networking-info

Nick has posted his analysis on Google's First Click Free . This free service allows the content providers to participate into it and promote their content by making the first click free when users discover the content via Google and subsequently enforce registration or subscription for the rest of the content. I think this is a great idea! I am personally against the walled garden approach and do not believe in registrations and subscriptions just because content providers haven't managed to convince me so far to register or subscribe to for their content. This is a great opportunity for the publishers to showcase their content by making the first link free, demonstrate the value proposition, and drive traffic towards the paid content. The discussion on the service has so far centered around: Google making other search engine's users second-class citizens and not sticking to an unmediated role. Users' ability to trick the content providers to get access to all t...

Federal News Radio interviewed Ron Markezich, a corporate vice president of Microsoft, Mike Bradshaw, president of Google federal, and Michael Farber, a partner with Booz Allen on the government's approach to cloud computing. Key comments: Michael Farber - many agencies understand this approach, but few have figured out the best way. Ron Markezich - Agencies need to understand how the cloud could fit into their architecture. The focus must be on the benefits. Mike Bradshaw - The consumer model is less expensive than other models because you don't have to focus as much on the infrastructure. You can download Jason Miller's report to hear the entire interview. To learn more about cloud computing in the Federal space, sign up for CloudCamp Federal , Nov 12, 2008, 3-9 pm in Chantilly, VA.

With the announcement of Azure, Microsoft has finally made it's cloud computing plans public. Maybe Larry Ellison is now ready to revise his opinion, huh? While this announcement is definitely a good thing, it also seems to be a defensive move on the software giant's part. In a USA Today article "Ray Valdes, an analyst at researcher Gartner, said that Microsoft's Web services strategy still isn't cohesive. It's "taking every major asset of intellectual property, and cloud-enabling it to some degree." Key components of the Azure Services Platform include: Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking; Microsoft SQL Services for a wide range of database services and reporting; Microsoft .NET Services which are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control; Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize document...

In case you mised it, the Department of Interior has announced that it plans to build a cloud computing platform to manage the processing and distributing of government grants. "Grants.gov is re-aligning its business efforts to allow it to focus principally on its core business This means that Grants.gov will no longer be in the ownership and management of IT As a consequence, Grants.gov anticipates pursuing the acquisition of a "cloud computing" environment to include but not limited to service-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capability to fulfill its mission needs." In a requirement description, the agency also clearly outlined its requirements. "From a mission perspective, a cloud computing environment possessing the follow capabilities would be considered as a viable candidate to establish a relationship with Grants.gov: An established capability (technology and staff) to develop (with business rules), test, deploy, host, manage, and maint...

This week, The Economist provides an insightful special report on cloud computing . From " Clouds and Judgement ": " Computing is fast becoming a “cloud”—a collection of disembodied services accessible from anywhere and detached from the underlying hardware. The chances are that much of business and everyday computing will one day be mediated by this ethereal cloud." I highly recommend the report as it presents an excellent case for disruptive nature of cloud computing. "In the years to come companies are likely to venture much farther. For one, operators of computing clouds such as Amazon and Google have shown that this is a far more efficient way of running IT systems. Secondly, many firms will find they have no choice. The way in which their IT infrastructure has grown is proving unsustainable. Most corporate data centres today are complex warrens of underused hardware that require more and more people, space and power to keep them going. The current economi...

As promised, here are some more results from the MIT /"Cloud Musings" on-line survey! Please remember, THIS IS   NOT A SCIENTIFIC SURVEY !! The purpose is only to get a sense of the government cloud computing marketplace. Total responses - 121 Type of Respondent Organization Federal Government - 41% Industry - 37% State/Local Government - 20% Educational Institution - 2% Familiarity with Cloud Computing Somewhat familiar - 63% Not at all - 21% Very familiar - 17% Geographic Distribution North East - 41% North Central - 17% West - 15% Southeast - 9% South Central - 9% OCONUS - 9% Challenges to address with Cloud Computing Capital Budget Limitations - 24% Storage Limitations - 15% Event driven information requirements - 13% Ubiquitous information access - 13% Composite application requirements (Mash-ups) - 10% Data center limitations-  9% Operational spikes exceed IT infrastructure capacity - 9% Other - 7% Main Concern Security - 54% Finance/Budget - 12% Unfamiliar with tech...

