Breaking the Code

The Right Fluff

Apologies to Tom Wolfe but I couldn't resist the title as I am a huge fan of The Right Stuff having grown up with the Cold War, Armageddon and above all the Space Race for company.  Music by Bowie - Hunky Dory, Space Oddity and, of course, Five Years.

Your Country Needs You

I've blogged about my fascination with Space Exploration before in Thank God we chose to go to the Moon so you can imagine my excitement when I got a call last week from Professor H. Wolff at the newly formed UK Space Agency saying words to the effect that "Your country needs you".

In a nutshell what Prof Wolff wanted to know was whether Cloudsoft was prepared to go where no other Cloud company had gone before and sponsor a mission to explore our Local Interstellar Cloud or as it is rather quaintly called our Local Fluff.

Roughly 30 light years across, this is the interstellar cloud through which the Solar System is currently moving. The Solar System entered the Local Fluff at some time between 44,000 and 150,000 years ago and is expected to remain within it for another 10,000 to 20,000 years.

I was sceptical at first but Prof Wolff quickly convinced me he was serious. It's the usual small world stuff - Heinz is on the same advisory board as one of our long term collaborators Prof Al Dearle. (As an avid fan of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, I should have expected something like this, I guess.) 

Cloudsoft Goes Galactic

Fast forward to yesterday and we put pen to paper (or in my case electronically signed a PDF using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8) and Cloudsoft Galactic was born.

As a result I can officially reveal that Cloudsoft's Monterey Platform is set to become an integral part of Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) 2.0, a new NASA satellite scheduled for launch on November 11, 2011. IBEX 2.0 is the successor to the original IBEX, a NASA satellite which has been in orbit for about 18 months and is the first to map of the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space. The IBEX mission is part of NASA's Small Explorer program and should complete its observation of the entire solar system boundary in about 6 months.

Cloudsoft Galactic is working very working closely with teams from the Southwest Research Institute, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center.

A Very British Twist - Not 'Arf

In a peculiarly British twist to this story, IBEX 2.0 will carry a small phial containing the ashes of Alan Leslie "Fluff" Freeman, MBE.

Once in earth orbit, a ceremony reminiscent of the Gene Roddenberry / Timothy Leary Space Burial will be broadcast on Steve Wright's eponymous BBC Radio 2 show in December 2011.

It's not clear whether this is a one-off or part of a longer term plan to position the UK Space Agency as the market leader in space burial services.

How cool is that? I will leave the last word to the Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud.

The Total Perspective Vortex

There is a famous scene in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Zaphod Beeblebrox emerges unscathed from the Total Perspective Vortex. If you are not familiar with this concept take a look at this clip from the original BBC radio series.

Douglas Adams' genius was the reductio ad absurdum of every day life. He lampoons our propensity to trot out phrases like getting things in perspective without giving them a first let alone a second thought.

Another curio is our ability to take the same data set and interpret this radically differently depending on whether we see a glass as half empty or half full.

Case in point - Jim Ottewill's take on a recent study released by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), which questioned companies from Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), about their plans for using cloud computing in the future.

When asked to comment on his article in bobsguide.com by our PR agency Articulate Communications he got my full attention with his provocative title Cloud Computing Risks Outweigh Benefits, New Report Finds.

However when I read the article I was struck by the fact that based on the data points cited I could have concluded the opposite:

Cloud Computing Benefits Outweigh Risks, New Report Finds 

Three quarters of businesses which use cloud computing believe that the positives associated with the technology are greater than the risks, a new report has revealed.

Findings from a study by Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), which questioned companies from Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), showed that nearly two thirds (64.4 per cent) are planning on using cloud computing in the future.

Of those planning to use cloud computing, 14.6 per cent will be adopting the solution for use with “mission critical” services which is a very healthy percentage given this is still a developing technology.

Clearly what you are looking for has a major influence on how you interpret what you are seeing. In this case I guess you could say I am a glass half-full kind of guy.

