NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratories, Inc.

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To ensure the future availability of new IP addresses for its customers, has completed the first phase of IPv6 deployment for large businesses and wholesale partners that use its domestic Internet backbone.
Complete info at EarthTimes, TradersHuddle and EON.(author unknown)

Among the many innovations that virtualization has brought to the data center is server mobility, or the ability to live-migrate virtual machines (VMs) across physical servers. With it comes a marketing story that dynamically moving VMs inside a single data center or between two data centers is a seamless process. While at some point that will undoubtedly be true, it’s far from an operational reality today. In the meantime, there are numerous opportunities for startups to offer solutions that will help make such seamlessness a reality.

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.

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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

Among the many innovations that virtualization has brought to the data center is server mobility, or the ability to live-migrate virtual machines (VMs) across physical servers. With it comes a marketing story that dynamically moving VMs inside a single data center or between two data centers is a seamless process. While at some point that will undoubtedly be true, it’s far from an operational reality today. In the meantime, there are numerous opportunities for startups to offer solutions that will help make such seamlessness a reality.

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.

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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

Public clouds are the new storage service providers. In addition to Amazon S3, there are now compelling offerings from Microsoft, Rackspace, EMC, and soon, Google. Even though the public clouds have garnered more than their share of attention, however, corporations are still a long way off from wholesale adoption; tens of billions of dollars of enterprise storage software and hardware will continue to be sold for years to come.

But for those keeping an eye on the enterprise storage future, it makes sense to consider whether the infrastructure challenges being faced by these large service providers today indicate what the largest enterprises will face tomorrow.

After all, the two share many common challenges, such as grappling with enormous amounts of data, a high number of overall data objects, a large user population and wide geographic reach. Public storage clouds have solved the challenges through innovative architectures and approaches, many of which are working their way into the enterprise. Let’s take a closer look at what, specifically, they’ve achieved.

Commodity hardware — The embrace of commodity hardware on the part of public service providers as a way to drive down per-gigabyte storage costs is among the biggest advantages they offer over enterprises, which still rely on storage vendors to provide integrated solutions. That’s partly because the largest public clouds are by default infrastructure experts — not necessarily a skill set that can be found in every enterprise. I expect these hardware purchasing preferences to remain distinct for now.

Multitenancy — Most public clouds were designed from the ground up to segment customers. The same can’t be said of enterprise storage technology, however, even though the behavior of large corporations is very similar to that of multiple customers. For example, it’s common for large companies to manage internal chargebacks for technology resources across groups and departments and therefore the same segmentation, quality-of-service guarantees and billing mechanisms apply.

Everything through an API — Part of the very notion of cloud computing is the abstraction of physical resources whereby new servers or storage repositories can be provisioned via a web browser as opposed to a screwdriver. This is hardly the case in conventional corporate infrastructure, where direct access to hardware resources has led to very differently designed products. But management and administration occupies a large portion of storage budgets; meanwhile, the sheer volume of data and number of objects continues to make more manual administrative processes impossible even for enterprises. So we are likely to see enterprise storage technology evolve to streamline management. Specifically, vendors need to expose some of their basic functionality through open APIs that can be passed all the way to the application.

Geographic reach and availability — Cloud customers need to know that their data is always available, which is made possible by having it in multiple locations. Leading cloud providers accomplish this by having different availability zones, such as with Amazon, or through maintaining specific software features, like GeoProtect within EMC Atmos. Enterprises need the same capabilities, which means the storage industry must evolve from basic two-way replication solutions to geographically distributed storage objects where the distribution benefits both the availability and the delivery of the data. For example, second copies should alleviate the primary system load by being able to serve read-only requests similar to a content delivery network.

Security, ongoing maintenance and administration, performance management and data protection are additional areas in which leading public cloud storage providers have seen problems at a size and scale that many enterprises will see soon enough. And in most cases, the solutions they’ve come up with will serve the needs of enterprises accordingly. So for the time being, the public cloud storage providers are filling a role as enterprise barometer as well.

Want to know more about how massive public cloud storage deployments are forecasting the future? Check out these sessions at the upcoming Structure conference:

• Scaling the Database in the Cloud
• Dealing With the Data Tsunami: The Big Data Panel
• Supermassive Storage: Cutting-edge Practices from the Service Provider Industry

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show

Public clouds are the new storage service providers. In addition to Amazon S3, there are now compelling offerings from Microsoft, Rackspace, EMC, and soon, Google. Even though the public clouds have garnered more than their share of attention, however, corporations are still a long way off from wholesale adoption; tens of billions of dollars of enterprise storage software and hardware will continue to be sold for years to come.

But for those keeping an eye on the enterprise storage future, it makes sense to consider whether the infrastructure challenges being faced by these large service providers today indicate what the largest enterprises will face tomorrow.

