Windows in the Cloud

Given how many companies rely on Windows servers to run their business, adding support for this operating system makes good sense for Amazon. The pricing for these Windows services, however, is considerably higher than that for running Linux instances on EC2.

As Mary Jo Foley notes, Amazon will also attend Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference next week, which is interesting, given that Microsoft is also expected to unveil its own cloud computing platform at this conference.

For the most part, though, the outrage over the outages and downtimes suffered in cloud computing are overblown. Even when they last for hours, there are few cases where complete data loss has occurred (e.g. Google Docs comes back up, but your data store is wiped clean)...well, unless you count Ma.gnolia.

But Gladinet seems to tap into that primal fear that comes with the loss of control accompanying cloud computing; the fear that your precious data will one day be lost to the ether. O.K. sure, that's not all the software does. It also connects your computers together so you can share files, provides a platform for different cloud services to interact with each other, and provides tools for easily moving your local data to the cloud. Yet, out of all its features, the fact that you can keep PC and cloud in sync - with a local backup for safekeeping - is probably one of the service's biggest selling points.

Is that the future of cloud computing, though? A combined cloud/PC experience? Or will cloud computing eventually make our hard drives, filled with locally stored files, obsolete? With the rise of netbook computing and mobile computing, it seems that the transition has been directly influenced by the number of web/mobile apps that now replace what local software once provided.

So where does that leave a software program like Gladinet? Is it a useful platform for hybrid computing? Or just a transitional piece holding us over until the cloud is all we use?

He notes that the service-level agreements (SLAs) for all the hosted applications are the same as those offered in the operation's traditional on-site computing environment - that is, 99.999% uptime. Google only offers 99.9% as does Amazon S3...and yes, those extra digits make a world of difference.

In addition, DISA also uses the same information assurance process (the process of managing information-related risks) for the RACE applications as it does for any apps running on the traditional, on-site computing platform. They've even cut the security accreditation process from 80 days to 40 thanks to built-in information insurance controls in RACE. 

One of the most obvious benefits of a cloud computing infrastructure, though, is the speed of deployment. The cloud platform has cut the acquisition time for a new server from 6 months to 24 hours - a change that means DISA will now be able to rapidly deploy new applications to the military in record time. "That's a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements," says Sienkiewicz.

RACE runs using VMware on HP blade servers. Defense Department customers can choose either Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux and are able to configure their server with up to 4 CPUs, 8 GBs of memory and up to a terabyte of storage. Test servers are $500 per month and production servers are $1200 per month. Next year, RACE will be deployed on the DoD's classified network (SIPRNet) as well. 

Most interesting perhaps is that the service is entirely open source, offering anyone a full copy of all its source code. Customers will pay for hosting, a Service Level Agreement and customer service. Today 10gen compares itself to Google App Engine and offers hosting for server side Javascript and Ruby.

Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson is one of the most publicly visible venture capitalists in the market and his backing is sure to lead to interesting connections. USV + open source in cloud computing may or may not work well - but it won't be boring. 10gen was founded by Kevin Ryan, the former CEO of DoubleClick, the massive display ad company that Google is currently going through court trying to buy.
Above, versions of the 10gen SDK currently available.

Other open source cloud computing platforms include Toronto's Enomaly and UC Santa Barbara's Eucalyptus. There's a good round-up of coverage on this topic over at Gigaom.

It was a big party. Amazon and Google were also invited. The message - all aligned with Salesforce.com in their quest to be the dominant Cloud Computing platform for business.

LinkedIn was not at the party. The announcement of Force.com for Facebook, which you can see here, was illustrated with recruiting applications, which is LinkedIn's primary domain. This was designed to show that companies, i.e. the Salesforce.com customer base, could build Force.com applications and deploy them on Facebook.

Sheryl Sandberg told us why we should bother - 120m users on Facebook, 30m joined in the last 3 months (the same number that took them their first 3 years to build).

Oh, and Microsoft was not invited either. In any case they might have got upset at all the jokes about Sharepoint that Benioff used whenever he wanted to play to the gallery.

Benioff told a compelling big picture story that computing has gone through two waves, from mainframe to PC client server and that now we are in the third wave of Cloud Computing. Salesforce.com got into that game early and have the clout and the drive to imagine being the number one player in Cloud Computing for business - assuming that Google will be the number one for consumer.

