The memories of a Product Manager

Many Core processors: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!

2012-01-16T11:01:00.000-08:00

David Ungar is "an out-of-the-box thinker who enjoys the challenge of building computer software systems that work like magic and fit a user's mind like a glove.". this is a summary from SPLASH 2011 in November 2011

In the end of the first decade of the new century, chips such as Tilera’s can give us a glimpse of a future in which manycore microprocessors will become commonplace: every (non-hand-held) computer’s CPU chip will contain 1,000 fairly homogeneous cores. Such a system will not be programmed like the cloud, or even a cluster because communication will be much faster relative to computation. Nor will it be programmed like today’s multicore processors because the illusion of instant memory coherency will have been dispelled by both the physical limitations imposed by the 1,000-way fan-in to the memory system, and the comparatively long physical lengths of the inter- vs. intra-core connections. In the 1980’s we changed our model of computation from static to dynamic, and when this future arrives we will have to change our model of computation yet again.
If we cannot skirt Amdahl’s Law, the last 900 cores will do us no good whatsoever. What does this mean? We cannot afford even tiny amounts of serialization. Locks?! Even lock-free algorithms will not be parallel enough. They rely on instructions that require communication and synchronization between cores’ caches. Just as we learned to embrace languages without static type checking, and with the ability to shoot ourselves in the foot, we will need to embrace a style of programming without any synchronization whatsoever.
In our Renaissance project at IBM, Brussels, and Portland State, we are investigating what we call “anti-lock,” “race-and-repair,” or “end-to-end nondeterministic” computing. As part of this effort, we have build a Smalltalk system that runs on the 64-core Tilera chip, and have experimented with dynamic languages atop this system. When we give up synchronization, we of necessity give up determinism. There seems to be a fundamental tradeoff between determinism and performance, just as there once seemed to be a tradeoff between static checking and performance.
The obstacle we shall have to overcome, if we are to successfully program manycore systems, is our cherished assumption that we write programs that always get the exactly right answers. This assumption is deeply embedded in how we think about programming. The folks who build web search engines already understand, but for the rest of us, to quote Firesign Theatre: Everything You Know Is Wrong!

This video, is an interview with David Ungar from IBM Renaissance Project on programming many core computers and non-determinism, is mind boggling and expands beyond the text above.

David Ungar likes anything creative, from poetry to starting a business. The moment we built a 1,000 core process is like discovering a new space . He also says , Small Talk - originally developed in the 70's Xerox PARC - was made more powerful by REMOVING features, not adding features.

Why Include the Network Virtualization to the Cloud

2012-01-12T01:12:00.000-08:00

Following the publication yesterday of the Network Virtualization (NV), The New El Dorado many people asked more about M2Mi (Machine to Machine Intelligence).

In an article originally published in the Intel publication Journey to Cloud Magazine: Volume 1, Issue 2 , I read one of the best rationale for Network Virtualization (NV) as organic part of the Cloud. The paper is presented by Geoff Brown from M2Mi. I recommend to read the article itself, following the links above.

Here is my own summary:

Network virtualization is a technology that allows layers of security and connectivity services to be deployed over heterogeneous, multi-vendor devices. The term “virtualization” applies since the technology abstracts applications away from propriety holes in and between incompatible devices. Incompatibilities among devices make networks complex and difficult to maintain. Human intervention often leads to mistakes, This is why more than 75 percent of traditional IT budgets are spent purely on networking

Why include the network in the cloud? Because:

ALL END USERS access the cloud application through the network.
THE NETWORK IS HOME to most security tools and devices.
The NETWORK IS COMPLEX and labor-intensive and is thought to require near "black magic skills" to maintain .

IT experts often refer to “the wilds of the data center.” The network is a big reason for the tangled jungle metaphor is the cloud security battlefield—the first and final layer of defense where most attacks start, from distributed denial of service to virus intrusion.

M2Mi’s Network Virtualization coordinates, security and access technologies like the Intel® SOA Expressway and Intel® Expressway Cloud Access 360 turn into sequential layers of dynamic protection, customizing applications specific security settings and augmenting them with automated response capabilities.

From a security point of view, network virtualization must assume all underlying network devices. Not all traffic can be trusted without extensive verification and validation

M2Mi uses Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT) in the cloud to enable encrypted communication between the CPU and the local operating system. Intel TXT andM2Mi are used to deliver a trusted boot-up, securing the cloud from start to finish. incoming traffic is white-listed (i.e., registered traffic sources are identified and then allowed to move through a reduced security line; average traffic sources are scrutinized and X-rayed; and sources labeled suspect are put through additional measures before being allowed to board the cloud).

Metaphorically, the white-listing of the Cloud traffic sources resembles the security checks at the airports, where all passengers traffic is allowed to pass after a standard security checking, while some passengers require additional security measures before boarding the airplane.

Using this metaphor, we want the airport check point to look like this:

and not like this:

How security checks should not look like

These features offer a nice surprise to the cloud operators. Network and server virtualization are billed differently in the cloud. And the network usage creates substantial incremental revenues potential.

The network device manufacturers have filled your network with wonderful features that network virtualization can expose as billable, premium services. These features include (1) secure socket layer (SSL), (2) packet inspection, (3) quality of service (QoS), traffic prioritization,and data encryption

This enables premium cloud add-on services to be delivered based on value-add instead of purely usage rate pricing models. Customer pays for premium billable services to increase security. This makes sense. There is no such thing as a security policy policy that fits all

The challenge for M2Mi solutions in the Journey to cloud is how to securely manage across millions of remote mobile devices, through Telco networks, across enterprise environments, and safely through the cloud

For the original article, click here

Network Virtualization (NV), The New El Dorado

2012-01-10T19:18:00.000-08:00

NV: What it is and what is the market size?

On Open Flow discussion list, someone from Stanford University asks on October 5, 2011:

I am trying to get a feel of how big the network virtualization industry will become. Do you have some sources on how much the industry is or will be worth? I have seen some figures on the compute and storage virtualization industry (such as from VMware), but I have not found such figures, or even discussion on network virtualization.

The reply comes from another contributor at Computer Science Stanford University

If you're a computer scientist, this is entirely the wrong way of thinking about it. Instead I would ask: what does network virtualization mean? how does it affect the networks, systems, and applications you are interested in? What transformative change can it bring about? What awesomely cool stuff can you do with it? How will it affect the world? Understanding the technology and what you can do with it is the important part.

If you're a VC, well then, it's going to be HUGE - bigger than Cisco, Juniper, Comcast and AT&T combined!*

Nobody formulated yet a widely accepted definition of what NV is, but everybody knows this technology has a HUGE market size. Google trends shows a sudden jump in the last18 months

In absence of a substantial definition or market data, the interest is triggered by news like Big Switch Bets On OpenFlow, Network Virtualization (ONF) where we read that

"...some ONF members describe OpenFlow as a virtualization technology. "We think we can be the VMware of networking,"

Or even news that Dario Calia (from Cisco) Joins Vello to Lead Network Virtualization Development, another ONF based start up or ConteXtream Launches Software-Defined Network Virtualization Solution for Cloud and Hosting Providers. The latter is a an event from December 2011, barely 1 month ago

Google trends is a mechanical tool, not an intelligent one, as it extracts the NV trend from content titles it believes contain the words "NV" Thus, it misses significant players, for example the Cisco Acquisition of Linesider, completed in December 2010

It misses companies like Nicira , Embrane and Machine to Machine Intelligence (M2Mi). In this blog I would look into two key companies: Nicira and M2Mi

Nicira

Nicira is a the darling of Silicon Valley, while no one really knows what they do. Their web site is vague,yet we see an impressive list of management people and investors. Anderseen Horowitz , top progressive VC on the Silicon Valley, Diane Greene, ex CEO VMware and Andy Rachleff, Benchmark Capital and Stanford professor. Nicira does not list any customers, and it has $40M in funding

In the 2009 article Open vSwitch Project Launches, Reuven Cohen writes

Before I go into the details of the project I will say I find it very interesting the complete lack of any insight into who is behind the project. The website doesn't include company or contact information.... According to the whois lookup, the openvswitch.org website is registered to MartinCasado a student at Stanford with no affiliation with Citrix. Some further digging through the mailing archive I discovered the only real activity seems to be coming from a stealth company called Nicira.

Now we know Open vSwitch comes from Nicira, which means they are not fans of ONF. To find out what is going on, we must a New York Times blog from October 2011 What Nicira is up to . This New York Times piece soared the curve trend of Nicira as the the real embodiment of NV

Steven Mullaney, the CEO says vaguely

. “We are the most non-disruptive disruptive company out there,” he says. “All the networking companies will be around.” What he may be ripping out, however, is the most valuable part of those companies’ business: the brains that govern what they do. He would not say when this will start, but indications are that it is a matter of months.

A matter of months?

The company originated with Martin Casado, now its chief technology officer. According to Mr. Mullaney, Mr. Casado was working on network security for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory some years ago, when he was asked by United States intelligence agencies to figure out how to run a global network that could continually change levels of security and authorization.
“They needed something that would be flexible all the time,” Mr. Mullaney said. “He couldn’t do it, so he went to Stanford to solve the problem.” While at Stanford, Mr. Casado began what would eventually be Nicira with Nick McKeown, a professor there, and Scott Shenker, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Here we have to admit the big truth . There is not Network Virtualization without proper security. And this security - not the virtualization per-se - is the biggest stumbling block. Here is an example of use of the of theNicira technology at Japan's N.T.T (not clear if it is customer or a beta tester)

There is no way to perform a live migration of data from Mushashino to Atsugi, without proper security. Nicira may or may not reach the security standard they set themselves as a goal (continually change levels of security and authorization). If they don't, the security feature may have to be set down a more pragmatic achievable level, The story on how Stanford and Berkeley universities became involved shows the technology is not yet proven. One day it will, yet the first Nicira adopters will take a higher risk

M2Mi (Machine to Machine Intelligence)

M2Mi is a start up based on NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field, California. They started in 2006 and will reach six years as a profitable business in 2012. Their Active Conﬁguration platform provides orchestrated services through the combination of an Orchestration engine and Network API libraries. Orchestration allows you to “transactionally” sync interactions across different devices all in one process.

According to the NV entry from Wikipedia

Machine-To-Machine Intelligence (M2MI) technology covers both Internal, External and Multi-vendor software and hardware based technologies. M2MI is unique in its approach of applying "whitelist" blocking across all multi-vendor network elements, this approach ensures that Virtual Machines can not be "ARP spoofed", a technique used to compromise Virtual Machines at the network level.

Security of M2Mi is proven. Their patented GlobalockBox can be used with AWS S3 and,has a cloud front end and middle ware that works with plug-in libraries for encryption. For virtualized clients, it uses a commercial library for encrypting business applications; for government projects, it uses the NSA Suite B Cryptography for IPSec (a library that incorporates elliptic curve cipher technology)."

M2Mi's presence in NASA Ames Research Rank hints they have government customers. But their list of business partners includes some of the top commercial companies in Silicon Valley: Intel, Oracle, Ericsson, Joyent and Cisco Systems.

Like the other players in NV, M2Mi are not disclosing much beyond their proven and patented technology.

Geoff Brown, M2Mi CEO is known among the Silicon Valley NV pundits. He is an organizer of the Network &; Infrastructure Meetup and he is member of many other Meetup groups in the Valley

Last year he wrote on Cloud Computing Google group:

Quite simply put, we address a significant market pull arising from the requirement to ... provide layered robust security services of which network provisioning is one element. I think it is fair to say that this area is complex, while customers want a simple to use, "cookie-cutter" solution.

Geoff sums up his company as follows:

From my perspective we established and now lead the growing field of Network Virtualization

An now what?

I agree that (1) NV is not a "cookie-cutter" solution, (2) that the solution must blend NV with the Cloud Data Center Virtualization and (3) the security must be near military grade. The market is HUGE and we can not wait to see a proof from analysts.

By the time the analysts (Gartner, IDC, Forrester and the others) will create the taxonomy of the NV market and estimate its size, it will be too late. The treasure will be shared by early players. Like in any poker game, some players bluff, and all keep their cards away from prying eyes.

M2Mi appears to have a proven, albeit complex solution. Nicira has the top names backing and promoting it, but we are promised results "in the next few months", a time frame continuously sliding so far. M2Mi is here, now, with millions of users worldwide.

IT Brand Pulse group conducted a survey of IT professionals by the end of 2010. The respondents were asked which vendors they perceived as the leader in 6 categories for Network Virtualization(market, price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation). Here are the results.

Cisco, VMware and HP appear as leaders in the IT community from a year ago. Brocade, Emulex, Force 10, Huawei, IBM, Juniper, Oracle/Sun are also listed.

They will the prime candidates to acquire any of the startups described in this blog. They have the power to collect the revenues from he market defined as "bigger than Cisco, Juniper, Comcast and ATT combined!*"

All companies from the NV Market Leader chart above, have a huge installed base, their customers are expecting them to deliver the NV, but they have not the technology in house. They must acquire it from outside startups.

Each of the companies must also discover one or a few individuals - outside engineering and product management as it is done in large corporation, - who will create that "I want it, I need it" public perception, in every data center in the world.

We don't call them geniuses, because this will belittle the many capable people in our industry. But they are very special people who are "knocking at the Heaven door".

Will Betterness Work?

2012-01-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

Umair Haque Beterness Manifesto is one of the most influential document published in 2011. Below are three essential quotes. They are designed as a remedy to the malaise we observe mainly in US economy and psyche. Summarizing the quote, betterness implies:

We are the freest people in history. It time to use our freedom
We are worthy and we have talent. Start a new company or find a better one, rather than wasting your life in "organizations that misallocate it, underutilize it"
Over the next decade, the businesses that can't do better, the ones you're giving your talent away to, are to go extinct anyway. Cut the cord now, before the axe falls and cuts it for you.
Stop living somewhere where you're forced to, like it's groundhog day

This is what will bring us betterness. But how is this applicable to people living in North Korea? They will read the four bullets of advise above, as if applicable to people living on the moons.

Perhaps everyone agree that this is a problem in North Korea, but what about most of Europe? Even United Kingdom, the civilization that created the democratic institutions as we know them today, people are happy to be underutilized as long as they have a job security and small town values preserved. And regarding point #4, no one really wants to live anywhere else.

Why Umair Haque - himself a member to the world top 50 thinkers award recipients in 2011 - met much more adoption in US than England? The two countries have a long time peculiar relationship. The British supply original ideas and individual brains of historic significance (e.g. Darwin, Lord Keynes, or the Rolling Stones) but US is the place where these ideas not only become reality, but blossom.

Here is the paradox: betterness, designed to revitalize talents and prosperity everywhere, will distance US from the rest of the world and maintain the advantage US economy has when producing iconic brands like Apple, Google, Facebook and tomorrow many more. One can not create iconic brands without tolerance to risk and freedom.

Therefore the betterness will create even a wider gap between North America and the rest of the world, with exception of a few countries (Israel is one of them). Betterness will create inequality.

Inside US itself, the Silicon Valley mentality dominates only in isolated spots. And nearly 90% of American employees simply lack the desire, never mind the guts, to leave a 20th century corporation that assures them a salary month to month while the lifetime employment is nothing but an illusion that can be shattered at any given moment.

For those talented and extremely gifted, there is always a the option to open offices in US and operate from Silicon Valley. You can not wait for ever for the political system to change in your country. You can not wait for ever to see deeply ingrained suppressing mentalities (like the caste system in India) to disappear over night.

This where I try to help.

Excerpts:

“Real change doesn’t begin with governments, presidents, or prime ministers. It begins with each of us. In the 20th century, never-ending mass-marketing, monopoly, and mega-politics came together to convince us, each and every one, that we’re not really free: just free enough to choose between different flavors of the same old toxic junk. It was a trick, a ploy, a television hallucination. We’re the freest people in history. It’s time to use it like we meant it."
"You're worth something. Stop giving your talent away to organizations that misallocate it, underutilize it, and possibly even abuse it. If you're doing something meaningless, quit. Betterness can't happen if you're spending your life churning out toxic junk. It can only happen when more meaningful work is done. Find a company that's better. Better yet, start one. No, it's not easy. But here's the thing: over the next decade, the businesses that can't do better, the ones you're giving your talent away to, are to go extinct anyway. Cut the cord now, before the axe falls and cuts it for you."
" If you're living somewhere meaningless, move. Exurban sprawl, mega-highways, big-box stores: that was the American Dream in the 20th century. In the 21st, it's closer to the awesome Richard Florida's dream of thriving, tightly-connected communities, that make up vibrant cities. Living somewhere where you're forced to, like it's groundhog day, hit the same old big, lame, toxic businesses, over and over again? Those places and spaces were built to support an industrial economy. Today, they're a barrier to letting it crumble and fall. Move somewhere where there's a local community made up of passionate, talented people, a community you can nurture and that nurtures you. It just might be good for your soul."

— The Betterness Manifesto by Umair Haque

Galati Flower Mill, aka Moara Bros. Aronovici

2012-01-01T17:51:00.000-08:00

Moara Galatilor, built by my father in 1945, confiscated by communists,as it looks at April 2011 bit.ly/vT0yGA
— Miha Ahronovitz (@myinnervoice) January 2, 2012

Moara Galatilor in 1948. Note the name Bros D & A Aronovici
and the sign IFA (Intreprinderea Fratii Aronovici) The Aronovici Bros Enterprise

Moara Galatilor in 2011 April. Bros Aronovici name was removed

April 2011: A dog takes care of the the run down flour mill

2012: Tell the status quo to go to hell

2012-01-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

Umair Haque'- one of the top 50 thinkers of 2011 in Mastering the Art of Living Well advises younger people what to do to contribute to the "betterness".

Do not study so you can be a faithful, loyal, unquestioning "employee" with the commoditized, routinized analytical skills to get the (yawn, shrug, eye-roll) neo-Fordist job done
Be a wholer person. What society has a shortage of living, breathing well-rounded humans; with a moral compass, an ethical core, a cosmopolitan sensibility, and a long view born of historicism
Without a refined, honed, expansive sense of what great accomplishment is, you stand little to no chance of ever pushing past its boundaries yourself.
Your youth should be spent pursuing your passion — not just slightly, tremulously, haltingly, but unrelentingly, with a vengeance, to the max and then beyond.
Dream laughably big
If your quest is mediocrity, then sure, master the skills of shuffling Powerpoint decks, but if your quest, on the other hand, is something resembling excellence, then the meta-skills of toppling the status quo — ambition, intention, rebellion, perseverance, humanity, empathy — are going to count for more, and the sooner you get started, the better off you'll be
When you fail, and fail big — forgive
Mistakes aren't the end of the world, but the beginning of wisdom — and firmly step forward into possibility.

The status quo is no way near prosperity: dying metropolises, battered exurbs, mass unemployment, nail-biting fear of the future, plutocracy and protest, the crumbling ruins of empire
So map the horizons of your own journey, and, when the status-quo tells you it can't be done, tell the status-quo to go to hell

Happy New Year 2012 Steve Jobs' revelation

2011-12-26T18:13:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year 2012

From the December 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review, Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chef writes

The death of Steve Jobs sure got people thinking... His passing prompted fascinating debates about everything, from the role of a CEO, to the art of innovation, to the perils of succession, to the very purpose of a corporation.

A scientific ranking of world's best CEO based on total shareholder return ... concluded in 2010 that Jobs was world's number one CEO.

Joan Magretta blogs also in HBR Stop Competing to Be the Best says there is no such thing as the best

What's your organization's underlying model of how competition works? It's a question well worth asking. If "best" is your model, you will follow the herd.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand is un-followable for a lack of a better word. Mona Simpson, Steve'sister, described the character inspired by Job in her fiction book A Regular Guy, in 1996 as "unable to pander to the wishes or whims of other people."

If Harvard Business School, the Sanhedrin of the business culture , - the laical religion of our times - says "we have to look in the very purpose of the corporation", it means many radical changes are ahead.

Many Core Processors. Challenges

2011-12-18T14:23:00.000-08:00

Here is an interview with Nazneen Shaikh, the CEO of Sanctum Networks

Q: What are the main challenges to many core adoption?

A: Todays' applications are not designed for Multi-core parallel processing and there is a only a small number of skilled programmers, while training takes a significant time.There is lack of migration and development tools, and the tools today are not efficient

Q: What about customer demand?

