Cloudkick

The digital counterpart of that old business chestnut that you can’t manage what you can’t measure may be, “You can’t manage what you can’t monitor.”  Nowhere is that more true than when you’re trying to take advantage of cloud services and are using multiple providers. They all have different dashboards, which makes monitoring their performance an onerous chore. Cloudkick, a Y Combinator-incubated startup, has developed a web application that provides a unified view of multiple service providers to help companies monitor performance. It enables users to monitor and manage cloud service providers that include Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EVC2, Linode, GoGrid Slicehost, RimuHosting and VPOS.NET. Cloudkick is available through subscription-based plans and a free developer plan.

Features:

• Load, CPU, bandwidth, and memory monitoring
• Alerts including SMS and Email
• Advance and innovative performance graphs
• Diagnostics performance
• Autosetup
• Multiple users per account
• Change-log tool

Alex Polvi, CEO and founder, introduced Cloudkick last year at the Under the Radar Conference

UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?

By Linda Broughton

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.

Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.

In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.

Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.

Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.

The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.

Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.

Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.

Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?

http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/

Black Duck Software Top Picks Part 2

By Chris R. Vaccaro

Cracking Black Duck Software’s list of open source Rookies of the Year for 2009 are AbiCloud and Rainmeter.

While Black Duck dissected a list of 19,000 projects and chose the top 10 to announce in its annual report, Digital Media Buzz is breaking down its favorite four. Click here for the first story.

AbiCloud, which grabbed the No. 6 ranking on Black Duck’s list, is infrastructure software that focuses on the creation and integral management of public and private clouds based on heterogeneous environments, according to a release from the company.

“The project aims to offer users a tool with the capacity for scaling, management, automatic and immediate provision of servers, storage, networks and virtual network devices, as well as applications,” according to Black Duck.

Most companies have specific needs for system architecture. “Not being able to attend to these requirements on demand in an adequate manner makes users feel defrauded by a bad quality service and hence no longer use the product,” says an overview of the project on AbiCloud’s website.

The project allows companies to manage users, appliance libraries, virtual infrastructures, physical infrastructures and private networks, among other integral business structures.

Moving to a different angle of technology, Rainmeter made the top 10 list at No 8. This customizable PC resource meter displays data in different formats. It can measure, “CPU load, allocated memory, network traffic, performance data, uptime, free disk space, and more,” says Black Duck.

According to Rainmeter, the program makes it easy to keep an eye on your system resources, like memory and battery power, or your online data streams, including email, RSS feeds, and weather forecasts by way of desktop skins.

“Many skins are even functional: they can record your notes and to-do lists, launch your favorite applications, and send your tweets to Twitter — all in a clean, unobtrusive interface that you can rearrange and customize to your liking,” Rainmeter’s website says.

According to Peter Vescuso, Black Duck’s executive vice president of marketing, his company evaluated project popularity using a scoring system that awards points for the number of releases within a project, the number of developers involved, and the number of websites linked to the project.

“The Rookies of the Year projects represent some of the hottest areas in software — cloud, gaming, mobile, healthcare - and open source at its best, communities identifying problems and developing solutions in an open, collaborative process,” Vescuso says. “Some of the projects are niche and others are well-known, but all represent the broadening innovation and influence of open source software.”

Black Duck Software Top Picks Part 1

By Chris R. Vaccaro

Black Duck Software recently sifted through 19,000 open source projects and chose the “top 10 Rookies of the Year” for 2009.

“From a Twitter client for World of Warcraft to a natural language processing system for the clinical health care community, open source projects have the answer to an increasing range of development challenges,” says Black Duck Software in a statement.

According to Peter Vescuso, Black Duck’s executive vice president of marketing, his company evaluated project popularity using a scoring system that awards points for the number of releases within a project, the number of developers involved, and the number of websites linked to the project.

DMB chose four of the top 10 that pertain most to digital media technology professionals. Two are featured in this story. Click here for the second story.

Mobile Browser Definition File ranks third on Black Duck’s list. The project provides information for mobile phones and devices, “presenting server applications with a set of 67 capabilities or properties - from screen size to cookie support - to describe a mobile client device.”

According to information on MDBF’s website, at run time the definition file ASP.NET uses this .browser file, along with the information in the HTTP request header to determine what type of device/browser has made the request and what are the capabilities of that device. This information is exposed to the developer through the Request.Browser property and allows them to tailor the presentation of their Web page to suit the capabilities of the target device.

Black Duck’s fourth selection in the top 10 is Google’s Redis or Remote Dictionary Server, which is an advanced key-store database that supports quick access to a dataset. Simply put, it’s a way to store data, “and a concept that can scale to the cloud.”

