Scaling in the Cloud
August 23, 2011
When everyone got on board with cloud computing, did scalability programs follow? The April 2011 meltdown at Amazon affected “only” certain customers.
With all the hype about moving to the cloud a year ago, it was easy for everyone to jump on the bandwagon without really realizing how they’d be able to allocate resources. IT World Canada reported on a cloud scalability technology in the 2010 article, “Montreal Firm Updates Database Management System.”
Almost a year ago, in September 2010, Sand Technology Inc. released Sand CDBMS 6. This column-oriented database management system is the one experts said would be beneficial for cloud computing customers who need workload scalability.
We learned the following about Sand CDBMS 6’s features from the IT World Canada article:
[It] also includes mobile computing support so IT admins can deploy the Sand technology on a laptop and manage data flow to and from the cloud by creating local personal data marts on portable devices…[T]he ability to manage data flow in incremental updates is important given bandwidth can be unreliable.
Additionally, towards the end of the article George Goodall, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group Ltd. offered insight about the current trend of alternatively structured databases given data growth. The clouds are gathering. Get ready for some additional engineering analyses.
Megan Feil, August 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: AIS Network Moves SharePoint to the Cloud
August 4, 2011
Security and Open Source: A Delicate Mix Requires a Deft Hand
July 5, 2011
I recall reading a very unusual write up with a “learning” hook. The story was “The 10 Worst Cloud Outages (and What We can Learn from Them).” The article makes lemonade from the Amazon faults, which is a combination of home grown, open source, and commercial software. The lemonade bucket is full because the same recipe is used for cloud outages at Microsoft Sidekick, Google’s Gmail (with no reference to the Blogger.com crash during this year’s Inside Search conference which focused on cloud stuff), Microsoft’s Hotmail issues, Intuit’s flubs, Microsoft’s business productivity online standard suite stumbles, Saleforce.com’s outage, Terremark’s troubles, PayPal’s hiccups, and Rackspace’s wobblies.
What the article taught me was that this cloud stuff is pretty difficult even for folks with deep pockets, lots of engineers, and oodles of customers who swallow the pitch hook, line, and sinker.
My hope is that US government funding of research into the use of open source software for security applications can route around cloud dependencies. “DHS, Georgia Tech Seek to Improve Security with Open Source Tools.” The article said:
Although parts of the government, such as the Defense Department, have embraced open-source software for a variety of applications, many agencies still view it as suspect. As a resource, Davis hopes HOST will help to dispel the “hippie in the basement” view of open-source programs — that it’s cobbled together by enthusiasts rather than teams of professional programmers. The advantage of open-source software is that users can vet the source code themselves to make an application more secure. “Having something in a cellophane wrapped box doesn’t make it safer,” he said.
A combination of cloud technology and open source might prove the undoing of a well conceived program based on open source technology. Intertwining the cloud and open source tools for security might create a interesting and difficult to troubleshoot situation. Let’s hope the approach delivers lemonade with just the right amount of sugar, not a sour concoction.
Stephen E Arnold, July 5, 2011
From the leader in next-generation analysis of search and content processing, Beyond Search.
Google Misfires on Cloudy Office
July 2, 2011
According to the Business Insider’s “Google Tries to Show Microsoft How the Cloud Should Work,” the Internet giant has announced an update to its Google Cloud Connect that will let users open documents stored on Google Docs from directly within Microsoft Office through a new menu option. We learned in the write up:
The feature ONLY opens files that are in formats supported by Office, like .doc and .docx for Word or .xls and .xlsx for Excel.” “Google-formatted files can’t be opened from Office, so Google decided they shouldn’t even show up in the dialog box.
While Google’s update is an improvement over the lack of coordination between Microsoft’s Skydrive cloud storage service and Office documents, people who do some work in the browser and other work in Office and want all files to be available from everywhere are still without a solution.
Other vendors are adding value to Microsoft’s cloud offerings. You can get a good short profiles of a a couple of other companies in this sector in “Office 365 Partners Extend UC and Email Options.”
Stephen E Arnold, July 2, 2011
You can read more about enterprise search and retrieval in The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published my Pandia in Oslo, Norway, in June 2011.
Laurent Couillard, CEO, Dassault Exalead: Exclusive Interview
June 28, 2011
Exalead caught my attention many years ago. Exalead’s Cloudview approach allowed licensees to tap into Exalead’s traditional Web and enterprise functions via on premises installations, a cloud implementation, or a hybrid approach. Today, a number of companies are working to offer these options. Exalead’s approach is stable and provides a licensee with platform flexibility as well as mobile search, mash ups, and inclusion of Exalead technology into existing enterprise applications. For organizations fed up with seven figure licensing fees for content processing systems that “never seem to arrive”, Exalead has provided a fresh approach.