A: The demand is huge, but is tempered by customer skepticism. They think the present software are not yet ready for heterogeneous clusters involving many-core

Q: What do we need to create an ecosystem for migrating and c developing apps for many cores?

A:We need answers to many questions. We need to clarify what is the the right programming model, and how the new development tools should be like. Shall we use multi-processing, but how this compares to core level pipelines? we need to decide among automatic vs manual partitions. We need to design a run time management layer.

Q: So how can we implement a many core system today?

A; We offer customized hardware-aware computing solutions. We do code optimization. we have a significant heterogeneous parallel environment expertise. We can do many-core clouds for specialized applications, like Facebook and perhaps Zynga and Twitter are implementing

Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform, part 2

2011-12-08T10:24:00.001-08:00

Summary:

Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform (FGCP) should be a completely separate entity, ideally based on Silicon Valley. They should have total freedom from Fujitsu corporate rules and even culture. They will compete, not only against AWS, RackSpace, and all other public cloud players. They will also compete against Fujitsu own private cloud and hybrid cloud offering. Read on to see why

Apple's first marketing plan

Steve Jobs' biography, mentions Apple's first marketing plan. I wonder how this plan could be applied to Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform (FGCP). It is an intellectual exercise, because Fujitsu is not Apple, is not a company originated on Silicon Valley. Fujitsu is a solid multinational corporation with an ingrained conservative culture.. However Japan has demonstrated an unusual capacity to emulate and exceed versions of products invented elsewhere. The commercial cloud was invented in US, but Fujitsu may soon compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

I said "may" but right now, FGPS is no match for AWS. Here are my thoughts. The three bullet Apple Marketing plan devised when Steve was 24 years old is shown here

Empathy. To understand Fujitsu's customer needs better than any other company

Empathy is feeling happy or sad because someone else feels happy or sad, it is experiencing and/or sharing another’s emotions. This is a very simple definition, that assumes Fujitsu's knows what makes happy the users and customers in North America, which is slightly different from the users in Japan, Central Europe or Singapore. What the tweeters from Part 1 of this blog entry show, in North America there is no empathy.

Traditionally product development is based on Market Research Documents (MRD), Product Requirements Documents (PRD) or the latest Agile Development are invitations for committee work , compromises, hierarchical opinions imposed top down (meaning from the people who know less to the people in contact with customers) that breed mediocrity.

Even if Fujitsu has not a Steve Jobs equivalent, one thing we learn is that one person with the right intuition knows better than the customers themselves. This is true even more in Cloud Computing, where most suspects leads, will become prospects the moment they learn what cloud computing is - in Fujitsu version - , why is it better than other offerings and how easy is to start & rip the benefits they are told will come later.

To achieve this, Fujitsu needs an independent FGCP decision maker, with authority, to make quick changes, see what it works, and what not, and filter out all bad while keeping all good

Focus. Eliminate all unimportant opportunities

As result of multiple departments, Fujitsu offers all sorts of cloud initiatives, sometime competing one with another. Fujitsu offers Fujitsu Hybrid Cloud Services based on Microsoft Azure private cloud, and all sorts of studies on Cloud TCO (total cost of ownership), when TCO is not the measurement of a success in the cloud, the Return on Investment (ROI) is. Visiting Fujitsu web site there is constant confusion between public clouds , private clouds and public clouds, with offerings for all three. Also there is an offer for a program that takes TWO WEEKS (yes, two weeks) to determine the cloud road map of an enterprise customer.

Impute: People form an opinion about a company

Apple wording: "If we present things in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod. If we present them in a creative, professional manner, , we IMPUTE the desired qualities

This is perhaps the biggest drawback of FGCP. Just look how Apple describes iCloud .The readers see What is a Cloud , How to build the cloud in your applications and a video demo.

Even Amazon Web Services home page looks much better - although I am not a great fan of AWS user friendliness

Being professional means being clear. Being clear means knowing what one is doing, and, in turn the customers and each user know what they are doing and why. At this stage Fujitsu does not impute the desired qualities.Their offering reading is confusing. The FAQ of FGCP does not help the user understand how to solve its' own problems; it is a litany of confessions from Fujitsu of what does not work and users should not attempt.

Fujitsu is absorbed into itself. It has no empathy for the potential users, at least in North America. But this is something that can be corrected. It should fascinating to be part of a US Silicon Valley centered team that does this creative corrections and transforms Fujitsu into all it can be.

The bottom lines

The latter require a steep learning curve inside an enterprise, which must reinvent the wheel and acquire a know how on how to operate the IT and their Data Centers as private clouds. The FGCP already does all the work for the customers / users and the ease of use must be their 1st priority. The FGCP group will use heavily teh social networks to promote services, ask for for feedback, respond to feedback. Their success in US will propagate with the speed of light in other parts of the world and complement the local experience, making FGCP truly global, as the name implies.

Fujitsu Global Cloud needs improvement.

2011-12-06T03:14:00.001-08:00

Here are some of the tweets commenting Fujitsu launch

Service Portal - FAQs OMG, This is a huge bugs documentation!!! It does not work on W7 IE9 and so on bit.ly/uYcHVe

Bravo! #iaas #cloud Fujitsu takes on AWS Global cloud Servicesbit.ly/tgsE8j. But why using IE 7 or 8 is a pre-condition?

#iaas #fujitsu offers a trusted (IaaS), private hosted IaaS, on-premises private cloud options, PaaS and Hybrid Cloud.bit.ly/tT6ReB

@khazret_sapenov @cloudpundit kaizen is a mechanical process made for "by committee" product development. Fujitsu lacks Jobs or Bezos@cloudpundit @khazret_sapenov "Fujitsu ... to embrace the cloud. Clearly biz direction". We laughed at Toyota cars 40 yrs ago.

@cloudpundit @khazret_sapenov the Fujitsu cloud seems implemented top-down by engineers who are tasked to do that

@myinnervoice @cloudpundit visionary is good for yet undiscovered opportunities, while here fujitsu's product development & marketing failed

@myinnervoice @cloudpundit fujitsu may need to borrow Toyota's kaizen (continuous improvement) to make proper cloud in less than 40 years

@khazret_sapenov @myinnervoice Fujitsu and the other data center outsourcers have no choice but to embrace the cloud. Clearly biz direction.

@cloudpundit @myinnervoice seems as fujitsu's pre-historic 'me too' approach to jump on cloud bandwagon. I was shocked to see this back then

@myinnervoice It's like Fujitsu is saying "Our developers only use antique machines and can't get nice things to test with."

@myinnervoice Fujitsu wacky "I have never been involved in developing arms" problematic for those who have worked in the defense industry.

The quest for a cloud using Many-Core processors

2011-11-26T12:51:00.001-08:00

Just as we learned the cloud is SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, our minds were geared into the desktop / servers processors produced by Intel and AMD mostly. The many virtualization packages declared themselves cloud, in reality facilitated the management of resources, but virtualization by itself does no management whatsoever.

In June 2011, Tilera unveiled the "Cloud Computing Processor"

TILE-Gx™ 3000 processor family specifically designed for today’s most common cloud computing applications. Co-developed with some of the world’s largest Internet brands, the TILE-Gx 3000 processors are optimized for cloud datacenters.

Although Tilera does not name these "world's largest Internet Brands", we know Facebook is one of them. The reference is Facebook Sides With Tilera in The Server Architecture Debate. Quote

Low-power many-core processors are well suited to KV- store workloads with large amounts of data. Despite their low clock speeds, these architectures can perform on-par or better than comparably powered low-core-count x86 server processors. Our experiments show that a tuned version of Memcached on the 64-core Tilera TILEPro64 can yield at least 67% higher throughput than low-power x86 servers at comparable latency. When taking power and node integration into account as well, a TILEPro64-based S2Q server with 8 processors handles at least three times as many transactions per second per Watt as the x86-based servers with the same memory footprint.

As this is not already mind boggling, Tilera and Adpateva have strikingly similar many core architectures able to reach 4096 cores per processor. Yes you read well. In about two years, 245 processors will create a 1 million cores cloud, with a power consumption at a fractions of the behemoth supercomputer today

Here is Adapteva Epiphany CPU

And here is Tilera Tile-Gx CPU

They look quite similar, don't they? Quote

Tilera's iMesh™ on-chip network. Each tile is a complete full-featured processor, including integrated L1 and L2 cache and a non-blocking switch that connects the tile into the mesh. This means that each tile can independently run a full operating system, or multiple tiles taken together can run a multi-processing operating system like SMP Linux.

The primary markets for the Epiphany multicore architecture include: (1) Smartphone applications such as real time facial recognition, speech recognition, translation, and augmented reality. (2) Next generation supercomputers requiring drastically better energy efficiency to allow systems to scale to exaflop computing levels. (3) Floating point acceleration in embedded systems based on field-programmable gate array architectures.

This is ambitious. Adapteva name comes from Hebrew and it To adapt to Nature This has both a poetic and visionary connotation.

This technology is great, but there is a revolution in the way we write applications. Zynga and Twitter are also attracted by Tilera architecture and hiring software engineers to make their apps optimized..

A lack of supporting ecosystem, applications and proven tools around Tilera are a challenge.Tilera must encourage and create a new breed of agile and smart multi-core programming experts to facilitate the mass adoption of Tilera. Performance however requires a bridge to migrate from the mediocre X86 to many-core computers.

Soon, the cloud as we know it, will be history. So will be the virtualization software in it's present day incarnation. The cloud many-core may take over, which eventually may fit in one or two racks

The quest for a cloud

2011-11-24T17:06:00.001-08:00

I can't get no satisfaction

'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try

I can't get no, I can't get no

When I'm drivin' in my car

And the man comes on the radio

He's tellin' me more and more

About some useless information

Supposed to drive my imagination

I can't get no, oh no, no, no

Hey, hey, hey, that's what I say

A personal look: Super Computing 2011

2011-11-20T07:42:00.001-08:00

Here is aquote from my blog about 2009 Super Computing conference commenting on thepurpose of the TOP500 list

So what? Many people ask this question today. "Sowhat?" The business model this list promotes brought the bankruptcy ofSGI, Thinking Machines, Cray Research, SiCortex and many who designedsupercomputers based on one criteria: to pass a LINPACK test. This wasoriginally introduced in 1979, 30 years ago. It tests the floating point andlittle more. LINPACK tells nothing of how easy is to solve complex problemswith a given supercomputer.
Sure Science and Defense need these supercomputers. Theyalways did. However, once one developed such a winner, it was difficult, if notimpossible to sell it to a commercial entity, who also needs these powerfulcomputers, but they must make money from the investment

What you see about is this year TOP500 winner, Riken K computer

As of the November 2011 TOP500 list, the K computer uses 88,128 2.0GHz 8-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors packed in 864 cabinets, for a total of 705,024 cores, manufactured by Fujitsu with 45 nm CMOS technology. Each cabinet contains 96 compute nodes in addition to 6 IO nodes. Each compute node contains a single processor and 16 GB of memory. The computer's water cooling system minimizes failure rate and power consumption.

As it is today, the computer uses power as ten thousands suburban homes and the water cooling reduces the failure rate, but there is no word about what the real number is. For the next year the plan is to double the number of cabinets to nearly two thousands and probably the power consumption will reach the equivalent of twenty thousands homes.

In this spirit, I wonder whether the SC11 is not a the equivalent of TOP500 pharonic pyramides. We live in the green era, yet SC11TOP 500 lives in the ancient history mentality. Here are the slides: the most interesting is the power consumption on slide 34, projected to grow with the steepest gradient for the Top 10 supercomputers

Top500 11/2011 BOF Slides

Whereas most computer shows are for meeting more customers, SC11 has no clear purpose. While I was there, I had to read on line what is going on. No one can see or witness it all. I think SC11 is all about to show off what humans can do with unlimited financial resources.

The huge booth of the Government Agencies on level 4 of the show, all paid with taxpayer money, explains why Mitt Romney (would be 2012 presidential aspirant) wants to eliminate the departments of Education and Energy.

We were lucky Mitt Romney did not attend SC11. Department of Energy must continue to exist, but they can not control the specs of their procurement, simply because they have the money. I sincerely hope Fujitsu will survive and grow and not meet the fate of Thinking Machine and Cray Research.

Is Steve Jobs a Syrian - American?

2011-11-19T23:03:00.001-08:00

Since the name of his biological father was revealed as Abdulfattah “John” Jandali , Jobs is called a Syrian American. But Jandalli only learned that Jobs was his son “around 2005,” His first attempt at contacting Jobs came only in the last year, with casual e-mails.

But who are the most famous Syrian Americans? Wikipedia writes:

The overwhelming majority of Syrian immigrants to the US from 1880 to 1960 were Christian, a minority were Jewish, whereas Muslim Syrians arrived in the United States chiefly after 1965. According to the United States 2000 Census, there were 142,897 Americans of Syrian ancestry, about 12% of the Arab population in the United States.

How can Steve Jobs, - who never heard a word of Arab in his family, grew up in a Christian non-observant family and became a Buddhist - can be a Syrian American? Well it can. The list of Syrian Americans includes Jerry Seinfeld, whose father was a Hungarian Jew and the mother a Syrian Jew, Paula Abdul, also Jewish with family roots from Syria or singer Paul Anka, who is born in Ottawa his parents are of Syrian descent. He sang with the St. Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church as a child.

By the same token, my wife is born in Israel in a Jewish family originating in Aleppo Syria. If Steve Jobs is a Syrian American, so my daughter and son fully qualify for this label

Steve Jobs and the touch of ruthlessness

2011-11-12T22:19:00.001-08:00

In The Razor Edge, W. Sommerset Maugham writes about the character Larry: “Larry lacks just that touch of ruthlessness that even the saint must have to win his halo.”

That "touch of ruthlessness" is all over the biography of Steve Jobs, We transformed him in a new God. Steve's talents and achievements are blended with this ruthlessness he must have "to win his halo", This is obvious from the book of Isaacson, Commented by Steven Shankland

It would have been impossible, of course, to overlook Jobs' temper, his impatience, his brutal treatment of co-workers, his callous treatment of his first child, and his unforgiving separation of the world's population into A-team gods in the one corner and shitheads and bozos in the other.

Isaacson, while opining that the "nasty edge to his personality was not necessary," more often presents Jobs' harshness as effective. "Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible," Isaacson wrote.

Steve Jobs friendship with Larry Ellison, who never created any product, never was a Buddhist, or vegetarian and coolly decimated up to 60% of the companies he acquired. He is the darling of Wall Street, this institution that is blamed for our economic misfortune by demonstrators all over the world

Everyone says Steve Jobs life will create a new model for the new entrepreneurs

It's not clear whether Jobs could have left a legacy that was more humanitarian--a sequel, perhaps, to the HP Way that Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard established at Hewlett-Packard, a company that Jobs admired. It is clear, though, that Jobs couldn't be bothered to behave otherwise

Does it mean, in order to become a superhero entrepreneur, one has to become a super-jerk. It is happening already at Twitter See Interview: Bill Gross Talks About Twitter’s Clampdown

Where is the Eudaimonic prosperity Umair Haque from Harvard U preaches? The Steve Jobs emulators have plenty of reasons to become obnoxious and moody, it is the license one gets for being a millionaire, adulated by masses of techno-crazed fans. And Silicon Valley will attach creativity with petty dictatorships licenses in order to create high tech employment.

Tweets on Cloud Expo 2011 West, Santa Clara

2011-11-12T01:05:00.001-08:00

Here are the tweets I selected to summarize what I have seen

inetu INetU So what's the biggest thing everyone learned at#CloudExpo?

myinnervoice Miha Ahronovitz #cloudexpo most exhibitors arehosting services companies posing as cloud. They charge fixed subs

myinnervoice Miha Ahronovitz CEO Power Panel #cloudexpo.Only Mårten Mickos Eucalyptus & Lawrence Guillory @Racemi made sense.

myinnervoice Miha Ahronovitz #cloudexpo No Google, no AWS,no Yahoo, no Joyent, no IBM well, yes Platform), no Univa

myinnervoice Miha Ahronovitz How to become a cloud company?Go to #cloudexpo, rent a booth, display whatever you have on a monitor, and say"This is our cloud offering"

khazret_sapenov Khazret Sapenov @myinnervoice :) perhapssame applies to big data company?

myinnervoice Miha Ahronovitz #cloudexpo Many interestingpeople have no booth

myinnervoice Miha Ahronovitz @CloudExpo #Oracle PublicCloud, they show the web site cloud.oracle.com/mycloud/f?p=se… Nothing is live.

sec_prof Phil Cox My quick thought on my first #CloudExpowp.me/p1R2Cx-d #NotGoingToBeVeryPopular

myinnervoice Miha Ahronovitz "Tech entrepreneurs wouldbe out of their minds to build out their own data centers rather than rentingcapacity" gigaom.com/2011/11/10/ari…

Proto-clouds

2011-10-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

The definition of a cloud is very simple:

1. On demand computing i.e. the ability to get a resource when I need it in matters of minutes.
2. Pay-per use i.e. the ability to pay only for what I use.
Therest is implementation detail. From an end user perspective it doesn'tmatter that much if I can get the above value from an internal orexternal cloud.

If the cloud is a box, and I don't know what's inside as long as final result is delivering (1) and (2), we call this cloud. Everybody assumes all has to be automated by code. Ideally, yes. But in HPC and EDA (Electronic Design Automation) we still need a human intervention to detect bottlenecks and fix them. As a result, the performance literally explodes. There is not yet an automated way to achieve the same result in high end computing.

Some people think if an EDA application runs on AWS, this is a cloud and this MUST be good. It may be a cloud, but this is NOT the only one way of delivering the (1) and (2) from the definition above, and the tools Amazon Web Services offers can not match the performance of a specially build intensive, purpose-build computational farms.

The nature of compute intensive loads does not lenditself to an automatic elastic resource feature, which define a cloud. Wedo not know if a performance bottleneck is due to insufficient numbers oflicenses, or for lack of additional servers, and which servers in the clusterwill solve best the bottleneck. There are tools but we need humanintervention.” The commercial distributed resource management software can easily provide historical resources for billing.

A proto-cloud (my terminology) delivers now when compared to AWS EDA limited cloud implementations.

Perhaps purists are disappointed. But the customers want the fastest time to market.They can not afford to wait for that pure cloud.

My view: OOW11, San Francisco October 2011

2011-10-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

Excel4Apps

Brian Grossweiler from Excel4Apps talks about the most interesting product I saw at Oracle Open World. I do not know how much you know about Oracle 11i or R12, which compete with other dinosaurs like SAP 4.7, ERP 2004/ECC 5.0 or ERP 2005/ECC 6.0. I know nothing about them and probably the poor people working in the Finance Departments of the mega-companies using these software don't know either.

So somebody had to do a simple tool, like GL Wand, which takes out the information one really needs from the jungle of this user-unfriendly large applications and create a simple table where people can actually use, interpret and understand. See a demo here. While you listen to the demo, you will notice a charming South-African accent, which is where this company originated, before declaring itself Australian and recently opened an office in US.

Don't be fooled by the small booth these guys have at OOW11. Without GL Wand, you can not manage what you have. Excel was commissioned by Steve to Bill Gates - when he was still struggling - because Apple OS could not run Lotus 123.

I walk to the large Oracle Fusion collective boot at the end of the exhibition hall. No Oracle employee is allowed to give an interview as they need multiple approvals to do so, from people who are seldom there. I did not understand why all those disparate products are called Fusion. My own interpretation is maybe because they will be available real time as part of the newly announced Oracle Cloud.

I read the The Story Behind Oracle Fusion Applications’ Extraordinary User Experience and I learned. User Experience is something Oracle got from the acquisition of PeopleSoft and decided to keep. You can research Oracle web site ups and down, but you never know what user experience is in Oracle's meaning.

Here is my take: I sit in front of a special terminal. It has lights and camera. "The terminal is made by a company in Switzerland", said the kind Oracle engineer. It measures my eye movement. Like a visit to the optometrist, I am asked to look left, right, up and down. Then, I am shown some web interfaces.

After many trials, I realize I look mostly in the upper left side and very seldom to lower left of the screen. I see maps with my attention area and then maps with attention areas of everyone else who was tested. They look similar my maps. It seems the entire world looks at the upper left side and not the lower right side. So - I thought to myself, - one should place all it matters in the higher left corner of the screen

Maybe not a coincidence, but the web site I was looking at was a Human Resources application. I saw each sales person graphed on many dimensions, beside revenues. Assume we do a better HR design, I can take decision of who is promoted or demoted simply by looking to the computer?

