Companies and developers are taking early steps toward making proprietary clouds interoperable. Stephen Foskett, director of consulting at Nirvanix, believes the cross-platform cloud may first arrive in storage. Here’s why.
The basic idea is to provide a common front end that makes it easier for users to tap multiple clouds — and avoid vendor lock-in. So why would this happen initially on the storage side? Foskett said work on storage compatibility is going on right now, citing a number of examples.
Those include CloudLoop, a description of which surfaced last September (2009) on a Nirvanix developer forum. The open source Java API “abstracts away differences between vendors’ interfaces, allowing you to switch between providers without changing code.”
CloudLoop also allows data to be copied across vendors, affording he ability to synchronize and migrate data among providers, according to the forum post.
Also in September 2009, Zend Technologies debuted the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project. The company said the open source initiative seeks “to facilitate the development of cloud applications that can access services on all major cloud platforms.”
The project’s first deliverables, according to Zend, will focus on “interfaces for file storage, document database and simple queue services” from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, and Rackspace Cloud Files.
Tony Pearson, senior IT storage consultant for the IBM System Storage product, cited another example in his blog. He related the story of GE, which developed its own cross-platform tool. GE, he wrote, wasn’t pleased with “proprietary APIs and vendor lock-in.” So the company created CloudStorage Manager, which “works with five different cloud storage providers through an abstraction layer,” according to the Pearson’s December 2009 blog post.
And then there’s the case of Nasuni, a startup that plans to launch a gateway to cloud storage. This direction seems to hint at a cross-platform push, but the company has yet to spell out exactly what it plans to offer.
In contrast, cross-platform compatibility is a thornier issue on the compute side of cloud computing, Foskett said. He noted the difficulty of moving server instances from one vendor to another, citing the need for compatibility among virtualized environments.
Cloud Pricing Strategies
Amazon recently rolled out spot pricing, albeit on the compute side and only within its own cloud. In December, Amazon announced Spot Instances, an approach that lets customers bid on unused EC2 capacity.
The spot pricing “lets them fill out troughs in capacity quite effectively,” Foskett said. The identical model would be harder to pull off in storage, he added, since storage grows steadily and doesn’t fluctuate.
That said, storage will remain in the mix. Fadi Albatal, vice president of product marketing at FalconStor Software, said an application provisioned into the cloud also needs some kind of storage behind it. A cloud platform delivering high performance computing services, for example, must address the amount of storage a customer’s application will consume as well as the number of CPUs.
“That would bring spot pricing back to the storage side,” Albatal said.
Over time, cloud storage compatibility via a cross-platform front end could also lead to pricing innovation.
Foskett envisions the arrival of third-party firms offering a Priceline model: universal access to cloud storage platforms and discounted rates. He said that particular development will probably take a while to get here, however.
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Online Backups helped by Cloud Computing
Cloud computing services supported widely by Amazon cloud computing architecture has been proven to add value for enterprises in the online backup business to negotiate a lot of cost and time benefits over traditional on site databases.
Cloud computing explained :
Cloud Architectures address key difficulties surrounding large-scale data processing. In traditional data processing it is difficult to get as many machines as an application needs.
Second, it is difficult to get the machines when one needs them.
Third, it is difficult to distribute and coordinate a large-scale job on different machines, run processes on them, and provision another machine to recover if one machine fails.
Fourth, it is difficult to auto scale up and down based on dynamic workloads.
Fifth, it is difficult to get rid of all those machines when the job is done. Cloud Architectures solve such difficulties.
Benefits of Cloud Computing :
Almost zero upfront infrastructure investment.
If you have to build a large-scale system it may cost a fortune to invest in real estate, hardware (racks, machines, routers, backup power supplies), hardware management (power management,cooling), and operations personnel. Because of the upfront costs, it would typically need several rounds of management approvals before the project could even get started. Now, with utility-style computing,there is no fixed cost or start up cost.
Just-in-time Infrastructure.
In the past, if you got famous and your systems or your infrastructure did not scale you became a victim of your own success. Conversely, if you invested heavily and did not get famous, you became a victim of your failure. By deploying applications in-the-cloud with dynamic
capacity management software architects do not have to worry about pre-procuring capacity for large scale systems. The solutions are low risk because you scale only as you grow. Cloud Architectures can relinquish infrastructure as quickly as you got them in the first place (in minutes).
More efficient resource utilization.
System administrators usually worry about hardware procuring (when they run out of capacity) and better infrastructure utilization (when they have excess and idle capacity). With Cloud Architectures they can manage resources more effectively and efficiently by having the applications request and relinquish resources only what they need (on-demand).
Usage-based costing.
Utility-style pricing allows billing the customer only for the infrastructure that has been used. The customer is not liable for the entire infrastructure that may be in place. This is a
subtle difference between desktop applications and web applications. A desktop application or a
traditional client-server application runs on customer’s own infrastructure (PC or server),
whereas in a Cloud Architectures application, the customer uses a third party infrastructure and gets billed only for the fraction of it that was used.
Potential for shrinking the processing time.
Parallelization is the one of the great ways to speed up processing. If one compute-intensive or data intensive job that can be run in parallel takes 500 hours to process on one machine, with Cloud Architectures, it would be possible to spawn and launch 500 instances and process the same job in 1hour. Having available an elastic infrastructure provides the application with the ability to exploit parallelization in a cost-effective manner reducing the total processing time.
The below link helps to understand how the team at Vembu Technologies have in their endeavor to explain their online backup software to facilitate backup service providers to make use of Amazon cloud computing.
http://www.vembu.com/storegrid/amazon-cloud-backup.php
Sachin: Thanks for the note but is this a comment or a product statement from Vembu? We welcome timely opinions and reader feedback but the item above reads like a product article…
-jp