Slicehost

Slicehost was founded two years ago and quickly became one of the more popular cloud computing and hosting companies on the Internet. Slicehost's offering are mostly complimentary to Rackspace's services and Slicehost expects to integrate Rackspace's new CloudFiles storage solution in the near future.

Slicehost also announced a number of new features, including the availability of larger 'slices' and lower prices for its high-end offerings.

JungleDisk

By acquiring JungleDisk, Rackspace is now supported by one of the most popular online backup and file storage solutions. Rackspace is planning to integrate JungleDisk into all its products, but it will also continue to support S3.

Challenging Amazon

With these new services, Rackspace is directly competing with Amazon's Web services. The JungleDisk acquisition and the new cloud storage services go up against Amazon's S3, while the Slicehost acquisition competes directly with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

Thanks to its established user base, Rackspace is in a good position to challenge Amazon's cloud computing services and, if anything, it is good to see that the competition in this space is heating up.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a RWW sponsor.

To us, this looks like a great way to introduce students to cloud computing, and, as far as we are concerned, the more students get access to this technology, the better. We also like Amazon's idea to grant researchers access to its services, as this can mean significant cost reductions for many academic projects, which, given the current economic climate, can only be a good thing as well - and, of course, it will also introduce these researchers to the potential of cloud computing.

Practice Fusion currently has "over 18,000 users," which would appear to be a big increase on the 1,300 medical professionals they had one year ago. The product originally launched in November of 2007, so it's nearly two years old now.

Is Cloud Computing Suitable for Healthcare?

A post on the Practice Fusion blog today asks the question: is "cloud computing" right for health IT? We reported earlier this week that cloud computing is infiltrating virtually every corner of technology right now, but it still has dangers. We noted the recent hacking of Google Docs to steal internal Twitter documents, as one recent high profile example (high profile because the stolen documents were subsequently emailed to some news outlets, some of whom published the 'hot' docs).

However despite these risks Practice Fusion claims that the cost benefits of cloud computing in healthcare are significant, particularly in its EMR niche:

"Cost and poor usability have been cited as the biggest obstacles to adoption of health IT - especially Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems - and has resulted in problematically-low EHR adoption rates. Eliminating this cost, and the IT maintenance burdens that are often beyond the reach of small medical practices, clearly removes these significant roadblocks to EHR adoption."

Security and safety is of course the big potentially negative issue with cloud computing. But Practice Fusion points to several use cases where it says that cloud computing has advantages over desktop apps: disaster-recovery, hacks (because "SaaS providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford"), and privacy. All of those points come down to the premise that a cloud computing / SaaS specialist, such as Practice Fusion, has more expertise, more resources, and is generally better able to deliver those safety and security requirements.

That all sounds great in theory, however every case like the Twitter stolen documents one serves to undermine that argument. And there are just too many such cases right now.

Nevertheless, we're sure that over time cloud computing will become ever more secure. It's clear that Practice Fusion is a young company that is growing well. With Salesforce.com on its side too now, the future looks secure for them.

For the six universities involved in the project, that means access to a small scale version of the type of data center that runs Google's own search engine and applications on which to teach students about cloud computing. Distributed computing works by creating clusters of commodity hardware that run on an interconnected grid and allow web applications to scale without the need for expensive, large-scale server farms.

"This project combines IBM's historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google's complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters," said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive officer of IBM in a press release. "We're aiming to train tomorrow's programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global Web growth and trillions of secure transactions every day."

Google and IBM are betting that cloud computing will continue to be important on the web and by training future engineers on their tools they can ensure themselves access to the top minds in the field.

In theory, cloud computing will usher in an era wherein innovation based on massive data processing becomes affordable for almost any company, no matter how small. The possibilities are exciting; I think of the huge benefits we've seen from the network effect of users aggregating their activities online and the thought of leveraging a related paradigm for processing power seems fantastic. I hope we'll get to see the direct application of such an approach, but cloud computing could remain an activity of big, stuffy organizations only. Any semantic web companies interested in both heavy processing and avoiding investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm that's ubiquitous in the semantic web sector, might appreciate improved cloud computing options. IBM's hardly got a perfect record historically, either, but nobody's perfect.