For Oracle, this a very new and praiseworthy initiative, but how much revenues the tool will produce? One of the hardest points to make it in companies like SAP and Oracle is to say that you generate indirectly the revenues. I expect a push for a new business model for usability.

With a tent between South and North pavilions, Moscone looked like a Circus. I can see the faint demonstration in support for Benioff banned keynote, which delighted the media. You could buy Lenovo Laptops at a special Oracle World discount And have your photo taken on the cover of National Geographic Magazine.

I left early to enjoy the real San Francisco in Starbucks on California Ave. just next Joyent's head office.

EDA clouds?

2011-09-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Resource management has been around since clusters started in production, and even earlier in main-frames. There is something that it should happen in a cloud, invisible for the user, but in resource intensive applications this a different discipline and know-how. Grid computing, the predecessor cloud computing, could not exist without a resource manager. Runtime Design Automation, (RTDA), a 16 year old privately held company from Santa Clara California, explains:

Our products are designed to help you get the most of your resources, whether they be computing hardware or expensive software licenses. Our goal is to maximize your efficiency while reducing waste.

RTDA has a workload scheduler, NetworkComputer™ at least as good as Grid Engine from Univa and Oracle or LSF from Platform Computing, but it is much simpler to use. In addition to NetworkComputer™, RTDA offer three more complementary products.

FlowTracer automated the design flow. In real life, all resource managers handle "jobs" a single piece of work which is part of a design flow process normally done with scripts or GNU Make. FlowTracer can speed up ten times the design cycles
WorkloadAnalyzer™ : Workload Automation Simulator.
Taking a job scheduler's workload (NetworkComputer™, LSF™) along with the configuration of the compute farm (hardware & software resources) as input, a workload simulation can uncover advanced analytics of a particular compute farm configuration.
LicenseMonitor™ : Monitor Software License Utilization

The last product is perhaps the main reason why resource managers still exists. Prices in hardware and networking dropped drastically, but the design automation, like EDA (Electronic Design Automation) have licenses costing in six digits per year per user and seven digits per year for entire design teams

The entire EDA industry was not ready for applying the concept of Cloud Computing in resource managers, because of the silent opposition from large EDA ISVs whose business model was to make money from few expensive licenses and not many more lower cost licenses priced as utility.. Univa has a cluster creation using Grid Engine with RightScale. LSF advertises the intelligent scheduling, which is a me-too feature of WorkloadAnalyzer™

The company does not do marketing on ongoing basis. The word of mouth generated a worldwide customer base. The company has offices in Europe, Israel, Japan. Resource management is not a growing market, largely because the high cost of licensing prevents the widening of the market. LSF has campaign to replace Grid Engine, while Univa has a program to replace LSF , Grid Engine Open Source and Oracle Grid Engine

RTDA does not try to replace anyone. They have hooks to utilize all other resources managers as add-ons with FlowTracer or Workload Analyzer. Whereas both Univa and Platform call their products cloud, RTDA does not claim this.

The need of a cloud in EDA is an ongoing effort and Synopsis published a white paper on this, very convincing that this is the next step to go. You can download it from here (requires registration). Synopsis even implemented a verification AWS cloud solution.

This online service is not for everyone. As Synopsys stated in their White Paper:

Rapidly increasing gate size and complexity in the ASIC/SoC industry has fueled an exponential growth in verification demands. Unfortunately, server technology has failed to deliver the performance increases necessary to keep up. A few years ago, for example, a directed test simulation at the register transfer level (RTL) on a 10-million ASIC gate design with a 10Hz clock targeted to operate at 1GHz required 100,000,000 seconds, or 1,157 days (3.1 years) to simulate one second’s worth of real-time operation. Things really slowed down when the rest of the system and software were added. Gate-level simulation on the same design would be an order of magnitude slower.

Moreover "Even if computers today were doubling in performance every year, they still could not keep up with this exponential verification gap"

Even companies that can afford large server farms and the best verification technology face a major challenge, namely the variability of verification workload. Typically, the earliest stages of verification focus on individual blocks and subsystems, which are relatively small compared to the entire project. The server farm works at optimal capacity and even test queues are manageable. But as noted above, performance of individual tests drops precipitously as multiple subsystems are integrated and the project transitions to full ASIC and eventually system-level simulation. Individual tests are then lengthy, and queues grow large. Only through careful project planning and an advanced verification methodology can the project complete on time with a reasonable level of confidence that the design will work.

What Happens with Netflix?

2011-09-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

This is whateveryone sees: Netflixhas fewer subscribers, plummeting stock price They lost bigmoney in the 1997 to 2002,, but since 2003 , they shot up with spectacularprofits year after year. There was a roller coaster from about $20 a share to $250in 2011 first half a cool drop to $155in just weeks after September 1, 2011.

The challenge is how Netflix will stop the share price drop? Is it stoppable?

I have manyfriends and acquaintances in Netflix. I see them in meet-ups, at Structure 2011 show. They are rather inebriated with success, and techie talks by Adrian Cockcroft canattracts more than 600 people. They love the rock-star metaphor; after all theyinvented the movie streaming technology, running on AWS, when Amazon was neverdesigned with this end in mind

The other dayan executive from Online.com explained me their business: “We stream games asNetflix streams movie” . Netflix created the standard for streaming somethingover the Internet. It is an impressive technology. Everything they do haslogic, like A/B and Hadoop testing to determine the taste of the subscribers.

Buttechnology can not make successful a movie streaming service. People see moviesand they don’t give a damn about the science behind. A crap movie seenin 3D it is still a crap movie. A crap movie with clear reception no one willorder anyway.

This is myexperience, as I had the most expensive subscription to Netflix, as movie buff. The Blue-Ray DVD mailings deteriorated. This is what Netflix did best in thefirst years. Many DVD came broken or scratched, as the focus on streaming heightened . Onereturned DVD get lost in the system, and I could not order DVDs for months in arow. Finally I gave up and I subscribed for streaming movies only.

I like havingaccess to foreign movies, like French, but I am atypical in America. No more reallynew releases on Netflix streaming. For example Woody Allen “Vicky CristinaBarcelona” is available from Netflix only via DVD, but Amazon has it for instantvideo Sure it is more expensive per movie on Amazon, but it offers aninstant gratification. Even old classics, like Casablanca, one must order a DVDin Netflix

IMHO #1, Netflix can emulate Amazon and offer all recentvideo released titles at individual prices for instant streaming. They canoffer “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” as instant video and charge a nominal fee. Thecustomers who do not want to pay, still have the option of one DVD a month.

I am gratefulthat Netflix has a great collection of Indie movies, like Arranged. But one cannot see up to date releases of French, English,German and East European movies. The horror movie from Romania “Strigoi.The Undead” is on Amazon, but not available at all on Netflix.

Most annoyingis the lack of captioning on Netflix’s streamed video. Cohen brothers True Grit where all characters mutter an indistinguishable words in a thick, over-exaggerated Texan accent, must havecaptions even for my native English daughter.

IMHO #2 Pleaseadd option to see recent video releases in Europe and charge for it in US necessary.Different markets will pay different prices

IMHO #3Please add captions to all streamed movies. Charge 50 cents to 99 cents more,if required

IMHO #4. Refine your Hadoop clever algorithms, as theyare just a machine, and just code. They can lead to inaccurate (not to saystupid) conclusions. As my son anddaughter use the account, their go into the Cassandra Data base and. I get asrecommendations to see Power Rangers,Thomas the Train Engine or Princess Diaries

Success isnot rooted in the technology. Success is rooted in the people desires to payfor entertainment delivered in their homes. Once the streaming technology hasbeen developed, and here Netflix has a big merit, it becomes like generic drug.Anybody can use it at lower and lower costs. It is no longer a differentiator. The content and pricing ofthe content are the differentiators now.

Can Netflixmake it? If they focus to hire more carbon-copy engineers, selected by the existing engineers who believe in the God of noSQLdata bases and to a lesser degree in God, they willnot make it.

And anotheridea I promote for few years, Netflix must seek an alternative to AWS public data center model. Speakingabout online.com, the have their own servers in co-located Data Centers all over the world, and this waythey can stream games

As Netflix likes to quote, there is no certitude, there are only opportunities Netflixwill react. I hope with humility, as without humility, one looses thegift of prophecy

Net Promoter Score For four Cloud IaaS providers. Joyent has highest score

2011-08-11T12:35:00.000-07:00

For four cloud IaaS Providers, see here the ranking as of today August 11, 2011With very data, Joyent got the maximum score of 100%, followed by AWS and CloudSigma 50% and RackSpace 40%

The following text is from Net Promoter Official Site and it is quoted here for easy reference:

NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company's customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By asking one simple question — How likely is it that you would recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague? — you can track these groups and get a clear measure of your company's performance through its customers' eyes. Customers respond on a 0-to-10 point rating scale and are categorized as follows:

Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

To calculate your company's Net Promoter Score (NPS), take the percentage of customers who are Promoters and subtract the percentage who are Detractors.

Please complete the two question survey on loyalty

2011-08-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

Would you recommend any of the cloud IaaS providers below? Use your direct experience or what you learned from people around you to reply. Just click the links. The survey takes 30 seconds to complete

Sokojikara and #fuckyouwashington on twitter

2011-07-24T22:28:00.000-07:00

There is a Japanese word: "sokojikara." When applied to US, it means a reserve power that allows it to overcome the inadequacies of its leaders and the foibles of its citizens.

The classic notion of American decline & a fading global power predicted since 1970's is the darling of conservative predicting a destructive immigration and string of "oy-vey" lamentations.

American Capitalism is constantly reforming has created enormous wealth & a pattern of upward mobility unprecedented in the world. Mr. Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner, and he is no ordinary middle of the road political commentator the same way Steve Jobs is NOT the common company man running a business.

This can-do attitude made this country and will continue to do so. Just read Mr. Kotnik readers' comments on http://amzn.to/fXXWej, to see the radical right and left in action.

An investment firm wrote on their home page: Sokojikara -- buy companies that they would be profitable even if an idiot were to run it… because someday one will.” http://crinvestmentadvisors.com/...

An IaaS company has a an average potential valuation of $2.2B each

2011-07-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

Derrick Harris from Gigaom Pro has an article restricted to subscribers from May 2011. The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

The article picks 50 companies as Cloud Innovators. It lists some exotic names like Nicira, still a stealth company and some well known names such as Dell, who signed a definitive agreement to acquire Force10 Networks, Inc. today, The latter has a long list of investors, twelve to be more precise.

Yet Force 10 was not listed among top 50 Cloud Innovators barely two months ago. It may be an oversight, yet it is impossible to produce lists without oversights.

On July 19, Gigaom published this graph, represented the number of objects stored in AWS S3 over the years

Quote: "Long story short: cloud computing usage is growing overall — at about 100 percent a year in the case of S3 — and AWS looks to be steering the ship for the time being."

Fair enough. What is means is that next year , Amazon will have 1 Trillion S3 Objects. (1 Trillion storage objects raises some other worries, but this is a different story)

Yet I like Gigaom discovery: Cloud is growing at 100% per year. Interesting, Force 10 did not do any storage, yet their function is key in the cloud constellation of companies.

Here is my thinking, a fusion into something tangible: making money.

If IaaS market will be $11B sales in 2013 (according to IDC) and we value the companies operating IaaS service , their total valuation will be $220B.

Assume that The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators are in reality 100 companies, to cover the oversights, the average potential value of each IaaS provider today is a mind boggling $2.2 Billion per company !!!

Yet most people do not see this potential. The smaller companies with very sound technologies are the best bet.. And the number can double, is Gigaom estimate of cloud computing growth is 100% for another year or two.
This is what my work as consultant and rainmaker is. To tell the fledgling, talented IaaS start-ups what I write above and be part of it.

Structure 2011. Interview with Miha Ahronovitz

2011-07-06T11:28:00.001-07:00

The videos is are located here or by clicking “Watch Now” on StructureConf.com. Then scroll to the CloudSigma interview, (stop when you see a big bald guy with green shirt )

Many thanks to Rich Brueckner from InsideHPC.com who placed this interview on youtube here. I used his code to embed it below.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Mr Vogels, AWS CTO at Structure 2011

2011-07-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Thus spoke Zarathustra: Cloud has nothing to do with technology, is defined by benefits.We said it for 4 years. Clouds have to do with business benefits. Sure we employ technologies, there no definition of the cloud that includes predefined technologies.

Clouds are a business proposition and no paying customer is attracted by elegant technology; Only by benefits: more agility, lower costs (of course lower costs)

Mr. Vogels is lending all the prestige of his title and company behind him, Amazon Web Services, to convey respectability to an idea Nati Shalom and I developed in 2009.

There are two main driving forces for Cloud-Computing:

1. On demand computing i.e. the ability to get a resource when I need it in matters of minutes.

2. Pay-per use i.e. the ability to pay only for what I use.

The rest is implementation detail.

Werner says those cloud drawings with a platform at the bottom & apps at the top are obsolete. The ecosystem is in.. Nati Shalom drew this two years ago, among many others contributors.
The exception is that an ecosystem applies not only to AWS, but to everyone in cloud computing.

One mantra AWS and its CTO repeats for years we do the heavy lifting for you This is not original. Psalm 55:22 says Cast your burden upon the LORD and He will sustain you. Amazon has a bit of Bible copyright issue, if they don't reveal their source. If they would, they will reveal their conviction that as far as cloud computing goes, they are God.

The most used word, I counted about 15 times in a 20 minutes speech, is Sophisticated . AWS, Werner said, always had the mission to deliver sophisticated applications or services in the cloud. Now they do it. They have increased the number of objects in S3 from 50B to 359B (wow). Oracle, SAP, Netflix, all have implemented incredible sophisticated application, with all components available in the cloud.You can store data in EU and US. If EU falls down, operate from US. If US fails down, operate from EU. AWS is colossal (it adds in 2011 daily as much infrastructure as it did in a the entire year 2000). It is so Sophisticated, that it needs specialized companies like Snaplogic to take them out of trouble & clients who with armies of engineers who make presentations of how they did it, that no one else among the mere mortals can replicate

Thus spoke Zarathustra:

At this point, I became dizzy: You can build sophisticated enterprise apps without making any modules in house. Just use AWS's modules.OK. But AWS' increasing sophistication adds exponential complexity. Bye, bye ease-of-use. The ease-of-use is replaced by the nightmare-to-use.

Mr. Werner talks of the new Spot Pricing and transparency of costs. He must be joking, of course. One needs a Ph.D to figure out the simple the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator

Then one must figure out the updates not included in the calculator and call Snaplogic to quote a price for their services.

Soon AWS will n become the SAP company of 2011 decade. SAP , just as Grid Computing, were great technologies, that collapsed under their own weight, unless they conserve the ease of use. They should hide all the complexity under some interfaces and human easy to use screens.

I spent at Structure an evening at Cloud Camp, these guys are refreshing. Many start-ups and established companies with something to say are part of it and they offer 90% of the services Mr. Werner hints at., cheaper simpler and more reliable. The rest of the 10% will stay with AWS because the are hooked so deeply that it will cost a fortune to change providers

They have yet to learn the that True Freedom is how cloud providers will develop "easier ways" to migrate to other clouds. There is false freedom: API. If we listed to Mr. Werner advise to build "sophisticated applications" using their modules and ecosystem, you are trapped for life.

If you have patience, listen to this historic speech embedded here for convenience and judge for yourselves.

gigaomstructure on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

How to distinguish the real cloud, from a fake cloud

2011-05-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

So rather than talking, this is cloud, this not cloud, this meets NIST definition, or this does not mean NIST definition, let see how cloud and SaaS empowered business to make more money than before.

This reminds me of the Madison Square Garden concert of Lady Gaga. It's on HBO and behind the striking appearance she is an accomplished artist. She says, "I extend my stage to you, so you can too also perform , that you too can be all you can be and make your dreams alive" She says that because she suffered rejection, like all great artist and personalities, and now all these people are to eat their words.

The Cloud does just that. It extends "the stage", I mean the customers of an IaaS and or PaaS make money, but they enable the customers to offer the services to their customers, at a scale not possible before. One service is SaaS, but their are more

It is like like having a theater troop, or circus, struggling from town to town, carried all equipment on wheels. Ok you sell tickets, one by one, - like say most middle ware companies sell licenses one by one. But in the era of TV, and Cinema, one movie or a series can make more money than all combined tickets sold on Broadway theaters in one year.
So if some hosting company calls itself cloud (all of them do), simply because they claim they can maintain IT cheaper. this is not a cloud.

Everything that reduces costs, fine, OK, great. But companies have success from making more revenues, not from cutting costs. Therefore a cloud MAKES more revenues for a customer. It make those revenues faster and a lower cost than traditional bizdev

A true cloud solution makes richer the customers alongside the owners of cloud providing company,

I as a service provider make money, My customer saves money because of my service = NOT cloud
I as a service provider make money, My customer makes money because of my service = Yes cloud.

Is this NIST definition? No. This is the commonsense, entrepreneurial definition and the gentlemen working for a standards institution, like NIST will look at you stunned.

Because no one following NIST definition will ever make money, as their focus is completely different.

There is a need to offer an IaaS customer the ability to directly the billing to its' customers, without even disclosing who the service provider is. This will happen soon.

What we learn from Amazon Web Services cloud failure

2011-04-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

Learning from AWS incident (main culprit seems to be the S3 design flaw) - we need to develop processes to easily have clouds on different providers and mitigate the risk that one of them fails.

Strategic Blue "solution transforms multi-cloud infrastructure deployment from a potentially complicated management issue to a simple billing relationship with one party, Strategic Blue."

Applications like RightScale and Besol Tapp will move applications among different cloud providers. They providethe actual software the brokerage dealers in cloud resources need.

What should be strategy to select multiple providers? IMO, the the application requiring MINIMUM effort to port on two or more cloud providers, are #1 choice for multi-provider hosting. The easiest would be to use Tapp or Rightscale.

We need a magic list of cloud providers customers may choose for multiple hosting for defense against cloud failure. I am paraphrasing Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud providers

What's the difference between enterprise cloud and private cloud?

2011-04-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

"Organizations going down the private cloud path have some tough decisions to make. (Why Private Clouds Are a Catch-22 for Buyers, GigaOM)

This title question appeared on Quora . The first Catch-22 is to define what a private cloud is Here are some opinions, all valid.

"A private cloud is behind a firewall - the likelihood is therefore that it is being operated by an organization's own data center".

"The term 'private cloud' as it's used now seems to miss the entire point of cloud computing."

" Enterprise Cloud is a euphemism that a small number of marketers and vendors will use to describe on premise blend of IaaS & SaaS. It is simply a private cloud plan and simple

"The private cloud means user own the resource privately and use the resource privately"

"Private Cloud ... is a marketing term being applied to private IT resources that are organized, orchestrated, managed, deployed, and used in a service oriented model"

The main reason any organization wants a cloud is to make more money than it does now. A bunch of computers, no matter how well orchestrated are not a cloud. Here is my take on private clouds

"There is no difference between a private cloud and a customer using a public cloud. If you use your own physical servers, the creation of a cloud with elasticity & billing of resources is very complex, The private cloud software really relegates the CIO to the same headaches of running a data center today.

One can build exactly the same private cloud using software servers. IaaS providers like CloudSugma - give customers root access, and the option to install whatever software they need to mount the application and services, the same as for physical servers. You select your own security and firewall, or select it from the 3rd parties on CloudSigma. The software offered as PaaS is from 3rd parties only and it is optional. CloudSigma's customers select which 3rd party PaaS they like from CloudSigma site (jclouds, enStratuss, AppFrist and so on), or they can select none.

AWS slogan is "we do the heavy lifting for you'. This is true, the intention is to remove all complexity and so one can have it's own private cloud on Amazon public cloud. CloudSigma goes a step further, and gives customers the ability to create a cloud in a day, using the same experience curve familiar from having a bare physical server; load the OS, load the middle ware, use CloudSigma billing and ask your customers to use your services with a credit card.