Exalead provides high-performance search and semantic processing to organizations worldwide. Exalead specializes in taking a company’s data “from virtually any source, in any format” and transforming it into a search-enabled application. The firm’s technology, Exalead CloudView, represents the implementation of next-generation computing technology available for on-premises installation and from hosted or cloud services. Petascale content volume and mobile support are two CloudView capabilities. Exalead’s architecture makes integration and customization almost friction-free. The reason for the firm’s surge in the last two years has been its push into the enterprise with its search-based applications.
The idea of an enterprise application built upon a framework that can seamlessly integrate structured and unstructured data is one of the most important innovations in enterprise search. Only Google, Microsoft, and Exalead can boast commercial books about their search and content processing technology.
In 2010, Exalead’s market success triggered action on the part of one of the world’s leading engineering firms, Dassault Systèmes. Instead of licensing Exalead’s technology, the firm acquired Exalead and aggressively expanded the firm’s research, development, and marketing activities. Exalead’s approach enables more than 300 organizations to break the chains of the “key word search box” and has provided Dassault with a competitive advantage in next-generation information processing. In addition to mobile and rich media processing, Exalead is working to present integrated displays of real time information that add value to a wide range of business functions. These include traditional engineering to finding a restaurant on an iPhone.
Laurent Couillard, Chief Dassault Exalead
With the purchase of Exalead, Dassault appointed Laurent Couillard as Exalead’s chief executive officer. Mr. Couillard joined Dassault Systèmes as an application engineer in 1996, most recently serving as Vice-President Sales and Distribution for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In that post, he played a central role in the sales transformation of 3DS, establishing a powerful reseller channel for all PLM brands and contracting with more than 140 companies. As CEO of EXALEAD, his mission is to accelerate the market penetration of applications based on search technologies. Mr. Couillard holds an M.S. from Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace, a preeminent institution in Toulouse, France.
I asked him what was capturing his attention. He told me:
We are devoting more energy to developing packaged business applications or SBAs built on this foundation. That’s a mission right up my alley. And I intend to apply all my experience in sales and partner network development to this mission as well. That’s my charge from Dassault: To use my dual technology/sales background to develop Exalead and to penetrate new markets with SBAs, while preserving all the qualities that make Exalead so unique in this market. I’m fortunate to be in a position to leverage the full knowledge, resources, geographical coverage and expertise of the Dassault group to make this happen.
I probed for the reasons behind Dassault’s purchase of Exalead in 2010, a move which caught many analysts by surprise. He said:
Dassault saw first-hand how search-based applications based on Exalead’s systems and methods solved some of its clients’ long-standing, mission-critical business challenges quickly, painlessly and inexpensively. Dassault’s management understood–based on technical, financial, and performance facts—that Exalead’s search-based applications were a prime reason why search was, and is forecast to remain, an exceptional performer in the information technology software market. Because Dassault was seeking to diversify its content processing offerings, search in general and search based applications technology in particular were obviously an appealing choice. Dassault is, therefore, developing SBAs as one of its three core activities.
We discussed the challenges facing most of the traditional key word search and content processing systems. He noted:
You have to remember Exalead’s always understood search is sometimes something you do, and other times something you consume. In other words, sometimes it’s a search text box, and sometimes it’s the silent enabler beneath a business application, or even an entire information ecosystem.
You can read the full text of my interview with Mr. Couillard in the ArnoldIT.com Search Wizards Speak collection. The interview is located at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, June 28, 2011
Freebie from the leading vertical file service for search and content processing.
Does Google Have the Ooomph to PaaS Other Vendors
June 24, 2011
Writer Derrick Harris details several potential problems for Google in Gigaom’s article, “Can Google App Engine Compete in the Enterprise?”
First and foremost, the company has discontinued the App Engine for Business. That service was specially designed to function in enterprise environments, and was created in partnership with VMware. It seems that many users balked at limitations, like the inability to gain access from outside the owner’s domain.
Google is still working on the more generic App Engine, which is currently in preview mode, but the Platform as a Service’s (PaaS) full release may come too late for the company to profit fully. Harris conferred with the senior product manager for Google App Engine, Gregory D’alesandre, before drawing his conclusions, asserting:
D’alesandre acknowledged that he’s impressed with some of the PaaS offerings that have hit the market lately. If anything, timing might be critical for Google, which will need to get the production-ready App Engine into the market before any of the myriad other PaaS offerings gather too much momentum. I thought App Engine for Business was a formidable competitor when announced, but time and new PaaS launches — including from Amazon Web Services — have dulled its edge.
Harris also points out that Google’s architecture is considered outdated by at least one insider. That’s not good.
The GOOG is still a giant, but it had better step up its game if it wants such stature in the enterprise market. Our view is that the chatter about new cloud centric platform services is increasing. At the same time, technical issues and concerns about security are capturing headlines. Once again, truth and fiction become difficult to separate. We will just PaaS. Next.