After all, the two share many common challenges, such as grappling with enormous amounts of data, a high number of overall data objects, a large user population and wide geographic reach. Public storage clouds have solved the challenges through innovative architectures and approaches, many of which are working their way into the enterprise. Let’s take a closer look at what, specifically, they’ve achieved.

Commodity hardware — The embrace of commodity hardware on the part of public service providers as a way to drive down per-gigabyte storage costs is among the biggest advantages they offer over enterprises, which still rely on storage vendors to provide integrated solutions. That’s partly because the largest public clouds are by default infrastructure experts — not necessarily a skill set that can be found in every enterprise. I expect these hardware purchasing preferences to remain distinct for now.

Multitenancy — Most public clouds were designed from the ground up to segment customers. The same can’t be said of enterprise storage technology, however, even though the behavior of large corporations is very similar to that of multiple customers. For example, it’s common for large companies to manage internal chargebacks for technology resources across groups and departments and therefore the same segmentation, quality-of-service guarantees and billing mechanisms apply.

Everything through an API — Part of the very notion of cloud computing is the abstraction of physical resources whereby new servers or storage repositories can be provisioned via a web browser as opposed to a screwdriver. This is hardly the case in conventional corporate infrastructure, where direct access to hardware resources has led to very differently designed products. But management and administration occupies a large portion of storage budgets; meanwhile, the sheer volume of data and number of objects continues to make more manual administrative processes impossible even for enterprises. So we are likely to see enterprise storage technology evolve to streamline management. Specifically, vendors need to expose some of their basic functionality through open APIs that can be passed all the way to the application.

Geographic reach and availability — Cloud customers need to know that their data is always available, which is made possible by having it in multiple locations. Leading cloud providers accomplish this by having different availability zones, such as with Amazon, or through maintaining specific software features, like GeoProtect within EMC Atmos. Enterprises need the same capabilities, which means the storage industry must evolve from basic two-way replication solutions to geographically distributed storage objects where the distribution benefits both the availability and the delivery of the data. For example, second copies should alleviate the primary system load by being able to serve read-only requests similar to a content delivery network.

Security, ongoing maintenance and administration, performance management and data protection are additional areas in which leading public cloud storage providers have seen problems at a size and scale that many enterprises will see soon enough. And in most cases, the solutions they’ve come up with will serve the needs of enterprises accordingly. So for the time being, the public cloud storage providers are filling a role as enterprise barometer as well.

Want to know more about how massive public cloud storage deployments are forecasting the future? Check out these sessions at the upcoming Structure conference:

• Scaling the Database in the Cloud
• Dealing With the Data Tsunami: The Big Data Panel
• Supermassive Storage: Cutting-edge Practices from the Service Provider Industry

Gary Orenstein is host of The Cloud Computing Show

Comments(author unknown)0721824413248464853506970041435663445938

Computerworld

A group of technology companies has launched the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (TAG), a broadband technical advisory committee that will examine ways to resolve net neutrality issues. TAG will bring together engineers and other technical experts to develop a consensus on broadband network management practices. The group will work to advise U.S. agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of Justice about the technical issues surrounding network management. Among the companies involved in TAG are AT&T, Cisco Systems, Comcast, DISH Network, EchoStar, Google, Intel, Level 3 Communications, Microsoft, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon Communications. "The TAG will function as a neutral, expert technical forum and promote a greater consensus around technical practices within the Internet community," says University of Colorado professor and TAG facilitator Dale Hatfield.

From "Tech Companies Form Group to Study Net Neutrality"
Computerworld (06/09/10) Gross, Grant
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UPDATED: VMware is back on the hunt for new startups as it looks to further raise its profile in the platform-as-a-service market. Sources tell me its latest target is EngineYard, the Ruby on Rails cloud provider that’s raised $37 million from the likes of Amazon, Benchmark, DAG Ventures and Bay Partners. Neither VMware nor EngineYard could be reached for comment. Update: A VMware spokesperson responded to my query in email by saying, “We don’t comment on speculation or rumors.” EngineYard’s Jim Shissler, director of marketing, denied the talks and said EngineYard works closely with VMware because VMware provides the underlying software and is a strategic investor in Terremark, which hosts EngineYard’s enterprise-class platform as a service.

VMware has been buying startups such as Zimbra, SpringSource and others as it works to transition from providing a hypervisor to offering higher-value services. Earlier this year it released its VMforce platform as a service built on Salesforce.com’s infrastructure using SpringSource’s Java-based framework. Adding a Ruby-focused platform or capability makes a lot of sense, and EngineYard has been working on a transition of its own — moving away from startups and more toward the enterprise, where VMware’s focus is.

For a closer look on how the PaaS business is evolving, (GigaOM Pro sub req’d) check out our panel dedicated to the topic at our Structure 2010 conference in two weeks. If platforms as a service don’t interest you, perhaps VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz will explain in his keynote what else his company is looking for in its acquisition spree.