Servers as software are better: cheaper, faster, more fault-tolerant, and more secure than traditional servers. The shift from private to public cloud is related to hardware replacement cycle. So what we call today private clouds, will become simply a readily available service from public cloud. The owners of private clouds will have the same exclusive privileges they have on their own premises"

So why not build the private clouds using the public clouds resources?

A "pure IaaS" provider ?

2011-04-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

Revolutionary, yet evolutionary these thoughts will change the thinking on how to offer IaaS services to customers respecting their dignity and wishes, while making them richer.

The largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) public clouds are increasingly morphing into more like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) operators.

The customers using cloud services, particularly at the infrastructure level, are also interested in other tools that may add convenience. These are usually service driven; things such as email services, content distribution networks, DNS services etc. etc. So the debate here really is who is best positioned to provide those services and how should they be offered/delivered to end customers?

Can Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintain a position where it offers the best email service, the best DNS service, the best database service …? The answer so far is yes

In all categories I can point to products and services offered today that in my opinion are better than the AWS alternative. Of course customers have different needs so the best for you might not be the best for another user. Don't customers deserve easy access to the best services for them? Surely the challenge for the IaaS cloud vendor is therefore to make the widest choice of services available easily to their customers, not to offer an anointed service or in-house offer.

CloudSigma describes itself as the pure IaaS cloud. This is a marketing metaphor, as 3rd party PaaS can create havoc, when not designed to work together.

One impact is to have a lock-in effect on the customer base (using proprietary PaaS) to the particular cloud which is something customers might want to think about carefully. There are some even more worrying problems associated with the move to PaaS as the IaaS provider increasingly widens their role and comes into conflict with users of their own cloud

The primary motivations for IaaS cloud vendors to offer their own in-house PaaS services are that they feel they have a captive audience. If for whatever reason the customer wishes to move to another vendor, this is going to be a wholesale move of your entire operation. Whilst looking convenient up front, in fact creates a very entrenched situation for the customer which is difficult to escape from.

Vendor lock-in is not something desirable for customers (it is for providers) and should be avoided if possible when choosing a provider. Multiple providers is the solution.

Technology will keep re-inventing itself and evolving through creative destruction or if we'll see convergence and some abstraction from computing processes.

In the US Netflix, the leading movie streaming service is estimated to account for some 20% of peak internet traffic! The company chose to migrate to the cloud ( most of their IT), and now largely uses Amazon's EC2 service. As a result, EC2 benefits from the bulk purchasing of data traffic that Netflix necessarily purchases from them in the course of its operations in their cloud.

Netflix are known to be happy with their cloud experience and Amazon clearly aren't complaining so what's the problem? Well, Amazon just launched a video streaming service which is a direct competitor to Netflix and their strongest competition currently. Netflix are hosting much of their infrastructure with their biggest competitor. Not only this but Amazon will likely be benefiting from lower data transfer costs over their whole operation as a result of the additional traffic that Netflix puts through their cloud! It is a neat trick but how do Netflix shareholders feel about it? :-) (Note December 2011; this paragraph was prophetic :-) )

Is the "New Approach to Amazon EC2 Networking" really so new?

2011-03-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

I had a look at the new blog from Jeff Barr at AWS, that are always a pleasure to read. I like the push botton

I look at some of the features and I asked myself: are they really so new? I happen to know CloudSigma IaaS cloud in more details, but other public cloud providers can make similar claims

A new VPC Wizard to streamline the setup process for a new VPC.

CloudSigma does not have this feature, one can get it a standard server with web interface developed with relative ease.

Full control of network topology including subnets and routing.

CloudSigma has this a default since almost one year

Access controls at the subnet and instance level, including rules for outbound traffic.

This is a surprise. Do you mean AWS did not have the above, until this week announcement? Of Course CloudSigma has it

Internet access via an Internet Gateway.

In CloudSigma this is controlled by the customer but we can put some standard deployments in that are out of the box ready for use.

Elastic IP Addresses for EC2 instances within a VPC.

What does it mean? . Every CloudSigma customer get to set its' own private IP networking as standard.

Support for Network Address Translation (NAT).

This is a good hint. CloudSigma does not have it now, but it couldbe set-up on the gateway server, and incorporate into any standard gateway server for deployment in the drives library.

Option to create a VPC that does not have a VPC connection.

I assume this means a fully private instance. This standard in CloudSigma

At the end, I see a couple of questions from readers. What about IPv6 support? I just learned that Amazon EC2 instances do not support IPv6? I can not believe it. I thought we push an AWS button, and voila!. Maybe we should for ask Harry Potter

The unbearable lightness of being: Trying to know in advance how much a cloud service costs

2011-02-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

From Huan Liu’s Blog we found some revealing cost comparisons of Terremark, RackSpace and GoGrid versus Amazon EC2. There are various sources for this type analyses that convey a deceiving first impression that making cloud cost comparisons is easy, It is not, Most providers made it a rocket science.

The Rackspace cost comparison with Amazon EC2 entry is from January 25, 2011. Interesting RackSpace and GoGrid charge only for RAM and not for CPU, as the CPU is shared proportional to the memory it uses. Did you know this? I didn’t. So if you use little RAM 1.5 GB, the ratio of the RackSpace Cost / EC2 cost is 17% at low RAM and it jumps 191% if the one selects 16Mb.

RackSpace was and still is a hosting provider like the wolf from the Little Red Riding Hood They attract subscribers to their cloud, then when a serious usage occur, the prices jump double the costs of the 100% cloud providers. This is natural, as RackSpace, same as Go Grid, cannot offer competitive cloud prices, unless they erode their own co-location and hosting customer base.

Another entry in this blog, Comparing Cloud Providers on VM Cost shows RackSpace and Terremark cost ratios with an equivalent EC2 cost from 17% to 50% ONLY when the memory usage is low (0.25 GB to 1.5 GB maximum).

Terremark cost comparison with Amazon EC2 has in some cases (high RAM versus minimum CPU allocated) cost up to 3x to 5x the EC2 costs. GoGrid has similar prices as EC2 at low RAM, but it jumps 4x in high ram configurations.

The above data prove clearly three bullets

· Former hosting providers converted to cloud providers have an intrinsic obstacle of bringing competitive cloud offerings, as they could erode their lucrative hosting business
· The $25 million in cloud revenues minimum requirement for admission to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service is not fair. It is virtually impossible to discern how much income GoGrid, RackSpace and Terremark have from cloud versus hosting services

· It is sad how little transparency most cloud and hosting companies offer to predict a budget.

Amazon EC2 so called simple monthly calculator to predict billing is nothing by simple. You have to know Number of Elastic IPs, Elastic IP Non-attached Time, Number of Elastic LB, Data Transfers In and Out, Regional Data Transfers, and so on and on and on. And this is just EC2. Then you have to know CloudWatch, in case you use it, asking again details I have no idea, because as an advance estimator, I supposedly do did not use AWS before. As most people, I blush to admit that I do not know how to write an AMI (along with 95% of the people using AWS who are not developers).

So far by the simplest to use the price estimator’s instant quote is from CloudSigma . You try it and boom, the price you pay is the price you see.

Cloud IaaS providers; Survey Results.

2011-02-09T13:28:00.000-08:00

Here are the results of the survey Tell us your preferences: Cloud IaaS providers
The following IaaS providers were considered:

My comments are below each picture. Feel free to add your comments

Most respondents are familiar with public cloud. 30 out 34 respondents to the question above are cloud users , some for as long as three years.

Most prefer public IaaS providers who do not use proprietary PaaS. Only 18% like the idea of IaaS plus provider proprietary PaaS (best known example are AWS, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure). 56% prefer pure IaaS providers who may offer 3rd party PasS (like Enstratus on CloudSigma )

As expected, AWS is a clear popularity leader. 80% of the respondents know how to use their site or want to learn how to use it. Google Apps is a second place with 60%, based on the same metric, although there are more people knowing how to use RackSpace (#3 ranking). The biggest surprise is CloudSigma, that ranks #4 as most popular IaaS public provider. Most other companies, excluding Joyent, are traditional hosting and co-location companies evolving as cloud providers

Here we rank IasS providers who either are a customer or expressed interest to become customers short (6 months) and long term. AWS is #1 leader, followed by Google Apps, Rack Space and Microsoft Azure. Ranking #5 are the group that prefers to have a private cloud (in orange). They are about the same size as CloudSigma, the next in rank.

Maybe this survey is filled in by a sample representing public cloud users. There is not representative, But the private cloud advocates are a smaller pie than we thought. One inference is perhaps, once one has a good experience with a public provider, there is less propensity to consider the private cloud alternative.

This is an "inglorious" list of how many do NOT want to consider a particular IaaS provider. The most startling discovery is to see Microsoft Azure the least considered provider. The other IaaS with high "inglorious" rating (GoGrid, Savvis, Terremark) are really perceived as hosting companies and they must increase their PR and awareness marketing as cloud providers.

The price one pays as leader , if that also has the high number of customers leaving. The absolute numbers are not relevant, as the percentages of those leaving versus new customers would be a better indicator . Rack Space and Amazon had the largest numbers. Surprisingly we see Joyent loosing as many customers as Amazon. One way is to dismiss this chart as unreliable, not enough data, etc. This will be not the responsible thing to do. Sure, we may have too few respondents in this survey, but what if we discover something that can be rectified, and investigating further?

CloudSigma, Savvis have no records of loosing customers. What it is more ironic, is that CloudSigma has the reputation that they are completely open and seek as a matter of policy not to lock in clients.

My final take away are are:

In spite of the preference for IaaS providers with no proprietary PaaS, the market is dominated by proprietary PaaS IaaS (AWS, RackSpace, Google Apps) Yet Microsoft Azure failed to gain acceptance
Newer players started from ground up to provide cloud IaaS do much better than established co-location and hosting companies re-focused in providing cloud services.
As a an entry point to the Magic Quadrant of Gartner, an IaaS provider must show minimum $25M in revenues. It is not clear in the case of case of most hosting companies, including Terremark (recently acquired by Verizon for $1.4B) what segment from their revenues comes from IaaS Cloud Services, Their popularity is not proportional with their valuations.

We read in the Verizon news of Terremark acquisition, that other IaaS companies as potential take over: Savvis, GoGrid and others with a big hosting operations. The gold lies in the soft technologies of the new IaaS providers such as Joyent , CloudSigma, and others, not considered in this survey.

Otherwise, when the acquisition ecstasy is over, the big telecoms might discover they just bought real estate, bricks and legacy hardware.

From HPC In The Cloud "Univa Revving the Grid Engine Revival"

2011-01-21T14:41:00.000-08:00

Gary Tyreman, Univa,s CEO

There is finally a happy ending to the Grid Engine saga following Oracle’s formal acquisition of Sun in January 2010, which I described in my post The Fate of Oracle’s Grid Engine.

Word of this pleasant conclusion arrived today (January 19, 2011) via a press release from Univa,

Tell us your preferences: Cloud IaaS providers

2011-01-18T15:05:00.000-08:00

To all the readers of Part 2 and Part 1 , I prepared a survey to learn how you select the infrastructure cloud providers

Click here to take survey

I will publish the results on this blog periodically. I want to thank to all the people who read this blog and amazed me.

A million thanks!

The following IaaS providers are included. List is not comprehensive, but I may cover others in a follow up survey:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
RackSpace
GoGrid
Savvis
Joyent
CloudSigma
NaviSite
Google Apps
Microsoft Azure
SoftLayer
Terremark

Part 2. Getting out of the Trough of Disillusion Will cloud computing be adopted massively in 2011?

2011-01-07T11:11:00.000-08:00

Dilbert strip licensed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

We have seen in Part 1 of this post that Cloud Computing is the least considered (15%) and most rejected (46%) new emerging technology in Data Center space.

This statement is based on research from the largest organization of Data Center professionals - AFCOM. Their survey has 436 respondents members from 27 Countries worldwide. 83.3% in the U.S., 16.7% Overseas. representing: Private Industry 84.5%, Government Agencies 8.1%, Colleges or Universities 7.4%, Respondent’s Personal Budget Responsibility: $3M+ 41.9%, $5M+ 29.3% and for $10M+ 19.4%.

For 2011 there must be a real osmosis between the Data Center professionals and the cloud computing community. I discovered a total disconnect between Cloud Computing providers- who talk in terms like PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, which is the focus of the technology creation, - and Data Center owners - who are traditional consumers of the Data Center enterprise technologies and who own the most significant budgets that cloud computing must leverage to gain widespread adoption.

We are , using Gartner Hype Cycle, in the the Trough of Disillusion and we need to reach the Plateau of Productivity . You can follow the answers on Quora to the question Has Cloud Computing reached its peak in terms of hype? According to J. Herman - artist, writer, producer - "Cloud computing is still PO, meaning Pre -Oprah. The moment Oprah declares cloud computing cool... then the hype will peak"

In the eyes of the Data Center folks we are just the philosophers, technologists and artists of the cloud computing. We get just as much credibility as tiniest middle character from Dilbert strip at the top of this page. The size hints we are little blah-blah dwarfs for now. Our rhetoric - which we call "messages"- did not reach our target audience.

Cloud Computing hopes for 2011

Here are the important companies for cloud computing, according to Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service last updated on December, 2010This paper is one of the best analyst documents I have come across. The distinct groups in the Magic Quadrant are

Self-managed IaaS, for cost-effective agile replacement of traditional data center infrastructure.
Lightly managed IaaS, for customers who wish to primarily self-manage but want the provider to be responsible for routine operations tasks.
Complex managed hosting, for customers who want to outsource operational responsibility for the infrastructure underlying Web content and applications.

For a vendor to be included above, here are Gartner's criteria

They must sell on-demand hosting as a stand-alone service, without the requirement to bundle it with application development, application maintenance or other outsourcing.
Their services must be enterprise-class, offering 24/7 customer support (including phone support), SLAs, and the ability to scale an application beyond the capacity of a single server.
They must have significant market presence, as indicated by Web-hosting-related revenue of at least $50 million in 2009, or an on-demand hosting revenue run rate of at least $25 million in 2010.
They must have demonstrable global presence. They must have reference customers in North America, Western Europe and Asia. They must have data centers in North America as well as either Western Europe or Asia, or they must derive at least 20% of their hosting revenue from customers outside the region in which they have their headquarters.

Ben Rockwood, Deirdré Straughan, Brendan Gregg
Joyent

The third bullet eliminated many promising companies who are no-where near $25M in annual revenues.

If you look at the 10 best financed companies in Cloud Computing out of 10 companies, only one is listed: Joyent . This is one of the most hopeful Palo Alto cloud companies. They host what they preach and are nice people to do business with.

Companies like Rightscale, Cloudera, Eucalyptus are not listed on the Magic Quadrant. One may argue they are not in the infrastructure business, But this is a fuzzy distinction as we will see later on. What it matters here that these companies attracted top investment funds and that the VC community believes they will deliver the expected revenues.

Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision

These are two axes of the Magic Quadrant. This is in a nut shell how the companies are evaluated

Market Understanding and Product Strategy are the highest ratings possible in Completeness of Vision

Product/Service and Customer Experience are the highest ratings for Ability to Execute

To get into the Data Centers, we need to understand this market, the way it is now, setting aside our belief-in-Nirvana that cloud computing will bring. In fact, we need to completely forget any solutions we have in our mind when interviewing for product management purposes a significant customer. We need to be humble and respect for the all data center classic practitioners.Then, as follow up, we need to test the Data Center Customer experience, when compared to the one that have today.

As vision of infrastructure providers, one of the better companies having this approach is RackSpace, whose philosophy is expressed in the graphic below.

They seem to offer pure hosting, managed hybrid clouds and clouds as fluent transition among the products.

Making IaaS revenues in 2011

John Considine from CloudSwich writes on his blog on January 4, 2011

From IAAS providers, we’re seeing a trend to offer more PAAS services. This is apparent in Amazon’s offerings

These tendencies of adding PaaS creates a complexity that hinders adoption. Amazon, by far the market leader is, according to Gartner "Amazon is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest cloud IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices"

However Gartner has some reservations on the Amazon business model:

Amazon does not offer any managed services.
Amazon is the only evaluated vendor that does not also offer the standard options of colocation, dedicated nonvirtualized servers (often used for databases), and private non-Internet connectivity (although Amazon will negotiate peering). These components are critical for many customers, who need hybrid, not pure cloud, environments.
Amazon has the weakest cloud compute SLA of any of the evaluated competing public cloud compute services, even though its uptime is actually very good.
Amazon is a price leader, but it charges separately for optional items that are often bundled with competitive offerings. Prospective customers should be careful to model the costs accurately, especially network-related charges. Support is not included — it is a 10% to 20% uplift to the price, and it is geared primarily toward technically knowledgeable, expert users.
Amazon's offering is developer-centric, rather than enterprise-oriented, although it has significant traction in large enterprises...Amazon will negotiate and sign contracts known as Enterprise Agreements, but customers often report that the negotiation process is frustrating.
In other words, the Amazon model is not Data Center friendly. To port a Data Center center on Amazon, is an extraordinary feat of complex engineering, requiring top experts. Netflix port was breakthrough but it gives headaches even a year later . See 5 lessons a we have learned using AWS

Talking about Amazon AMI (Amazon Machine Interface), most people pretend they understand them and that are simple to write. My experience is 99% of mainstream cloud users have not a clue on how to write an AMI. So we are ashamed to admit it, and we praise the new clothing of the emperor, ever if we can not see it.

How much is it worth to enlarge the market share for IaaS?

The Economist's article Tanks in the Cloud tries to figure outhow much money IaaS makes. Why IaaS? Because "the most interesting layer—the only one that really deserves to be called “cloud computing”, say purists—is “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS)."

Economist, quoting among others the well known cloud expert Randy Bias estimate AWS revenues for 2011 at $750 millions per year. Taking a total estimate for all companies from Gartner Magic Quadrant, maybe we get $1.5 billion per year (being generous). So we have a long to go up and up and up.

The most recent and conservative estimates from 451 Group is 16.7 billions for 2013. Other Analysts including IDC estimated 50 billion per year plus. There are at least $10 billions per year to be made. The study includes SaaS revenues The entire companies from the Magic quadrant can not have a combined growth to reach the 50% of the 16.7 billions, unless significant new players will appear in the next year or two.

The time is ripe for a Google-like or Facebook-like player on IaaS space, Economist says

"Computing clouds—essentially digital-service factories—are the first truly global utility"

We are close to the Plateau of Productivity or - as Quora's contributors call it - the Oprah-ready Cloud Computing

David, Regina and Miha

Getting out of the Trough of Desilusion Will cloud computing be adopted massively in 2011? Part 1

2011-01-04T13:50:00.000-08:00

For 2011, will cloud computing be adopted massively in enterprises? There are many definitions in cloud computing, the most common being National Institute of Standards (NIST), but no one adopts a new business model based on a definition. To me cloud computing is about making money with IT by delivering the infrastructure (IaaS), the platforms (PaaS) and the software applications (SaaS) as pay-per-use services. Many times I read that cloud computing reduces the costs, the so-called Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – one of the most difficult to measure and calculate real-time. If the cost reduction is the objective, then we must shut down the IT to have zero costs.

This is not obviously the goal. The goal is to make money, to maximize the Return for Investment (ROI) for IT. If the IT pays-per-use its' suppliers, and then invoices the internal and external customers also as pay-per-use, one can calculate instantly the profit. If by spending $1M to have revenues of $3M makes sense, the IT might discover that doubling the costs to $2M might lead to $7M revenues. In this case we doubled the TCO (expressed for simplicity as pay-per-use to suppliers) to generate a much higher profit

In real life, the transition from silo-ed Data Centers to cloud computing is much slower than expected by pundits. The actual studies from the field show that cloud computing is still little understood and perceived as risky by data center rank and file. These are the folks that be convinced by Cloud Computing and they are not.

The InformationWeek 2010 Data Center Trends ranks cloud computing the last trend

Top of the Rack (ToR) switching model
Converged networks (Converged Enhanced Ethernet)
In-server cooling
Regulation and efficiency
Built-in Power Management
Cloud computing

The list of the trends shows that the Data Center crowd thinks and acts based on classic, static, silo-ed business models they are used from the past. There is no paradigm shift yet. I quote:

For the vast majority of organization with data centers, public or private infrastructure services will be restricted to extending systems in place today. Few can afford to jump wholesale into outsourcing, even if security and availability concerns permitted--and that's a really big "if."
Assuming resource management tools are in place, the relationship with the cloud will not be one of simple "resource on demand." Like the steel mill's relationship with the power grid, the future relationship between the private enterprise data center and the public cloud will likely be one of constant interaction, monitoring where processing is most cost effective for your particular service-level agreements. In all cases, dynamic control and monitoring will be a significant part of the data center staff's responsibilities.

