News Topics:   

Dave:  Survey: Cloud’s hard, insecure and my boss made me do it

The 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey queried more than 1,300 people on their feelings and experiences with moving to a cloud computing model, and the findings paint a somewhat confusing picture (perhaps due in part to the questions asked). While the majority of respondents expressed relative comfort with the state of their cloud migrations, some took rather extreme negative positions.

But even IT personnel who don’t like it are stuck with the cloud: not going there would mean disobeying their bosses or, worse, not keeping up with the Joneses. One finding — not included in the infographic below — is that while 52 percent are moving to the cloud because of an imperative from above, 41 percent are following their industry peers. Hey, if everyone else is doing, what can go wrong?


Chris: Happtique mRx Trial Prompts Doctors to Prescribe Mobile Apps to Patients
This story speaks to consumerology as well as mHealth.

Now you may leave the doctor's office with not only a prescription for medication but an Rx for a mobile application to help take better care of yourself.  Happtique, whose name stands for health app boutique, offers branded multiplatform app stores to health care organizations. It also offers a certification program to vet mobile health apps for doctors, nurses and patients. The program is similar to a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

It’s a framework that allows a doctor to “prescribe” applications, and then be notified when those applications are downloaded by the patient.  Feels kind of big brother-ish but when you look at the numbers it’s only about 65% of people with chronic diseases that are following their prescriptive solution.  I think the aim here is that this isn’t the same as discharge instructions - this is an actual prescription to use an application for a set period time until you’re better.  Time and time again I see that knowledge doesn’t change behavior, maybe this is a move in the right direction.

For the future the question would be if your insurance can be affected by your tendency to follow or not follow prescriptions that can be verified.  Where does this end up?  Well there’s plenty of sci-fi stories that both warn and encourage but the need for this probably outweighs any privacy concerns between a patient and their employer’s insurance company.

News Topics:   

News buzz: University of Florida - planned to cut $1.7M from CS budget (effectively killing the program) and has backpedaled due to an overwhelming backlash.  Nice job down there in Florida - increasing the athletic budget by cutting CompSci?  Give me a break.

Dave:  Cloud storage booming, but trouble brewing

As of today, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and SugarSync have the same feature: They make it very easy to upload a file and generate an URL that points to that file alone. Uploader can then send the URL to anyone they wish, in some cases with an optional password, and the recipients can download the file without signing up for an account, without logging in. SpiderOak has a similar capability, called ShareRooms, that works with folders.

If Megaupload's transgressions were so egregious they warranted international police action, what standards apply to these other cloud storage companies? There's hardly a hair's breadth of distance between cloud storage and file sharing. Will Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, and SpiderOak be required to scan incoming files for copyright violations? Will they have to implement a Content ID system, similar to YouTube's? If so, Google -- which invented Content ID -- has a big leg up on its competitors.

Chris: Cloud Computing Startups Raise Big Money

We’ve talked about this before on the podcast but I wanted to do a status update and mention a couple recent funding events.

1 - CloudPassage, a San Francisco-based cloud security startup that advertises its services as “Everything you need to secure your cloud servers,” has raised $14 million in second-round funding, bringing total funds raised to $21 million. The startup, whose customer list includes Foursquare, StrongMail, Exois, Avatar New York and Izoox, has experienced subscriber growth of over 70% during the first two months of 2012 as compared with last year. It offers the security and compliance platform Halo, purpose-built for the cloud.

2 - Opscode, which promises to help customers rule the cloud” with its open source Chef tool, has raised an additional $19.5 million in Series C funding.  Opscode enables companies to automate their cloud infrastructure.

This is an ongoing trend of investment that we’re seeing.  True, that cloud is in the hype cycle and money is attracted to the riskier, more bleeding edge, concepts.  Investment has always been about speculation.  It’s important to examine the business value derived from each product offering, however, and these are two to keep an eye on.  Also check out my Pinterest Board on Cloud Startups to Watch (2012).  Jeff big data recommendations: CouchDB and Cloudera.


Jeff: Big Data and the Coming Conceptual Model Revolution
Open Question for panel discussion: Is “information modeling” required in the brave new world of big data? If needed which area of big data does it apply and which type of model (conceptual, logical, physical/object) is needed.

Conceptual modeling, or semantic modeling if you like, is a rather nebulous area in data management. There seems to be a lot of agreement that it is needed, some disagreement about what it is, and little understanding of how to do it. Yet I believe we are now at a point where we will be forced to deal with it in a far more serious way than we have in the past.