The Future is ... Content Processing Clouds

I have to confess to being a little ring rusty as this is my first post in over four months. It turns out that running a company can be something of a preoccupation at times. That said, here goes ...

Location, Location, Location

I’m impressed by the staying power of property shows like Location, Location, Location (UK Channel 4) which have managed to re-invent themselves as an essential property guide in these stressful times. Their point is simple: Now more than ever identifying the right location is key if you intend to move house or invest sensibly in property. The same could be said for Utility Computing which after something of a false dawn has been re-invented as Cloud Computing.

Utility Computing, to paraphrase another popular reality TV concept, has had a make over and is now 10 years younger! However, although related, there are significant differences between the two concepts.

Utility Computing #fail

Utility Computing drew heavily on the analogy with traditional utilities such as water, gas and electricity companies, the implicit assumption being that it was the commoditized raw resources – compute, storage and networking - that enterprises were interested in consuming on-demand and which they expected to be available on-tap, as it were. This turned out to be unworkable in practice and it wasn’t until virtualization went mainstream around five years ago that managed services providers were finally able to package these raw resources and, more importantly, manage them effectively in a multi-tenant environment. Cloud Computing on the other hand took it as read that tools like virtualization and automation were readily available and instead focused on what was needed to enable enterprises to develop, deploy and run their applications given the increasing availability of utility computing infrastructure. It quickly became apparent that being able to provide this infrastructure and – if you’ll excuse the pun – knowing how to utilize it were totally different things.

Opportunity Knocks

Over the past few years the managed services providers have been slow to address this issue instead focusing on providing ever more exotic flavors of infrastructure-as-a-service – everything from community cloud offerings through to bare metal cloud and more recently virtual private clouds. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream may be the greatest but it will never beat an ice cream sundae which is the reason that Amazon Web Services has become such a dominant cloud computing player. Amazon understood from the outset that to get the most out of a utility computing infrastructure you need to augment this with application building blocks.

More recently large companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce and Google as well emerging players like Gigaspaces and my own company Cloudsoft have taken this a step further by focusing on providing application developers with application delivery platforms. These provide them with the support they need to develop, deploy and ultimately manage their applications so that they can take full advantage of the cloud computing model. This neatly brings us full circle – it turns out that understanding location, location, location is fundamental to achieving this goal.

Application Mobility is Key

There are many factors that contribute to the efficient delivery of an application or service but of paramount importance is its location. This is not something that should ever be exposed to the consumer of an application or service but the hooks for managing location and the ability to dynamically migrate an application or one of its components from one location to another at runtime are essential tools for the developer. Without application mobility it is impossible to optimize the delivery of an application or service and meet its regulatory or compliance requirements regardless of whether the goal is to deliver optimal performance for end users (follow-the-sun); minimize the cost of delivery (follow-the-moon); or avoid cross-border issues (follow-the-data).

The Future is ... Content Processing Clouds

Since the optimal location for an application or service can vary dramatically over the course of a 24 hour cycle, application mobility needs to be baked into the application delivery platform as a key component of its runtime architecture. What application mobility essentially lets you create is a Content Processing Cloud (CPC).

Companies like Akamai have pioneered the concept of the Content Delivery Network (CDN). In a CDN you optimize for the location/distribution of caching in a network whereas in a CPC you optimize location/distribution of processing in the cloud. Not only are these complementary concepts but I can envisage a future where content processing clouds will be hooked up to both content delivery networks and able to exploit advances in Complex Event Processing (CEP) technologies. Personally I can’t wait.

Cloudsoft - Bringing Business to the Cloud

I know I twittered on the topic of funding a couple of weeks ago but I'm delighted to formally announce that we've closed our seed round and that Cloudsoft is now up and running with a small development team based in Edinburgh led by our co-founder and CTO Alex Heneveld a.k.a. Red Threads.

We've secured seed funding from an innovative new fund Andromeda Capital along with Scottish Enterprise and we've taken up space at ETTC @ Informatics which is host to a number of other start ups including CereProc, Hubdub, Speckled Computing and VidioWiki.

