Currently, moving a VM from a one physical machine to another has two important constraints. First, both machines must share the same storage back end, typically a Fibre Channel/iSCSI SAN or network-attached storage. Second, the physical machines must reside in the same VLAN or subnet. This means that inside a single data center, one can only move a VM across a relatively small number of physical machines. Not exactly what the marketing guys would have you believe.

While this might be a small inconvenience to an enterprise data center, think about it from the perspective of a cloud provider. Their entire reason for existence is to maximize revenue earned from every dollar spent on servers. If the network limits their server utilization by constraining VM mobility, then it’s costing them revenue. Maybe they should try asking for that money back from their current networking vendor?

Many networking vendors talk about the flattening of the data center network as a cure-all, and would advise simply building a very large VLAN. But such an approach has a host of problems that have been around for years and are why routers are deployed in the first place: limiting multicast traffic, Spanning trees issues with multipathing, and of course the fact that network operations staff use VLANs for very real purposes like segmenting traffic for security, compliance, PCI, etc. These and a number of other limitations of current data center networks are on the radar of vendors and standards bodies; meanwhile, the research community has responded with lots of papers with funny names like VL2 (PDF) and PortLand (PDF), among others. What we need now are startups to come up with some creative, and practical, solutions to these problems. For if networking continues to play second fiddle to compute and storage, the cloud vision will never be fully realized.

And while server mobility inside a single data center is tough, inter-datacenter and data center-to-the-cloud server mobility is even tougher. Cisco and VMware have published (PDF) papers about it a few times, but the solutions they’re proposing seem more like hero experiments than practical solutions at this point.

For long-distance applications storage becomes the big problem, which EMC highlighted just last month with the release of VPLEX (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d). It turns out that replicating VM data across the WAN is doable, but really expensive and even more bandwidth-consumptive. Also, if you’re using Fibre Channel there are distance limitations due to the FC protocol. Oh, and with the various flavors of storage over IP, you’d better not have any packet loss. On the other hand, you could chose to move just the VM state while keeping storage in the original data center, but that will impact application performance. In other words, when all is said and done, getting this to work is extremely complicated, and probably only feasible if money is no object.

The typical use cases cited for VMware’s LD VMotion are for disaster recovery and avoidance, workload balancing, etc. The concept of moving from disaster recovery to disaster avoidance is a compelling shift and can add additional layers of reliability on top of existing features from VMware, including High Availability and Fault Tolerance. There seems to be a clear need for inter-data center and private-to-public cloud migration. And those use cases –- which I believe are set to take off –- should be the real call to arms to make such a capability operationally efficient and much less expensive.

Server mobility is a powerful tool in the modern data center, but it currently has numerous limitations. In these limitations I see opportunity for startups, especially when it comes to fixing the networking issues and helping to decrease the storage costs. Let me know if you do, too.

To hear more about server mobility and similar topics, attend Structure on June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.

Alex Benik is a principal at Battery Ventures

An innovator in the iPhone mobile space, Atimi has developed applications for leading global brands in media & entertainment (the New York Times and HBO); fashion (Donna Karan); health (ann-e); youth education and gaming (Etch-A-Sketch by Freeze Tag); finance (TIO Networks); sports (Vancouver Canucks) and utility (Drive Savers). More than 65% of the Atimi developed applications have been featured by Apple in TV ads, iTunes advertising, in-store or in Apple print ads, with many applications placing in the Top 10 Best/Best in Class App categories.

Atimi has several major iPad apps in the works. As an expert in app development, Atimi understands the unique approach to iPad development, what’s required to take advantage of all that this new product offers and produce an award-winning app.

Atimi’s comprehensive process for developing and launching apps leaves no stone unturned. Typically, the Atimi development process includes discovering what is going to make the app stand out, analyzing competitors, mocking up key screens and defining the marketing strategy. The Atimi Orchard iPhone rapid development framework provides the most asked-for features and facilitates the creation of quality apps in the shortest possible time.

Whether for iPhone, iPad or Macintosh, Atimi truly is a one-stop app development shop.

How often have you heard that?

As a network provider, it’s probably your mantra.

