Grid Computing

Hyperic Launches CloudStatus, Cloud Management Software Deluxe

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

In an impressive effort to make the cloud more transparent, open source cloud management software vendor Hyperic has launched CloudStatus.com, a web service (in beta) that lets a user peek in on the various compute clouds to see how things are running.

CloudStatus measures service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. The initial release provides metrics for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (which runs on the Xen hypervisor), Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service and Flexible Payment Service. Hyperic does so by sending a software agent to make requests against various cloud services, which obviously leads to a few questions about the viability of the service.

As Stacey Higginbotham puts it on GigaOm:

“It’s a decent idea, but my worry is that Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.”

The Hyperic team also blogged about the release featuring a promotion video which we’re happy to share with you.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst On The Linux Vendor’s Virtualization Initiatives

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston this week for the annual Red Hat Summit, where a lot of announcements were made about Red Hat’s forray into virtualization. Whitehurst sat down with Network World’s Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat’s moves in virtualization, reports PC World.

This is the excerpt of the interview where they talk about virtualization:

The virtualization market is dominated by VMware, but you guys expanded your virtualization portfolio with a Linux-based hypervisor this week. What are your goals in virtualization?

Virtualization is half the operating system. Paul [Cormier, Red Hat president of products and technologies] would actually say virtualization is the operating system in a lot of ways. We feel pretty strongly virtualization needs to be pretty tightly integrated with the operating system.

VMware’s the dominant player in an industry that’s what, like 5 or 10% penetrated? And it’s primarily in development and test scenarios, and primarily to reduce server sprawl.

We come from a different heritage. Our systems usually aren’t running at 10%. Linux workloads are a lot higher. The value from our perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures can be enabled by virtualization.

You talk about grid computing, cloud computing, whatever that is. The necessary enabler of that is Linux with integrated virtualization. Because otherwise what are you going to run on a cloud?

Read the rest of the interview on PC World.

Layered Technologies Secures $ 11 Million in Private Investment

March 12, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Layered Technologies has secured $11 million in funding from private equity firm Enhanced Equity Fund and its founding investor Pangloss International. The new cash will provide Layered Technologies with working capital to expand, develop new products, and accelerate sales and marketing efforts within new enterprise markets.

Layered Technologies is a provider of on-demand hosting, utility computing solutions and web services with clients in over 120 countries. The Texas-based company offers a grid hosting service as well as virtual private data centers.

“We see great potential for Layered Technologies to play a key role in shaping the future of grid computing and virtualized services within the hosting marketplace,” said David Howe, Managing General Partner for Enhanced Equity Fund.

[Source: Data Center Knowledge]

Are Grid Computing & Virtualization Blending?

March 21, 2006 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

The synergy between Grid computing and virtualization is becoming more and more apparent and is starting to find common ground in Linux.

At Novell’s Brainshare conference, virtualization is taking the spot light. In fact, Dell made an announcement that it will offer Novell ZENworks for Linux servers.

Adam Fineberg’s (Levanta) view was reported by InfoWorld

Adam Fineberg (Vice President of Engineering at Levanta) sees specific technical reasons why Linux has become the most widely used OS for Grid environments:”Some of the key aspects of an operating system that you really need take advantage of in a Grid computing environment are the networking and file systems. The networking side is very important because of the large number of nodes, the need to quickly / easily add more nodes, exchange information between the nodes with low latency, as well as access shared storage systems and devices. Linux does very good ‘zero copy’ networking, meaning that once the data reaches the network stack, it doesn’t have to be copied again all the way through the rest of the operating system. That really keeps the networking efficient in Linux systems. With respect to file systems — because of the very strong interface that’s defined within Linux, there are a great number of file systems that are available for you. And that’s something that’s fairly unique to the Linux OS. Most of the operating systems don’t actually have a large number of file systems available for them, other than some standard ones like NFS. That makes it relatively easy to pick a file system that’s well-suited for your particular application. So having access to, for instance, XFS or JFS — which are two very high performance file systems that have good characteristics, but by the same token have very different implementations and therefore very different operating characteristics — you can optimize by choosing the file system that’s best suited for your application.”

The embracing of Linux by the Grid / Virtualization community boils down to being able to understand the boundary values of this set of complex use-case equations. Linux, being open source, lets you get at the raw OS kernel code. This gives you access to the “boundaries” of the OS, the way it interfaces to applications and the hardware. An intimate understanding of these boundary conditions are critical to Grid and Virtualization…

Read this full article at source.