Given the support we've received from Scottish Enterprise and Informatics Ventures (@infventures on twitter) we chose to post this today as we will be part of the Investor Showcase at Engage | Invest | Exploit 2009 (#eie09) this afternoon.

Rather than put out a press release (don't worry there will be plenty of time for those in the months and years to come!) we thought we'd mark the occasion a little differently by unveiling a limited edition poster featuring our mantra Bringing Business to the Cloud.

All too often we use language rather glibly so it is worth reminding ourselves what we mean by a mantra. Widipedia's entry for Mantra sums this up rather elegantly as a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that are considered capable of "creating transformation".

So that's what we are about - transforming the way business thinks about technology by bringing business to the cloud.

Controlling the Weather

Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, Here I am at Camp Granada ...

Well actually, not quite, I'm currently on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with my family.  (Well strictly speaking my family is on vacation there and I've sneaked up to NY for a couple of days to catch Deutsche Bank's FinTech 2008.)

Anyway the point is that in Florida the weather is a major topic of conversation and a more or less permanent feature of local news bulletins particularly at this time of the year which marks the start of the hurricane season.  In fact, there is already extensive coverage of the first hurricane of the season - Bertha - although this looks like being nowhere near as severe as its namesake from 1996.

Of course the joke is that the English love to talk about the weather (if you don't believe me check out online English primers such as the English Club!) which in the UK is pretty benign whereas in this part of the world - Florida, the Bahamas, the Caribbean and so on - knowledge of what the weather is doing or how it may develop can mean the difference between life or death.

In the short time we've been been in Florida there have already been some spectacular storms which got me thinking about Cloud Computing.  Sad but true.

The background to all this is that I have been following the debate led by William Fellows at 451 on its merits and relevance to the enterprise which he addresses in his latest report Partly Cloudy - Blue-Sky Thinking About Cloud Computing.  (Unfortunately I will still be on holiday but you can catch Will at the upcoming Cloud Camp London organized by the guys at CohesiveFT.)

So where have I got to in my own thinking?  And here I have to confess that I was unusually skeptical when Cloud Computing first surfaced having lived through Grid and then Utility Computing yadah yadah.  My concern is that the half life of a marketing concept is now so short that you barely have time to flesh out one and start to ask the really interesting - and tough - questions before it becomes passé to even talk about it!

Well, looking beyond the marketing hype and continuing in the same vane (sorry that was awful even by my standards!), my view is that without adequate climate control and ultimately the ability to control the weather resistance to Cloud Computing will dramatically slow its adoption by business, for example, the financial services industry which would be a huge lost opportunity.

In short the key to realizing the benefits of Cloud Computing in the enterprise is to implement robust service governance to ensure that it is utilized in a tractable, compliant way i.e. by enforcing the appropriate operational risk management policies.

On that topic more anon and hopefully a demo before too long and definitely by HTS 2008 in Vegas.  For now it's time to get back to my vacation.

Virtualized Electronic Trading

Virtualization is set to play a key role in the next wave of exchange systems.  This might seem like a commonplace given the impact virtualization is having elsewhere but there are some subtleties to do with the way electronic trading is implemented that make its application in this area non-trivial.  But before we get into this lets look at the history of electronic trading.

The Rise and Rise of Electronic Trading

An Electronic Communication Network (ECN) is a computer system that facilitates trading of financial products outside of stock exchanges. The primary products that are traded on ECNs are stocks and currencies.

ECNs came into existence in 1998 in the US when the SEC authorized their creation.  There is a good entry in Wikipedia on Electronic Communication Networks which goes into this in more detail.  What is interesting is that the introduction of ECNs and other classes of Alternative Trading System (ATS) has accelerated the adoption of electronic trading by the traditional exchanges.  This has resulted in significant M&A activity with ECNs such as Archipelago and Instinet being acquired by the exchanges themselves.

Some analysts have gone as far as to say that at this point ECNs and exchanges are virtually indistinguishable.  A good example is Celent.