Many IT departments are defensive when discussing cloud technology, and they raise legitimate concerns. Disaster recovery becoming a challenge for smaller companies that end up low in the pecking order for resources. According to an expert

"More facilities are being built in places with cheap power, and the server farms are sold off in blocks as 'cloud computing' to other companies," he says. There's minimal expertise on site, and all data flows through one big pipe, disguised as multiple entry points from multiple directions but all within the same country's infrastructure.
"Then, a disaster occurs," he says. "The owner of the data center uses the resources it needs first but lacks the labor to reroute network capability. Small and midsize customers that had their critical data in the cloud may find themselves well down in the 'please hold' queue."
The upshot: If "IT"in your organization translates to nothing more than "governance of your contract with the cloud computing provider," you could be in major trouble. On the other hand, companies that judiciously incorporate infrastructure-as-a-service capacity will eventually drive a higher level of IT sophistication and demand. Cloud technologies require a very clear understanding of application performance requirement, service-level agreements, operational and business priorities, and costs across all aspects of service delivery

Other reference is the AFCOM (Association of Data Center Management Professionals) 2009-2010 Data Center Trends survey. From the emerging technologies, the virtualization is the most considered (73%) and least rejected (10%)

Virtual Processing (72.9%)
- considered, but rejected by 10% more
Web Applications (70.4%)
- considered, but rejected by 5% more
Automation (54.8%)
- considered, but rejected by 15% more
Cluster Computing (50.0%)
- considered, but rejected by 12% more
Cloud Computing (14.9%)
- considered, but rejected by 46% more

Cloud Computing is least considered (15%) and most rejected (46%) new emerging technology in Data Center space.

AFCOM was so surprised by the findings, that it prepares a new study exclusively on Cloud Computing can be adopted in Data Center. The study is targeted for publication for March 2011

Before Cloud Computing, we had Grid Computing, which failed to reach mainstream the enterprises, in spite at the benefits. It was too complex to set up (or perceived as too complex) in spite of a nirvana of benefits promised and proven, if some expensive consultants were hired for life.
Gartner Hype Cycle for high performance workplace reveals importance of enterprise portals, cloud-based grid computing, hyperconnectedness and media tablets. That go through a inflated rags to riches fuzz stages. Grid Computing never made it beyond the Trough of Disillusion.

Can we avoid that Cloud Computing does not end as Grid Computing and we start the Slope of Enlightment towards the Plateau of Productivity?

We see right now , in spite of AWS success, in spite of market sizes of up to $160B per year in size coming from analyst reports, the Data Center strategists simply ignore Cloud Computing. We need to face this challenge and work directly the traditional IT enterprise staff.

The human factor requires a symbiosis with cloud providers. Making enterprises use public clouds, for example should not be geared by profits only. Cloud Computing should be part of a new social contract, as described by Umair Haque in his book The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business

The twenty-first century capitalist’s agenda, in a nutshell, is to rethink the “capital”—to build organizations that are less machines, and more living networks of the many different kinds of capital, whether natural, human, social, or creative.

Nothing fits better these attributes than cloud computing. I will try to answer more questions in Part 2 of this post

Blessings for the New Year

2010-12-26T00:43:00.000-08:00

Bob Dylan

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young

Kindle 3G + WiFi from Amazon

2010-12-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

I was - like most people who read - a believer in printed and bound books. I like the smell of a new book. I bought them, to own the copy, as I often made notes for reference later.

The kindle 3G changed my perception. It is a marvel of product management work,the engineering design is secondary. Here are the reasons why:

Kindle 3G+ WiFi is designed exclusively for reading. A serious reader does not want distractions, like browsing Internet, twitter, email, games and so on
Screen is black on white. Sure books may have illustrations in color, but the text in 99% of the books is black on white.
The screen resembles the paper. No back-lit screen. Very readable in full sun or from the light of a small lamp next to the bed. Reading from back lit screen is like watching a lamp's bulb: very tirening. Amazon slogan is : "50% better contrast with latest E Ink Pearl technology". Sure, whatever, but it works
Small print or large print is adjustable. As we get older, we can increase the font, rather then getting new glasses :-)
No touch screen! This was puzzling at the beginning. We are used with touch-on screens in our PDAs. No-touch screen maintains the screen clean, without fingerprints
Actual keyboard and special purpose keys allow to move pages, consult dictionary, make notes. However the notion of pages is not working for Kindle (or any electronic reader). The number of pages depends upon the size of the font used. What you have are locations and percentages of what you read versus the total size of the book. You can see the location clearly at the bottom of each screen.
Do you need both wireless and 3G connectivity? Actually 3G increases the price by $50 versus WiFi only. This is a source for additional revenues for Amazon. The clever part is that the 3G or Wireless can only be used to order new Kindle books. The 3G does not usage fee, for this very reason.If teh kindle user uses 3G ONLY to purchase a book, then the connection fee is absorbed by Amazon . Unless you are in terrible hurry to purchase a book outside a WiFi area, you don't need a 3G. Save $50, if you find a Kindle WiFi only. The only Kindle you can buy in top stores (Best Buy) - in stock - is the more expensive 3G.. If not , order it directly from Amazon.
The screen size 6" is plenty and weight is 8.7 ounces, holding up to 3,500 books. In the store you may be tempted to buy Kindle DX, which is double size, double weight, it does not fit a large pocket, like the one I have on my shirts from Cabelas, and the battery life is less than half the Kindle 3G.

Steve Jobs is famous saying that people don't read anymore. People email, browse, twitt, listen to music and watch videos. What Kindle did, it took the entire experience of reading, that serves us well ever since the Bible was written and read, and adapted to the electronic era. The product amazingly conserves the passion and pleasure physical book, with even more concentration and enhanced clarity.

The IPad tablet is a dazzling device from Apple, a company with astounding skill in product management. Yet Ipad does not enhances the experience of reading. It makes reading flashier in a device with many distractions that tries to be a laptop and PDA and HD TV. These product goals require compromises, Each of those functions can delivered much better in dedicated devices.

Kindle 3G is a real winner, as it captures the soul of a hard core reader. We are what we are (doctors, politicians, writers and accountants, dreamers, soap opera fans) because we learned how to read.

Reading is still considered the most fundamental medium of knowledge acquisition.

The importance of Kindle to generate post sale revenues is substantial. The Kindle will make reading books popular again. I just formulated the product goal. The execution to get here via product management is superb. I expect the Kindle to improve constantly. It took a few incarnations to get here. Amazon did not get discouraged, because there is no success without failure. In fact failure is part of the product life cycle for top products in the world.

I have to believe

2010-12-01T00:48:00.000-08:00

I have to believe that people can take care of themselves, and I know that sometimes they cannot.
I have to believe that my thriving and prosperity will not necessitate someone else's suffering, and I know that sometimes it might.
I have to believe that being a good steward for my business will help me show up and serve.
I have to believe that I can afford to act in my client's best interests, even when that means that I will earn less (or no) income.
I have to believe that prosperity is attractive to the people I want to work with.
I have to believe that there are plenty of people for whom my work is a perfect match who can and will value my services enough to pay for them.
I have to believe that mistakes are the compost for future success, and I know that this includes picking up after myself and making amends for my errors.

From Molly Gordon, Master Certified Coach

Amazon and the extinct dinosaurs

2010-11-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

Here is my tweet on this subject

#AWS #SC10 rank 230 breaks a new era in #HPC It has billing on demand All #TOP500 entries must disclose $/yr/Rmax, or be extinct dinosaurs

The point I wanted to make is in HPC, a price of $ 1.60 per node per hour is deceiving. To make an HPC configuration able to get on #230 on TOP500,we need so many nodes like never before, and pricing was not devised for these kind of volumes. The 25M assumes 100% usage, which is unrealistic and assumes on-demand prices, when one can use reserved instances pricing. This combined effect of lower utilization and the usage of reserves instances may reduce the cost to $6M to $8M, IMHO

But in Top 500, the annual operating cost are mind boggling. Here are the example of the cost of supercomputers (back in 2005)

http://bit.ly/aVacxg

As you see the combined cost of The Blue Gene/L (Rank 1) Supercomputer together with the ASC Purple (Rank 3) cost $290 million. If take a 5 year depreciation , that $58M per year. Add support Sysadmin and power and rent, at least 40% more, that is $81 per year to operate. Sure the Rmax for this computer is higher than Amazon, but Amazon @ say $8M per year in this context is 90% cheaper

If Amazon does something well, the best, is billing. As soon anyone will use AWS as a supercomputer,we will figure out very easily the exact total cost of an AWS supercomputer.

So AWS will do for Supercomputing, what it does now for the the Data Center, e which are transforming gradually in clouds. It forces private clouds to do metering and billing to justify themselves. Otherwise any DC risks to be des-intermediated and use hosting cloud companies A supercomputer is nothing but a huge private cloud, and now as AWS entered their territory, all this gigantic , dinosaur-size, TOP500 supercomputers will need to justify themselves economically. This is a real nightmare for the hard core in this industry, but it also will mean the democratic access to supercomputing applications we always wanted to achieve.

Amazon will soon improve the pricing to make CCI and Cluster GPU instances economically feasible on large scale. Knowing how amazingly they respond, I predict soon the special pricing will be in place to supercomputing even more affordable day by day.

Cisco clouds : A conversation with a friend

2010-11-05T14:21:00.000-07:00

We met at the Avalon Club party as part of the CloudExpo 2010. We chatted under British heavy rock louder than ever and eating some seared tuna, salmon with wine.

Your large organization wants a private cloud with all data local and secure. You have a very large data base and growing I promised to share with you what I discovered myself and maybe all this people will attend the next Cloud Expo event.

This is what I dug out in the last 6 weeks

Cloudera has a seminar on how to integrate Hadoop with DB and BI applications
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/515000760

Anil Madan, eBay, Director of Engineering, Analytics Product Development leads the team at eBay that is leveraging its data assets to do advanced insights and analytics

Jeff Hammerbacher, Cloudera, Founder and Chief Scientist conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for inventing and building powerful data analysis applications on Hadoop

Here are some notes from A NoSQL Evening in Palo Alto
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/10/28/notes-from-a-nosql-evening-in-palo-alto.html

See Wikipedia for a good definition of NoSQL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosql

See here the Dynamo paper from Amazon AWS

See Werner Vogel blog about this paper and link to the pdf text
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html

There a couple startups developing products based on Dynamo
like Basho Riak http://www.basho.com/

A few words for membase used extensively at Zynga.com

http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/08/membase-the-database-powering.php

Membase, is a "NoSQL" database optimized for storing web applications.
Membase was developed by Zynga, NorthScale, and NHN, and its source code
released as open source in June of this year.

I don't want to overwhelm you with non ACID scalable cloud new fledgling
companies and geeks Yet it is nice to know they exist

You asked a very good question: where o I go to have the complete cloud solution delivered and supported? Cloud Expo we had quite a number of product companies, but no one with total solution, including professional services.

Cisco Systems has an interesting approach.

http://www.cisco.com/assets/cdc_content_elements/flash/sp_strategy/USD/workbook/index.html
You see an architecture where the cloud compuring is simple an overlay on the Unuified Service delivery. Cisco identified heir market for cloud as the service providers niche, and it is estimated at $49B per year in 2013. Cisco Believes:

First, we see our partner ecosystem as central to Data Center Business Advantage. We have a world-class stable of development partners we work with for solution development (everyone from Intel to VMware to SAP to name a few). The fact that we have these open solutions stack is one of the advantages of Data Center Business Advantage–it gives customers flexibility and choice and allows them to work with the favorite vendors.

The second thing worth pointing out is the critical role of professional services. Whether it is services from Cisco Services, from one of our channel partners, or from a blend of the two, services are going to be fundamental to any successful data center strategy.

So this is all about services. One cannot sell a cloud via one product only.

See also this flyer
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns951/ag_c45-533403.pdf

Please note that Cisco has an ecosystem of 40,000 partners!!!. I saw a Webex talk at Cloud Expo. The speaker said, before they were acquired by Cisco, they sold 95% directly and 5% via partners. In Cisco is the other way around. They sell 95% via partners. Even is only 10% of the partners resell WebEx (Gartner is such a customer), this means they have to test the implementations for 4,000 different partners!

Dell also acquired Boomi, as they offered integration services, but this seems more opportunistic rather a clear vision for cloud offerings

A large private cloud implementation offers a few options

1. Buy one or two "cloud" products and then System Management is left to deal with the complexity and responsibility. It may mean many sleepless nights and risk, which a sysadmin administrators are not paid to take them

2. Get informed on what is going in the startup technology and specify a solution with the realm of reality, in addition to what big boys offer for sale. Get some consultants to help navigate the seas

Specify a contract and interview some players who provide all services. These players should have the ability to partner with some leading edge start ups

#2 and #3 may seem more complicated, but are by far more convenient. Also in designing the private cloud, only the absolute minimum features (MMFs) - the ones required to make happy your users base - should be considered. This will keep both costs down and will deliver the cloud in record time.

My recommendation for Cisco is not based on my experience with them But they have a realistic goal. They want to help all Service Providers to move to cloud and this is a real, $49B market by 2013, making room for by far bigger revenues than any exhibitor at Cloud Expo will ever have. Also I like their common platform for Unified Services Delivery, plus their understanding of Internet’s future traffic are great assets. According to Cisco, video will exceed 91% of consumer IP traffic, Mobile data will grow nearly 4,000% and cloud traffic grows nearly 300%

This will require new levels of integration between the Network and the core - cloud Data Center plus GPS-precision in resource location at multiple sites

We want our customers to reach us easily from everywhere, and we want the data to be available fast and without degradation. Then we want to re-use as many resources as possible
In my humble opinion, this is not available off the shelf. But no matter what the budget is, one can try to start implementing a proof of concept and then deploy in production.

Oracle suggest we buy and Exalogic server appliance and then we drop it in Data Center and we can handle all the traffic from ebay.com or Facebook. I love the idea but I wonder whether it is not too beautiful to be true :-)

Cloud investment & horse betting

2010-10-31T21:29:00.000-07:00

In my earlier blog, I listed 29 most promising cloud companies as listed by network world and other sources.

Now GigaOm headline is September 24, 2010: Cloud Startup Values Are Getting Insane.
RightScale and Eucalyptus are getting $100M valuation. The GigaOm guys, right in heart of Silicon Valley know how to sell hot news. With their announced Pro service, they ar emore informed than the traditional analysts, and they themselves had a $2.5M round of funding.

A year earlier in September 2009 we had the 11 Top Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing

The latest news October 29 2010 are the 10 best financed cloud startups. Here they are:

1. Aster Data Systems – $53 million

2. RightScale – $42.5 million

3. Virtustream – $40 million

4. Engine Yard – $37.5 million

5. Cloudera – $36 million

6. Nirvanix – $35 million

7. rPath – $32 million

8. Eucalyptus – $25.5 million

9. Joyent – $22 million

10. Nimbula – $20.75 million

I checked how many companies were listed in 29 most promising cloud companies.in terms of market share. Only Rightscale made the lists of best and they may have some significant revenues.

One the question I have, is how they reached these $100M valuations? And if they did, what we call most promising, or companies to watch are not fulfilling yet the expectations. Looking at 11 Top Open-source Resources for Cloud Computing where are the starts ups based on Open Nebula, Zoho, Puppet, Traffic Server and even RedHat cloud?

Other fast newcomers are data grid companies like NoSQL or the massively parallel databases. Their Meetups in the Valley are gathering a lot of attention, and soon we will see significant investments in Cassandra, Riak and other AWS Dynamo derivatives.

So betting on technology is like betting on horses: favorites don't win always and the jackpot could be in small new companies no one has heard off until they become winners.

Are America's employees hypochondriacs?

2010-10-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

I commented Umair Haque new blog

Umair, your voice and thoughts and blog are music to our ears. Probably the best way to start is to revive US economy driven by high-tech, is the IPO. The Feds can think of a law that gives incentives to all investments in IPO. This is the most attractive exit strategies for the VC community. 2nd, the VC's must invest in very early stage corporation, and not, like some institutionalized VCs employing scions of families with money and young MBAs with no business risk experience. Some VC act as loan officers in a commercial bank thirty years ago.

Here is a quote from Liel Leibovitz in Tablet: "the most radical thing about Brin, Zuckerberg, and the technologies they created is that they encourage constant commentary, ongoing debate, endless involvement. It’s a way of thinking that is very bad for oppressive corporations, zealous theocracies, and anyone else wishing to exert complete control over information." http://bit.ly/cNjISe

Using the clout at HBR, maybe we can organize step by step a practical implementations of the manifesto's you brilliantly produced. Reading you, I feel as I went to a doctor, who diagnosed exactly my malaise, whereas any other person told me I am imagining and perhaps the entire corporate America's employees are hypochondriacs.

See my initiative on Change.org: Revive the high-tech start up on Silicon Valley and US http://bit.ly/ayQZL2 We gathered some 51 signatures.

The IPO, the job, the bottom line & the Corporation

2010-10-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

This a quote The Institutional Innovation Manifesto by Umar Haique

The IPO

The IPO. The IPO window, venture investors will tell you, has been shut down for the better part of a decade. Here's a thought: maybe all the above — reckless banks, overinvesting in yesterday, and tuned-out investors swearing allegiance to yesterday — has more than a little to do with why it's shut. And will stay shut. So instead of hoping, praying, and pleading for it to open, why not reinvent the IPO as we know it? Here's my guess: whoever can conceptualize a better way for companies to get funded, one that doesn't require payoffs through the nose to (dis)investment bankers, enough legal paperwork to bury Jupiter, and the persuasion of institutional investors who should probably be institutionalized for all the care they've shown towards monitoring the health of the companies they own — well, said innovator probably stands to make a fortune.

The job.

The job. Some call this is the Age of the Internet, the Age of China, the Age of Innovation. But above all, we live in the Age of Dilbert. Or, more accurately, we suffer through it. So why can't we have work that nourishes the mind, body, and soul? Why can't we have work that's meaningful and fulfilling, challenging and compelling, riveting and involving? Work that's not just, well, work, a source of displeasure that pays the bills, but a calling, a mission, a purpose, and a passion, that pays life forward? Here's my hunch. Whoever does reinvent the job might have finally built a company that's so relentlessly innovative, so fully engaged, so unshakably persevering that it reduces pretty much everyone else to a distant second place.

The bottom line

The bottom line. We've spent decades trying to figure out how to make employees "feel" valued. But we can't seem to do it. Why not? Perhaps we have to work on stuff of authentic, enduring, and meaningful value first. If all you want to do is maximize near-term profit, well, there's little meaning or fulfillment in that for anyone, apart from an emotional zombie or a business school grad (just kidding, folks :-)). To get deeper engagement and commitment from people and more loyalty from customers, companies must do things of higher purpose in the first place. And that means rethinking profit itself, and what counts as real profit — and what just counts as ill-gotten gain. Now, here, let me say: I speak not simply of triple bottom lines. What's not important isn't whether you have three, thirty, or three hundred bottom lines: what is vital is innovating how to conceptualize doing stuff of more authentic worth.

The Corporation

The corporation. I have a theory. Trying to get the corporation as we know it to ignite 21st century prosperity is a little bit like using a water pistol to try and stop climate change. You can fire away till you're blue in the face, but the problem probably isn't going anywhere. It's a futile act — the industrial age corporation, bound to maximize financial profit, bereft of liability, asymmetrically endowed with the rights of people but not their legal, social, human, and ethical obligations, was a tool built for a very different purpose. But just as problems shape tools, so depending on tools recreates problems. Hence, tomorrow's most radical innovators are already starting to reinvent the corporation itself, history's most heavily used organizational form: think forporations and you start to get the picture.

The power of pull

2010-09-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

What motivates me to write is this quote from the "publishers' review: the authors "make poor analogies for someone looking to revitalize a corporation or present a compelling case for change to colleagues or an intransigent CEO. Professionals who already know that the Internet isn't just a phase will need more information than this book provides."