Amazon’s Import/Export Service, which allows folks with large data sets to mail their files to the company’s storage and compute clouds, has moved from beta to general availability. We wrote last year when the service launched about how our broadband infrastructure isn’t robust enough to handle terabytes of information quickly and affordably, which meant that certain AWS clients with large data sets would find the ability to put their data on storage drives and pop them in the mail to Amazon both faster and a better deal than sending it via the web.

A year later Amazon has opened the service up to everyone, and offers some use cases that drive home both the value of cloud computing and the amazing masses of data that are being processed on the cloud. The company’s Open Solutions Group, for example, uses AWS to parallel process more than 40 terabytes of geospatial data, yielding results in hours instead of years. “Within just days our customers have disks and data in hand, and can begin modeling, analyzing, and visualizing the results of our geo-processing work,” Brian Levy, president and CEO of Open Solutions Group, is quoted as saying.

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What will really be cool is when customers of Open Solutions no longer bring that data in-house for analysis. At that point we’d have a broadband network robust enough to send such information out to customers, but also a culture at enterprises that finds it acceptable to take the data and perform the modeling within a compute cloud. But first it will have to be easier to move the data from one cloud to another than it is currently (and ideally not involve the U.S. Post Office), and would likely require a special-purpose cloud dedicated to data analytics.

I think providing a faster way to move the data (such as Aspera does), ensuring open standards for the data so that it’s portable, and possibly special purpose high-performance computing clouds are emerging business opportunities for startups and established companies. I also think processing big data on compute clouds is leading to very interesting business opportunities, which I outlined in a GigaOM Pro research note a few weeks back (sub req’d). Anyone interested in either of these should really come to our Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco later this month where we’ll be discussing exactly these sorts of opportunities. Or you can talk about it in the comments below.

The VAR Guy: "Novell is using a surround-and-conquer strategy to compete against RHEV, which is still a fledgling virtualization option."(author unknown)

Enterprise Storage Forum: "CTERA Networks is giving the Linux Ext3 file system additional data protection in the form of new snapshot capabilities. The file system is also the basis of the company's Cloud-Attached Storage appliances, the C200 and CloudPlug."(author unknown)

Linux Magazine: "Take some of the headaches out of managing sever farms with Cfengine 3. Use this automation introduction to save time, money and spare yourself crippling manual mistakes."(author unknown)05197900185481847873

LinuxPlanet: "Whether you're wanting to give away or charge your visitors for the wireless Internet, you should find something that will work. The best part is that most of these solutions are free -- you don't have to spends hundreds on a off-the-shelf hotspot gateway."(author unknown)1522240768899946966902897057593936069761

DarkReading: "A new open-source operating system will come with the option of creating one-time, disposable virtual machines on the fly."(author unknown)1158080758051487959001401584327145296178

Since the beginning, a big question about cloud computing is how the ecosystem will evolve. Will there be only a handful of superpowers (e.g, Amazon, Google and Microsoft) that possess the knowledge and money to operate at a large scale, or, will there be dozens of providers in the mix, specializing in dozens of different infrastructural areas and vertical markets? Finally, as mainstream providers have begun segregating into the IaaS and PaaS camps, it seems we’re getting close to an answer.

Engine Yard provides a prime example of how the market might play out. The company already hosted its Ruby on Rails PaaS offering, AppCloud, on Amazon Web Services, but last week it partnered with Terremark to roll out its enterprise-grade xCloud offering. The benefits it gets from each provider are passed on to customers, along with prices to match. Of course, Engine Yard isn’t the first specialty cloud provider to rely on the big boys for infrastructure.

As I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, this seems to be the direction the market is moving; large IaaS providers — such as Amazon and Terremark — could end up serving as arms dealers for cloud specialists like Engine Yard. As IT consumers begin demanding increased automation of PaaS, and as demand for SaaS applications spreads, providers of these services will need infrastructure to house them, and large providers have plenty to sell.

More on The Cloud

• So You Wanna Be a SaaS Provider? Tech Insider
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I’ve been adamant recently that AWS, in particular, needs to offer its own PaaS to compete with growing cloud competition from IT goliaths like Google, Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, Salesforce.com, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If Amazon can undermine those companies by arming their competitors — not to mention any and every other flavor of cloud service — with infrastructure, maybe that’s profit enough.

When all is said and done, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com might be battling it out for PaaS (and SaaS) dollars against a whole slew of smaller providers operating within the infrastructural confines of AWS, Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis. I’m not making a prediction, but this does seem like a possibility.

Read the GigaOM Pro post here. Also, plan to attend Structure 2010 or watch the live stream to hear a lot more about the cloud market from thought leaders at the vendor, provider and user levels.