On October 17th in the "Redmond Channel Partner Online", a Microsoft Partner community publication, Kurt Mackie reported on Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer's comments on the company's vision for syncing up applications in the Internet cloud. Although Ballmer held back on much of the details he did say that Microsoft is planning to release big news on this topic at its Professional Developers Conference, which is scheduled to take place on Oct. 27 in Los Angeles. According to Ballmer, Microsoft's applications will not have to be rewritten to run in the cloud, "but we'll encourage developers to do something to make apps more manageable at a higher level,". "It's a transformation for our business, but I don't think we'll be buying all of the world's data servers," he said. Instead, Microsoft will have to "service-enable our partners and customers." Ballmer also denied that Google was Microsoft's most significant...

So why is the intelligence community so interested in cloud computing? Three letters: PED (Processing, Exploitation, Dissemination). Take these two real life examples from the publishing industry. Jim Staten of Forrester Research provided an example of how the New York Times leverage the cloud . The Times wanted to makes its historic archives available for online access. They needed to process 11 million articles and turn them into .pdf files. Initial estimates outlined that hundreds of servers and about 4 Tb of storage would be necessary. The IT organization at the Times estimated a months-long delay before beginning, the need for a significant budget and highlighted the difficulty of locating the computing resources. The project manager give Amazon Web Services a try and kicked off 100 EC2 instances and 4 terabytes of S3 storage. The job was finished the next day with a total cost of $240. Another hard example comes from the Washington Post . Peter Harkins, a Senior Engineer at The W...

To leverage attendees of the World Summit of Cloud Computing , a kick-off meeting of the "Enterprise Cloud Computing" work group will be held near Tel Aviv, Israel on December 3, 2008. The stated goal of this meeting will be to exchange information about best practices, use cases, standardizations, success stories, emerging technologies, and issues in Enterprise Cloud Computing. This clearly is a grass roots attempt towards creating a framework to facilitate the future global movement towards Cloud Computing. As put by Avner Algom of the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies: "The rapid growth of this technology will require a trusted source of objective information to enable enterprises to understand the opportunities and risks in this area. An Enterprise Cloud Computing Group can play this role and provide value to both vendors and customers." Bob Marcus of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium is supporting this effort by providing questions on ke...

In his post " Missing in the Cloud: package management ", Dave Rosenberg highlights a critical issue in the adoption of cloud computing by government agencies. "I dare say that a standard needs to be introduced--or at least a quasi-standard like we see for Linux with Yum, RPM and Synaptic (essentially flavors of the same ideal.) Since Amazon doesn't currently offer this feature, I wonder what vendor will step in to fill this void. So far all the Cloud app guys have taken different approaches which will certainly introduce some additional complexity related to portability (which also needs to be standardized.)" There was, in fact, quite a bit of feedback on this in the MIT Cloud Computing Survey . Matthew Small from Rightscale agrees and puts it this way: "It's a lot of work. Our ServerTemplate model has abstracted the configuration of the server from the base image that must be launched in the host. This provides for interoperability on public and priva...

Information Week has just launched PlugIntoTheCloud.com as their cloud computing destination. In his Non Linear Thinking blog, Bill Martin calls it a movement aimed at "providing a source and forum for IT pros, and the general population, to understand what the cloud computing trend/phenomena means to them and their companies". John Foley, InformationWeek Editor-at-Large, in his announcement of the site's launch , explained the importance of cloud computing this way: "We created it to address the growing need among IT pros to better understand what this trend means to them and their companies. Just this week, Gartner listed cloud computing second, right behind virtualization, on its list of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. Our research tells us that business technologists are intrigued by cloud computing, but not yet swayed. InformationWeek Analytics (our in-depth reports business) surveyed 456 business technology professionals to gauge their plans for c...

From Gartner " Why a little cloud hype might be useful ": "It’s too simplistic to say cloud hype is bad . If we are technically expert is might irritate us with its breadth and abstraction, but we are not the only audience.  Somehow the idea has to  cross the corridor into other business departments and that’s just as likely to be via a Business Week article or even (dare I say it?) an airline in-flight magazine.  Whether we like it or not, repeatedly promoting a basic collective term through broader media has a long history of overcoming corporate resistance and inertia in ways IT departments can’t do alone. ‘The cloud’ is a BIG idea, its a reasonable visual metaphor and most of all its not an acronym.  It may not be perfect, but if it captures the imaginations of a broader audience of decision makers we should cut it some slack.  IT must remember that even its biggest ideas compete for mind-share with other major strategic change and improvement options - like moving t...

