networking-info

Joab Jackson, in his " Cloud computing leaving relational databases behind " article, makes some pretty interesting points on the incompatibility of relational databases with cloud-based infrastructures. He first list the various cloud optimized databases: Google's Bigtable , Amazon's SimpleDB , 10Gen's Mongo , AppJet's AppJet database, and Oracle open-source BerkelyDB . And then notes that they all have cloud computing-specific characteristics. They can be run in distributed environments, None of them are transactional in nature, and They all sacrifice some advanced querying capability for faster performance. Since the national security community literally lives and dies by the information in their relational databases, what does that mean if the community adopts cloud technology in order to benefit from the scalability and economy? The key issue here is that in cloud implementations, database material is spread across different locations. Executing complex ...

From Sam Johnston's Taxonomy post Clients ( examples ) are computer hardware and/or computer software which rely on The Cloud for application delivery, or which is specifically designed for delivery of cloud services, and which are in either case essentially useless without it. Services ( examples ) (aka Web Service ) are "software system[s] designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network " [36] which may be accessed by other cloud computing components, software (eg Software plus services ) or end users directly. Application ( examples ) leverages The Cloud in software architecture , often eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computer, thus alleviating the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support. Platform ( examples ) (aka Platform as a service ) (the delivery of a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service ) facilitates deployment of applications wi...

In this month's Editor's Perspective, Mr. Harrison Donnelly announced the new KMI Media Group collaborative effort. Military Information Technology will be using the blogosphere to get their government and industry partners to talk about future products and services on-line. For the next two month's, they are "asking government and industry to discuss the cloud issue on the Web, via a pre-established cloud computing blog hosted by subject-matter expert Kevin Jackson. I want to publicly thank Mr. Donnelly, Dean Sprague and KMI Media Group for their interest in cloud computing and their trust in "Cloud Musings" as an unbiased forum for this industry discussion. I look forward to working with them on this project and supporting their future efforts.

Last week, VMware and Cisco announced their latest collaboration for the virtual datacenter of the future. The Cisco Nexus® 1000V distributed virtual software switch is expected to be an integrated option in VMware Infrastructure . "In this highly agile environment, the new Cisco Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology on the Nexus 1000V will integrate with VMware’s vNetwork Distributed Switch framework to create a logical network infrastructure that will provide full visibility, control and consistency of the network." If you pair this virtual networking capability with VMware's VDC-OS' capability to manage virtual infrastructures over the on-premise and off-premise cloud the cloud-based datacenter of the future, is now a reality today.

In an interview reported on in this month's Military Information Technology magazine, David Mihelcic, DISA Chief Technology Officer, has laid out his goal for the agency's cloud computing initiative. As CTO, he serves as the agency's senior authority on scientific, technical and engineering matters. Mr. Mehelcic wants the DISA cloud to be able to "enter a piece of software into a cloud, and have that automatically provisioned on servers globally, close to the customers who need the service". DISA's CTO clearly wants to move well beyond the current RACE infrastructure. In the interview, he states that the current stretch goal for provisioning computing capacity is 24 minutes. I say keep pushing. It's good to see that DISA plans to expand their cloud computing activities. What other goals do you think DISA should lay out for itself?

On September 9 th , Bob Lozano posted his kudos to GeoEye for a successful launch of GeoEye -1. (Hey Bob! Where's that post on your "cloud failure" last week?) According to their press release , GeoEye -1 will be able to collect images with a ground resolution of 0.41-meters or 16 inches in the panchromatic, or black-and-white mode, and collect multi spectral , or color imagery, at 1.65-meter resolution. (Under current government rules, the company can only offer the public half-meter images.) I would like to add my congratulations as well, but the thing that immediately comes to my mind is the GeoEye deal to provide "the highest quality satellite imagery available" to Google and the (you know it too) coming Android-powered mash-up between those images, GPS location services and Google-Earth. All you need now is some real-time queuing from a Twitter-powered ad- hoc information network and you really got something going. Isn't the cloud a wonderful thin...

Over the weekend, Maureen O'Gara of SYS-CON media reported that RightScale is now offering a "first in industry" capability to provide application management across multiple cloud infrastructures. It now offers application deployment options on Amazon EC2, GoGrid and Flexiscale. For mission critical applications, this capability could provide enhance fault tolerance and what I would call "cloud redundancy". When I've discussed cloud deployments with some Government customer, they have cited concerns about vendor lock-in. While this cross cloud capability doesn't really address that issue immediately, it does give hope that, in the near future, many vendors will be offering transcloud hosting solutions. According to their website, RightScale is also "working with Rackspace to assure compatibility with their cloud offerings, including Mosso and CloudFS".