“In order to be very fast but at the same time persistent, the whole dataset is taken in memory,” it says on the Redis webpage, “and from time to time saved on disc asynchronously (semi persistent mode) or alternatively every change is written into an append only (fully persistent mode). Redis is able to rebuild the append-only file in background when it gets too big.”

The other eight projects selected by Black Duck are: 1. Live Android, 2. Open Health Natural Language Processing, 5. Smasher, 6. AbiCloud, 7. Transdroid, 8. Rainmeter, 9. TweetCraft and 10. Native Client.

Cost Factor Cloudy in HP-Microsoft Deal

By James Zipadelli

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series regarding issues relating to cloud-based services. How will this partnership decrease cost for cloud-based services?

The three-year, $250 million pact HP-Microsoft pact raises questions about the cost of providing cloud computing services.

“HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure,” says a Microsoft spokesperson.

Jeff Carlat, director of marketing for blade servers and infrastructure software, HP Enterprise Business, says the partnership will “lower total cost of ownership as they move to new cloud-based computing models, enabling customers to deploy systems with confidence.” Here is the pricing model for Windows Azure platform on the “Windows Azure Team Blog.”

Windows Azure:O Compute @  $0.12 / instance hour O Storage @ $0.15 / GB / month stored O Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:O Web Edition - Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99 O Business Edition - Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:O Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

When discussing the pricing model the blog says, “Windows Azure instance hours are charged only for when your application is deployed so while developing and testing your application you may want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize instance hour billing. Windows Azure storage is metered in units of average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. Storage is also metered in terms of storage transactions used to add, update, read and delete storage data. These are billed at a rate of $0.01 for 10,000 (10k) transaction requests. Bandwidth is charged based on the total amount of data going in and out of the Windows Azure platform services via the internet in a given 30-day period.”

Carlat says the HP-Microsoft partnership will provide several ways both companies will collaborate, including on cloud computing.

“Other services available include architecture, design, pilot, global implementation, support for server virtualization and management solutions, client virtualization, data management, as well as cloud computing,” Carlat says.

Blue LotusSIDC’s Bolden says Microsoft gets the better end of the deal. “For HP it’s a niche marketing gimmick - a particular product offering in their total range of product offerings,” Bolden says. “It may help their bottom line a little bit. Microsoft has a 30-year-plus track record on commoditizing hardware. They will treat HP the way they treat all their vendors, so the change that they’re going to allow HP to have something exclusive is zilch. It’s not going to happen.”

In a paper, “HP-Microsoft Partnership Will Shake Up the IT Management Market,” Gartner Research analysts David Williams and Ronni J. Colville write that it’s too soon to say how much the Microsoft-HP partnership will benefit IT organizations. “If this one proves an exception, it will be because the combination of tools it offers meets the business demand to optimize and automatically change the IT infrastructure,” they say. “Customers and prospective customers of HP and Microsoft should not change or disrupt their current IT management strategies or decisions until the two companies provide the products and details of their go-to-market strategy needed to understand the partnership’s viability and potential value.”

For more information about the partnership, please visit Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business News Bytes blog, or view their press kit.

James Zipadelli is a Connecticut-based freelance journalist. He has written for CTNewsJunkie.com, OurParents.com and several publications in Boston. He can be reached at jzipadelli@gmail.com and his website is www.jameszipadelli.com.

Virtualizing a Future in Green IT

By Moria Byrne

As the IBM senior-certified IT architect for IBM Global Business Services, John Lamb works as part of an influential group of architectural engineers changing how IT departments approach energy usage.

An information technology leader who has worked on IT systems for the New York Stock Exchange and other industry leaders, Lamb implements new money and energy-saving techniques as part of IBM’s Project Big Green project. The project will redirect USD $1 billion per year to increase energy efficiency of IBM products and services. As part of a team of technology engineers building data centers for a South African mobile phone company, Lamb helped the company provide energy and services to the local community without expending energy resources.

As part of the IBM Global Business Service team and author of more 50 white papers and two other books on technology, Lamb shares his technical expertise on energy-saving techniques with businesses in the U.S. as well as IT businesses with in his latest book, The Greening of IT: How companies can make a difference for the environment. Lamb explains how cloud computing, more efficient cooling systems, increased use of energy metrics, incentives and better hardware are all changing the role of IT operators from energy users to energy watchdogs. His book is intended for both CEOs and technical engineers by providing both the why (savings and increased productivity) and the how (a technology guide of how to apply energy savings techniques) of energy-saving IT techniques. Lamb recently spoke with DMB’s Moria Byrne.

What are the major trends in IT Green Technology right now?
There is a growing awareness about energy consumption in the IT business community. Also, the economic downturn has forced companies to look for ways to reduce costs.

