GigaOM » Baidu

First ARM-based servers in production support Baidu’s cloud storage

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:00:32 +0000

Chinese search engine giant Baidu is using ARM-based servers from Marvell making it the first company to depend on servers using the cell-phone chip in a production environment. Baidu is using the new ARM servers in its cloud storage application named Baidu Pan.

ARM, which licenses its IP to a variety of chip makers, had stated its intentions to enter the data center market back in 2010, as worries about energy efficiency increased and the needs of webscale computing customers changed. While less powerful than their Intel counterparts, a cluster of lower-power ARM chips is more power efficient on a performance per watt basis and some workloads don’t even need the performance characteristics of a big Intel core.

The combination of these two trends has led to a plethora of vendors from big names like Marvell and AMD to startups such as Calxeda to license ARM’s cores with an eye toward making servers. Holding ARM back so far has been the delay in building out 64-bit capable cores (they are expected later this year) as well as a lack of enterprise software running on the ARM platform.

But given the economics of these so-called wimpy cores and the limits of using ARM cores in the enterprise server market today, the use of ARM-based servers in the storage arena is not surprising. Storage usage scenarios are perfect in many ways because they don’t need a lot of raw performance, nor do they require 64-bit capable cores.

Thus, Baidu using ARM for storage makes sense. It’s also an area where Calxeda expects to see its first production deployments sometime this year, according to a conversation I had with Karl Freund, the VP of marketing of Calxeda last December. As for ~~the~~ Baidu ~~deployment~~, it’s using the quad-core Armada CPU, Marvell’s storage controller, and a 10Gb Ethernet switch all integrated on a single system on a chip.

Marvell’s release says the chip firm customized the ARM servers specifically for Baidu’s cloud storage requirements, taking the concept of server customization common in webscale deployments to the chip level. Marvell says the platform is designed to increase the amount of storage for conventional 2U chassis up to 96 TB, and to lower the total cost of ownership by 25 percent, compared with previous x86-based server solutions. The end result should cut Baidu’s power in its data center by half according to the release.

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A peek inside China’s internet giants and their massive scale

Derrick Harris — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 23:12:40 +0000

Here’s the thing about China: It’s very, very big. And although the Great Firewall cuts its citizens off from many popular U.S. web services, those citizens still exist. In fact, there are more of them than all the citizens of the United States and European Union combined. And they use social media and e-commerce just like the rest of us.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the companies serving the country’s 1.3 billion people with their social media, e-commerce and information-discovery needs are very, very big, too. Here are some statistics that demonstrate their scale.

Alibaba Group

Taobao, the eBay-like e-commerce line of business from Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group, does a lot of business. On a single day — Nov. 11, 2011 — the company did a whopping 19 billion Yuan (or approximately $3.05 billion) in sales. According to Alibaba Group CTO and Alibaba Cloud Computing President Wang Jian, the company site surpassed the 1 trillion Yuan (about $160 billion) mark for 2012 revenue at the end of November. Alipay, the company’s version of PayPal, handles about 3 billion Yuan (about $480 million) in transactions every day.

By comparison, eBay posted $3.4 billion in revenue for the entire third-quarter this year. Amazon.com, with which Taobao also competes (although Alibaba also has a business-to-consumer division called Tmall), closed its third quarter with $13.8 billion in revenue.

The women’s shoe department on Taobao

Of course, Taobao and Alipay are just two of Alibaba’s expansive portfolio of services, which includes a much-publicized (although recently reduced) partnership with Yahoo.

That type of business means Aliaba needs a lot of servers. In a single year not too long ago, Jian told me, the company bought more servers than it had in previous five years combined. If you charted Alibaba’s server count now versus five years ago, he added, the previous number would look like zero. How big is its database? Enough to store data for more than 800 million items for sale.

Baidu

The Chinese search giant is ranked fifth in the Alexa internet rankings (behind Facebook Google, YouTube and Yahoo), which is evidence of its popularity. All those users, I’m told, result in an annual server growth approximately equal to the previous three years combined. It has been reported that Baidu is planning possibly the world’s largest data center — spanning 120,000 square meters, costing $1.6 billion, housing 100,000 servers (totaling 700,000 CPUs and 3 million cores) and storing 4,000 petabytes of data.

Tencent

Somtimes compared with Facebook in the United States (although it’s actually quite different), Tencent boasted more than 717 million users for its popular QQ messaging service as of September 2011. That number has surely grown. The company says its highest-ever number of concurrent users was more than 176 million, although there are often tens of millions (if not more than 100 million people) using it at any given time. An individual with some knowledge of the company’s infrastructure told me Tencent adds about 100,000 servers per year.