Cynthia Murrell June 23, 2011
ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Stormy Weather for the Eucalyptus Grove?
June 10, 2011
Still feel safe in the cloud? Have you heard from Eucalyptus lately?
According to “Critical Vulnerability in Open Source Eucalyptus Clouds”, there has been another break-in. At least a theoretical one; university researchers have found a hole in the cloud. Per the article:
“An attacker can, with access to the network traffic, intercept Eucalyptus SOAP commands and either modify them or issue their own arbitrary commands. To achieve this, the attacker needs only to copy the signature from one of the XML packets sent by Eucalyptus to the user. As Eucalyptus did not properly validate SOAP requests, the attacker could use the copy in their own commands sent to the SOAP interface and have them executed as the authenticated user.”
The platform has already provided a newer, downloadable version that corrects the issue. Eucalyptus has warned their services may be a little spotty while the rest of the system recognizes the fix.
Go ahead and tally another tick mark against the cloud. What’s worse, besides the discovered threat, users must contend with the hassle of outages related to the fix. I could be wrong, but it seems it is only a matter of time before some serious consequences arise from lax attitudes concerning data storage.
How about putting enterprise data in the cloud with a search interface? Or maybe a bank of social security numbers? Now what about a security lapse?
Sarah Rogers, June 10, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Cloud Crashes: Just One Villain!
June 5, 2011
The article “Cloud Outages: Why Storage Is the Real Villain” surprised me. My understanding of the high profile cloud problems is that there were different types of problems. Some of these were external such as Sony’s inability to keep hackers from penetrating the once proud manufacturer of the Walkman.
Amazon had intraprocess issues. Google’s Blogger went south due to a process issue. The recent Gmail problem is, according to probably specious news reports, China. (Google blames China, which is okay, just a bit repetitious in my view.) Microsoft Exchange did those wild and wonderful Windows ME sorts of things just in Microsoft hosted services, not on my neighbor’s computer.
Here is the passage that caught my attention in the ZDNet write up:
But first and foremost, we have to recognize that the real issues with storage-as-a-service are caused by inadequacies in storage technology, not by the concept itself. We have to address those problems rather than lay responsibility at the feet of cloud computing.
I agree that since Amazon Web Service’s flamed out in April 2011, the cloud looks less like a solution and more like YAP (yet another problem).
Considering the number of companies which are testing and using “cloud computing”, these issues may give some customers a sleepless night or two.
When I worked through the ZDNet write up, I was interested in boiling down some quite different problems to storage. Sure, storage is an issue and it may have been the problem at Amazon. However, the article casts a wider net and catches a whopper, letting the other and tastier fish slip through the weave in the logic. I
If anything, we should be examining the current model of cloud computing more, not less. Tightening the logic net around cloud computing seems like a reasonable step. If one is looking for information, and the cloud based enterprise search system fails, what then? Storage is not the problem, is it?
Stephen E Arnold, June 5, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Google Blogger, a Victim of Data Corruption
May 31, 2011
If Google was a victim of data corruption, what happened to the customers of the cloud based online publishing system?
It seemed that Google might be the latest victim of the recent vicious hacks such as those that recently plagued Sony. However, according to The Inquirer article “Google Says Data Corruption Led to Blogger Outage” offered an explanation for the outage. “During scheduled maintenance on Wednesday night Google’s Blogger team encountered data corruption, which caused the service to crash for many, while others encountered severe bugs such as disappearing posts or error pages.”
Users were unable to make posts for a brief time period. Google was able to solve the problem by restoring their software to an earlier version. The majority of Google Blogger is back up and ready for use. Google should actually be applauded for admitting a problem existed, apologizing, taking care of it quickly and even more surprisingly promising to issue a full report. Recent judgment lapses such as those recently made by Sony have some consumers just waiting to hand the guilty “out to dry.”
April Holmes, May 31, 2011
From ArnoldIT.com, your resource for enterprise search information.
Amazon and Billboard Go Gaga
May 29, 2011
Short honk: Navigate to “How Many Millions Did Amazon Lose on Two Days of 99 Cent Lady Gaga Sales?” Anything missing from the analysis:
Here’s the math: For every unit it sells at 99 cents, Amazon will lose about $7.40, according to Billboard’s calculation. At $7.40 per unit and 430,000 units (10,000 shaved off total digital sales to account for some sales of the deluxe edition), the Gaga-related loss comes to $3.18 million.
I was thinking it might be interesting to include a factor for loss of credibility related to Amazon’s “elasticity”. Obviously Billboard did not think this minor issue relevant. Great ginger beer in New Zealand. Business analysis? Hmmm.
Stephen E Arnold, May 29, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
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