Fortunately, even in this bad economy, electricity is doing well, which means IT will continue to grow. For example, Google has 450,000 servers and keeps growing. What this means is that the company needs to keep building upon a tremendous database.

Does cloud computing play an important role in IT energy conservation? Absolutely! Ten years from now, everything will be done through cloud computing. It is a way to optimize a data center.

IBM consulting expects the number of server shipments to grow by six times and the number of server databases by 69 times. Information technology keeps growing. It reflects how data centers keep growing. In South Africa, we are working with a mobile phone company with a tremendous customer service database. A lot of the information is regulation customer information, etc. The company has 2 Pedbites of information; that’s 10,000 GB! This is a tremendous amount of data. Overall, IBM is building more than 70,000 GB of new information a day.

Were you able to save a lot of energy by using cloud computing for the South African mobile phone company?
IBM moved all 10 database servers into a private cloud where the energy is shared. IBM worked with a company to make their system of 1,000 data servers more efficient. It was hard to keep track of 1,000 servers and going around to keep up the power supply. Now, their power is all in one server. Companies can save a lot by consolidating data servers.

It’s important to create a network, to consolidate and centralize data centers. Cloud computing makes a global network possible. Currently, IBM has 10 virtual servers. Energy costs were greatly reduced by cloud computing. Yet, consolidating data center isn’t enough; companies must moderate metric systems by new standards.

And cloud computing is your way of virtualizing data centers?
Before laptops and the like, which was 40 years ago, every department had their own terminal. It turns out if you wanted to share energy from one center to another, you couldn’t. We decided to go back to the future and make computer systems highly available, uninterrupted service with high-end supplies of energy. This way when the power goes out, the computers keep running. Now, the power is all in one data server.

You save a lot of energy. It’s like taking 10 houses and turning them into an apartment building in which residents are sharing the same heating system. With cloud computing, we don’t have to think about the servers running out of power.

Virtual just means you don’t have separate servers but systems sharing (like a printer) a bigger storage device. For instance, if you have two stand-alone servers with 10-percent capacity and one is using at 5-percent capacity and [another one is] using at 10-percent capacity, it’s better for the two systems to work together. As one is underused and the other is used to its capacity, you still have 5 percent energy capacity to spare.

Do you think that IT departments will be responsible in 10 years for keeping their energy consumption in check?
Absolutely. IT departments will be responsible for their own energy bills. Currently, there is no repercussions when an IT department wants an additional server. There isn’t a good chargeback system in place.

IT departments would have a certain number of GB of storage per month or fiscal quarter.  If a department decides that they need 100 GB more, they will be charged for the additional GB out of their departmental budget. IT departments take responsibility for their electric bills and consider energy needs carefully before increasing GB storage.

Do you think government incentives are going to become increasingly important in pushing IT companies to use energy more efficiently?
I think there will be an increase over time in the number of government rebates available. More government-sponsored incentive programs to push companies to change would make a difference. The government of California put pressure on BGE. Now, the company receives rebates for reducing energy costs in California.

In 1977 or 1978, there was a big energy crisis. IBM was concerned about cutting servers. Then, energy suddenly got cheaper again. Things are going to get bad if you don’t give people incentives. Would they make the same energy choices without it? I’d like to think so. I think things are changing, I think this is a permanent change.

How are you changing IBM applications for maximum energy efficiency?
It’s not just about saving energy by using more efficient hardware and better infrastructure, it’s about the applications, too. You can do 50 percent of your work in 50 percent of the space. If you optimize your applications, you can save up to half your energy.

Both Google and Amazon use private clouds to store their information. Clouds allow large companies to make their information available and transferrable to staff in India or Beijing as readily as someone in NYC.

Do you think all companies will be using cloud computing in the future?
Yes. Ten years from now, every company will be using cloud computing. Most large companies will use private clouds to consolidate different data centers. This way, the company information is protected and only available to specific employees. Smaller businesses will use public clouds or not have a data center at all.

How can the Internet support these new clouds?
High-bandwidth is on the rise in major international cities and cloud computing internationally will be more easily accessible. Already, I have seen strong bandwidth in international cities such as Bangalore, India, where IBM currently has 70,000 employees.

And as bandwidth grows within companies, the need for more space will also continue to grow within data centers. Companies will increasingly be able to house information where ever they choose. For example, IBM has data center operators in Brazil that manage the data centers physically housed in Chicago.

Do you see any other countries other than the U.S. leading the way in Green IT?
China is on its way to becoming the world’s largest producer of renewable energy, yet it remains one of the most polluted countries on earth. India is also on a green IT boom.

To diagnose how to have energy used in data centers download the following online software tool from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Moria Byrne is a freelance journalist and editor. Her work has been featured in: Baltimore Business Journal, Maryland Daily Record, The Jewish Times and The Narragansett Times.

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