Xen

Sun buys Q-Layer a tad early

Sun Microsystems snapped up a key piece of cloud-enabling technology via its acquisition of Belgium-based Q-Layer this week, but it’s way ahead of most enterprise IT shops that are not ready for private clouds just yet.

Data from The451 Group, published in October, 2008, showed that 84% of their IT client base, several hundred large enterprises worldwide, have no plans to deploy internal, on-premise cloud computing.

Intergenia, a hosting company in Germany is the only public Q-Layer customer.

Q-Layer is focused on the orchestration layer above the hypervisor and supports VMware, Xen, Microsoft and Sun. Its NephOS software is designed to run on virtual and physical servers, storage and networks and abstracts all components in each layer through a uniform set of actions (E.g. create machine, reboot, backup, restore, start, stop, etc). The software translates these actions to the underlying physical or virtual technology. IT admins manage a virtual view that is automatically mapped to the underlying virtual or physical technology.

Other companies in this space include 3tera, Enomoly, Eucalyptus, DynamicOps, Arjuna and Cassatt, among others.

It sounds like great technology, which is typical of Sun, as is the timing. Sun’s track record of acquiring great technology and even building great technology way ahead of market adoption is second to none. This deal with Q-Layer looks to be in keeping with the technology focused company we know and love. Let’s hope IT shops are in a position to try this kit out sooner rather than later and Sun finally gets a break.

Gartner VP predicts thousands of clouds

Gartner’s Vice President and distinguished analyst Tom Bittman spoke with us about the IT industry evolution led by virtualization and cloud computing, and why big players like VMware won’t be the virtualization software of choice.

Since virtualization is the foundation of cloud computing, clouds are the next logical step for virtualization vendors like VMware and Citrix Systems, but Bittman said if these vendors don’t make pricing changes, cloud platform providers like Google and Amazon won’t use them.

“Cloud computing is a wide open market, dominated by open source Xen. It is a market that is there for the taking, and for VMware that would require a significantly different pricing model,” said Bittman, who also blogs about virtualization and cloud computing. “Sun and Citrix could get a major foothold in the cloud market as well, if they get their act together.”

VMware has taken steps towards becoming cloud friendly with its Vcloud initiative, but Vcloud is limiting because the provider has to use VMware, Bittman said. Microsoft also has its own cloud service, Azure, supported by Hyper-V.

Microsoft will probably try to turn Azure into a platform for ISV’s to build software as a service, so “in a lot of ways, they are trying to build a platform for a cloud,” Bittman said. But, “there is no reason Windows will be a prominent player in the cloud…[because providers] like Amazon EC2 don’t care what the OS is; all they care about is what is being provided.”

The future of clouds; more providers, fewer OSes

Today, cloud computing is dominated by a small number of large providers, but in the years ahead there will probably be ecosystems built around those islands; Software as a Service (SAAS) built upon the existing clouds, and the sharing of resources between cloud providers, Bittman said. He also expects fragmentation from the few general cloud platforms of today into many specialty cloud providers with applications and infrastructures that cater to specific industries, like healthcare, which have specific compliance requirements, Bittman said.

“We will see a growth to thousands of cloud providers and they won’t want to write their own software using Xen; they will want to buy software and that is where companies like Sun could make a play,” Bittman said.

Cloud computing is also changing the game when it comes to operating systems; the concept of the Meta-OS (like VMware’s Virtual Data Center OS) is changing the paradigm of using one OS per physical server, Bittman said.”The old idea is you build one platform to manage one box, but if I have 10,000 boxes, I don’t want 10,000 OSEs managing everything independently,” Bittman said. “If I turn an OS into a dumb container, it can work in a much more distributed way, like Microsoft’s Azure, which is essentially Windows 2008 sprinkled all throughout the data center. This is changing the way we look at OSes going forward.”

Cloud computing has the power to change things in the IT industry because of what it offers companies; flexibility and agility, Bittman said.

“Most infrastructures today focus on cost, but we are beginning to see a focus shift towards agility. People are using [cloud environments] not because of the cost savings, but because it is flexible. The ability to make changes according to demand qickly is becoming a more important factor for data centers,” Bittman said.

Rackspace: From managed hosting to cloud hosting

In an effort to wrap my mind around this cloud computing stuff, I watched the webcast of Rackspace’s cloud computing launch today, where the company laid out its plans to move from simple managed hosting provider to cloud provider extraordinaire, taking on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, and Simple Storage Service, or S3, in the process.

Rackspace’s plan centers on acquisition, partnership and expanding its existing Mosso Web hosting product into three broad offerings: Cloud Sites website hosting, Cloud Files storage service, and Cloud Servers virtual private servers.

On the acquisition side, RackSpace has acquired Jungle Disk, a cloud-based desktop storage and backup provider that has thus far relied on Amazon’s S3. It also acquired Slicehost, a provider of Xen-based virtual private servers (VPSs) that claims 11,000 customers and 15,000 virtual servers.

As far as new Mosso offerings, the new Cloud Files will come in at $0.15 per GB of replicated data, or if the data is distributed across a content delivery network (CDN), at $0.22 per GB. CDN capabilities come by way of a partnership with Limelight Inc.

Also as part of Cloud Files, RackSpace will partner with Sonian Networks to provide cloud-based email archiving starting at $3/mailbox.

Coming soon, Cloud Servers is Mosso’s new name for Slicehost’s VPS offering. Under Slicehost, the services starts at $20/month for a virtual Xen server with 256GB of RAM, 10GB of storage, and 100GB of bandwidth. “Slices” scale to 15.5GB of RAM, 620GB of storage and 2,000GB of bandwidth for $800/month.

When it comes to the Xen-based Slicehost — aka Cloud Servers — I should note that Mosso is a longtime VMware customer that has publicly pondered the viability of the relationship as it expands its services. It will be interesting to see whether this acquisition signals a break from VMware or whether it will continue to use VMware as the underpinning of its Cloud Sites offering. Rackspace, care to comment?

On another note, Slicehost is one of many hosting providers that use open source Xen as the basis of their cloud offerings. Presumably, it’s also the kind of company to which Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix Systems Inc., referred when Citrix announced XenServer Cloud Edition and Citrix Cloud Center (C3) at VMworld 2008.

At the time, Crosby said that luring these hosting providers into Citrix support contracts was a huge priority. “Trivially, we looked around and found a couple hundred hosted IT infrastructure providers using open source Xen,” he said. “XenServer Cloud Edition is intended to win greenfield accounts but also to bring the open source Xen guys back home.” XenServer Cloud Edition boasts features like the ability to run Windows guests and commercial support.

One final thought: If any of you find this whole cloud computing thing a bit, ahem, nebulous, Lew Moorman, Rackspace’s chief strategy officer, made an interesting distinction between different types of cloud offerings. “Cloud apps,” Moorman said, are what we used to think of as Software as a Service (SaaS); “cloud hosting,” meanwhile, refers to pooled external compute resources. And of course, there’s cloud storage. Rackspace, it seems, will offer all three.