Tencent usage at 5:51 local time on Jan. 10, 2012.

Weibo

Weibo, the Twitter-like platform from internet new-school internet company Sina had more than 400 million users as of April 2012. That’s about twice the number Twitter claims. And the Chinese use Weibo a lot, for everything from micro-blogging to self-publishing. It might actually be a more important tool in China than Twitter is in the United States, sources told me, because while the government can censor official news outlets, it can’t possibly control the stream of information coming off Weibo. And that will mean even more growth.

Not (yet) innovators

However, despite their sheer scale, Chinese internet companies are, by most accounts, less technologically inclined than their American counterparts. The biggest reason — one I heard time and time again — is that these companies tend to view themselves as traditional businesses rather than technology companies, and that employees often strive to work up the management ladder rather than remain career engineers. This inevitably affects R&D budgets, makes companies less willing to take risks and reduces the pool of employees that really, deeply understand complex systems.

As an example, one might look at the server situation within China’s big four internet companies. Alibaba’s Jian told me that although his company is running all white boxes in its data centers now, it had a lot of legacy IBM gear in its data centers five years ago. I heard the same thing about Baidu. Tencent, someone told me, had 10,000 webscale servers fail in six months last year and is considering a move back to traditional boxes.

However, maybe these companies are coming around on innovation beyond just buying more-efficient gear. Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, for example, are all members of the Facebook-led Open Compute Project for designing webscale hardware. Tencent and Baidu actually created their own rack-design specification, called Project Scorpio, that is being merged into Open Compute’s Open Rack design in 2013. They still don’t build their own servers like Google and Facebook do, preferring instead to push their custom specs on server makers, but many innovative American companies, including eBay, do the same thing.

Power specs of Open Rack

One has to assume that a closer working relationship between engineers at American and Chinese internet companies will spur even more changes in the tech culture there. Although technical talent comes relatively cheap in China, perhaps they’ll realize that highly skilled, forward-thinking engineers (and data scientists, for that matter) are something worth hanging onto and rewarding with high salaries.

As Facebook VP Frank Frankovsky told PCWorld in July as the Open Rack designs were unveiled, “We compete with those guys, but on the infrastructure side, if we can make our infrastructure more efficient, it makes everyone that much better. Where we differentiate our business is in the service we provide to our end users.”

That differentiation comes from in large part from an incredible investment in research and technology. If they want to be considered thought leaders in their field — and if they want to expand significantly into cloud computing (as Alibaba and Sina clearly want to do) — China’s internet companies will have to start matching their immense scale with demonstrated technological prowess.

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Another company for the networking startup files: Pica8

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 13:17:10 +0000

Pica8 is a startup trying to use the hype around software-defined networking to build out a business selling commodity hardware switches from several vendors with an open controller software layered on top. The company, which we profiled back in February, came out of Quanta, the ~~Chinese~~ Taiwanese computer equipment maker, and raised $6.6 million in venture capital from Vantage Point Capital last October.

Steve Garrison, VP of product marketing at Pica8 said that the startup already has 85 customers in the web scale and financial services markets testing its products. Several of those customers are using its gear in production, including Chinese search giant Baidu and Yahoo Japan. Customers can select their switching hardware from a selection of vendors that currently include Quanta and Synnex (the goal is to add more commodity switch makers over time) and then license the Pica8 PicOS software.

The Pica8 software works with Open vSwitch, but is designed to work with the specific Pica8 switches provided by this select menu of vendors. Garrison envisions a buyer being able to choose gear from a drop-down menu when ordering, and then build out a custom system that will then scale using the Pica8 software. Applications and machines that support Open vSwitch will integrate directly with Pica8 software and since the boxes will all support OpenFlow, it’s possible that the overall system will be as open as a custom-built system with those goals in mind.

Since Pica8′s founders’ background is in the commodity hardware-building business, it understands the model associated with selling programmable gear that does exactly what webscale buyers want. The caveat is that buyers must rip out their old gear and replace it with new gear to use the Pica8 software. The customer then pays for the boxes and licenses the software to run them. Basically, low-cost hardware is the carrot that gets customers to buy into the software.

Another stealth mode startup targeting this market is Cumulus Networks, which was built by ex-Cisco executives. Garrison admits that it is early days for true software defined networks, but he expects the technology to have a big impact in the year ahead.