It seems to me the publishers are still a last century push company. This insensitivity is like being a parent of a dyslexic or highly functional autistic child, who is told his child is a retarded idiot. If we talk about recession, and if we hope the recession will pass and we will be happy as before, you must read this book. The "push" companies believe we can predict the future, we can plan resources being pushed wherever they want, and we can make money ad infinity as if the society is made of force-feeding geese. This is why most top five hundred companies are factories for meekness, people put up with jobs that make them chronically unhappy. They do what5 they are told to do, as if the company knows everything, and particularly the elites know everything. Here is quote from Betterness Manifesto that summarizes what this book says in essence:

"Work. You're worth something. Stop giving your talent away to organizations that misallocate it, underutilize it, and possibly even abuse it. If you're doing something meaningless, quit. Betterness can't happen if you're spending your life churning out toxic junk. It can only happen when more meaningful work is done. Find a company that's better. Better yet, start one. No, it's not easy. But here's the thing: over the next decade, the businesses that can't do better, the ones you're giving your talent away to, are to go extinct anyway. Cut the cord now, before the axe falls and cuts it for you."

You must read this book to understand why it is revolutionary and relieving the pain we are not crazy or sick felling miserable working for all these big stupid companies, just because we need the bi-weekly check. There are alternatives, I hope, no despair. Yet it is not a book for everyone. Sadly society moves ahead with only about 5% of the people doing something about it.

The power of pull is a litmus test to prove we are not sick, the illusion of freedom might become reality, work and happiness can be synonymous.

Top 11 Cloud Companies Versus IDC and Gartner estimated market sizes

2010-09-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

The purpose of the table below is to estimate very roughly how much business in terms of revenues the cloud companies collect today. Then I compared these numbers to much publicized IDC $56B per year and Gartner $146B per year. Assumptions:

I included top 10 2009 companies, top 15 2010 both from Network World
I added new names suggested by contributors to Google cloud computing discussion group (over 40,000 readers)
I added the company names suggested as comments to my previous blog entry
I divided the revenues as "Licenses sales and Services", "Hardware Sales" considered for Oracle only and advertising income, which is key
My research for revenues is minimal and I used these simplifications

Any cloud company that does not disclose revenues, gets $10M per year default assumption. This is generous for many start-ups, usually struggling with the first millions,and could be an underestimate for some other companies. Overall the number is adequate
Google advertising data is from published data
Oracle cloud income come from their estimated business on Amazon. and "cloud-in-box" future sales
The table does not list other hardware vendors, who also supply cloud service companies: Dell, HP, IBM
The table does not include Hadoop and analytics companies, as promising startups, like Cloudera are struggling to find a business model. If we include Cloudera and assign a default $10M in revenues, it will make no difference in final conclusion

Looking at the data, here are some starling conclusions:

The 29 companies listed had revenues in Licenses ad Services just over $10B per year.That is barely 19% of the total market estimate of IDC ($56B per year). As most cloud companies are software and services, the current market size could be, say $15B , but not$ 56B !!!
The discrepancy may be that IDC counted the hardware sold by Dell, IBM, HP, Sun (now Oracle) as part of the cloud market. Thus is a fuzzy assumption, as one does not know for sure, whether the 1,500 boxes Sales Force bought are the part of the cloud market, just 10,000 more servers were sold to other enterprises where we may guess will be used for clouds
The definition of "cloud-in-a-box" will make easier to include the hardware as part of the cloud market
The advertising revenues in cloud market size is 3x larger than software and services revenues
In terms of revenues, Google and Yahoo pocket three quarters of the entire cloud revenues, almost exclusively through advertising and marketing services
11 companies in the next bullet capture almost 100% of the total revenues.
- Google
- YAHOO
- Salesforce.com
- Microsoft
- Oracle
- Amazon
- SAVVIS
- GoGrid
- NetSuite
- Rackspace
- RightScale
All the other 18 companies share a meager 0.5% of the market :-(
Not much left over from cloud sw and service market ?
The take away is this: we usually call any company providing software and service for cloud industry. This market is still very small and it is 10% of the total Gartner number including marketing services and add revenues. (Assumed $15B versus $146B per year)
For all practical purposes, the cloud market for software and services is $15B maximum. This is realistic. This is what we should plan before. Don't base your business plan on market share, but on named customers, say 20, that you know for sure will buy from you once you have the product ready
As earliest cloud adopters, Google and Yahoo cleaned the bulk of the revenues that go into their pockets comfortably

	Revenues (US$ millions per year)
Company	Lic & Services	Hw	Adds	Total	% Total	Cum.
Google	762		23,000	23,762	59%	59%
YAHOO	100		6,000	6,100	15%	74%
Salesforce.com	5,000			5,000	12%	86%
Microsoft	2,000			2,000	5%	91%
Oracle	800	1,000		1,800	4%	96%
Amazon	600			600	1%	97%
SAVVIS	300			300	1%	98%
GoGrid	250			250	1%	99%
NetSuite	200			200	0%	99%
Rackspace	100			100	0%	99%
RightScale	100			100	0%	100%
Enomaly	10			10	0%	100%
Abiquo	10			10	0%	100%
Boom!	10			10	0%	100%
Cloudshare	10			10	0%	100%
Crosscheck Networks	10			10	0%	100%
Elastra	10			10	0%	100%
Egnyte	10			10	0%	100%
Good Data	10			10	0%	100%
Kaevo	10			10	0%	100%
Nasuni	10			10	0%	100%
Navajo Systems	10			10	0%	100%
Symplified	10			10	0%	100%
Terremark Worldwide	10			10	0%	100%
Viewfinity	10			10	0%	100%
Virtual Ark	10			10	0%	100%
VMlogix	10			10	0%	100%
CloudSwitch	10			10	0%	100%
Greenqloud	0			0	0%	100%
T O T A L	10,382	1,000	29,000	40,382

Market Estimate, no advertising IDC	56,000
Market Estimate with Advertising, Gartner				146,000
%	19%			28%

The Fate of Oracle’s Grid Engine , fall 2010

2010-09-16T15:59:00.000-07:00

For more details see my blog on http://www.hpcinthecloud.com/blogs/The-Fate-of-Oracles-Grid-Engine-To-HPC-or-Not-to-HPC-102982089.html

The growing concern in HPC circles about the fate of Oracle Grid Engine (OGE) after the merger with Sun in February 2010 is the catalyst for asking thiis rhetorical question.

Oracle strategy seems focused primarily to monetize immediately new products from acquired companies. OGE monetary potential visible with the naked eye is misleading. The product itself and the know how of its’ engineers can create new solutions in Oracle impossible to acquire from other companies, because they don’t exist yet.

For now the access to Oracle Grid Engine product page is complicated. If one does not know anything about what Oracle Grid Engine can do, it is highly improbable to discover this product by simply browsing Oracle's web site.

A screen of Arco billing and accounting system, OGE's best kept secret

A seasoned executive from HPC industry commented: “Add to it the convergence of the IT infrastructure operating enterprise and HPC services then you will see that Oracle blocks out an opportunity if they don't listen to the HPC side of their customers and doesn't give them suitable products.”

Can Oracle wait until they can buy some company which has shown how to bridge enterprise and HPC computing rather than be the innovator themselves? My answer is No.
Here is an example of where Grid Engine can bring a competitive edge for Oracle. OGE can help Oracle being very competitive on smart power grid market. Perhaps they did not realize this yet. But they will.
The new $200B per year smart power grids has no dominating product ready. President Obama has called for the installation 40,000,000 smart meters and 3,000 miles of transmission lines. Venture Capital companies like Nth Power, Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, Siemens venture arm and many others are actively investing. Cisco just acquired a start up Arch Rock, a smart grid monitoring company. The market is there, but the products are incipient.

Top 15 Cloud Computing Companies

2010-09-07T18:39:00.000-07:00

According to Network World these are the cloud companies to watch in May 2010:

Abiquo
Boom!
Cloudshare
Crosscheck Networks
Elastra
Egnyte
Good Data
Kaevo
Nasuni
Navajo Systems
Symplified
Terremark Worldwide
Viewfinity
Virtual Ark
VMlogix

A year before, in May 2009, Network World listed 10 companies to watch

Amazon
Enomaly
Google
GoGrid
Microsoft
NetSuite
Rackspace
RightScale
Salesforce.com

Do you agree? In 2010, all are start ups yet to make a name. In 2009, we had all big companies listed

Please delete or add companies to watch in September 2010, and a short explanation why in the comments section. The idea is to keep the numbers to 10 top cloud companies

Virtualization is Not Cloud...But Does Make It Shine

2010-08-31T15:45:00.000-07:00

The blog is live on hpcinthecloud.com

http://bit.ly/akGpih

VMworld event ongoing in Moscone Center, San Francisco seems to place VMware as the self-crowned monarch of Virtualization

But when Oracle reads the 200 pages program and (did anyone read this gargantuan program?) and comes across a paper like" EA7061 Creating an Internal Oracle Database Cloud Using vSphere" by Jeff Browning, EMC Corporation or another paper "EA8700 Oracle on vSphere: Re-Platforming Tier 1 Oracle Databases from UNIX to vSphere at Indiana University" by Robert Lowden, Indiana University Dave Welch, House of Brick Technologies, no wonder they will not attend the event and instead placed their position in very harsh terms.

See "Our [Oracle's] full Virtualization Stack beats VMware"

http://zd.net/9Uzc1a

The Oracle's own web site has the details :

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/virtualization/index.html

In general at VMworld it seems everyone who ever downloaded VMware has written a paper or makes a presentation.

Pioneering Utility Computing: The Idea of Sun Unit of Compute Power (SUNCOP)

2010-08-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

Compute power deliver through a plug, like electricity

Here is the exchange with Jonathan Schwartz, in February 22, 2003. A Nothing happened for more than a year, when, on September 4, 2004 - my birthday - we read in the news that the launch of network.com $1 per CPU per Hour initiative is a reality.

Sample Utility Bill to model SUNCOP or the future equivalent of SUNCOP

In it's ultimate incarnation, beyond Amazon.com, the vision was first described by Ian Foster in his book, "The Grid". It is a plug in the wall, to acces any compute power you want, whenever you want, as along as you pay your bill.

Subject: Re: How to break through with new ideas: SUNCOP
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 2003 22:10:43 -0800
From: Jonathan Schwartz
To: Miha Ahronovitz

thanks for your note - Robert and I had a similar discussion recently. We're not yet at the point of wanting to mandate the idea, but we're hovering around concepts quite like SUNCOPS.

Stay tuned - and keep driving!

----- Original Message -----
From: Miha Ahronovitz
Date: Saturday, February 22, 2003 10:30 am
Subject: How to break through with new ideas: SUNCOP

Hi Jonathan,

It's a privilege to write directly to you as you are the highest ranking Sun executive in our Division who can set goals, and make decisions

In these challenging times, how can ideas from the bottom go up? The utility computing task is spread over 4 to 5 separate groups, with no synchronization. As usual in a large company, everyone assumes somebody else knows what's going on.

I know how busy you are, but can you read the enclosed text?

It will take 3 minutes.

cheers and many thanks

Miha Ahronovitz
Line Product Manager
SGE/E

-------------------------------------------------------------------

We invent a Sun Unit of Compute power, a parameter defined and
calculated by us from hardware measurements that the Grid Engine
collects.

Say we call it SUNCOP (Sun Unit of Compute Power).
We store the cumulative calculations of SUNCOPs in a virtual utility
meter for hardware only (CPU, Memory, I/O, network devices, usage a
standard feature in SGE). Then we add - like in telephone bill -
the use of each application software similar to the International and long
distance calls in a phone bill.

The money collected (or recorded as "funny-money") can easily be
redistributed to the right owners of hardware and software in the IT
center.

I mentioned this idea to ... who works for .... I mentioned it to ….. and …... I vaguely
hinted a it to ….. We need a goal from top level Sun management.

We need Jonathan Schwartz to say: I want this DONE and assign measurable goals to all participants

Sun may regain the leadership in the enterprise Data Center Management. Sun Unit of Compute Power SUNCOP may become the industry standard.

To deliver, we need a final definition of the goal, a Project and a Product Manager with a P-Team.

--
Miha Ahronovitz,
Line Product Manager
N1 Grid Engine

Employees in Silicon Valley

2010-08-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

Adrian Cockroft, from Netflix, published a thought provoking blog, Open letter to my Sun friends at Oracle After reading this blog, people are in a state of shock, unable or fearful to utter thoughts. It challenges our innate political correctness, our inertia. I wish we can all join Ebay and then go to Netflix and go through the learning process Adrian describes. Obviously, all of us have our own path, yet few of us have his prophetic vision to see what is going on from above.

But if we all try to imitate him, we will never be original and better, just imitators.

This blog is about defeating our innate, stubborn resistance to the life we really want, instead of the life we have now.

We live in a rational Silicon Valley. Although many people are entrepreneurs, most of the the people in the Valley are employees, not entrepreneurs. And some of these employees, however gifted, lack the personality to take a minimum risks versus the stability of a salary and the lure of stock vesting, in companies created and made stable by others, not them

Netflix's success, it was Netflix's entrepreneurs' success, due to the correct definition of business model and to the fabulous product management work. This made the superb technology - yet invisible to Netflix users - wanted by people, and not the other way around. What Adrian praises is the intuition to select the right company, not the guts of starting a company

It was Netflix's management that attracted and made their employees clever, resourceful.

Miha Ahronovitz
http://ahrono.comprobably

Remote Revolution, HPC in the Cloud & my guest blog

2010-07-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

My latest blog is featured in the HPC in the Cloud:

Many thanks to Nicole Hemsoth, the Editor of the publication. Nicole started the the idea of Remote Revolution

The Remote Revolution is defined and perpetuated by the contracting economy—a process that in itself is revolutionary because it represents a necessary downshift in unsustainable levels of consumption and waste....
The Remote Revolution is defined as a movement away from traditional, stagnant modes of work that emphasize and value the judgments of vast hierarchies of management as they observe and monitor perceived productivity.
The Remote Revolution is defined by its emphasis on humanity and family, thus it is devaluing the Protestant work ethic that propelled this country forward (or so grandpa always said) with long hours and a corporate culture that actively eschewed personal and family time.
The Remote Revolution encompasses concepts of worker autonomy, proactive environmental change, social and community restructuring, family and flexibility, sustainability in all areas…

It is going to change the world.

HPC on-demand, is the another proof, a continuation of of the Remote Revolution Nicole envisages.HPC on-demand is non-traditional, non-stagnant mode of work and offers outright value to end users. It des-intermediates layers and layers of some bureaucrats and inefficiencies in creating HPC facilities, We can have more wealth, innovation, more democratic access to resources not accessible until now to the ordinary computer users.

Nicole's thoughts will be the subject of a forthcoming book, and the HPC on-demand is another proof that our lives are richer and more meaningful

Amazon New HPC Compute Cluster Instances. How much it costs?

2010-07-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

I don't think from just reading the announcement, that many people realize the high costs involved in placing an HPC data center on AWS.

See the blog from Jeff Bar at http://bit.ly/99zipE ,

"Each Cluster Compute Instance consists of a pair of quad-core Intel "Nehalem" X5570 processors with a total of 33.5 ECU (EC2 Compute Units), 23 GB of RAM, and 1690 GB of local instance storage, all for $1.60 per hour."

The price list for Compute Cluster Instance (CCI) is at http://bit.ly/dbdyQ2 . Please note the Reserved Compute cluster (not on demand) is priced $4,290 upfront for 1 year and 56 cents per hour, which apparently is about one third of the non-reserved , 6,590 for 3 year upfront and 56 cents per hour

Armed with information, let's price on demand, without commitment of time the configuration that ranks #146 on TOP500 described below:

" We ran the gold-standard High Performance Linpack benchmark on 880 Cluster Compute instances (7040 cores) and measured the overall performance at 41.82 TeraFLOPS using Intel's MPI (Message Passing Interface) and MKL (Math Kernel Library) libraries, along with their compiler suite. This result places us at position 146 on the Top500 list of supercomputers.

The [price for 880 CCI are then 1.60*24*30*880 = $ ! million per months, or 12 millions per year at 100% utilization. This quite mind boggling.

So if we want reserved instances, the same price will be 0.56*24*30*880 = $0.35M per months or $4.3 million per year., PLUS upfront fees for each new cluster added. For 880 clusters the upfront money to pay is 880*4,290= $$3.8 million. This results in 4.3+3.8 = $8.1 Million in reserved CCI

Sure $8.3M is lower than $12M by 31%. Note the "saving" - if we call these savings, are even higher if the commitment is for 3 years.

What does it mean

o Prices are easy to use
o Prices are designed to encourage long term commitments
o Prices very easy can evolve in high fees to be charged, even out of control
o Ease of use will democratize the HPC user access
o Many champion users will try to negotiate discounts,
o Profits are so attractive that other players will jump in

Over all good news. However to be able to use optimal scheduling policies in hybrid clouds HPC, billing is NOW a condition sine-qua-non. The comparison between the HPC on-site costs and the fees to pay Compute Cluster Instances, should be part from the cloud management software.

2 cents

Miha

Making big money with Hadoop

2010-07-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

Hadoop Summit 2010 in Santa Clara was like a shot of adrenaline to the letargic Silicon Valley. Sold out, booming with developers, and with would be investors in sessions that filled the rooms to the brim. Imagine you wake up with a second chance. This is Hadoop Summit, Santa Clara on June 29, 2010

Who has the greatest opportunity with Hadoop? Yahoo?, Google? Facebook? I believe they already cash on this technology. The biggest revenue opportunity is for database companies, particularly for the market-leader Oracle. I will explain why below.

There are a few bloggers covering what actually happens, but none of them foresee the huge monetization future of this technology. As the CTO of Kharmasphere Shevek Mankin, says it easy to set the Hadoop cluster, put the data in, but how do you take the data out? This is crux of MapReduce technology: it t is not, in spite of contrary claims, mature enough to conquest the Enterprise on June 29,

Basically all Hadoop applications are collecting huge streams of data, classify them via MapReduce and place them in a structured data base using some form of intelligence..

Open source tools like Oozie, a work-flow system for managing Hadoop jobs including HDFS, are nice, but what is the business model? . This is more frustrating as one can see the billions and billions of dollars in revenues and valuation at social sites companies like Facebook (recently valued at $ 24 Billions), Netflix Yahoo and Google. What about Enterprise, where most of the wealth in our society is created ?

Cloudera and KharmaSphere want to sell supported Hadoop distributions and developer tools. Market is limited by the minimal sales coverage these companies have in enterprise settings.

So here is the other way around. IBM plans it's own Hadoop supported distribution and has presented at the Summit a do-it-yourself analytic tool based on Hadoop. It has “an insight engine, for allowing ad-hoc business insights for business users – at web scale. It allows access to embedded unstructured data, previously un-available to analyze”

The most puzzling and conspicuous was is the de-facto absence of Oracle at the Hadoop Summit 2010. If anyone from Oracle attended, it was probably in a stealth mode :-)

Assume Oracle can productize a Hadoop-based analytic at web scale , they can sell add-on to all theiir database enterprise users. Oracle, according to Gartner 2009

o Is #1 in worldwide RDBMS software market share by top five vendors
o Holds more market share than its four closest competitors combined
o Is #1 in total software revenue for Linux and Unix with 74.3 per cent and 60.7 per cent market share respectively

Assuming $24B per year total revenues in Oracle, can you imagine having a Hadoop product to complement the existing $10B a year database income only? Note this is a yearly amount, the installed data base based on the last five years should be at least $40B . Assuming a 1% attach ratio, they can sell Hadoop analytic web-wide tools for $500 million per year growing exponentially to $5 billion if the attach rate is 10%. What if the attach rate is 20%?

At that level, it would be the biggest money making product using the Hadoop technology, outside social networking industry.

There is simply no other product, IMO in Oracle portfolio that can provide this growth. Oracle has a Grid Engine team, they recently acquired via Sun acquisition, which has been integrated in December 2009 with Hadoop as Sun Grid Engine. A significant chunk of Oracle's Hadoop know-how comes from Sun's merger.

The first step is not engineering, but customer research within their corporate data base customers and determine the minimum number of features customers need and are enchanted with. And making the product wanted through astute customer research are not the focus of the Hadoop Summit developers so far.

