, and increased visibility of inventory across 30 factories and distribution across all channels, including its flagship retail store in downtown Boston.”

For many fast growing concepts like Ibex, the pay as you grow SaaS model is ideal, and NetSuite’s wide footprint saves them infrastructure, integration, upgrade and other costs. Ibex was previously on an on-premise Sage MAS 200 and a custom-built Web storefront.

So my daughter asks – That was so easy..does NetSuite also power Tiffany? Apple?

I respond - Not yet. But they are always looking for good salespeople. Want to help them sell their software to brands you like? And, by the way, that way you can pay Mom back for the card Mei meant for her :)

Google’s $ 249 “laptop for everyone”

Update - I pre-ordered one at Amazon. no tax, no shipping with my Prime account.

This may kill off netbooks and even put a dent in Win 8 laptops.

From Computerworld

“The new Chromebook boasts an 11.6-in. 1366 x 768 display. That's slightly smaller than the 12.1-in. 1280 x 800 displays on the previous Chromebook models, but at a glance, it's hard to tell much of a difference. The screen certainly isn't the most eye-catching, high-def display you've ever seen, but with its matte finish, it's easy on the eyes and perfectly suited for things like Web browsing, email and document-oriented work.

Above the display there's a webcam and microphone for online video chatting. The Chromebook has a headphone jack and SD card slot on its left side; along the back you'll find one USB 3.0 and one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, the power connection and a slot for a SIM card. This last appears to be nothing more than a placeholder -- Google confirmed to me that this model is Wi-Fi-only and that a 3G-capable version will launch at some point in the future.

While the device includes 16GB of local SSD storage, buyers also get 100GB of cloud-based Google Drive storage for two years -- a subscription that would cost $120 if bought outright. “

Super-Cloud-Computing

Stowe, a math whiz-turned-entrepreneur, realized that Amazon’s cloud computing had gotten good enough to change this equation. He and his company’s engineers developed software that scours up to seven of the data centers Amazon has scattered across the globe for large numbers of free machines. Cycle Computing chops up computing problems into small chunks that can be spread across all of the machines and then reassembles the results into an answer. The company deals with any glitches that arise when an Amazon computer dies in mid-calculation. “Amazon is wonderful, but it still does have errors,” Stowe says. “You have to correct for those in a compressed time frame.”

Cycle Computing’s customers include heavyweights such as JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Pfizer (PFE), and Lockheed Martin (LMT). The 20-person company has yet to take any funding but may seek it out now that the rental business has started to boom, Stowe says. The hope is that smaller companies will take advantage of the technology as well, using a supercomputer rental to put them on equal footing with more established competitors. “A startup doing a new product design can now get a system as good as that at Procter & Gamble or General Motors in only a few hours,” Stowe says. “This opens up a whole new path for innovation.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Internet Infrastructure Innovators

This is the focus of the GigaOm Structure event this week

“In the next five years a new way of thinking about, constructing and operating IT will emerge. Data centers are no longer the size of mini-marts but instead are mega-marts like Rob Roy’s 2.2 million square foot Switch data center in Las Vegas (photo below) . Servers are no longer the unit of computing, but instead are being taken completely apart or are a mere component in the new data-center sized computer, a trend being pushed by Frank Frankovsky at Facebook and at the Open Compute Foundation.

The walls between data centers will also matter less and less as software defined networks help create secure, flexible bandwidth between data centers and eventually continents, which folks like Martin Casado of Nicira are working on. This new era sees infrastructure as a service and the hardware becomes a fungible element, supporting a river of data and applications that flow on top of it. The U.S. government is certainly taking advantage of this shift with its Digital Government Strategy, led by U.S. CIO Steve VanRoekel.”

GigaOM

Photo Credit Switch

Walmart’s Movie iCloud Match type offering

What Apple introduced with its Match service around personal music MP3 libraries, Walmart is trying out around your movies

“To use the service, you simply bring your DVDs or Blu-ray titles into a Walmart retail store, where an associate will help you create a free Vudu account (if you don't have one). A standard digital DVD or Blu-ray conversion will cost $2 per disc, or you can pay $5 to get a high-def version of a DVD. Walmart will then authorize the digital copies (there are no uploads, and you get to keep your discs) and place them in your Vudu account. You can view the movies any time by logging into your account at Vudu.com.”

Consumer Reports