Define Logical Model, Physical/Object Model.

Dave:  High stakes for open source in the commercial cloud

The opportunity for lock-in with cloud solutions is huge, and the usual suspects have tried to exploit it. As you might expect, there's heavy competition, with every big-brand vendor inventing a clever and unique spin to lure you to its cloud offering. But the behavior of most of them may surprise you. All the most interesting competitive plays are actually open source. That may sound odd if you think open source is a matter of mass philanthropy, but as Simon Wardley pointed out in Forbes recently, altruism is at best a secondary motivation for the open source cloud computing activity that's evolving.


The cloud computing project landscape is rapidly changing, and there's not a hobbyist in sight. Just this week, we've seen OpenStack form a commercially backed foundation, with player after player folding their hands, joining the project, and putting up big bucks for influential positions in its leadership. Under these circumstances, it will be hard for a private contributor to hold sway with OpenStack.


Chris:
Some electric (amusing) news: verify how clean your power distribution and power generation utilies are, why?  Greenpeace posted a gigantic banner across from Amazon and Microsoft buildings on Thursday asking them how clean their clouds are.  Considering tech advances we’ve covered on the podcast like Server on a Chip, optimizing processor utilization and all kinds of capacity with virtualization, commodity computing being leveraged while scaling out by many major cloud providers, not to mention bare metal provisioning (get a clue Greenpeace) I’m assuming that hilarity ensued.  It’s like if all the cars on the road were removed and people commuted using several highly energy efficient hovercraft and then Greenpeace got upset because the electricity still came from unclean sources even though it was a massive reduction in energy consumption.  I’m going to hear from Greenpeace aren’t I.

The story I’m covering this week:
Appcelerator Delivers Titanium 2.0 With New Cloud Services  
“Appcelerator simplifies the process of integrating cloud services into mobile apps—enabling not only Titanium developers but any native or mobile Web developer to quickly create, configure and deploy rich, cloud-connected applications. Developers can use ACS to leverage all of the new Titanium 2.0 features and capabilities or use it as stand-alone services in conjunction with developers’ choice of development environments...”

“Appcelerator’s new solution also enables app publishers using Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha and HTML5 technologies to create and configure a server-side backend, add mobile app features without writing server code and easily deploy their cloud-connected app. Tasks that can require server programming or integration with multiple SDKs are performed through one simple interface. Developers need only choose which APIs to use, and Appcelerator takes care of deploying and maintaining a full server stack that includes a database, search engine, file storage and application logic...”

I get asked quite a bit what tools and platforms my teams have used to build our cool mobile applications actually.  I haven’t personally used Titanium 2.0 but my advice to the dev listeners is to try it out for me and let me know what you think - if it delivers on the marketing collateral I’m going to give it a whirl.

JP:

What’s All The Fuss About Showback v. Chargeback

A recent article by Joe McKendrick referencing a ZapThink piece posted by Jason Bloomberg predicting backlash against chargeback in private clouds. From McKenrick’s piece:

At issue is the fact that private clouds need to rely on chargeback mechanisms for funding, which tend to create more animosity than a sense of sharing. As Jason puts it:
“Everybody hates chargebacks. Not only are they a bookkeeping hassle, but they also demotivate the consumption of shared resources. We went through this problem when we dealt with shared services and SOA, and now we’re sharing cloud resources, but the problem remains: the whole point to the private cloud is to achieve economies of scale across the enterprise, but the only way to make such economies work is if most or all divisions participate. Chargebacks, however, discourage that participation.”

My Take: Posted at http://infocus.emc.com/author/jp_morgenthal/ discusses the underlying intent for showback and chargeback for the business. Historically, these efforts emerged from attempting to turn IT into a profit center. However, IT was so poorly aligned with the business it had the unintended consequence of fostering shadow IT once the business began to understand they had a choice. The result was many IT organizations once again becoming a cost center. We’re now revisiting this trend around cloud computing, but approaching with the same 90’s mentality of the business coming to IT for IaaS and PaaS. If we don’t change our approach we will end up with the same results as last time.

Jeff: Soaring Splunk Shows Public Markets Intrigued By Big Data
Founded in 2003, Splunk’s three founders set out to build a Google for machine data– essentially a search engine for all the data that servers, network switches and any device with a processor spits out when those devices are in use.

Though there are several technologies that power its software, its “schema-on-the-fly” technology more than anything else makes it a big data company. That technology enables Splunk to organize data around when a customer enters in a search term.