Recently Google published the Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) numbers of their data centers. PUE is defined as a ratio of the total power consumed by a data center to the power consumed by the IT equipments of the facility. Google's data centers' PUE ranges from 1.1 to 1.3 which is quite impressive. Though it is unclear why all the data centers have slightly different PUE. Are they designed differently or are they all not tuned to improve for the energy efficiency? In any case I am glad to see that Google is committed to the Green Grid initiative and is making the measurement data and method publicly available. This should encourage other organizations to improve the energy performance of their data centers. The energy efficiency of a data center can be classified into three main categories: 1. Efficiency of the facility: The PUE is designed to measure this kind of efficiency that is based on how a facility that hosts a data center is designed such as its physical location, la...

Dan Morrill! Count me in !! In his excellent article, " Cloud Computing is Scary - But the FUD Has to Stop ",  Dan makes some excellent points: It is time to start embracing where business is going, and trying to make sure that they are doing it in the safest way possible. What security professionals need to be doing rather than creating their own FUD is work out ways to make it safer. While we might struggle with new technology, it is time for information security folks to step up to the plate and get smart on how the technology works, what the risks are, and how those risks can be reasonably addressed by good security solutions.  There are some great resources for good information, Cloud Ave is one of them, but  trend micro , IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and others who have all figured out that this can be a very neat technology and help companies expand and contract according to business need and market conditions. Hear ! Hear !

On October 6th, IBM launched their cloud services initiative . This is a:  "[C]ompany-wide initiative that extends its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). IBM's new cloud services can help businesses of all sizes more easily adopt cloud computing models to better manage data, lower operational costs and make collaboration easier." Since IBM has partnered on cloud computing with Google, this commentary on Microsoft by Michael Vizard may be telling: "Just about everything that Microsoft does and says about cloud computing comes across as fairly reactionary. Essentially, Microsoft has let Google set the tone for much of the last two years and every service that it rolls out is compared and contrasted to something Google already did...." " ...Unfortunately, it looks like Microsoft is pretty much asl...

Back in mid-September, there was quite a thread in the Google Cloud Computing Group on the use of cloud computing by the federal government.  Some of the interesting comments were: Khazret Sapenov   "Not an actual use case yet, but I see that electronic voting (e.g. US presidential elections) would be a good use case for cloud computing, given technology allows eliminate electoral fraud and provides reliable audit trail. " ( NOTE: Throughout the thread, many participants disgreed with this as a good use case) "Another use case in my mind would be optimization of USPS, that might be beneficial for both government, businesses and cloud providers, but I'll leave it here, until I'm ready with specifics."  Forman, Mark A   "As the first U.S. E-Govt Administrator, I am very intrigued by applications of Cloud Computing to government.  The best use case for this would be electronic filings, especially quarterly Tax payments and annual Tax returns.  Howeve...

I'm proud to announce that the final SOA-R Cloud Computing Education Event will be held in collaboration with CloudCamp . Now dubbed  CloudCamp:Federal , the event will be held as a n " unconference"  to help early adopters meet and share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp , you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate. Due to the expected large number of attendees, we will be moving from our normal Tyson's Corner location.   CloudCamp: Federal will be hosted by Apptis, Inc at their conference and training facility,  4800 Westfields Blvd, Chantilly, VA 20151. We will also be changing the start time from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm.

With the fast growing interest in cloud computing, the Federal Government community has established a Federal Cloud Computing Wiki. This wiki is managed by Dr. Brand Niemann , Senior Enterprise Architect with the US Environmental Protection Agency. This new wiki, along with the Federal SOA Community of Practice wiki are Web 2.0 tools for the Federal IT architect.  "The Federal SOA CoP is an open community of practice fostered to assist government and commercial organizations in achieving the promise of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) through collaboration, demonstration and community efforts. The Federal SOA CoP is open to all.  Participation is encouraged by users, who want to better understand how SOA may benefit their organization, by academia who may want to discuss research directions, and by standards organizations and vendors who would like to better understand user needs and help users better understand how the SOA approach can benefit their organization." Please...