References:

1. Hadoop Tutorial; http://thecloudtutorial.com/hadoop-tutorial.html
2. IBM BigSheets : http://www.slideshare.net/ydn/1-ibm-disruptiveapplicationwithhadoophadoopsummit2010
3. Oracle Grid Engine: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/tools/oracle-grid-engine-075549.html
4. Ahrono Associates : http://ahrono.com

Miha Ahronovitz

The new voices in Product Management

2010-06-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

With reportedly 90% of products failing to meet goals, the new product management voices make sense. Automatic processes that most corporations think product management is, are on the verge to be replaced with human considerations. Think of any buyer as human being.

Marty Cagan lists the latest bloggers that make sense:

Ben Horowitz - http://bhorowitz.com/
Eric Ries - http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/
Steve Blank - http://steveblank.com/
Fred Wilson - http://www.avc.com/

Nassim Taleb book "Black Swan" describes "turkey" companies that take the past to predict the future. A turkey gains day be day more confidence for one thousands days while it is fed copiously, only to be slaughtered in day 1001 on Thanksgiving.

"Think of a bank chairman whose institution makes steady profits over a long time, only to loose everything in a single reversal of fortune". Many companies who claim that they are conservative in product management, can wiped out in a few months. Think Altavista after Google.

Unless we make products wanted by people. How do we make someone to "want" what we do? How do we stop others to lure our customers to "want" their products, not ours?

I don't have the answer to these questions, but how many product managers do they ask these questions? everyone says, Apple. Apple took it's name from Beatles record publishing company, called Apple. it's like naming a product Lady Gaga and it worked from 30 years ago every day. They continue to ask this question and added the color, the thin-ness, the music itune-ness, the phones with music, the ipad-nesss, the stevejob-ness, etc

Interview with Miha Ahronovitz, Principal Ahrono Associates

2010-05-19T01:27:00.000-07:00

Q: Why do you want to bring companies on Silicon Valley, as unlike a decade ago, there are opportunities elsewhere?

A: Statistics show that up to 90% of the product developed in-house, for internal or external customers, fail. The same we can say of many startup companies that operate in Europe only or even US East Coast. Facebook is an example on why they moved to Palo Alto or Boston

Q: How Ahrono Associates can improve the success rate?

A: The product must be usable, valuable and feasible. The product must be “wanted” The product discovery process is must pass companies hurdles and inertia. We facilitate the collaboration between the product manager, interaction designer and the software architect. We make sure to collect the goals and wishes of all parties involved. We smooth conflicts, create bridges and find the shortest way without eliminating esentials.

Q: What you specifically do?

A: People think a consulting company on Silicon Valley which does not do coding, must do marketing or sales or both. We do that too, but we have a holistic mission. We pay attention to the product portfolio and and to the people who make them. . The product ideas must be tested, but the company has an intuitive designer, we may skip pilots as an exception. We are on the look for intuitive entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs. There are many, if you read his biography, but none have usually power of decision making. Their influence is key to make a success. We recommend the minimal set of features that meet the goals within the budge and advocate against product cannibalization at higher levels.

Q: How do you charge for your services?

A: We charge consulting fees and / or a contingency fee on results which can be in the form of equity. One question I ask my customers often, is how much they think their company is worth. They usually under value themselves by a factor of five to ten . So if the customer says" I believe my company will be $10M in three years", we may look a bit closely and decide they can have can have a $100M valuation. All action items from now on are filtered. Does action item B lead to a 100M valuation in three years? Yes, we do it. If not, we don't.

Q: What do think is most important to select ideal customers?

A: Empathy: In simple words we sense in-sync whether we both are happy or unhappy. The type of work we do leads to extraordinary results, these will not happen unless there is a chemistry among ourselves. Great customers breed good consultants.Great customers think differently, out the box and have very significant ideas.

Clouds versus Grids and 360 degree Billing

2010-05-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

At the beginning, a 10-node-network users had to call the sysadmin to know where to login and submit jobs. Everyone working in Sun a decade ago, everyone working in EDA a decade ago, knows, if you forgot the name of the server to log in, you could not get in the network. You had to call the sysadmin. This was called the telephone load balancing. The result was many people overloading say 1 server, with 9 servers doing nothing & no one knew that they exist or if they are available to them. A job taking 10 days in reality used 10% of the total available resources per day

Grid Computing Software. To build a grid (SGE, LSF, Condor, etc) , a master and scheduler worked hand in had. Jobs and logins did not go straight to a server, but to the master, which had the exact picture of what every server was doing. The software will aim at keeping 100% busy all servers. As a result, a job that took 10 days at 10% utilizations, could run in one day at 100% utilization, leaving the network free to do more work for the rest of 9 days. The productivity can increase up to 10 times.
Grids are nice and dandy, but the whole concept of a grid was that it can not have enough resources for everyone. If I am the only user in a 100 node grid, the master will allocate all servers to me. Maybe I don't need 100 nodes to run my work, still, the dilligent aomeone stupid master, is trying to keep busy the servers 100%. I will use 100 nodes, when in reality I needed 20 to satisfy my level of service, wasting electricity for another 80 nodes. But when more users came in, I was given 50 nodes, then 25 nodes then a super-duper job with top priority comes in and I am thrown out altogether. I must wait until resources are available, because important jobs are defined in Heaven by management - no matter if I think I am more important- the Heavens never took me into account). Therefore grids are NOT guaranteeing the level of service, as there are not enough resources for everyone. They are often annoying, have a built it dictatorship, designed to create unhappiness in those not so well connected at the top.
Now clouds. Here the users of the grid are greatly alleviated. First, they want to use the cloud only when they need it. If is is once a month, be it. If it is 24 hours a day each day, be it. In that case determine a service level and the customers pays ONLY FOR THE TIME USING THE GRID. Contracts per year are hosting, not clouds. The customers also want to know if the they pay $100, for 1 hour with a specific service (PAM Car Crash, for example, or Intuit Sw), they got the same quality of service constantly. Here no user is thrown out or loosing resources to another user, like in a grid. The grid must bring in elastically resources (some call them cloud bursting, but many other techniques can be employed), to maintain the service levels promised by contract. Note that here the blind predicament, the raison d'etre (the existential reason), of 100% utilization, might not apply. If a corporate user wants an advanced reservation for two days, whether they use the allocation or not, as long as they pay hefty for privilege, be it. Here money talks. Do I have funds for my projects? Yes, no problem, I pay and I demand service for what I pay. No big dog will decided how important I am. Money talks. In a cloud maximum utilization goal is replaced by maximum return on investment (ROI).

There was a thread in cloud computing Google group on whether clouds could be free. They could be free, if their daddy or mommy or their employer pays for the them. Other wise, by definition as you see above. BTW, the IT is not free and never was free. Enterprises paid hefty money, adding to the cost to make an employee productive. IT cost much more than the chair, the desk, the rent of teh cubicle, but no one know for sure how much each user costs. In the cloud, one ALWAYS knows how much each employee costs if if the service would have been outsourced to RackSpace or AWS, etc. - if we use their price lists and we create some invoices never sent to the employee, but to the management.
This is called 360º Billing. About how to make IT profitable, see here
http://ahrono.com/what-we-do/

Scribbling Passions, my new book

2010-04-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

The book is for sale at Amazon.com

http://amzn.to/dq9hOf

It is also is available from create space, where I set up a discount for friends
https://www.createspace.com/3436005

The discount code is 39BVTKLL for $5.00 discount.
Please use it, if you decide to buy the book.

The book is the first of more episodes to follow. The main character is a child named John Lady Sir who scribbles. He does not know why the apparently rational world is irrational. But not understanding. he makes us wonder how the world looks if we stop and watch closer

Here is the quote from Proust at the beginning of the book.

"Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of
optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern
what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

What is a grid and what is a cloud?

2010-03-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

Cloud computing is user friendly grid computing. Take any grid and say: Lets us make the life of the user easier. first, no need to learn the submission language and scripts. Second, no need to wait anxiously to see if your job runs, or having a nightmare finding out WHEN the job will run.

Third the user always worries "Do I have resources to run my job?". Users less sophisticated sit by side and watch. They do not dare to use the grid, because a too complicated learning curve is the driving test for mainstream users

Cloud Computing delivers all apps from what it was a grid, as a service. Just a job submission interface and a predictable response time according to a Service Level Agreement. A cloud is nothing but an elastic grid with Service Level Agreement implementation capability and charge-back and or billing capability. All all users feel no discrimination and can use the cloud service at ease. They use and they pay only for what they use.

Once they pay, they can demand the service promised to maintain their standards. This user right simply does not exist in grid where the ivory tower policy makers decide what you are entitled to receive every day and every time of the day, depending on your assigned priority and what other users are in the system.

"How to move your business to the cloud", Forbes magazine

2010-03-05T12:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/03/cloud-computing-it-technology-virtualization10-software.html

This article does NOT say in clear words what is a cloud. A cloud delivers any application as service, on-demand and a pay-per-use basis. This involves a charge back or billing mechanism. You do collect billing data even for internal users, although no invoices are sent out. Thus, one can compare the costs of delivering IT services internally versus outsourcing it.

Second, the quality of service must be identical for two users paying the same price. This requires some ways of adding incremental resources when demand is high. One can use "cloud-busting" to get additional CPU resources from Amazon Web Services and other public providers.

Third a well operated cloud will become a point of profit, as it covers through billings it's costs. The term TCO becomes meaningless (it is in a way meaningless even today) and the cloud measurement is ROI.

None of these topics are covered unfortunately in the article, which underestimates the intelligence of the Forbes readers.

Un-ignorable Internet

2010-03-01T08:07:00.000-08:00

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Think about any product you work on. From shoes to digitizers, from B2B software to games, how this video is relevant to you?

The Demise of Cost and Profit Centers

2010-02-27T11:27:00.000-08:00

Harvard Business School has this paper authored by Robert S. Kaplan. In high-tech industry, the classic profit and cost centers do not make sense. This Balanced Score Card state of the art management style is not used widely. Instead, like primitive dentists-barbers, a saw tooth is extracted and not treated. By laying off knowledge workers because their salaries can be saved, the strategy is badly hurt and mid term the company looses both competitively and money that will nor longer earn,

When Dave Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in the 1990s, we
described the limitations of financial metrics, such as profits and ROI, for motivating and
evaluating the performance of profit and investment centers. We claimed that financial
metrics were no longer sufficient for measuring the annual performance of the managers of
these units in creating long-term value. We advocated that the performance of such
managers must include a variety of nonfinancial metrics designed to capture how well the
unit’s intangible assets built and expanded relationships with targeted customers; improved
the quality and responsiveness of operating processes; created and introduced new products
and services; enhanced the motivation and capabilities of employees; leveraged
investments in data bases and information technology; and aligned the culture and climate
linked to the unit’s vision, mission, and strategy.
The BSC soon proved to be a more general and powerful performance management tool

I wish the conclusion of the Robert Kaplan paper will be true for all companies. IMHO it only applies to a handful of companies:

Just as operating units must work closely with the firm’s external customers,
support units must understand their (internal) customers’ strategies and align their service
offerings to contribute to their customers’ success. These objectives typically appear in
the support unit’s BSC customer perspective. Many support unit scorecards therefore
include an objective to become “their customers’ trusted adviser” and measure this
objective with metrics from service-level agreements and from customer feedback. As
with revenue and profit in the financial perspective, some support units may even
incorporate external customer metrics in their scorecards to recognize how they can
directly create value for the operating units’ customers. For example, an IT shared
services unit can create new platforms and new capabilities for servicing customers that
help strategically differentiate the company’s operating units.

Riffs are a brutal, primitive way of improving short term the profits. They work short an mid term, likea Ponzi investment scheme when acquiring next company is the source of immediate revenues and their long term potential is discarded. The cure is an elegant, intuitive Management Control Systems (MCS) applied intelligently.

If not , imagine single income families that should divorce their spouses, to get rid of the cost centers. Everyone can see the absurdity.

Reference: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-030.pdf

Recession busting: from anxiety to $300,000 per year

2009-11-15T22:57:00.000-08:00

It is narrow mindedness to consider that a higher productivity will make people loose their jobs. The contrary is true.

I see around me very capable workers, creative minds. All they do is worrying not to loose their jobs. The challenge is to transform the anxiety, fearfulness, paralysis to hopes restored beyond the wildest dreams.

We and our ancestors did not come to America to be humiliated. We came here to work knowing that opportunities are nowhere else. The mere fact that this forum exists, it shows we can do it.

In 1848, 150 years ago, Karl Marx published the The Communist Manifesto. At that time in England factories employed children, the work day was 10 to 12 hours, there was no vacation or retirement. In the name of business efficiency. The Manifesto - lead to trade unions and also to the communist dictatorships, some them lasting even today.

Obama administration has voted to grant a tax rebate if a company hires the unemployed. Barron financial magazine praised Oracle that laid off employees "in excess" of the number announced after the merger with Sun webcast, and will continue to do so, until the promised incremental earnings are delivered. The science of management includes layoffs as part of the "state-of-the-at" of the business science.

Talking about very large companies in US, the ones under continuous watch by anti-monopoly regulators.. These companies should pay punitive taxes for each employee that lay off or pay employees a much larger severance compensations, easing the government obligation to deliver welfare. All other smaller companies can be exempted from this tax, but very large companies can afford to make profits without layoffs, and if they do make layoffs, they should not come out cheap for them.

It is both trivial and unethical to declare profits solely from laying off people in companies that have $25B revenues.

Does it still make sense? Top 500 Supercomputing list

2009-11-15T07:25:00.000-08:00

I am in Portland, Oregon and the new list for Top 500 supercomputing sites will be made available tomorrow November 16, 2009.

So what? Many people ask this question today. "So what?" The business model this list promotes brought the bankruptcy of SGI, Thinking Machines, Cray Research, SiCortex and many who designed supercomputers based on one criteria: to pass a LINPACK test. This was originally introduced in 1979, 30 years ago. It tests the floating point and little more. LINPACK tells nothing of how easy is to solve complex problems with a given supercomputer.

Sure Science and Defense need these supercomputers. They always did. However, once one developed such a winner, it was difficult, if not impossible to sell it to a commercial entity, who also needs these powerful computers, but they must make money from the investment.

The LINPACK test, even in its' most refined modern form - tells little or nothing of how useful the supercompter is. Yet, adding insult to injury, the Top 500 judges claim that

Any system designed specifically to solve the LINPACK benchmark problem or have as its major purpose the goal of a high Top500 ranking will be disqualified..

Then, who will use this system? It is like buying a Formula One car for personal use. I can not even drive it to buy milk without cohorts of mechanics supporting me. Never mind I can not take any passengers... and the ten million dollars price tag..

By analogy, the computers we need to make money with are the computers our customers will make money with.

Time has come to compile new lists, in addition to LINPACK. We should take actual applications used by enterprises and test the fastest supercomputers running them.

We can havefor example a TOP 500 for E-OLTP (Extreme on line transaction processing) computers designed to process more than 500,000 transactions per second, now that all banking and credit card processing and stock exchange need these types of volumes. We can havea weather simulator application top 500 and genomic TOP 500 lists, etc.

We can add a a TOP 100 supercomputing clouds lists based on specific bench-marked services delivered

We need to make the competition of TOP 500 and its winners improve in directions we can create additional wealth.

These are my thoughts as I wait, with an indifference that makes me feel guilty, the new 2009 TOP 500 LINPACK supercomputers results. This is why I voice these ideas for new TOP 500 lists, not based on abstract - and with less and less impact- LINPACK test only. We want the TOP 500 list to remain relevant and not push itself and the HPC market into insignificance.

It is time to create HPC entrepreneurs who become rich and successful and not bitter from failed ventures.

A glimpse into the new features of Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5, due in December 2009

2009-10-10T11:50:00.000-07:00

This somewhat geekier blog, shows how Sun Grid Engine, the leading world software managing cluster resources evolves in the future 6.2 Update 5 release to optimize the new multiple core CPUs ubiquitous in modern clusters. This step is necessary before the irreversible transition to cloud computing is fully completed. The complexities will be hidden from the end user, but they can explain how this software will work behind the scenes to assure the magic of an HPC cloud.

All features subject to change...

Features in both Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5 and Open Source Grid Engine

F. Slot-wise preemption

D. More efficient and effective preemption

B. Preemption makes users unhappy. Therefore, it must be enforced only when absolutely necessary. The concept of the subordinate queue comes from the times when only one core CPU's were used in clusters. Rather then preempting the entire subordinated queue (Queue-wise subordination), Slot-wise subordination allows preempting individually jobs from a subordinated queue, minimizing the disruption of users work. The ability to more finely enforce subordination policies, results in a more efficient use of resources. It works well in conjunction with Topological Scheduling (see below) and thus contributes to higher throughputs.

F Array job throttling

D. Allow users to prevent large jobs from monopolizing a cluster

B. An SGE Array Job is a task that is to be run multiple times with a single command. This means EXACTLY the same task is going to be run multiple times, usually processing different data segments. The same task processing gets applied on different aspects of a problem. Array Job Throttling allows users to set a self-imposed limit with the maximum number of concurrent running job tasks. The array job may take some tolerable longer time to conclude, but this blocks out less resources for the array jobs and allows other jobs from the same user or other users to run sooner.

F. Topological scheduling

D. Performance optimization for multi-core processors, specifically on Nehalem

B. In the modern multi-core processing, each socket CPU and each core has execution units, cache, memory channels, I/O channels. Under NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-local memory, that is, memory local to another processor or memory shared between processors. Topological Scheduling allows to schedule jobs at core level or CPU level according to its unique needs. The use of Topological Scheduling has resulted in dramatic performance increases when tested at leading EDA customers.

Unique Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 5 Features

F. Data-aware job scheduling

D. Send work to the data rather than vice versa, because the application performance is tied to data locality Update 5 allows Hadoop (also known as MapReduce) jobs to be run efficiently in an SGE cluster. Update 5 offers the groundwork for a future Oracle Coherence integration.

B. Sun Grid Engine will be making a best effort to schedule jobs to servers with fast data access. It will be made aware of data locality and of data needs of jobs and will place data dependent jobs correspondingly. The rest is then done by the data grid technology being used (Hadoop in Update 5, Oracle Coherence in a future release). These data grid technology usually are able to migrate data where needed. Data-aware scheduling will minimize the need for data migration thus resulting in dramatic throughput improvements.

F. Service Domain Manager Cloud Adapter

D. SDM Cloud adapter will support more use cases, especially if multiple OS versions are needed and thus multiple AMIs need to be managed.

B Increases the number of users who can take advantage of SGE connectivity with AWS EC2.

F. Power Saving

D. A Cloud Service adapter can be configured for power savings, based on SLOs for power savings. New commands such as "showCloudHosts", "startupCloudHosts" and "shutdownCloudHost" can used to create new power saving scripts.

B. Substantial savings in reducing the costs of the utilities bills and the ability of having a Green Data Center.

F. SGE Inspect improvements

D. Will support configuration of Sun Grid Engine Parallel Environments

B. More ease of use when managing parallel processing workloads with Sun Grid Engine.

Open Letter to Mr. Obama. An idea to create jobs

2009-07-25T09:18:00.000-07:00

Mr Obama, please read this post!

This is applicable for Silicon Valley within 200 miles radius, later to be extended in the rest of the country

Two of more engineers, consultants, students, new graduates get together. They are all excellent professionals most probably laid off, or worried how to get a job in the high-tech today. They come from top notch companies like Ebay, HP, Google (yes, the mighty Google laid off 10,000 in 2008), Sun, SGI and so on. The students come from U.C. Berkeley or Stanford University, until now considered a sure passport to get a job, and now trying to get into the work market

They present a slide show and a brief summary for their ideas. Then they receive from the federal government program at least $ 250,000 to make their early start idea suitable for investment by the famous and now relatively inactive early stage venture capital industry of Silicon Valley. The rate of the award should be 50%, it means from two applicant teams, one gets approved. The goal is to have a prototype, a customer trial and to show interest from about 20 companies. Then, early stage Silicon Valley VC community will become alive and the most important portion of the risk has been removed by a Government program

The idea comes from Israel, where a similar program has generated 100 Israeli companies listed on NASDAQ and 75% of Israel's $70 Billions in exports to come from high tech products.

With hundreds of thousands of technical experts laid off by larger companies, such a law will capture the brain and create jobs.

Let's assume 20,000 requests are handled by this early stage federal government program. 10,000 starts receive the $250K funding. This is $2.5 Billion plus 10% administration costs, this is $2.8B. This amount is peanuts (0.3%) compared to $1 Trillion for health care reform.