The ability to search, chart and graph massive amounts of data, with unknown, changing and confusing structures, isn’t exclusive to Splunk. It’s the promise behind almost all big data companies, and, judging by Splunk’s debut, an intriguing prospect for public-market investors.

My Thoughts:
Based on the success IPO of Splunk it is obvious that every company these days must have a “big data” association (product, tools or service) in other to be relevant in the technology market. Splunk is a great product for a specific purpose. The company’s product is more of an analytics tool than a big data technology. In other words, its a business intelligence tool for system analytics rather than business analytics.

Please e-mail podcast@bluemountainlabs.com to contact us directly.   

Speaking:

• VMWare Federal Partner Exchange, Thursday April 12th
• Cloud Expo in June

• Cloud Connect in September

Webinars:

• Big Data in Healthcare: Age of Meaningful Use

News Topics:      

• Can big data improve national security? Obama Admin commits $200M to find out

Dave:   There’s a new open source cloud in town. Meet Apache CloudStack

It looks like OpenStack won’t have the open-source cloud spotlight to itself anymore. Citrix Systems has released its CloudStack software (which it obtained via its acquisition of Cloud.com last year) to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competitive option to the OpenStack project of which Citrix was an early member. And while the move is ultimately part of Citrix’s corporate battle against VMware on the cloud-software front, it’s also very much a comment on the state of OpenStack.

Assuming it gets traction with developers, CloudStack should present a formidable competitor for primary targets OpenStack and VMware, as well as fellow open-source cloud vendor Eucalyptus. The software already claims thousands of private IaaS clouds running atop it, including large production clouds at Zynga, Bechtel and GoDaddy. Those big names help explain why Citrix paid more than $200 million for Cloud.com in July.

And while the software was always open source — Peder Ulander, vice president of marketing in Citrix’s Cloud Platforms Group, claims more than 30,000 members in its online community — making CloudStack an Apache project is very important. OpenStack has been dogged by concerns over its Rackspace-heavy governance model since its inception, resulting in the project creating last October the independent OpenStack Foundation to take over project management. Apache, of course, is a well-respected open source foundation responsible for everything from the eponymous Apache HTTP Server to Hadoop.


Jeff:   Microsoft Releases Second Preview of Hadoop-Based Service for Windows Azure
On previous PodCast I talked about Microsoft’s new found love for Hadoop with Microsoft suggesting that MS SQL Server can be leveraged by customers to persist Hadoop harvested data and analytics; implying that MS SQL Server to be used as a database middleware to access Hadoop.

Today I have a new blog post by Rikki Endsley @ CMS Wire.com stating that Microsoft Cloud platform Azure is now offering Hadoop services to an expanded users of up to 2000 via invitation only to test the Hadoop service on Azure

Microsoft has stated that it will release a Hadoop for Windows Server planned for June 29th. In addition to this limited release of Hadoop on Azure, Microsoft includes additional Hadoop add-ons such as the libraries for Hadoop Mahout which is an open source predictive analytics modeling application used for data mining and machine learning algorithms.

Dave:   Gartner: SaaS market to grow 17.9 percent to $14.5 billion

Global spending on SaaS (software as a service) will rise 17.9 percent this year to $14.5 billion, according to figures released Tuesday by analyst firm Gartner.
SaaS market growth will remain strong through 2015, when spending on the software is expected to hit $22.1 billion, according to Gartner.

The spending rise is attributable to greater familiarity with how SaaS works, growth in related PaaS (platform as a service) offerings, and IT budgeting considerations, Gartner research director Sharon Mertz said in a statement. SaaS products are typically sold via subscription, allowing companies to avoid large up-front licensing fees and capital costs.

North America is the most mature and largest SaaS market, expected to generate $9.1 billion in revenue this year, compared to $7.8 billion last year.



JP:   DevOp/NoOp

Jeff:   
Will Google Big Query Transform Big Data Analysis?
By Doug Henschen InformationWeek

BigQuery offers the following features:

• Speed - Analyze billions of rows in seconds

• Scale - Terabytes of data, trillions of records

• Simplicity - SQL-like query language, hosted on Google infrastructure

• Sharing - Powerful group- and user-based permissions using Google accounts

• Security - Secure SSL access

• Multiple access methods - Connect to BigQuery using the BigQuery browser, the bq command-line tool, the REST API, or Google Apps Script

BigQuery is also ideal for:

• Ad-hoc analysis

• Standardized reporting

• Data exploration

• App prototyping

Oldy, but a goody.    

The basics of cloud computing interoperability, including portability and use of standards.    

