GigaOM » hybrid clouds

Red Hat open sources its take on Hadoop storage

Derrick Harris — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:35:00 +0000

Red Hat is getting into the big data act more deeply, announcing on Wednesday that it’s open sourcing its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plugin as an alternative to the Hadoop Distributed File System. The plugin, which the company expects to release to the Apache Software Foundation some time this year, is based on the Gluster File System technology Red Hat acquired when it bought Gluster for $136 million in 2011. Red Hat has already incorporated Gluster’s technology into its Red Hat Storage Server product.

According to a press release announcing the news

“Red Hat Storage brings enterprise-class features to big data environments, such as Geo replication, High Availability, POSIX compliance, disaster recovery, and management, without compromising API compatibility and data locality. Customers now have a unified data and scale out storage software platform to accommodate files and objects deployed across physical, virtual, public and hybrid cloud resources.”

Because it’s fully distributed, Red Hat’s file system does away with the NameNode that keeps track of data in most Hadoop clusters and can be both a bottleneck and a single point of failure. (Although, the Hadoop community has mitigated some of these concerns with Apache Hadoop 2.0 (as has Facebook with its own engineering effort called AvatarNode).) Red Hat has also combined its storage and virtualization technologies so anyone using both can have virtual pool of storage and compute resources residing on the same physical infrastructure.

Red Hat isn’t the only company or organization trying eliminate problems associated with HDFS or to improve its utility to large enterprises and/or webscale companies. Companies such EMC, NetApp and others are offering their own alternatives, and Quantcast actually built and open sourced its own version of HDFS called the Quantcast File System. As we’ll be discussing at Structure: Data next month, Hadoop’s future prospects will be determined by how applicable it is to the workloads companies want to run, and some of the HDFS alternatives might represent solid options for enterprise workloads until Apache Hadoop can catch up.

Of course, Red Hat being Red Hat, Wednesday’s news isn’t all about big data. The company makes it pretty clear that it expects its Hadoop efforts to be part of a broader cloud computing push, in which companies can run their applications in big data environments that span private and public resources, including OpenStack and the Amazon Web Services clouds.

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The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 07:55:48 +0000

The last quarter of 2012 saw the rise of cloud-based databases, the cloud awakening of software giants such as HP, and many cloud outages that have put question marks around the use of cloud computing. Many enterprises found more IT dollars in their budgets, and they will focus on the cloud for much of that spending. And while the enterprise focused largely on private clouds, interest in public cloud computing is greater than many analysts expected. This fourth-quarter analysis discusses these trends and more.

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Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:55:08 +0000

In 2013 IT organizations that support large enterprises will have to figure out how to successfully get mission-critical systems onto public and private cloud computing platforms. The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 is not a matter of prediction but more a matter of following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends, discussed in this report, include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more.

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IT spending update, fourth quarter 2012

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:42:40 +0000

IT spending grew 3.6 percent between 2011 and 2012. Many factors have driven this demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Next year, 2013, can only be characterized as uncertain. We think that the looming fourth-quarter major product refreshes will provide some uplift for 2013. And if the uncertainty abates sufficiently to allow enterprises to open their wallets, there will be a real upside to 2013.

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Helix Nebula and the future of Europe’s cloud

Paul Miller — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 04:55:22 +0000

The Helix Nebula project combines the computing needs of large European research institutions such as CERN and the European Space Agency with the technical capabilities of companies like CloudSigma, Logica, and SAP. Working together, these two groups are addressing the technical, legal, and procedural issues that today make it difficult to seamlessly move jobs from one cloud to another at scale. Lessons learned from the project will be of wider relevance as Europe’s cloud activities gather momentum and create a projected 3.8 million jobs by 2020. This report examines Helix Nebula and how it could serve as a prototype for Europe’s future cloud.

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Examining open hybrid cloud options for the enterprise

quicloud — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:55:25 +0000

Ask 100 people to define “openness” and their answers might include cost savings, agility, freedom, portability, or avoiding vendor lock-in. A major trend over the past decade has been open source, even when mature commercial alternatives exist. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cloud, but at present, there is no true open standard that all providers obey. AWS won the API battle for the cloud, but the tide could always turn, and anyone looking for a longer-term alternative now has two exciting prospects: OpenStack and OpenShift.

