I know I promised a post on how the network fits into cloud computing, but after a wonderful first part of my week spending time first catching up on reading, then one-on-one with my 4-year old son, I'm finally digging into what's happened in the last two days in the cloud-o-sphere. While the network post remains important to me, there were several announcements that caught my eye, and I thought I'd run through two of them quickly and give you a sense of why they matter
The first announcement came from Replicate Technologies, Rich Miller's young company, which is focusing initially on virtualization configuration analysis. The Replicate Datacenter Analyzer (RDA) is a powerful analysis and management tool for evaluating the configuration and deployment of virtual machines in an enterprise data center environment. But it goes beyond just evaluating the VMs itself, to evaluating the server, network and storage configuration required to support things like vMotion.
Sound boring, and perhaps not cloud related? Well, if you read Rich's blog in depth, you may find that he has a very interesting longer term objective. Building on the success of RDA, Replicate aims to become a core element of a virtualized data center operations platform, eventually including hybrid cloud configurations, etc. While initially focused on individual servers, one excellent vision that Rich has is to manage the relationships between VMs in such a tool, so that operations taken on one server will take into account the dependencies on other servers. Very cool.
Watch the introductory video for the fastest impression of what Replicate has here. If you manage virtual machines, sit up and take notice.
The other announcement that caught my eye was the new positioning and features introduced by my alma mater, Cassatt Corporation this week. I've often argued that Cassatt is an excellent example of a private cloud infrastructure, and now they are actively promoting themselves as such (although they use the term "internal cloud").
It's about freaking time. With a mature, "burned in", relatively technology agnostic platform that has perhaps the easiest policy management user experience ever (though not necessarily the prettiest), Cassatt has always been one of my favorite infrastructure plays (though I admit some bias). They support an incredible array of hardware, virtualization and OS platforms, and provide the rare ability to manage not only virtual machines, but also bare metal systems. You get automated power management, resource optimization, image management, and dynamic provisioning. For the latter, not only is server provisioning automated, but also network provisioning--such that deploying an image on a server triggers Cassatt to reprogram the ports that the target server is connected to so that they sit on the correct VLAN for the software about to be booted.
The announcement talks a lot about Cassatt's monitoring capabilities, and a service they provide around application profiling. I haven't been briefed about these, but given their experience with server power management (a very "profiling focused" activity) I believe they could probably have some unique value-add there. What I remember from six months ago was that they introduced improved dynamic load allocation capabilities that could use just about any digital metric (technical or business oriented) to set upper and lower performance thresholds for scaling. Thus, you could use CPU utilization, transaction rates, user sessions or even market activity to determine the need for more or less servers for an application. Not too many others break away from the easy CPU/memory utilization stats to drive scale.
Now, having said all those nice things, I have to take Cassatt to task for one thing. Throughout the press release, Cassatt talks about Amazon and Google like infrastructure. However, Cassatt is doing nothing to replicate the APIs of either Amazon (which would be logical) or Google (which would make no sense at all). In other words, as announced, Cassatt is building on their own proprietary protocols and interfaces, with no ties to any external clouds or alternative cloud platforms. This is not a very "commodity cloud computing" friendly approach, and obviously I would like to see that changed. And, the truth is, none of their direct competitors are doing so, either (with the possible exception of the academic research project, EUCALYPTUS).
The short short of it is if you are looking at building a private cloud, don't overlook Cassatt.
There was another announcement from Hyperic that I want to comment on, but I'm due to chat with a Hyperic executive soon, so I'll reserve that post for later. The fall of 2008 remains a heady time for cloud computing, so expect many more of these types of posts in the coming weeks.