As you’re shifting to a next-gen IP network, that concern becomes tantamount. Keep repeating the mantra, “Keep costs under control,” and then focus on these three hot areas as suggested by Alcatel-Lucent.

High Leverage Network: Unlike a rigid legacy network, this network’s intelligence can save money by dynamically adapting and managing bandwidth demand.

Non-linear cost reduction: As you shift to an IP/MPLS network look for efficiencies to reduce the network’s complexity. If you have to hold onto some legacy equipment, outsource management as you focus on new services.

Strategic investment: Even if initial capital expenditures are inevitable, it doesn’t mean you can’t start generating better returns right away. Prioritize IP transformation, starting with the greatest cost reductions. And as network capacity increases, make sure that risk doesn’t increase with it.

A migration is far from easy and fully understanding the architecture can be overwhelming. To comprehend the scope of your transformation, request an Alcatel-Lucent Network Readiness Analysis to examine existing architecture and flag critical issues and steps for the transformation.

Major players have benefited from such pre-planning. Sprint saved $719,000 its first year and $2.4 million annually after Alcatel-Lucent inventoried 2,500 network elements, outlined a consolidation plan, and eliminated excess equipment.

For more, read the full guideline, “The New Economics of Telecom Networks: Bringing value back to the network” and watch the video “Total cost of operations.”

Click here to view all Alcatel-Lucent posts

May 19, 2010 | 5:00 PM Registration & Networking | 6:15 Dinner | 7:15 PM Program | Location: Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, Calif.

What new trends will take shape in the year ahead? Find out at one of the Churchill Club’s most anticipated events of the year: the 12th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends debate!

Be sure to get your seat as we welcome the tech industry’s leading (and most opinionated) visionaries as they make predictions for the year ahead. These noted industry pundits will tell all as they rate and debate the up-and-coming tech trends. Our usual live audience of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest — all with opinions of your own — will be asked to agree or disagree with the trends.

And that’s not all. At the end of the evening, you, the audience, will cast your votes and choose which of our pundits will reign supreme as this year’s Trend Idol.

Price information: GigaOM readers that call (408) 265-0130 and mention GigaOM will save $55!

Members-only event package special price: $220 $165

www.churchillclub.org| info@churchillclub.org

Think of this as a search problem. Traditionally, there was an index of every document in which every word occurred. When a query was received the search engine could just look up the precomputed answer to which documents had which word. For a personalized search, an exponentially larger index is needed that includes not only factual data (words in a document, brand of cameras, etc.) but also taste and preference data (people who like this camera tend to live in cities, be under 40, love “Napoleon Dynamite,” etc.).

Unfortunately, personalizing along 100 taste dimensions leads to nearly as many permutations of recommendation rankings as there are atoms in the universe! Obviously there isn’t enough space to precompute what recommendations to show every possible type of person that queries a site. Additionally, precomputing the answer to queries is too slow. People expect real-time results, not hours- or days-old precomputed answers. If I tell Amazon I don’t like a book, I want to immediately see that reflected in my recommendations.

We’re at a turning point in how we need to build web sites to handle these sorts of personalization problems. While first-generation distributed systems split the application into three tiers — web servers, application servers and databases — second-generation systems build large non-real-time back-end clusters to analyze huge amounts of sales data, index billions of web documents etc.

A third generation of systems is now emerging, with the computation shifting from those back-end clusters into front-end real-time clusters. After all, you just can’t build a back end that precomputes personalized results for millions of Internet users. You have to compute it in real time.

Adding complexity, many personalization problems are more difficult to parallelize than a lot of traditional back-end applications. Indexing the words in web pages is actually a lot easier to parallelize than are the long sequence of matrix calculations required to optimize a user’s recommendations.

Matrix calculations tend to involve complicated data access patterns that mean it’s hard to partition calculations and their data across a cluster of computers. Instead there tends to be a lot of sharing among many different computers, each of which holds a piece of the problem and updates the others as data changes. This back-and-forth data sharing is both incredibly hard to keep track of for the programmer, and can significantly degrade application performance.