Amazon's showcase customers for EC2 are mostly tiny, random startups, so it's hard to know the extent of adoption, but the potential is big. The market for time on single Super Computers is substantial, so in theory cloud computing should see a lot of demand as well.

Is cloud computing set to become commoditized? That probably goes without saying. What direction will it move in then? I can't help but think that IBM is uniquely prepared to add a layer of business services on top of their cloud. It's mornings like this that I wish I was more engaged in the enterprise space - this sounds like a whole lot of fun.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet, a writer far more informed on enterprise matters than I, says that "It’s still early to ponder the enterprise cloud possibilities, but it can’t hurt to mull over the issues. The cloud will be hovering over your corporation shortly." There's also some informed discussion over at DataCenterKnowledge.

Interested in other large scale, futuristic work at IBM? Check out this post here on Read/WriteWeb earlier this year from guest authors Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two researchers behind IBM's Many Eyes program.

Our second winner is kayvaan, for a comment on our post The Birth of the Political Long Tail. Congrats kayvaan, you also win an Amazon voucher!

"The "common sense solution" is simple 'black boxes' with the minimum of linkages. In short, less to go wrong. But things will still go wrong, so allow for backup servers / sites / clouds (see how it works ? if you us server based computing, you need a backup server; if you use cloud based computing, you need a backup cloud...). Not only must these backup clouds be 'safe', they must be available.

The implication, for 100% uptime (and true vendor independence), is that your service needs to be able to run on AWS and EMC and..

This will cost $$ (developer time if nothing else). Someone (i.e the customer) needs to decide how far doen the route you go before the spend outweighs the value."

SaaS offerings made available will be government-approved services like email, productivity apps, document management and business process management software. Those services are intended for use by other government agencies. Even more exciting may be the application platform that's part of the plan.

The prospect of government agencies using a government cloud platform to build and deploy web based applications like the private sector has used services like Amazon's cloud computing is exciting. By lowering overhead and easing application management, a government cloud could yield a wave of application innovation across agencies. That's the theory at least.

If government is to become the next hot application development sector, it will have to compete with a private tech sector that's already deep into this paradigm and offers developers the possibility of turning cheap web apps into huge riches through acquisition by larger firms.

Also worth watching will be any integration between the government's new cloud platform, data created by the apps deployed on it and the federal site data.gov, where an ostensible cross-section of public data is cataloged for subsequent use as development fodder. Creation of a mutually beneficial development ecosystem seems ambitious and promising, but could be far-fetched. Apps on a cloud, contributing data to the data storehouse, so that other developers could pull that data back onto the platform to create new apps and feed new data back into data.gov listings? Sounds too good to be true.

For a more in-depth look at the government's cloud agenda, see today's write-up by Jason Miller at Federal News Radio.

The weekend's six-hour Amazon S3 outage caught a lot of people by surprise, including more than a few blogs and web apps who rely on it. Sure, it was just a momentary glitch. But whenever something big and supposedly rock-solid has a hiccup, it chips away just a little of your confidence...

Top image: VintFalken

AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools.

AppStore users will find pre-configured, ready-to-use elements from software vendors, many free or offered as trial versions with other appliances offered on a pay-per-use basis. Data center architects and consultants can package and publish ready-to-run app infrastructures, complete with capabilities such as clustered solutions, high availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability, and automated backups and security.

Initial AppStore vendors include CohesiveFT, Layer 7 Technologies, SOASTA, Tap In Systems, and Zeus Technology. 3Tera is also seeking additional infrastructure and software vendors to round out AppStore offerings in time for its beta release in Q3 2009.

Zimbra did not release any information about the pricing for this hosted solution, but the company guarantees a 99.9% uptime and will provide 24/7 support. Otherwise, the hosted Zimbra platform provides the same feature set as the self-hosted version, though faculty and staff get a few extra features for group scheduling and Outlook synchronization. Zimbra also offers schools the option to run advertising on the service, though we assume that most schools will opt out of this.

In the educational market, Zimbra is competing directly with Google, which has been providing an 'Education Edition' of Google Apps for about two years already, and which, thanks to the inclusion of Google Docs and Sites, provides a slightly more comprehensive feature set than Yahoo currently can.