cloud computing Archive

NY-based CA has announced the acquisition of NetQoS today for $200 million in an all-cash transaction.  CA trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol CA. NetQoS had annual revenue of $56 million in 2008 and has over 1,000 active customers worldwide.

The release talks about the combined technologies of both companies and the strengths for their customers. The combined companies, “will further strengthen its ability to help enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver reliable, flexible and cost-effective IT and business services.”

They also discuss cloud computing and note, “As enterprises and service providers become increasingly reliant on the shared infrastructure of private and public computing clouds, CA and NetQoS will provide a robust level of network and systems traffic management that will be critical to successfully delivering cloud-based services.”

From the release, “At the close of the transaction, Joel Trammell will join CA as senior vice president and general manager, and Dr. Cathy Fulton, NetQoS chief technology officer and executive vice president of Products, will join CA as senior vice president, Software Engineering. Initially, NetQoS will operate as an independent entity within CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit”. The release also notes that a “majority” of NetQoS’ 250 employees will remain on with CA.

The deal is expected to close by December 31.

Hosting company Rackspace has announced that they will be launching a Chicago datacenter in late 2009. From the announcement, “Rackspace will lease approximately 36,700 square feet of raised floor space, consisting of 5.633 megawatts of available critical load, from a subsidiary of DuPont Fabros Technology, Inc.”

Rackspace notes that their “cloud” business is what’s driving the expansion. Formerly known as Mosso, the Rackspace cloud computing division is known as the “Rackspace Cloud”. I am not sure if the entire space will be used for the cloud computing division or if other Rackspace customers will be serviced in Chicago (it looks like the latter). We currently host the CN network of sites on Rackspace.

Additional techy notes from the announcement:

• Rackspace believes that this lease with DuPont Fabros will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility.
• The Chicago facility maximizes operating efficiency through an enhanced power capacity and flexible design with N+2 redundancy on all major systems including heat rejection systems, generators and UPS systems.

Assembla describes their service as, “portal for software development, collaboration, and code management.” We first posted about Assembla in January 2008 when we interviewed Assembla president Andy Singleton. Earlier this year Assembla partnered with oDesk.

Today Assembla has announced the launch of their “private install” model. Private Assembla is a dedicated server that contains the same software that runs the main Assembla service.  From what I can tell, it looks like a white label plus additional features offering.

There are three options with Private Assembla: download, run in the Amazon EC2 cloud, managed option where Assembla manages the private install.

Pricing for the download option starts at $3,000 for a perpetual license and a year of support. The Amazon option starts at $1/hour and the managed option starts at $2,000/month. There are also additional options for support and installation.

This morning I attended Amazon’s Executive Cloud Computing Workshop. I was able to snap some photos and jot down some notes I’d like to share. The presenters included Werner Vogels – VP & CTO at Amazon.com and Marten Mickos – Sun SVP. I very much enjoyed Werner’s discussion – he basically took us on a tour of the history of AWS (ec2, s3, etc) and some examples of how customers are utilizing their cloud infrastructure services.

Werner explained that using Amazon web services (AWS) helps companies move from capital expenses to variable costs. The basic idea is that instead of buying enough hardware to make sure you can handle spikes, AWS can grow and shrink as needed.

Here you can see how fast AWS is growing and how in mid-2007, AWS bandwidth passed the bandwidth used by Amazon itself. Werner said if they showed 2008 on the chart, the Amazon line would be gone as the growth has been that big. In fact, he said that Amazon’s ecommerce sites combined is only a moderate customer of AWS.

On a typical product page on Amazon (say for a book), Amazon pulls 200-300 services to generate the page. Each service is managed by an Amazon employee and Amazon gives them the flexibility to build in the language and tools that best fit the needs of the service.

Here you can see the growth in registered developers for AWS. At least count it was 500,000 (I am one of the 500,000).

One of the interesting examples Werner provided came from the New York Times. They wanted to put all of their old editions online but didn’t want to utilize their current TIFF files as they were very large in size per page. They wanted to use PDF files instead. They had to convert 4TB of data and internally they looked at using 6 servers and a lot of hours of development. By using AWS, they got the project fully completed in a weekend and it cost $25 in EC2 processing and S3 storage.

Check out all of my event photos on Flickr.

Found via MadLid, Amazon Web Services is holding an Executive Cloud Computing Seminar on March 3rd. Looks like it’s worth checking out. It will be held at the Nasdaq building in Times Square. Looks like it will be half-sales, half-status updates.