Dave

News Topics:      

Dave:   Amazon comes out on top in cloud data transfer speed test

A study investigating the amount of time it takes to transfer 12TB of data from one cloud to another shows there can be up to a 25 times difference in transfer speed among providers.

Nasuni, which provides cloud storage using various public clouds, tested how long it took to transfer the data between Amazon Web Services S3 (Simple Storage Service), Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace. The company used 22 million files of mixed sizes, with each file having an average size of 550KB. Transferring into AWS from Microsoft Azure was the fastest and transferring data from AWS to Rackspace was the slowest.

For example, transferring from one bucket of AWS's S3 servers to another set of S3 servers took four hours. Transferring from S3 to Azure took 40 hours, and transferring from S3 to Rackspace took 115 hours, or almost five days. Nasuni also tested data transfers into S3 and found that migrating the data from Azure to S3 took four hours and moving it from Rackspace to S3 took five hours. Nasuni did not perform Azure to Rackspace or vise versa testing.

Chris: OMGPop scaled to 36 million users in three weeks

OMGPop can thank the cloud for its acquisition by Zynga on Wednesday. The gaming startup, whose Draw Something iPhone app used cloud computing and a NoSQL database to scale from zero (relatively speaking) to more than 35 million downloads in three weeks and never miss a beat.

Derrick Harris met with Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold, whose company worked with OMGPOP to scale its implementation of the Couchbase database as demand started growing.

Details:

• OMGPop is hosted in the cloud, but “they’re not on Amazon.”
• Draw Something has been downloaded more than 35 million times. Players have created more than 1 billion pictures and are creating around 3,000 pictures per second.
• To handle the incredible traffic spike, OMGPOP had to reconfigure its Couchbase cluster, scale it into the many tens of nodes, and many terabytes of data and increased throughout into the tens of thousands of operations per second.
• Throughout all this, Draw Something didn’t experience any downtime.

This type of load really stresses a system, Wiederhold said, and if it wasn’t for its decision to use cloud computing and NoSQL technologies, “their game would have fallen over.” EA recently removed its “The Simpsons: Tapped Out” game from Apple’s App Store after server problems prevented users from being able to login. It’s not clear what, exactly, caused EA’s problem, but it speaks to the importance of having components that are able to scale as apps go viral.

Scalability, of course, is one of the primary calling cards for both cloud computing and NoSQL providers. NoSQL databases, which broke onto the scene a few years ago by claiming to solve the scaling problems inherent in many relational databases, are hugely popular among those building web applications. One of the early poster children of cloud computing was Animoto, who launched its Facebook app in 2008 and scaled to about 250,000 members and about 3,400 Amazon Web Services compute images over the course of a week.

Chris 2: High Performance Computing Division Launched by Patriot Technologies

Patriot Technologies has launched a High Performance Computing (HPC) Solutions division that provides customized hardware solutions designed to enable the best-designed configuration at the lowest possible cost of ownership to support even the most demanding technical computing environments -- including the Cloud and Hadoop.

Patriot Technologies solutions include Turn-key Clusters, High-Performance Workstations/Servers, GPU Solutions, Enterprise Storage and Cloud Computing. In addition, the company specializes in crafting Hadoop Clusters Solutions. Hadoop is an Apache Open-Source Project, which represents the largest open-source Big Data technology on the market today. It origin dates back to 2004, and it is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for analysis of unstructured data. [Patriot offers] a complete line of rackmounts servers/cloud servers as the building blocks to turn-key Hadoop Cluster deployments.

>Share thoughts around purpose-built hardware (e.g. routers) and examples from SOA (hardware based service gateways) - hardened and optimized OS layer but will it succeed?  Time will tell.


jeff:  

Supersize me: Hadoop upgrade will handle even bigger data

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-explosion/supersize-me-hadoop-upgrade-will-handle-even-bigger-data-187800

The key objective of this upgrade  (0.23) is to increase the number of nodes within a given Hadoop cluster from 4000 to 6000, rewrite the MapReduce framework (version 2.0) to allow for higher throughput on larger node clusters and an upgrade to HDFS to allow high availability of data across a given cluster nodes.

Hadoop is no longer a “big data” technology but a “massive data” technology…this is a first here by the way. With this level of scalability; a “wide area” distributed data warehouse performance is no longer an issue, granted there is dependency on network performance. In addition this upgrade makes the HDFS more stable and highly available because you can now configure the “Name Node” as an “active/passive” cluster enabling a failover capability for high availability. 

