In Search of the Great Cloud

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 01:56:41 +0000

I have a fondness for the Cloud. Not the actuality of it, but the idea of it. The vagueness of it and the subsequent myriad of definitions for it, amaze me. Not since the World Wide Web became Web 2.0 have there been so many definitions for a thing no one really understands but seems to agree is real. Kind of like Santa. I love that we can wholeheartedly believe in something we cannot see, feel, or touch. We have faith in the great all-knowing Cloud.

At the RSA 2009 conference the concept of the Cloud had not yet fully crystallized in our collective consciousness. It was out there, hanging around with the likes of quantum cryptography and unicorns, but it hadn’t caught fire as a business model or term du jour. I asked a popular security analyst what his definition of the Cloud was and he said, “I don’t really know but I suppose it’s really a big group of servers that store your information off-site.” Just like that. Not very sexy if you ask me. The Cloud was unmasked in my mind as an imposter, much like the Great Oz behind the curtain. It’s all an illusion, your data does not live in the sky with the god that you may or may not believe in. It does not exist on the wings of fairies. It lives elsewhere, on servers, virtual or physical. This, in its purest essence, should frighten you. I mean really, do you know where your data is?

In my personal quest for understanding the great Cloud I found this very interesting December 2008 entry in John Willis’ IT blog on the coining of the phrase, “Cloud Computing”:

Chris Sears, one of Atlanta’s finer cloud enthusiasts has earned some battle scars on the forums discussing the topic of “Cloud Computing.” I remember him once telling me that he had done some research on the original sighting of the phrase “Cloud Computing.” So this afternoon when I posted a tweet asking the titled question he sent the following response:

“As for the origin of the term “cloud computing”, there are a few possibilities…

In May 1997, NetCentric tried to trademark the “cloud computing” but later abandoned it in April 1999. Patent serial number 75291765.

In April 2001, the New York Times ran an article by John Markoff about Dave Winer’s negative reaction to Microsoft’s then new .Net services platform called Hailstorm (if you want a laugh sometime, ask a Microsoft Azure person about Hailstorm). It used the phrase “cloud’ of computers”.

My personal pick is in August 2006, where Eric Schmidt of Google described their approach to SaaS as cloud computing at a search engine conference. I think this was the first high profile usage of the term, where not just “cloud” but “cloud computing” was used to refer to SaaS and since it was in the context Google, the term picked up the PaaS/IaaS connotations associated with the Google way of managing data centers and infrastructure.

Much like “Web 2.0″, cloud computing was a collection of related concepts that people recognized, but didn’t really have a good descriptor for, a definition in search of a term, you could say. When Google’s Schmidt used it in 2006 to describe their own stuff and then Amazon included the word “cloud” in EC2 when it was launched a few weeks later (August 24), the term became mainstream. People couldn’t definite it exactly, but they roughly knew it meant SaaS apps and infrastructure like Google was doing and S3/EC2 services like Amazon was offering.”

So it would seem that quite possibly Google is to blame (or thank?) for the Cloud. Since we can’t really proclaim our continued belief in Santa, we had to have something don’t you think?

Gluster Introduces First Scale-Out NAS Virtual Appliances for VMware and Amazon Web Services

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 18:50:02 +0000

Califorina-based Gluster, provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions, released Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances specifically designed for virtual machine (VM) and cloud environments. The new appliances are designed to give enterprises the ability to treat physical storage as a virtualized, standardized, and scale-on-demand pool. The VMware Virtual Storage Appliance integrates GlusterFS into a virtual machine for deployment on any VMware certified hardware or cloud platform. For Amazon Web Services (AWS), GlusterFS is packaged in an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for deployment on the AWS public cloud. The appliances are functional Gluster storage servers that pool storage resources under a global namespace with elastic volume management for data growth and migration with no downtime.

Gluster points to trends that have increased demand for such appliances: a 60% yearly growth in unstructured data which greatly impacts traditional storage mechanisms; data suggesting that over 50 percent of all computer workload will be virtualized by 2012, creating a need for shared storage architecture; and, anticipation that cloud-based solutions will account for 12% of IT spending by 2014, creating a need for storage that works both on-premise and in the cloud.

“The interest in scale-out storage has significantly increased recently as enterprises look for the most effective way to address scalability and manageability in such highly dynamic environments as the cloud,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Gluster’s new offering is representative of the types of major breakthroughs we’re seeing in storage technology for VM and cloud environments, delivering the scale-out architecture that is needed in a highly responsive manner thanks to its software approach to the problem.”

Gluster says their Virtual Storage Appliances are:

Tailored for VM and cloud environments: The software-only appliances are decoupled from hardware and virtualize the underlying disk and memory resources in a unified global namespace, allowing for limitless scalability. With this feature, enterprises are able to deploy storage similar to virtual machines and eliminate the need for expensive physical monolithic storage systems.
Easy to deploy and scale: By scaling performance and capacity linearly, data is able to be added as required in only a few minutes without affecting performance across a wide variety of workloads. Additionally, storage is centrally managed across a wide variety of workloads.
Supportive of multiple platforms: The virtual storage appliances are available in two versions: as a VMware Virtual Machine or an Amazon Machine Image, providing easy deployment on any VMware certified hardware or Amazon Web Services’ public cloud. This support delivers excellent performance across a wide range of workloads, including those found in highly virtualized environments.

“Over the past decade, enterprises have seen enormous gains as they have migrated from proprietary, monolithic server architectures to architectures that are virtualized, open source, standardized, and commoditized. Virtualization technology is at the heart of cloud computing, but unfortunately the storage side of the equation has not kept pace with computing,” said AB Periasamy, co-founder and CTO of Gluster. “Gluster’s new virtual storage appliances play a crucial role in closing the server-storage virtualization gap and deliver a solution that is tailor-made for cloud and VM environments.”

The Gluster AMI is available in multiple instance types from Amazon Web Services. The flexibility of the AWS pay-as-you-go model combined with the elastic scaling capabilities of Gluster ensures customers only deploy and pay for what is needed when needed. Gluster offers a fully POSIX compatible interface that aggregates multiple Elastic Block Storage (EBS) devices in a unified pool. This storage pool can be accessed simultaneously by hundreds of clients and configured for high availability.

Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances for VMware are designed for virtual environments and run on any VMware certified hardware. With the ability to deploy in minutes in the same manner as standard VMs, the appliances accelerate the transformation of storage to more closely resemble the compute environment.

Product Availability

Gluster Virtual Storage Appliances will be generally available on February 15. To sign up now or obtain more information, go to http://www.gluster.com/products/.

data storage

In Search of the Great Cloud

Gluster Introduces First Scale-Out NAS Virtual Appliances for VMware and Amazon Web Services