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Judge gives go-ahead to iOS location tracking suit, plus 4 other Apple stories to read today

Erica Ogg — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 17:13:42 +0000

With so many people writing about Apple, finding the best stories and reports isn’t easy. Here’s our daily pick of stories about the company from around the Web that you shouldn’t miss:

A federal judge has dismissed some claims that Apple violated customers’ privacy rights by allowing mobile advertisers to track customer location through iOS app downloads. However, the judge is allowing customers to pursue a lawsuit against the iOS device maker that claims they “overpaid” for their devices “based on the company’s statements concerning privacy protection, and the consumption through the defendants’ actions of finite bandwidth and storage space,” Reuters reports.
Chinese search giant Baidu is potentially poised for a big payday. As part of the company’s deal to make Baidu a search option on mobile Safari browsers in China, Apple will share search revenue with Baidu, Bloomberg reports. The terms of the deal aren’t known.
In an op-ed for CNN, Apple writer John Brownlee explains one of the key things that sets Apple apart from its competitors.
Time Inc. finally gets with the times and makes a deal with Apple that will put its roster of magazines in iOS Newsstand, AllThingsD reports.
The Loop notes how bringing GameCenter to OS X Mountain Lion means Apple is getting serious about desktop gaming.

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Apple could unveil Baidu for iPhone search at WWDC

Erica Ogg — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 15:14:50 +0000

It was rumored before and now it looks like it’s happening: Apple is going to offer China’s leading search engine, Baidu, as an option on iPhones sold in China. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the deal was done, and that Apple could announce it at WWDC in San Francisco next week.

That’s a boon to the growing ranks of of Chinese iPhone users, and to Apple if it wants to continue to attract new customers in the region. It’s been reported that Baidu accounts for nearly 80 percent of searches in China. And that explains why Apple has already announced that Baidu, along with Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter), will be built-in search and sharing options for the greater China market when its desktop software, OS X Mountain Lion, debuts this summer.

In both cases, rather than an outright replacement, Baidu will be another option. Google Search is the current default search engine in the mobile Safari browser on the iPhone, but handset owners can set Microsoft’s Bing to be the default as well.

But while it’s not a replacement, it is a way for Apple to shrink Google’s footprint on its most important products. And search isn’t the only area where Apple is said to be plotting to move away from Google: It’s widely expected that Apple is going to announce its own mobile mapping solution at WWDC next week, revealing what the three mapping companies it bought in the last few years have put together.

As Google continues to grow its market share of smartphones that compete with Apple’s, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to set itself up to be less and less dependent on its archrival for some of the iPhone’s most basic functions.

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What Tim Cook is doing in China

Erica Ogg — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:18:46 +0000

Updated. Apple CEO Tim Cook has reportedly been spotted in China this week, at a Beijing Apple Store. What’s he really in town for? On Monday he met with government officials to talk further “investment” in the country, but there are whispers he’s also there to meet with China’s top three mobile operators. As has been noted, this kind of trip to the country is something Steve Jobs didn’t do.

But for Cook, this kind of mission isn’t new — when he was COO, he had been spotted in the country for meetings with China Mobile. And while you could read his visit as a difference between Cook and Jobs — something to do with Cook’s particular style, say — these visits also serve to highlight the shift in China’s importance to Apple over the last couple years.

When Jobs was CEO, China wasn’t yet the largest source of activations for iOS products; the company’s most important devices. Neither had China yet begun bringing in more than half as much revenue to Apple’s coffers as the entire continent of Europe. And the country hadn’t yet embraced the iPhone in particular to the point where more than 10 million people use the device on a network (China Mobile) that doesn’t even officially support it.

So Cook going to China is probably as much about specific tasks, as generally strengthening relationships there.

Apple is also wisely looking to make its already popular brand more relevant in greater China through some added options in its upcoming desktop OS refresh. When the new OS X Mountain Lion debuts this summer it will have localized search and sharing options for the Chinese market built right in: Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter) and Baidu (China’s Google Search).

But that’s just the desktop. What about mobile, Apple’s most important business? Well, on Monday a rumor began to circulate in Asia that Apple is considering making Baidu a search option within iOS. It’s an interesting possibility that isn’t completely crazy, considering its inclusion in Mountain Lion. The can be read as a middle finger to Google, of course, or it could be interpreted as Apple being as China-friendly as possible.

Update: An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on whether or not Baidu could be a future option for iOS search.