Yesterday's  SOA-R event  coverage by  TECH Bisnow Washington  was yet another indication that cloud computing is real in the Federal space. Thanks goes to Mr. Dave Stegon from  Bisnow on Business  and Pauline Healy from  Apptis .  Thanks also to Tim May from Apptis for him and his team's support of cloud computing in the Federal marketplace.

I am proud to announce that I've been invited to speak at the " World Summit of Cloud Computing ", December 1-2, 2008, at the Wohl Centre in Ramat Gan, Israel. As their homepage  attests; " ...the m aturity of the Virtualization technologies, both at the VM and at the IT infrastructure levels, and the convergence of the Grid, Virtualization and SOA concepts, enables the business implementation of the Cloud Computing for utility and SaaS services." This year's anual IGT event will focus on cloud computing and its impact on enterprise IT, the next generation data center, sofware as a service, and utility computing. I am honored to be sharing the stage with representatives from Google, Amazon Web Services, Yahoo, ebay, Sun, HP, IBM, 3Tera, Forrester, Salesforce.com and a host of other prominent cloud computing community leaders. My presentation will be centered on the goverment customer insights expected to be gained from the MIT Cloud Computing Survey . Ple...

We've been quite surprised by the number of survey responses we've received.  THANK YOU !!   That subset of the cloud computing community interested in national security and public sector applications is certainly making its views known. To whet your appetite for the upcoming special report in Military Information Technology magazine and to encourage more participation, here are some preliminary results: We have enjoyed participation from a wide range or Federal, State, Local and Public Sector organizations, including Department of Defense, Department of Transportation,  Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA,  United States Marine Corps, United States Navy, United States Air Force, United State Army, NATO, Air National Guard, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Spokane Regional Health District, Manvel Police Department, Norwalk, CT Department of Public Works,    Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, New York State Education Department and the   T exas Health & Human ...

There is still time to register for the next SOA-R Cloud Computing Education event at the  The Tower Club, Tyson's Corner  in McLean, Va. Speakers for this event include: Tim May, Apptis SVP, Corporate Development Geva Perry, Gigaspaces Chief Marketing Officer Barry Lynn, 3Tera Chairman and CEO This will be yet another informative and enjoyable session. Please sign up now.

The other day I talked about how cloud computing could change the government's budgeting process. Well what about this! Last week, Google filed a patent application that describes a system that would allow users to auction their network connection business to participating carriers, in real time! Instead of buying a month-to-month or contract service with a single designated carrier, the Google patent would allow carriers to bid, in real-time, for the user’s business. This would create sort of a bandwidth cloud with “bandwidth on-demand” services. "Devices using the system would send networks a description of their requirements – for example, a phone call or access to the Internet – and receive back bids with a per-minute cost, or flat rate, at which those needs could be met. Users could either manually accept the bid that looks best to them, or have the phone choose one automatically, based on pre-programmed criteria. The patent does not specify particular access technologies...

First Oracle's Larry Ellison bashes cloud computing as nothing but hype and then his company announces that it will let customers run Oracle 10g and 11g databases and its Fusion middleware in virtual machines within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service ( Oracle Unveils New Products, Then Drifts Into The Cloud ). Larry's quote, as reported by many sources, was; "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" Also Larry, what are you going to say to the cloud computing poster child and Oracle customer Salesforce.com ? Last week Pa...

In her post " Cloud computing killed the capacity star ", Ivanka Menken brings up some good points. Just think what changes this could bring to the government budgeting process. The trends that Ivanka addresses could result in the following: Traditionally, demand management is used as an input into a capacity plan that is then used for capital expenditure budgeting. In the new world, this will no longer be sufficient, because the ability to rent capacity on "pay as you go" basis will now be a much more important input into the operational side of the budget. In economically unstable times (such as today) the focus is on low fixed cost. The accompanying budget strategy is to purchase infrastructure with excess capacity and sit on it for as long as possible. While this may not be the lowest initial cost approach, it does minimize the risk of mission failure over the longer term. In the new budget world, agencies can purchase the minimum infrastructure needed to m...