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Measure your cloud mojo: 7 steps to cloud success

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 06:55:45 +0000

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Take that, vCloud: Microsoft opens Windows Azure to web hosts

Derrick Harris — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:26:14 +0000

Updated: It looks like Microsoft is serious about becoming the operating system for cloud computing. At its Worldwide Partner Conference on Tuesday, the company announced what amounts to a white-label version of its Windows Azure cloud platform targeting current Windows Server-based web hosts. This looks like a shot across the bow at VMware, which has been pushing its vCloud agenda — which spans both on-premise and cloud-based VMware deployments — for a couple years.

Microsoft has taken flak in the past for not having a legitimate hybrid cloud strategy, but it’s certainly shaping up now. With the new offering called Service Management Portal, currently in Community Technology Preview mode (Microsoft lingo for “pre-beta”), Microsoft partners can offers customers a Window Azure-like infrastructure-as-a-service experience without actually using Microsoft’s cloud. This is accomplished via a standardized management portal, but also via extensible APIs that let developers connect their hosted applications to hosts’ other specialized services, to their own on-premise resources, or even to Windows Azure, if they so desire.

Sinclair Schuller, founder and CEO of Microsoft partner Apprenda, said the move is smart as Microsoft tries to grow its cloud computing footprint. “As Microsoft is expanding their toolkit,” he said, “they’re trying to make sure it’s not a disjointed experience.” Users might want to utilize 10 different cloud services, but they don’t want to use 10 different interfaces for interacting with them.

Apprenda, which offers on-premise platform-as-a-service software for .NET applications, is a partner of Microsoft’s new offering, too. If web hosts deploy an Apprenda instance internally and plug it into the portal, customers can deploy web applications that leverage Apprenda’s auto-scaling and other PaaS capabilities right from the management portal.

In the grand scheme of things, Service Management Portal could go down as Microsoft’s most-significant blow in its battle against virtualization market leader VMware to become the operating system for the cloud. VMware has a headstart with its vCloud Datacenter Services program and vCloud Director management software, but Microsoft now essentially has an answer to both, although it still has plenty of maturing to do (especially if it wants to compete for enterprise workloads). It tried to do something similar a couple years ago with the promised Windows Azure Appliance, but that strategy, which was limited to large partners such as Dell, HP and Fujitsu, never really took off. (Fujitsu is apparently the only one of those partners that actually followed through.)

To add insult to injury, Microsoft is also working to grow its ecosystem of service provider partners with a new program helping them move off of VMware’s hypervisor and onto Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor.

Microsoft already has one big-name pilot customer for Service Management Portal in the form of web-hosting giant GoDaddy — whose involvement raises the question of just how disruptive Microsoft might be to the entire private-cloud software industry that has seen most of its traction thanks to service providers. Last year, GoDaddy announced a cloud offering based on Cloud.com’s (now Citrix’s) CloudStack software~~, and I’m awaiting word from GoDaddy as to whether Microsoft’s new portal might replace that offering~~. According to an email responsed from GoDaddy Distinguised Engineer Brian Krouse:

GoDaddy is always looking for ways to better serve our customers. We are currently exploring the new Microsoft Windows solution for our 4GH Web hosting, which is a scalable shared-hosting offering. GoDaddy is aware of Microsoft’s capabilities to run an IaaS solution and we are actively investigating the possibility. Currently, our Cloud Servers product is powered by Citrix for both Windows and Linux.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user olly.

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Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:55:04 +0000

With enterprises now open to hybrid clouds, Amazon Web Services finally relaxed its rigid public-cloud-only stance and launched services to support hybrid-cloud deployments in the first quarter of 2012. On the big data front, the Hadoop players realized very few companies have teams of systems engineers to learn MapReduce. This has meant adding support for SQL and integrating Hadoop with existing data-management tools and systems. In other words, Hadoop has grown up and is now being taken seriously by companies like Oracle and Microsoft. This quarterly report examines these trends as well the exciting M&A and IPO news in this arena. It also includes a near-term outlook for the next 12–18 months.

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EnStratus raises $3.5M for hybrid cloud management

Derrick Harris — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:50:16 +0000

Cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. El Dorado Ventures led the round with participation from Vesbridge Partners.

The long and short of enStratus’ technology is that it provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring popular public and private cloud offerings through a single interface. In theory, this means customers can utilize multiple clouds and even switch between cloud providers without having to learn the intricacies of each provider’s APIs or management consoles.

The Minneapolis-based EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.

This is the company’s first round of funding since emerging out of SaaS provider Valtira in 2007. EnStratus has been on something of a hiring binge lately, including bringing on popular cloud blogger (now GigaOM contributor) and former Cisco cloud strategist James Urquhart as VP of product strategy.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user aresauburn

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