The systems we’ve built at Hunch to solve this started off using distributed caching with memcached but very quickly veered into something more akin to distributed shared memory (DSM) systems, complete with multiple levels of caching, coherency protocols with application-specific consistency guarantees and data replication for performance. With an abundance of processing cores at our disposal, the real challenges tended to revolve around getting the right data to the right core.

I think that in a few years we’ll look back at this time as an era in which a slew of new large-scale programming challenges and their solutions were born. Hopefully we’ll also see more open-source solutions along the lines of memcached and Hadoop, so that building personalized and real-time web applications is easy for everyone.

Tom Pinckney is the co-founder & VP of engineering of Hunch.com.

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In some respects, Skype already is the world’s largest social network, with hundreds of millions of users. And as a peer-to-peer system that generates revenue primarily through outbound phone minutes, Skype doesn’t need to sell advertising, which means that it doesn’t need to infringe on users’ privacy by turning their personal information into a salable commodity for advertisers — in my mind the fundamental flaw of web-based social networks. In other words, Skype has in place a well-established foundation for a social networking system based on privacy and trust. So what might a social Skype look like?

Skype already has a great client for real-time communication: a social graph of people its users know and call. It’s available for every major platform, and given Skype’s popularity, there are a large number of people online at any one time. Each Skype client could serve a XML file with the user’s current status, media files, link feeds and so forth, and to obtain a real-time view of what’s happening with other users, it could call around to folks in a user’s Skype list to get the latest updates. Such a system could be highly decentralized, with most content served directly from one user to another, and largely self-hosted, which means the infrastructure costs would be much lower than a centrally run web service.

The user experience would be effortless. Users would simply see more social features appear in upgrades to the Skype client, with, for example, Twitter-like functionality to broadcast to friends and followers in one panel, a link/news-sharing interface in another. By moving this functionality into the client, apart from a caching mechanism to temporarily store content for users while they’re offline, the need for a centralized web-based infrastructure is greatly reduced.

Apart from poking Facebook in the eye, why should Skype become a social network? Because it would drive phone minutes and SMS messages between friends, which drives revenues — which makes it a smart business decision. Besides, I’ve never bought the idea that a dominant position in a market guarantees long-term success. Skype took out a whole slew of early VoIP networks to become the world’s phone company — it could quickly and easily become the world’s social network, too.

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On a panel last night at Will Richmond’s VideoSchmooze event in New York, executives from Comcast, NBC Sports, Hearst and blip.tv talked about how publishers were still struggling to monetize video assets online, despite an increase in ad budgets slated for online video.

While much of the discussion centered around determining the appropriate ad loads for online video as opposed to traditional TV channels, George Kliavkoff, EVP of Hearst Entertainment & Syndication, suggested that the industry should be less concerned about how many ads are being delivered, and more concerned about what types of ads are being delivered.

“I hope that the market is not going to be deciding how many 15- or 30-second ads [we're showing],” Kliavkoff said. “If that’s the conversation, then we’ve failed as an industry. I think the conversation should be about what new and engaging ads take advantage of the technology that you can deliver online with video that are not 15- or 30-second re-purposed ads.”

Even though publishers on the whole have become more interested in delivering interactive ad experiences, pre-roll is still the most common ad format for online video. That’s due, at least in part, to the wide availability of TV ad units that can be repurposed for the web. YouTube, for instance, long eschewed pre-roll video advertising, preferring instead to sell in-video ads. But the company balked when some new content partners forced it to begin running pre-rolls against their content.

But execs say it’s also due to agencies being unable to meet the demand for innovative new ad units. Perkins Miller, SVP of digital media at NBC Sports, recounted at Tuesday night’s event how he asked a number of agencies to come up with better ways to do advertising online. But out of a half dozen agencies that NBC reached out to, Miller said he didn’t get back a single workable idea. So NBC developed its own interactive ad capabilities for many of its live sporting events.

The need for publishers to develop their own custom ad units is being driven mainly by agencies that don’t have the resources to create new, interactive ad units, according to Dina Kaplan, COO and co-founder of blip.tv.