Amazon describes the half-day seminar as, "this half-day event is designed to provide insight into the state of cloud computing technology today, guide you on assessing which projects are ideally suited for cloud computing, and illustrate best practices for managing cloud deployments."

The speakers include:

• Werner Vogels - VP & CTO at Amazon.com
• Marten Mickos – Sun SVP
• Michael Crandell - CEO and Founder of RightScale

If enough CN’ers attend, we could do a group lunch afterwards.

Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud hosting division has announced a new partnership with Limelight Networks today that allows Mosso customers to use Limelight’s content delivery network (CDN). Mosso notes that, "this union brings unlimited online storage, scalable content delivery, and application acceleration services, thereby allowing businesses to more easily and affordably distribute content to millions of end users around the world."

If you are new to CDN services, the simple concept is that servers are placed around the world and depending on where you are located, you get served via the closest or most appropriate server. CDNs cut down on the hops back and forth to handle a request.

Mosso’s pricing for Cloud Files with CDN starts at 15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 22 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth from any edge location around the globe. Stored files can be up to 5gb in size. Apparently you can activate the CDN service on any file by accessing it via the Mosso admin control panel. It makes sense for large video and audio files along with large volume sites.

As many of you know, we are hosted on Mosso. Mosso has continued to improve reliability and customer service since we joined back in March. However, when I see deals like this I get excited for the possibilities but wish that they would spend more time making Mosso work like a normal webhost. There are several items including IP addresses referrals (every user looks the same) that just don’t work right and cause big issues when trying to process users appropriately.

Last month Mosso/Rackspace announced their cloud computing strategy.

Yesterday I wrote about the issue of vendor lock-in regarding cloud-based services and how I think developers should think about it. In that discussion, I touched on the open source strategy of cloud computing company 10Gen. After thinking about it I begin to believe that such a strategy may be a serious liability for cloud-based services.

Then, this morning I read an article By Nick Carr where he discussed the significance of open source to buyers. His thesis is that what is most important are the meat and potatoes issues around reliability security, etc. Specifically, Carr says:

We can (and will) have debates about the relative openness of Azure and AWS and Force.com and all the other "cloud platforms" that are available or will be available. And those will be important debates. But in this early stage of the cloud’s development, openness means little to the buyer (or user). The buyers, particularly those in big companies, are nervous about the cloud even as they are becoming increasingly eager to reap the benefits the cloud can provide. What they care about right now is security, reliability, features, compatibility with their existing systems and applications, ease of adoption, stability of the vendor, and other practical concerns. In the long run, they may come to regret their lack of stress on openness, but in the here-and-now it’s just not a major consideration. They want stuff that works and won’t blow up in their faces.

This is very much in line with my thinking from yesterday. Azure is a big deal. No one is going to care about the fact that it is not open source. Basic hosting is going to become a commodity business very quickly, with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (MAG) competing in the game of creating highly scalable services that use traditional development methodologies. Microsoft is now ahead in that game from a technology perspective. Amazon is ahead in customers, and Google, for now, is left in the dust but can obviously catch up. But I don’t see any of these guys making any of their cloud technology open source, and I don’t think it matters.

I liken open source in this space to DRM in the music business. Its one of those things that a small number of people complain about but will later be proven totally irrelevant to the rank and file buyer. We now have statistics to prove that DRM was irrelevant in terms of sales, and we are beginning to see the outlines of the irrelevancy of openness in the cloud.

The real issue here is that small companies are not going to be able to compete selling basic “get your applications into the cloud” type services. MAG is going to own that business. I think that 10Gen and other companies providing baseline services are going to have a rough time playing that game.

Startups who wish to compete in the cloud business will have to provide great value added services that facilitate unique new application categories sitting on top of one or more of the MAG clouds. The services will have to be hard to copy and/or narrow enough to not attract the attention of MAG.

Given the need to innovate in some unique way, and the need to be interoperable with MAG clouds, I am not at all clear how you can create innovate cloud platform services using an open source business model in a money making way. Being open source in this space is akin to what it might be like if Apple made OSX open source and optimized it to run on standard Intel PCs. Good karma perhaps. Good profits, not so much.

Of course many open source businesses hang their hat on services, consulting and support. I personally hate time and materials type businesses masquerading as scalable software businesses, but my opinions aside, these are by and large tough businesses to succeed at.

In short, while being open source may be politically correct, I fear it may be a grave hindrance towards providing a defensible, unique, money-making offering in the cloud.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.