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Apple Gets Hit With $1.9 Million Copyright Lawsuit By Chinese Writers

Ingrid Lunden — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:46:55 +0000

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is putting a big bet on China, where its products and services have proven hugely popular, but that could also leave it exposed to a few bad beats along the way: the company is currently being sued by a group of Chinese writers, who are accusing the company of copyright infringement over some books on offer in its app store. It’s an ironic turn of events, given that Apple has been battling extensive copyright infringement of its own in the country, in the form of counterfeit products.

The group of nine writers, operating under the China Written Works Copyright Society, claim that some 37 works have been published in Apple’s App Store without their agreement. Their 12-billion-yuan ($11.9 million) lawsuit entered formal proceedings in Beijing last week, according to the English edition of the Chinese business news site Caixin Online.

The group includes pop culture figure Han Han, a politically-controversial author, Li Chengpeng, as well as other popular writers like Cang Yue and Murong Xuecun, the report says. There’s a screenshot of a Murong Xuecun app pictured here. Developed by “Portege Pte”, it’s unclear whether this is one of the authorized or unauthorized works.

As with other paid apps and books in Apple’s App Store, Apple takes a 30 percent commission on every purchase.

The CWWCS has been through this before with other companies that have been involved in the illicit distribution of their work via e-books: in 2010 Google (NSDQ: GOOG) had to issue the group a formal apology for a similar offense; in 2011, Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) deleted 2.8 million works from its Wenku e-book portal at the group’s request. Similarly, there have been two other suits against Apple over ebooks: one involving an individual writer and other concerning a group of six authors. It’s not clear in these past cases if the portals in question made financial settlements when dealing with the cases.

As with the counterfeit Apple stores that were closed down last year, it may well be the case that ordinary consumers have no idea that they are paying for books that are illicit. Created and published by third-party developers, some of the more popular works have seen up to one million downloads in Apple’s App Store. That also puts these e-books into the same category as digital music in the country, where of tracks have been published by those not authorized to do so, and many consumers downloading them are none the wiser.

Of course, $1.9 million in compensation is small change to one of the world’s biggest and most profitable companies, but even being accused as a facilitator of copyright infringement must be an embarrassment for Apple. China is a significant strategic investment the company, which has made a big push into China in the last year — ramping up its retail presence, making its App Store more local-currency-friendly, and (if you believe reports) even expanding its production in the country.

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The Latest Chinese Export: Tencent's QQ Mobile Browser, Via GetJar

Ingrid Lunden — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:54:35 +0000

We’ve observed a lot of western companies looking to cash in on the explosive growth of China’s mobile population by taking their products into the country. Now here’s an example of a Chinese giant looking shop its own mobile services abroad: the internet portal Tencent is now distributing its QQ mobile browser in the GetJar app store.

Under the terms of the deal, GetJar will be distributing QQ browser, which is available for iOS, Android, Symbian and Java devices, as part of Tencent’s strategy to take its products to a more global audience. The move comes as we are seeing more activity from Western companies to expand their business in China, too. Most recently, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) finally started to accept payments in Yuan on its Chinese App Store.

The deal is not exclusive as such: Tencent already offers its QQ browser through the Apple App Store, for example, although it is in Chinese so fairly unapproachable for those who don’t speak the language.

Tencent claims that its QQ browser is one of the fastest on the market. Because it is run as a cloud service, on Tencent’s XCloud architeture, users can also use the browser to securely store software, pictures and other files as part of the offering. Mobile QQ browser is built for mobile through cloud services.

In China, QQ browser is the second most-popular mobile web browser, according to November figures from Ai Media Consulting (via China News). It has a 27 percent share of the market, with the UC Web browser at 65 percent. (Opera is in third with six percent, and the browsers that are dominant in the West such as Safari on iOS, or Android’s web browser, don’t even seem to register.)

That share in China alone gives QQ significant penetration. As of last month, China had 1 billion mobile users, with 102 million on smartphones, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

That means that if the market share estimates are accurate, QQ has potentially 270 million users, since the browser is also available for feature phones on networks slower than 3G.

It will be interesting to see if the QQ browser will be able to get much traction in Western markets, where people largely default to using mobile web browsers that are pre-loaded on to devices: meaning iOS users use Safari, Android users use Android, WP7 users take Internet Explorer and so on.

Possibly because China is one of those places where mobile internet growth is outpacing that of fixed growth (fixed lines are actually in decline; and there are currently 150 million broadband lines), we’ve seen a lot of innovation — probably more than you get in the West — from tech companies in the country to target mobile users.