“One of the challenges is that now that clients have budgets for web video, which they do, you need to have video assets, you need to have pre-rolls, and post-rolls, and you need to have overlays. And at a time when the agencies are struggling, having to create more assets presents some challenges,” Kaplan said. “Agencies are shedding people, so how do you create more ad units with fewer people?”

Even if agencies are not able to create more engaging ad campaigns for online video, Kliavkoff said that the industry could at least do a better job of targeting the spots it has. “If all we’re going to do is take content from the TV and put it on the web, and all we’re going to do is put the same 15-second or 30-second ads on the web, can we at least target those ads? I know it’s some grand vision of the future, but i figured it would be here by now.”

Despite the lack of interactivity and targeting, the good news is that brands and advertisers are slowly moving more money into web video. Kaplan noted that while two years ago blip.tv had to fight to take ad money away from TV budgets or online budgets, her sales team had struck eight deals with eight brands in the previous eight business days — a milestone for the company.

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The move is also clearly a bid by Sony to establish itself as the No. 2 in the e-book market behind Amazon’s Kindle before the Barnes & Noble/Plastic Logic alliance comes fully online next year. But the big winner in today’s announcement is Adobe Systems.

While Sony is embracing the open, XML-based ePub standard for delivery and viewing of e-books, those e-books will still come wrapped in copy protection. As part of today’s announcement, Sony said it will scrap its own, proprietary e-book DRM in favor of the more widely supported Adobe Content Server 4 (although the ePub standards has no native DRM the ePub Container format, which bundles e-book content with metadata and other elements for delivery over the Internet, can support third-party DRMs, including Adobe’s).

As Adobe’s GM of ePublishing, Bill McCoy, pointed out in a blog post yesterday, the Sony announcement brings the number of e-book reading devices that are compatible with Adobe’s Server platform to 17, marketed by nine different vendors. Whether by accident or design, the Adobe server system is emerging as the leading e-book publishing and DRM platform after Amazon’s Kindle platform.

Why is that important? As I point out in a report on the e-book market released earlier this month by GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Amazon’s e-book ambitions go beyond simply selling a lot of Kindle devices. Taking a page from Apple’s iTunes playbook, its goal is to establish Kindle as the dominant e-book publishing and distribution platform. And as Apple has amply demonstrated, when you control the platform, you control the value chain, which means you reap a disproportionate share of the value that’s exchanged.

And the best way to maintain control over a platform — again, per Apple — is through the use of proprietary DRM. Like Amazon’s Kindle DRM, the copy protection at the heart of the Content Server platform is proprietary, in that Adobe owns it. Unlike Amazon, however, Adobe’s standard is openly licensable by others. While that still leave Adobe in an enviable position — able to collect licensing fees from both ends of the value chain — it’s clearly a more friendly environment for publishers and consumers than Amazon’s walled-garden approach — and may be publishers’ best bet to avoid getting trapped by Amazon the way the record companies were by Apple.

Interestingly, the odd man out here could be Barnes & Noble. The B&N eBookstore supports the ePub standard, but for now it’s sticking with its own DRM system rather than adopting the Adobe platform. Barnes & Noble was undoubtedly hoping to position itself as the industry’s best alternative to Amazon, but it may just have been outmaneuvered by Sony/Adobe. Two contending platforms is good for business. Three just might be a crowd.

Paul Sweeting writes The Media Wonk blog and is author of an upcoming report on the e-book market for GigaOM Pro.

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Essentially Xoopit’s CloudQuery allows you to search-enable any application. It combines the functionality of full text search with more structured database-like queries, which have the advantage of being aware of the underlying data structure of the application and thus provide more accurate search results and in near real-time. It is very similar to the open-source project Apache Solr; both are based on the popular Apache Lucene.

Suppose I start a dating site that I want to equip with a sophisticated search engine. I have certain well-defined data fields, which I want to be searched as such (and not with a Google-style free text search); in other words I want people to be able to search for “gender is female,” “age is greater than 30 and less than 40″ and “location is less than 5 miles from Zip 94107.” But I also want to enable a full text search that says “long walks on the beach.” With the Xoopit CloudQuery service I can quickly index my application and enable these sophisticated search capabilities, something I can’t do with Google ( s goog) Custom Search, for example.

