Inside Enterprise IT

I’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure.

Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all those Dell servers were powering).

Some of the topics Keith tackles

• How it works: You develop on premise (the cloud environment is emulated on the developer’s desktop) and then upload your code to the cloud where you have all the services, resources and compute power needed to run your app. You then manage all your code and storage areas via a portal.
• Yesterday’s official commercial launch– tech preview no more.
• Azure is ready to use but Microsoft wont charge for another 2 mos. The last free month the customer will get a bill of what it would cost if they had had to pay.
• What’s coming to Azure in the future, some examples:
  • Right now you have SQL Azure database in the cloud but they will build out the SQL Azure brand so that it has many of the same capabilities that customers are used to on premise.
  • When .net 4.0 becomes available they will have a work flow service
  • Will have synchronization services (SQL Azure sync) so customers can have a database in the cloud and one on premise and sync them.

Pau for now…

With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo.  Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.

Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:

• Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
• Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
• What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world?  Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
• Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
• The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.

Pau for now…

Pushing the envelope and finding new innovative ways to deliver an HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution is a priority at Dell. Our recent partnership announcement with Cray and Microsoft illustrate how industry leaders are going about making HPC make more accessible, scalable and affordable.

The Cray CX1-iWS, available exclusively through Dell, combines Cray’s HPC experience with Dell’s market reach resulting in a desk side “supercomputer” that is easy to configure, deploy, administer and use. Leveraging industry standard components such as Intel Xeon processors, Windows 2008 HPC software stack, the Cray CX1-iWS provides a good starting point for engineers, scientists and researchers including R&D groups who need a scalable HPC cluster. The key points on how the Cray CX1-iWS extends and complements traditional workstations by providing an affordably-priced departmental or workgroup HPC hub are covered in my video.

A couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM.  When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud.

Some of the topics Adam tackles:

• Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it.
• The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle portfolio and is slated for release in 2010.
• The Cloud as a higher level of automation on top of virtualization, compared to what traditional virtualization has provided.
• Where Oracle will play in the cloud space (hint: think private).
• The Oracle assembly builder that Adam was showing off at the show.
• Given Larry’s views on cloud computing, is “cloud” a dirty word at Oracle?

Pau for now…

At the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara I was able to grab some time with Rob Walters, director of product management at Houston-based The Planet.  Rob, who has an atypical Texas twang, talked to me about how The Planet has been dipping its toe in the cloud waters and how it is soon planning on taking the plunge.

Some of the topics Rob tackles:

• The Planet began its foray into cloud computing over a year ago by partnering with Nirvanix and providing a storage cloud for back-up and archive.
• They have spent the last 9 months working on a cloud compute offering which will launch in Q1.
• The Planet will look to offer the cloud capabilities to their dedicated hosting customers.  They will use the concept of virtualization which these customers understand and appreciate to create an understanding of the cloud, a concept that these customers are still a little leery of.

Pau for now…