The relentless rise in program trading (driven by the Hedge Fund industry in particular) has further increased the demand for automated electronic trading.

The Need to Virtualize Electronic Trading

Against this backdrop, creating an energy efficient computing infrastructure leveraging virtualization, provisioning and orchestration to virtualize electronic trading and deliver a consistently low latency high throughput non-stop quality of service i.e. achieve a specific set of performance service level agreements (SLAs) has become paramount, particularly as the many of the exchanges are seeking to reinvent themselves as service providers hosting third party regional exchanges as well as their own core exchange services.  In Europe a good example is Atos Euronext Market Solutions.

The Challenge

However to create this kind of infrastructure and virtualize an electronic market requires an understanding of the way in which electronic trading works in practice.  In any given market, each instrument (stock, option at a particular strike price, etc) traded electronically has its own order book.  Each order book is maintained by a book manager which is responsible for implementing whatever trading rules are in place (inverting, crossing, matching, sweeping, etc) as well as the top of book (best bid/offer) and depth of book (active bids and offers in price/time priority).  Furthermore orders or adjustments to orders sent by any trader (human or program) must always be handled in the order in which they are submitted by the trader and must never be lost or duplicated.  This is called preserving partial ordering and is a fundamental requirement.

Therefore the moment you start to think about dynamically reallocating resources and migrating order books from one resource to another you have to ensure that you can guarantee partial ordering i.e. the partial ordering SLA cannot be violated under any circumstances.

This is a special case of the general problem of dynamically distributing a mediated service that can be logically partitioned into well-defined segments that applies to not just electronic trading but also to betting, online gaming and so on.

How to meet this challenge while at the same time taking full advantage of the benefits that virtualization and virtualization management brings to the table is something I'll be covering in more depth in my next posting.

The End of Grid

In a recent Grid Computing Planet article Grid, Virtualization Get Closer Paul Shread highlights research by 451 Group analysts Steve Wallage and William Fellows who in their 2007 Preview - Grid Computing argue that Grid and Virtualization are converging with the former being subsumed by the latter.

I would go further and argue that Grid is a first generation attempt to virtualize IT resources and deliver a dynamic infrastructure which has been eclipsed by the rapid emergence of virtualization technologies that, appropriately orchestrated, finally provide us with the foundations for a Service-oriented Infrastructure (SOI).

Grid is ill equipped to deal with the challenge of how to “dial in” the requirements of individual applications and services and dynamically compose the infrastructure to accommodate these requirements.

Grid is a hammer that sees everything as a nail - it is a well suited to niche application areas like compute but hopelessly inadequate as a general solution where what is patently required is a more sophisticated top down approach.  One where a grid is just a way of organizing underlying virtual resources in a pattern that is well suited to certain applications.

Forget the notion of an Enterprise Grid – this has given way to the far more powerful concept of a SOI underpinned by the "holy trinity" of virtualization, provisioning and orchestration.

Think back to the first industrial revolution:  For Iron read Grid and for Steel read SOI.  And we all know what happened to economies founded on Iron production.  The End of Grid is just a matter of time.

If you don't believe me then check out the Belwether of emerging technologies Credit Suisse. What are they investing in?   Data center scale virtualization of course.

Check out today's BusinessWire announcement Credit Suisse Funds Scalent Systems Expansion.

Virtualization Management is the Key

Happy New Year!

While I've been on vacation a flurry of articles on virtualization have appeared online reinforcing the widely held view that this is the year that server virtualization goes mainstream and moreover that virtualization management is the key to unlocking its ultimate potential.

Here are just a couple of examples.

Writing in InformationWeek David Strom identified server virtualization as one of 5 Disruptive Technologies to Watch in 2007.  I've lifted a quote from this article which is indicative of the way most CIOs are thinking.

"We plan to use virtual server management to reduce our server support efforts, minimize downtime, and reduce the ongoing costs of server replacement, enabling us to support more hardware with existing staff," said Karen Green, the CIO of Brooks Health System.