What this can pay off? Assume only 10% of the companies funded are successful. That is 1,000 new companies are created. Let's assume 9% (900 companies) will have an average of 200 employees each and 1% (100) will have an average 1,000 employees each.

The total number these companies will employ in high quality, well paid jobs (not farm workers, not bricklayers, not shopping mall cleaners) is 280,000. This is larger than number of people laid off. Thousands of ideas stagnant in a large bureaucracy like Silicon Valley giants, will come to life and make money magically , from ideas, from apparently nothing but brain.

The brains are here. We need to money to make it happen. Other countries have oil, we have the educated brain, here on Silicon Valley.

The valuation of the 1,000 operational start-ups, let's assume can be $50M. Some companies may reach 5 Billion in value, some almost nothing. This means the value created in stocks is $50B, If the Government keeps 15% equity in each of those start up, the total value owned by feds is 7.5B.

This will nearly triple the $2.8B initial investment.

Mr Obama, please read this post!

Miha

PS: If you support the idea - I hope you do - please as a minimum leave a comment saying "YES". Surely, you add your opinions as well. The more YES we have, the more chances we have to be heard.

Who will dominate the cloud in the future?

2009-05-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

Who will be the winner of the cloud computing technology? My answer is ONE of the the system vendors, maybe two of them. They will create virtual monopolies via cloud computing.

In analogy to a chess game, the pawns to advance in the field will be the private clouds. Thus we will have

X + X customers' private clouds = X ecosystem cloud

where X= SUN (Or whatever SUN will be called in the future) , or IBM, or Dell, or HP.

X can not be Microsoft, or SAP and it is paramount to have the ability to sell hardware as part of a turnkey private cloud .

X assumes also that X will create an AWS EC2 me-too service. There is no reason IBM, SUN, Dell or HP not being able to build an Amazon alike service.

Why would X customers buy private clouds? To offer their service to their users as fast as possible after taking delivery.

The winners will be the X ecosystem who places most “pawns”, i.e. private clouds in the field. The prize is huge:

$ from selling private clouds solutions
$ from selling virtual resources on demand (CPU, Memory, Storage)
$ from selling software licenses on demand
$ from new subscription services, yet to be creatively discovered

The project RESERVOIR has the noble and altruistic goal of offering a grand solution for the interoperability of all clouds infrastructures via open source. But what is the motivation? Everyone in Cloud Computing is after the money that can be made or the money that can be saved. So the RESERVOIR project, if successful, will be customized by various players, and particularly by the system vendors. The cloud ecosystems they will create will have some proprietary features to protect the X ecosystem.

According McKinsey report, clouds are nothing but virtualized software packages. They must have something more: an accounting system to handle the billings from the users and accept bills from X system cloud who supplied the private cloud.

Once the System seller has a dominant ecosystem cloud with its customers, Alea Jacta Est (The Die Is Cast)

The Golden Orgasmatron: Money beyond imagination

2009-05-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

Dave Corley - on Cloud Computing Google group - defines the Orgasmatron

Every ISV on the planet is moving to this service model.

Having lived half my civilian life as a product manager and the other half as an engineering manager, Ive observed that most market transitions are driven by the likes of "techies" like Sergei Brin and Mark Andreesen....folks who realize the market value of the orgasmatrons they create.

So, when that red-eyed "techie" comes out of a dark, dank lab/cube at 3 a.m. , with the shiny new orgasmatron, trash the condescending attitude and know that, as a marketeer/sales guy you have a golden, orgasmatronic opportunity at your fingertips.

Re-creating America

2009-04-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

We have the books of Paulo Coelho, like "The Alchemist", where every person should have a "Personal Legend" a deep desire since we were born and we try to achieve it against all odds.

The Personal Legend is best achieved by following not only the science of engineering, but also the science of product management. It is the right combination of dreams and pragmatic business sense that made America, America.

US may have a recession, California appears in disarray because of a budget crisis and Silicon Valley may lose it luster to the outside world. But US is still the country where dreams (Dreams are the language of God, says Coelho) are manufactured.

Larry Ellison is right

2009-04-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

This is what Larry Ellison was quoted as saying about cloud computing in September 2008. Everyone was amused, but the impact of his words is not a coincidence. He resonated what we all knew deep in our hearts.

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?

This is what I wrote on Cloud Computing Google discussion group on January 25, 2009

From all the lively debates on this group, this is the one definition that makes sense. Almost everything we have today in IT, is a proto- cloud, and can be transformed into a cloud if we meet the end users expectations. As Nati Shalom pointed out, a person attracted to the cloud after reading all the buzz, has two key expectations:
1. The ability to get a quality service any time (how the provider will get in minutes the resources to provide this quality is not his/her business)
2. The ability to pay only for what s/he uses when s/he needs it.
The rest is an implementation details. Users want to be totally free away from any technical complexity other than the service itself.
Every current grid, data center, individual lab network, can become a cloud if it meets the above two simple requirements.
This reminds me of quote from Moliere
Monsieur Jourdain: And this, the way I speak. What name would be applied to...?
Philosophy Master: The way you speak?
Monsieur Jourdain: Yes.
Philosophy Master: Prose
Monsieur Jourdain: It’s prose. Well, what do you know about that! … These forty years now, I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it.
(Molière, The Bourgeois Gentleman)

We did try to make clouds all our lives, and we didn't know about it. We are now getting there.

Oracle has a rich offering of on demand cloud delivered as SaaS. Very few people quoted Larry's final words:

We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing.

Larry promised in 2005 to make Oracle a $30B company We all know this figure will be exceeded soon.

Sun Grid Engine and fulfilling the promise of cloud computing

2009-04-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

Watch the flash video from Sun. Through this narrated demonstration, learn how Sun Grid Engine fulfills the promise of cloud computing in High Performance Computing.

Billing. The cloud computing revolution

2009-03-28T11:35:00.000-07:00

> 1. A user will always have all resources s/he needs
> 2. A user will pay only for what it uses
> 3. The applications are delivered as an easy to use service
> 4. The users do not want to know what is going inside the cloud

The corollary of the above is that Data Center, outsourced or not, is transforming - for its owners - from a cost center, into a profit center, once it becomes a cloud.

This is major shift that started with Amazon Web Services sending an INVOICE. This is a natural consequence of having resources available outside the organization - like electricity,virtual nodes, storage and so on - is that the IT Director receives an invoice, and s/ he does not know who should pay for it.

Why? Because the IT department, does not invoice traditionally the employees and the company affiliated users. The major resource management software tools today simply don't have a billing module. The only possibility is the IT department pays for this invoice from AWS and adds it up to budget they should request next year.

What will happen short term is we will add internal billing modules inside the corporate ITs , able to interface to external billing systems (like AWS) and -as an option - assign charges to the internal project that generated the need for this external resources.

The idea of billing internal users is not as heretical as it sounds. The users will not pay in cash the invoice. But the IT will know for sure who consumes what and will be able to report back how much it cost the to offer services to the users.

If one event will declare victory in the cloud computing revolution, is the introduction of an internal billing in every IT department, which, from that moment onwards will operate a cloud, not a data center.

This is a huge qualitative jump: the cloud ecosystem will evolve with private, hybrid, public clouds using many wholesale resource providers (like AWS) to offer lower and lower cost services with increasing quality of service through competition and benefit ultimately the users of the clouds worldwide.

This is not a vision, but a real, achievable state. Here are some idea for business start-up

- Internal Billing System Modules
- Professional services to restructure organizations budgets for IT billing
- Remote billing services for internal IT
- Resource Optimization in a cloud eco-system
- job scheduling using pricing as one more criteria
- Porting applications to clouds
- become billing aware
- create AMI (Amazon Machine Images) and AMI-like for others
- ... more

What is not cloud computing

2009-03-02T13:36:00.000-08:00

Someone asked this question: "I would like to see... what is not cloud computing"

Here is my answer:

o Anything you don't bill and users work as they please.
Anything that you don't know who pays for what in a Data Center

o Anything that you have to reserve resources or have resource quota assigned to you, directly and indirectly
Anything that does not have elastic resources matching demand

o Anything that you have to load your apps and have headache to make them work.
Anything that does not have your application ready to be used as service

HPC-Clouds will make money

2009-02-15T14:53:00.000-08:00

One colleague asked. What makes you think that an HPC cloud will be in demand with commercial customers?

Because, I said, you own a computer site where you know what resources are used in the cloud, and how they are automatically re-allocated . You know when you have to go outside and “borrow” temporarily virtual resources. Thus you know how much your system costs. You also know who your users are and you bill them. If some users do not pay by definition, you have the tools to show your CIO how much the benevolence costs. And finally , you know whether the HPC Cloud or Private Cloud or Enterprise Cloud makes a profit, or looses money, and you can say exactly what this amount is in real time. Also by being easy to use, more people can have access to HPC and the profits will soars while the fees will go down.

If I tell now to a private customer to buy a Big Blue computer of IBM for $100M , he would look at the sales team bewildered. A $100M for what?

The customer says; “This is my business, this is not the Government and Department of Defense business, they spend money based on Visions, pure Science, Politics and Fear of Enemies. I have a business, and I have to make a living. This is why I am called - by you - a commercial account.”

The HPC Grid answers the idea of value perception from the commercial customer for HPC. Sure all Financial Traders and all risk takers need high powered HPC. They thought they could not afford it.

To make a sale, we need the customer to see the value of what they buy. For the first time, HPC can make money, in the hands of right people.

We are getting there for the HPC, via HPC-clouds. Big profits are about to be made. In HPC? Yes, in High Performance Computing, aka HPC. Click here for the TC Health cloud coverage on CNN.money

The HPC Cloud

2009-02-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

What is HPC (High Performance Computing)? It is something big and expensive, hard to use and administrate, that consumes a lot of power, can be used only by an elite group of HPC specialists. No two HPC sites are similar, and mostly governments, non-profit agencies and the like are giving money. Traditionally - there is NO expectation of $ profits. HPC is sort of sacrificial price society pays to advance science in a political sense. The only measurable attribute to define success was the participation in the TOP-500 list. Using a 25-year old performance test, called LINPACK, the biggest goal is to rank any new HPC site among the top 500 according to some metrics called Rmax and Rpeak that mean absolutely nothing to the 99.99% of the population.

An HPC site is a cost center. It gobbles and gobbles money, in return for a favorable Rmax ranking

A large IT site uses 150 MW of energy and costs about $60 million to built. (see Horst Simon, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, slide 20)

The electrical utility in California, - where I live - is named PG&E. Last month, quietly, they increased the rate for residential power to 24 cents per KW from 22 cents. At this rate, the HPC site will have to pay $36,000 per hour or, for full 365 days. As far as I know each day has 24 active computing hours, we land at $315M per year in energy costs alone. Even assuming a 90% discounted industrial electricity rate versus residential rates, this is still whooping $2.5 millions per month or $30M per year.

This is equivalent to employing 200 highly skilled engineers

Sure we can not have HPC installations like this in NYC, Sacramento or San Francisco itself. PG&E is an HPC show stopper in California, which ironically is the state where Silicon Valley is and where the great innovator companies have head offices.

Here is how HPC will be saved and becomes main stream: we will build a cloud named HPC-cloud that meets what the users seek. I mean any user, the type of user who uses Google today, will be able access a directly or indirectly an HPC-cloud. That significantly much larger number of HPC users (in comparison to the HPC elite today)

- will always have all resources s/he needs
- will pay only for what it uses
- will use the HPC applications as a service

The users will have no idea where the HPC-cloud is located and what's inside the HPC cloud. They are shielded from all complexity. Power Optimization software will turn off the power on all unused resources when demand is low. Turning the power on means that there are enough paying users to cover the cost of the additional power from the billings sent to users.

An HPC-cloud will not be a cost center. It will be a Profit Center. This means it can be sold to the commercial enterprises. The sale is much simple. Companies that need HPC (and today with all risk analysis and security concerns most companies do need HPC), will loose money every single day that did not buy an HPC cloud for their employees and and their customers.

I believe in the Adam Smith principle promulgated in 1776: "Individuals trading freely with one another, following their self-interest leads to a growing and stable economy." It is time to free the HPC from eternal subsidies from governments and military, or iron-fist bureaucratic regulators.

It is the time to democratize the HPC, by making it a business that meets real needs for all the people engaged in producing wealth - in USA and elsewhere in the world.

The Personal Super-Computing idea

2009-01-07T23:44:00.000-08:00

After making the computing “Personal”, what is the next stage for the largest computer companies to grow their business?

According to Microsoft, we need to create the Personal Super-Computing. Jeff Wierer, senior product manager for Microsoft Windows HPC said, "It seems the High Performance Computing, (HPC 's) definition is evolving and is being associated with a high level of productivity. We've seen sales across the board and been surprised. There has been a lot of progress in the area of personal super-computing."

An executive from Lloyds in London adopting Micrososft HPCS 2008 server said: "If I were to use Linux, I would need a different skill set and it would add to the number of tools we have, therefore increasing costs rather than decreasing them," (Lloyds success story from HPCS 2008 Server web site).

The “personal super-computing”, as my homologous in Microsoft defined, can exist only as a service delivered from huge computer power stations, part of the cloud. We don't care what's inside (what OS, what applications, what platforms). we know we can ask the HPC cloud and the HPC cloud will respond. Always.

Imagine making a search among hundreds of millions of photographs across huge databases, to find a look alike person with me, and find the response within a few seconds, This is personal super-computing.

Two companies should, in my opinion, put their forces together to create the Personal Super-Computing. These companies are Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.

Sun Microsystem.owns HPC IP and know how with the most scalable grid computing software in the world so far, Sun Grid Engine. The, Services Domain Manager, part of Sun Grid Engine can supply servers and hosts or remove them according to demand LUSTRE data base, the fastest there is today in HPC .

Sun's HPC know-how among the best in the industry.

Sun announced January 7, 2009 the acquisition of Q-layer. This is a working engineering and business solution to create elastic virtual data centers, very easy to set up. See the flash demo here:

http://www.qlayer.com/Qlayer_webversion/index.html

It is a question of creating an HPC Cloud Computing Environment, where we mesh the ability of Sun to run parallel applications on – soon - hundred of thousands of processors using operating systems, network elements and storage as drag and drop Cloud computing elements.

We could be there soon. Watch this demo from Daniel Templeton blog;

http://blogs.sun.com/templedf/entry/connecting_all_the_dots

We just released Sun Grid Engine 6.2 Update 2 beta, that fully supports 32 bit and 64 Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise, HPCS Server R2 2003 and HPCS Server 2008. This in addition to the solid support for Solaris, Linux, MacOS.

You can download it and try it from here.

A Windows HPC Server 2008 node - or a cluster of HPCS 2008 server nodes – can be a virtual node in a Sun Grid Engine cluster.

“Some day soon, you may use a search engine to locate every frame of home movie in which your Grandmother appears. Soldiers may be able to recognize buried bombs from a distance and doctors may detect early tumors automatically.” (Texas Advanced Computing Center publication, a Sun customer).

This will be the the Personal Super-Computing. It will transform what we call today Super-Computing - which few people in the street understand - into a commodity. We will get it faster if two important players, the most relevant players, develop together the potential I described here. A single start up can not do it alone, as it requires both high capital investments and the reputation of a world wide player in IT.

If the Personal Super Computing would have had existed, the potential of failures of AIG and the other financial institutions would not have had happened. Both the US regulatory agencies, and the businesses involved, did not have the tools to audit and assess risks. We accused Wall Street of greed. This is an unfair accusation, as all businesses are aiming to maximize profits.

For years the HPC community, one the nicest group of dreamers and doers I know, strives to find the magic stone that transforms the quite amazing HPC technology in gold. The Super Computing show is a place to see them all. I am one of them. I believe the transformation to Cloud Computing, and the emergence of Personal Super-Computing will make HPC into the magic stone we always hoped for.

Comments?

Miha Ahronovitz

The movie Das Leben der Anderen and Silicon Valley

2008-11-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

There is a similarity between the Silicon Valley today, in times of economic stress, and communist Germany.

This movie, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, it's about 1984 German Democratic Republic's Stassi (their KGB), and freedom. Lenin said he could listen totally immersed to the music Apassionata of Beethoven, but then he could not finish the revolution and kill people as necessary.

Germany has the double experience of national socialism and followed by communism in GDR. The later I share. The Stassi interrogations could have had been filmed in Romania or Russia .

The movie director eliminated the colors red and green from the photography. Indeed, what is left is the color of communism, and if you want, it has also nostalgic aura to it.

I stayed at home, in the middle of the day, absorbing this almost 3 hour movie, and postponing whatever I planned to do Saturday. The last scene, I had some tears in my eyes.

The system - any system, religious, state, corporation - by its nature is concerned with authority, power and defensive measures to protect. This leads to Bureaucracy, - which makes life very difficult for individuals. It commands total obedience. The human being live in an un-natural state.
There is no way one can live by rules in Communism, yet many people do, whether oppressors or victims. We all have bad or good inside, and it is up to the system to bring out the good or bad, to create opportunities, or to smash creativity in the name of something, be it communism, tradition, religion or company policy.

Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) is a woman not young and not pretty, yet both the actress and the character have an enormous sex-appeal and feminine presence. She is destroyed for all her vulnerabilities, rather than being protected for having them. These vulnerabilities are used in the movie to humiliate and kill her, and not for making her a great actress, which is her inner talent and destiny . She was a potential great actress, but no one cares, except her lover/husband Georg Dreyman, a writer (Sebastian Koch).

The member of the Political Buro and minister Demf, wants to have Christa-Maria as her lover, because of the power entitles him to have any women he wants, in the name of the Party. Agent Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, who is a professional Stassi interogator, spends his life writing every word he hears from a wired residence of Dreyman. He realizes that what he does, really helps a libidinous person in a position of power to satisfy his whims.

I once saw a play , in Romanian in Toronto . I even wrote an article about it in Romanian. It was about someone who, after the communists fell, enter the office of a mildly known journalist and tells him ; "I am you". The man was the secret agent assigned to follow the journalist under communists, and who knew details, embarrassing or not, that no one else even guessed the journalist had.

This is a scary thought. Imagine having someone assigned to spy on me, all my life, without me knowing. Simply knowing most intimately what I have done and thought, makes me vulnerable and insignificant.

If he is my friend and believes in me, he makes me a star. If he is my enemy, he destroys me. Because I have in me all the banality, occasional brilliance, talent or weaknesses that can make me a hero or a villain, a saint or a damned human being destined to be forgotten and spit upon in history.

Human values triumph only we as a people fight for them, sometimes in vain, but the next generations benefit. And any thing - regime, corporation, religion - that goes against human being natural state, is doomed to fall.

This movie is not only about Stassi. It is about us, the way we live, the way we work, the way we submit or rebel to authority, the way we fell and way we rise. As Florian Henckel says, for 160 minutes, the movie is our psychoanalyst. This is why this is no ordinary movie. It is experience that reveals and bring light to my life and our loves, I hope.

The crisis , the economic crisis, , makes us all as vulnerable as Christa-Maria Sieland, ready to make shameful compromises, for the illusions we have and don't want to give them up. We loose self esteem. We are unable to listen, like Lenin, to Beethoven Appasionata, because this will make us weak in fight for survival.

Obama won

2008-11-08T13:25:00.000-08:00

Ecstasy following an election. He has a come a long way.

Obama will win?

2008-10-21T02:11:00.000-07:00

We think we know. Obama will win, McCain will loose. The financial core melt-down will go away as world government protect us. We know President Bush is bad and must be replaced by democrats. We claim we understand what is going on. We claim a change of President will solve it all. A pool from Newsweek October 20, 2008 reports 90% of the Americans are unhappy.

What happens with the other 10%, 22 million Americans? They are happy! Investors don't trust banks, banks don't trust borrowers, and mortgage companies don't trust home buyers. Why shall we trust 1 in 10 in Americans who claim they are happy?

What should happen is a big surprise and we must see McCain win the election. Obama has another chance in 2012. He will be 50 year old, McCain 76. Obama will be wiser and will have more reasons to compete again. Maybe yes, maybe know

Sarah Palin

2008-09-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

If one and seeks prominence, prominence flees from her; but if one flees from prominence, prominence seeks her.

Talmud, Eruvin 13b