Because of their near-instant indexing capabilities, technologies such as CloudQuery and Solr will be key in implementing the notion of the real-time web that has been popularized by services such as Twitter. Not only will I be able to perform the above query, but I will be able to set a real-time alert for it. To see a very simple but interesting use of this kind of technology, check out Dave Rosenberg’s “A-Z List of Underrated Bands,” which he created using Twitter Search. If you click on the link you’ll see that the search query at the top says: “underrated bands” from:daveofdoom. This query essentially says “find all tweets that contain the words ‘underrated bands’ posted by the user ‘daveofdoom’.” if you were to leave that page open while Dave was adding to the list, you would have seen it updated on-the-fly — hence, the real-time web.

While Twitter has developed its own solution with significant development resources, Xoopit’s CloudQuery enables any application owner to very easily index and search-enable their application using its hosted cloud service and APIs. In addition to CloudQuery and Solr, other projects that are attempting to provide similar capabilities include the Ferret project for Ruby apps and Sphinx Search. As another indication of the level of interest in this area, Lucid Imagination, the company behind Solr (and Lucene support provider) recently received more than $6 million in funding from Granite Ventures, Walden International and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture fund. But Xoopit remains the only player that has implemented this type of technology as a cloud service.

Yet it appears Yahoo is acquiring Xoopit as part of its strategy of focusing on a handful of core apps — among them email — and turn its email application into a platform, around which it hopes developers will create an ecosystem of complementary apps and plug-ins, utilizing the APIs that Yahoo has published.

But as happens so often in this business, a lost opportunity for one company could prove to be a new opportunity for another.

Geva Perry, who writes the Thinking Out Cloud blog, is an adviser to startups and enterprises on cloud computing strategy and marketing. Follow him on Twitter: @gevaperry.

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Fifteen years ago, a similar industry conversation unfolded around how the World Wide Web could transform business — and really, society as a whole — as we then knew it. As commercialization of the web was getting under way, the idea that a new paradigm could really change the way technology was used and information was managed was met with both curiosity and skepticism. Much of the discussion centered around all the perceived barriers to widespread adoption of web technology, such as security, enterprise IT integration and technology lock-in vs. open standards.

Those of us who were a part of the technology industry back then as either vendors or customers can recall the volume and fervor that marked such debates. Industry analysts — along with much of the mainstream press — continued for quite some time to promote those aforementioned barriers as reasons why the transition to web- or distributed computing-based architectures would or could not be fulfilled. By the end of 1995, however, customers and vendors alike had begun to embrace the ideas and technologies of the web, fueling perhaps the largest economic expansion the technology business has ever seen, one that continues today.

Over the last two years, technology developers, businesses, industry analysts, press and vendors have begun to discuss the transition to cloud technologies. Just like in the early days of the commercialization of the Internet, both the benefits and barriers to such a transition are being hotly debated. Similarly, we now stand at a tipping point at which mainstream enterprises are seeing the value and vendors are offering services that deliver measurable business value, integrate into existing IT environments easily and address the common concerns around privacy, security, integrity, performance and availability. Widespread adoption, in other words, is already underway.

Granted, the industry doesn’t have all the solutions yet. But the solutions we do have and the valuable benefits they can provide to the enterprise IT buyer today are simply too compelling to ignore. With history as our guide those businesses that focus and commit on solving their challenges via these new services stand to reap the greatest financial, operational and competitive benefits of this technology transition.

It’s encouraging to see so many technology luminaries participating in healthy exchanges as the industry navigates this new era. My hope is that the conversation turns quickly from a discussion of “if” cloud technologies like storage and compute will become the norm for enterprises to one of “when” — and more interestingly, “how” the dramatic potential of the cloud can best be fulfilled. Indeed, another era of technology based innovation, adoption and economic prosperity has already started –- and it may just turn out to be even more compelling than the last one.

Jeff Treuhaft is the CEO and co-founder of Zetta Inc., a leading provider of enterprise cloud storage solutions.

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