Most intriguing in some respects was Kirti Devi's call to arms in Enterprise Networks and Servers Virtualize Now!  Kirti is Marketing Manager for Intel's Server Group.

Intel has been at the forefront of virtualization for some time not only supporting the Xen open source project but providing hardware support for virtualization under their Intel VT initiative.

The bottom line for Intel is that virtualization will accelerate the adoption of its new multicore chips.  Virtualization insulates applications from the underlying hardware and enables customers to take advantage of Intel's new Core 2 micro architecture without having to retool these applications.

A neat side effect is that virtualization also enables customers to extend the life of older hardware while introducing newer hardware alongside this allowing for continuous migration/upgrade of infrastructure.

Finally an unashamed plug for OpenVZ.  As Steve Shankland points out in a recent ZDNet story OpenVZ ported to Sun Niagara servers OpenVZ could race up the charts this year as it finds its way into new Redhat and Novell distros.

2007 - Sneak Preview

Earlier today I was in a reflective mood as yet another year draws to a close.

However, what is true of our inner life is also true of our technology.

We can invent all kinds of stuff but unless we understand its real value and how to exploit this it is worthless.  With this in mind here is my sneak preview of what trends and technologies will make a difference in 2007.

Virtualization Management

In my world the latest "stuff" is virtualization (leaving aside the fact that is really the latest reincarnation of a concept that has been around since Turing first proposed his universal machine).

Sure the many flavors of virtualization being marketed today are each clever in their own way but what renders virtualization really interesting is our ability to harness or manage it otherwise features like the live migration of VMs, application components etc etc are merely curiosities.

Know how isn't enough.  It's about knowing when and why to apply know how that matters.

Moving Beyond Automation

If virtualization management is key then how this is achieved will be equally important.

In 2007 early adopters will move beyond plain vanilla run book automation and start to combine this with policy-based resource orchestration.  Policy-based orchestration will determine precisely which services to run and what resources these will need to deliver the required service level; as well as resolving resource conflicts that may arise.

Service Level Management

Policy-based orchestration is an incredibly powerful tool but ultimately we will be judged on our ability to manage IT infrastructure software and services in accordance with specific service level agreements with the business.  Building on policy-based orchestration service level management will enable us to gauge the effectiveness of individual policies by monitoring service level objectives and automatically adjusting these to ensure that overall SLAs are not breached.

Delivering Dynamic Infrastructure

Policy-based orchestration combined with robust Service Level Management represents a departure from earlier Grid-based attempts to create a dynamic infrastructure capable of supporting the utility computing model regardless of whether this is applied internally or offered as a business service.

Whereas Grid was essentially a bottom up approach and imposed a somewhat rigid geometry and required services to map onto this (easy in the case of compute intensive applications but far less tractable otherwise); policy-based orchestration is top down and focuses explicitly on servicing the requirements of the application or service.

Conceptually, you can think of these requirements as being dialed in and the underlying infrastructure composing itself to form the appropriate geometry to suit the service and not the other way around.

SOI - The Missing Link

Policy-based orchestration is the missing link in creating a true Service-oriented Infrastructure.  When combined with virtualization and automated provisioning it delivers the platform for shared services capable of supporting the various flavors of SOA that are being touted.

Watch out for some interesting partnerships between Enigmatec and other exciting companies to deliver a best-of-breed SOI solution.

 

Hot Topics

Finally what hot topics are going to dominate the conversation in the coffee shops and on the campuses in 2007?

The role of ITIL is already a hot topic.  Alongside this at a more granular level there will be a lot of interest in the role of virtual appliances as components or building blocks of more complex composite applications and services while at the same time application virtualization will heat up as companies like BEA step up.

However, ultimately whoever the winners and losers are I expect emerging solutions to be built on solid policy-based foundations.

So that's it until 2007 when we will no doubt drill down on some of these predictions, find out which ones were wrong, as well as look at best practices in much greater detail.

I'm signing off 2006 by wishing you all a peaceful and prosperous New Year.