It’s not unusual for an internet portal like Tencent to make and distribute mobile phones, app stores, games, payment systems, messaging apps and mobile browsers. Others that have also followed this route include Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) and Alibaba. On the Android platform alone, there are dozens of companies operating app storefronts distributing apps for the OS.

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Big News For Dell: Its Devices Will Be Used By Baidu In Mobile Assault

Ingrid Lunden — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:47:34 +0000

Baidu’s determination to get a piece of the action in China’s fast-growing mobile market has yielded plans for an app store and mobile platform of its own, Baidu Yi, based on Android; and now we are getting more details on the second part of the equation: the devices.

The company is reportedly working with PC giant Dell to develop tablets and smartphones that will run Baidu’ services — a deal that Dell hopes will give it a leg up in the country’s booming mobile market — a space where it has stumbled in its own home market of the U.S.

From the looks of it, the partnership sounds like a new lease on mobile life for Dell: the report, in Reuters, quotes a Dell spokesperson, who says that one of the first products Dell will develop for Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU) will be based on the Streak 5 — which will be customized to run Baidu’s new mobile apps platform, the Android-based Baidu Yi (screen shots, pictured).

The Streak 5 was Dell’s Android tablet with a five-inch screen that sold poorly in the U.S. and was finally discontinued last month.

The partnership indeed could also be a big boost for Dell in its strategy to do more in China. The company already has a big retail presence there — with 10,000 sales points — and it is vying against local player Lenovo as well as Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) for more brand domination. According to SinoPac Securities analyst Hanna Chang, “All PC brands are trying to differentiate themselves from each other in the mobile space, and Dell’s tie-up with Baidu may give it first-mover advantage in the China market.”

But Dell will not be the only partner for Baidu, which says that it is working with two other handset makers as part of its Yi strategy. Baidu currently controls 80 percent of China’s online search market — a position it very much wants to extend to mobile platforms.

One other potential partner, for example, could be Huawei: a company that makes white-label, Android-based devices for operators in other countries (such as Vodafone). Huawei recently revealed new smartphones, based on Android, that link up with Huawei’s new Cloud+ storage service.

One of Baidu’s main rivals in China, Sina (NSDQ: SINA), recently announced a “Weibo phone” in partnership with HTC. The device is based on the Facebook-optimized HTC Salsa, with the hotkey instead linking to Sina’s Weibo social network.

Mobile is a huge opportunity in China: it still has relatively low PC and fixed broadband penetration, yet has a population with a huge appetite for technology and the Internet.

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The Latest App Store, From China’s Search Giant Baidu: ‘Baidu Yi’

Ingrid Lunden — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:14:54 +0000

Baidu (NSDQ: BIDU), the search-portal provider and “Google (NSDQ: GOOG) of China,” has made a key move into the world of mobile today: it is launching its own app store, to be called “Baidu Yi,” which will be available on Google’s Android OS. The move comes after months of speculation about whether the company would launch its own mobile operating system.

The move is yet another sign of how China’s tech players want to play a central role in the country’s boom in mobile usage: they are banking on the idea that consumers would prefer homegrown mobile services and devices rather than rely only on products imported from abroad.

One of Baidu’s biggest rivals in China, Alibaba, announced in July a cloud-based mobile platform of its own, to be called Allyun OS, which would run on its own devices.

Other Chinese mobile developments have included Sina (NSDQ: SINA) and HTC launching a new Android-based smartphone, the Weike, which features a hotkey to Weibo, Sina’s microblogging service. This device is a remake of the HTC Salsa, sold outside of China with a direct key for Facebook.

A report in Reuters seems to indicate that Baidu Yi will have its own SDK and approval process outside of the one that exists on the Android Market app store.

Developers will be able to create apps for games and other services which will then be distributed and promoted by Baidu.

Android has spawned a number of other “app stores” from companies looking to make more headway into the mobile world. One of the most high-profile has been the app store launched by Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), seen by many as a precursor to the online giant moving into more mobile devices like tablets.

The market for apps in China is a growing business. At the end of July figures released by the Ministry of Information Industry noted that currently there are 100 million mobile app users in the country — representing growth of more than 250 percent over the year before.

What’s perhaps more significant for Baidu is that the Chinese market for apps is still a wide-open game. Figures from analysts at iResearch earlier in the year showed Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to have a commanding lead in the Chinese market for app stores, but second up was the M-Market from China Mobile.

That indicates there is definitely interest from consumers for app stores run by different players like Baidu — not just those running the platforms.

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