Dave:

Gartner: “The Personal Cloud Will Replace the Personal Computer as the Center of Users' Digital Lives by 2014”

Building on the fact that the use of cloud computing is freeing us from dependence on a specific device, Gartner may be spot on.   

According to Gartner, the personal computer as the sole access device is coming to a close by 2014.   What’s replacing it?   The personal cloud.   Okay, what the hell is a personal cloud?

“Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity. However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.”

Actually, this is building on the topic of my last blog, which I produced without seeing this release.    The concept being that the use of cloud-based resources is providing use with the flexibility to use many different devices, and thus the rise of the personal cloud that becomes the new center of our digital universe.     

Chris: Cellnovo's Cloud System Monitors Diabetes in Real Time

An insulin pump, attached to the body with Velcro, connects wirelessly to a touch-screen activity monitor that resembles an Apple iPhone but doesn't make calls. Cellnovo has disabled the voice capabilities of the mobile monitor as a safety feature.

"We have many sensors on the pump that measure the temperature of the insulin," said McKeon. "All of that information is constantly being communicated to the handset, and once that information is on the handset, that information gets moved up over the mobile network."

By wearing the pump as a patch, patients don't have to keep a journal, according to Cellnovo.

Cellnovo is conducting trials with 100 type 1 diabetes patients in 10 leading diabetes centers in the United Kingdom to determine how connecting a wireless insulin pump to a wireless data-transfer system will help them regulate their diet and take the proper amount of insulin.

The usability trial allows patients to share data and caregivers to evaluate it remotely in real
time.

Professor John Pickup of King's College London School of Medicine is the principal investigator for the trial.

"The Cellnovo system provides us immediate access to the clinical status of all our patients on a single screen," trialist Stephen Greene, a professor at the University of Dundee, said in a statement.

The Cellnovo diabetes management system is part of a remote-monitoring trend in health care, according to McKeon. Mobile technology will become embedded in medical devices on a regular basis, he predicted.

However, McKeon believes that eventually the device will matter less and the real value is with the cloud-based platform. In a way, it mirrors how the iPod became less important as Apple's iTunes moved toward a more cloud-based model.

"That's the real seismic shift, moving from MP3 players to iTunes," said McKeon. "The device has become less important. What's most important is in the cloud, and it's the same way with managing a patient."

"In five years when we're talking about medical devices, people are going to look back to when patients would drive to a diabetes clinic or cardiovascular clinic four to 10 times a year when a [wireless] radio could have done that for us," McKeon explained.

Following trials in the United Kingdom, Cellnovo will show the diabetes management throughout Europe and then seek 510(k) clearance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to try to begin selling the device by midyear in the States, said McKeon.

With the real-time data provided to doctors, McKeon hopes that more diabetes patients will be able to avoid losing limbs and eyesight. By using software to record blood sugar and diet numbers and by connecting to cellular radios to transmit the data, people could possibly live longer and healthier "without the burden of this disease," he said.  

JP:  

Jeff (pick one story Jeff):

Microsoft courts big data market with SQL Server update

http://www.infoworld.com/d/computer-hardware/microsoft-courts-big-data-market-sql-server-update-188123

Guess who is invited to the big data party….its your favorite desktop buddy Microsoft. With Azure issues behind them, Microsoft is touting the next release of SQL Server (2012) RDBMS as a “big data” platform. In short, Microsoft…a late comer to the “big data” movement is showing signs of wanting a piece of the action. According this article by By Joab Jackson from IDG News Service
Microsoft, customers can use SQL Server 2012 as a connector to Hadoop to access harvested data from Hadoop data sources.

In my opinion why go through an intermediary system to access Hadoop aggregated/harvested data when there are tools out by several vendors to access the data directly. In addition many of BI vendors are now building Hadoop connectors within their BI stack to access Hadoop data sources.

Supersize me: Hadoop upgrade will handle even bigger data

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-explosion/supersize-me-hadoop-upgrade-will-handle-even-bigger-data-187800

The key objective of this upgrade  (0.23) is to increase the number of nodes within a given Hadoop cluster from 4000 to 6000, rewrite the MapReduce framework (version 2.0) to allow for higher throughput on larger node clusters and an upgrade to HDFS to allow high availability of data across a given cluster nodes.

Hadoop is no longer a “big data” technology but a “massive data” technology…this is a first here by the way. With this level of scalability; a “wide area” distributed data warehouse is possible. In addition, it makes the HDFS more stable and highly available because you can now configure the “Name Node” as an “active/passive” cluster enabling a failover capability for high availability.