Tag Archives: Cloud computing

Cloud computing, buzz-word du-jour

Open Source, Technology, , , ,

Cloud computing

The buzzword du-jour in the current economic crash of 2008 is “Cloud Computing”.

There are several interesting question around cloud computing – why now, how are people building it, what are people doing with it and what about security.

1) Why now?

Back in 2001 after the dot com crash, On-demand / SaaS started picking up. My personal  explanation is that  a) there were a lot of  programmers and entrepeneurs out of work, looking for new things to do and  b) an oversupply of bandwidth and server capacity on the Internet and c) a lot of VCs looking for the next big thing. The sales guys try to pitch an economic reason for on-demand: businesses not having the money to buy large enterprise software systems in a down-market.  Since Salesforce.com is not keeping up with the profitability of year-on-year growth of Oracle Applications and SAP – I don’t buy it. At $50/seat for Salesforce.com – if I have 100 people, it’s $5000/month or $60,000/year which is 10x more than I would pay for a free open source instance of SugarCRM or TigerCRM running on a dedicated server at rackspace.com. If SaaS is not an economically sustainable business model for service providers, it will not sustain  for end user customers either long term.

Continue reading →

Tell your friends and colleagues about us. Thanks!
Share this
Email, RSS Follow

EMC Atmos – cloud storage

Technology, , ,

I had heard about this EMC startup but didn’t know much about what they really do. My friend Arik Blum from HP takes the time to send interesting technology updates to his own private distribution list.

Atmos is  COS “cloud optimised storage”, with web services such as SOAP and REST for access. Cloud Optimized Storage(COS) systems are geographically disperse yet managed as a single entity.

Information inside the Atmos repository is stored as objects. Policies can be created to act on those  objects allowing Atmos to apply different functionality and different service levels to different types of users and their data, for example – Replication,DE-duplication, Deletion etc.

Atmos is designed for multi-Petabyte deployments. There are no LUNs. There is no RAID. There are only objects and metadata : Billions of objects globally distributed with policy based information management.

As new data gets written into the Atmos infrastructure it gets synchronously mirrored to N locations (depending on the policy).  The goal for Atmos was to provide a low cost bulk storage system for these emerging markets, like Web 2.0 companies or other industries with lots of user generated content.

  • From a hardware perspective, there’s nothing radical here. Drives are all SATA-II 7.2K 1TB capacity.
  • Front-end connectivity is all IP based, which presumably includes replication too.

A few open questions are pending regarding ATMOS:

· What resiliency is there to cope with component (i.e a hard disk ) failure?

· What is the real throughput for replication between nodes?

· Where is the metadata stored and how is it kept concurrent?

· Where is the rich metadata going to come from?

· Is 1Gb/s enough to replicate my data to a remote site synchronously?

· Is this all battery backed write cache in case I experience a hardware failure?

· how long will it take to replicate a 1TB drive over IP?

Continue reading →

Tell your friends and colleagues about us. Thanks!
Share this
Email, RSS Follow

Host your own SaaS with Open Source – the potential of Mosso

Open Source, Technology, , , ,

Show me a profitable business application-as-a-Service (SaaS) company.

There is a lot of trade talk about the success of Salesforce.com. Here is a company with a $3.2BN market cap as of Oct 26, 2008 currently trading at 24 down from 72, 5 months ago.

In 2007 – SF.com  posted a net income of $480K on revenue of $497M. Compare this to BMC Software,  a software vendor that provides system and service management solutions for the enterprise. BMC has a current market cap of $4.2BN, trading at 23 down from 39, 3 months ago. In 2007 – BMC Software posted $215M net income on $1.5BN in sales.

In plain language – Salesforce.com does not or cannot charge high enough prices for their services to sustain long-term profitability and growth.   At low price points; Free Open Source on inexpensive hosting becomes a highly-competitive alternative, especially for an SME.

Five years ago – the barrier to entry was application functionality but today, Free Open Source line of business applications like Sugar CRM Community edition are mature, full-featured applications with very little, if any, missing features and some unique advantages that Open Source offers.  Salesforce.com imposes a unique IP address/user constraint which can be very annoying. In SugarCRM, if you get User logged out when IP dynamically changed, just change 1 line in config.php

‘verify_client_ip’ => true, to false

Suppose you need a CRM system (if you’re a large shop, you already have one – like Siebel). We’re a small group of 5 guys – and we were using Salesforce.com with one of our business partners and wanted to use SF.com for our own business. The cost is $325/month or almost $4,000/year for 5 users. You can get 90% of the functionality from Sugar CRM for the cost of a onetime installation (which will take less than an hour of your time or about $150 if you pay someone) and $15/month for the hosting (if you use dreamhost.com, like we do). That’s a net savings of $3,000 / year.  dreamhost give us 700GB – more than SF.com, and the response/time is at least as good.

I know you’re saying that dreamhost.com at $15/month can’t compete with the scalability, reliability and service levels of SF.com. Maybe,  maybe not – but if you want muscle – consider Mosso.

For $100 per month, Mosso will sell you 80 GB of SAN storage, 2000 GB of bandwidth, a control panel to create sites, email accounts, databases, etc. and customer support.

Mosso says it takes radically different approach to Web hosting, using enterprise-level architecture. It deploys each website across clusters of servers, so when a server crashes or a hard drive fails, the other servers in the cluster pick up the slack without downtime. Their promise: for every 1 hour of downtime, they will reimburse you for 1 day off your bill.

Tell your friends and colleagues about us. Thanks!
Share this
Email, RSS Follow