GigaOM » Structure:Europe

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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ComodIT wants to bring about intuitive IT

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 15:00:01 +0000

Instead of telling a server to take an action, what if instead you could just tell your infrastructure in which computing state you wanted it to arrive? That’s the goal of ComodIT, a Belgian startup that is a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition. The company’s cloud management software wants to take the scripting out of cloud management and let anyone –from IT to business employees be able to order up new instances and compute resources across clouds.

The startup, which launched in June, is seeking its Series A round and is currently bootstrapped by the three founders. The company employs seven people and offers Software as a Service (Saas) as well as on-premise deployments. Unlike some of the other configuration management or other cloud-provisioning and management tools out there, ComodIT is aimed squarely at the enterprise — although anyone else can use it too. The company offers identity management and compliance-related features that enterprise customers need, but has taken an API-reliant approach more familiar to the dev-ops community.

However, it is also built so that other tools can easily integrate with it, meaning customers can bring their own cloud tools with features ComodIT doesn’t have. It even posted the code for Synapse, the software that governs its agent, which helps track virtual instances and other IT assets the ComodIT platform controls on GitHub earlier this month.

ComodIT will compete against clusters of open-source software as well as IT management software from established vendors like RightScale and giants such as CA, but it’s worth watching because it’s trying to bridge multiple clouds with its software. If it succeeds it could essentially wrap all available clouds into a user-friendly Platform as a Service (PaaS) with enterprise levels of control.

ComodIT is one of five finalists in our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, which will take place on October 16th in Amsterdam. More information can be found here.

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Facebook’s next compute challenge is cold storage

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:21:06 +0000

Facebook is a designing a new data center designed specifically to store all those photos of your baby from three years ago or your senior road trip from seven years ago for the long haul. It has to be cheap, it has to be power efficient. And it’s a fundamentally different data center design and compute architecture than the big web companies use today.

Ahead of his talk with me later this month at our Structure:Europe conference in Amsterdam, I spoke with Jay Parikh, VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, about the computing challenges facing the giant social network. The one most on his mind at the moment is how to store users’ photos, videos and other digital bits so they can access them anytime they want. Like the piles of albums I have from my high school days, our digital photos have to live somewhere, so Facebook is trying to create a data center equivalent to that dusty old box in the attic that you only open when you move.

Jay Parikh

He says Facebook is rethinking the infrastructure for how it stores huge repositories or photos and videos in a way that’s accessible and convenient but also cost-effective. Unlike a business that might store records on tape, Facebook can’t afford to let users wait that long to access something, nor can it afford to build data centers that keep photos in caches next to the servers (those Fusion-io machines aren’t cheap!).

“The current data center and hardware design is actually very sub-optimal for that problem,” Parikh says. “People say to us we should just use tape, but I’d rather poke my eyes out with chopsticks.”

So instead he’s thinking about a new storage-based data center as described in this article, with servers that turn on and off as needed and take up a lot of floor space but consume very little power. He added that the company is building software to handle moving data between different regimes of popularity and that changes the properties of the stored files as they migrate from one location to another. The product team shouldn’t have to think about that, said Parikh, the infrastructure should.

“Where we are going to be innovating at the data center, the hardware, the operating system and the kernel level,” he said. “All of that needs to be rethought. You can’t do this by shoving it into existing computing environments. You need a separate storage facility and other, bigger data centers, and different physical building and different design.”

Unlike today’s focus on getting the most performance from a watt of power, generally in a dense computing array, the cold-storage problem requires a lot of floor space and machines consuming the least power possible. So, in Prineville, Ore., next to its large web-serving data center, Facebook is essentially building out a 62,000-square-foot attic for your digital junk.

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