Ed Byrne

Cloud Computing is a wonderful buzzword being touted by any and all in the technology industry these days - although the definition varies widely depending on the source or sector. So what is Cloud Computing? At the recent Irish Open Source Technology Conference, Hosting365 delivered a presentation (embedded below) called ‘Cloud Computing - The Evolution of Internet Infrastructure’, which aimed to explain Cloud Computing, talk about the components of a Cloud Platform, and then discuss the future potential of this area.

Introduction to Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is often confused with Grid Computing or Utility Computing, and while these may be uses of Cloud Computing, they are not inherently part of it. Grid Computing is typically a massively scaled infrastructure capable of processing huge amounts of data very quickly. Environmental Modelling or DNA Modelling are examples of uses for grid computing. Utility computing on the other hand is really a model of pricing and delivery. In utility computing, the premise is that you can access computing resources as you need them, and only pay as you use them. Utility Computing is often explained by referencing the Electricity Grid - where they is a massive power grid that you can tap into as you need it, and scale up and down as you require.

Cloud Computing is essentially computing resources delivered from the Internet to your desktop.

Cloud Computing refers to services on the Internet as being ‘in the cloud’ - which means not in your office server rack or your building’s comms room. Cloud Computing means outsourcing your computing requirements and receiving these services through your Internet connection. You no longer need to worry about power, cooling, server hardware deployment and management.

You can use Cloud Computing services to store data (archive, backup, general-purpose), deliver applications (SaaS - Software-as-a-Service), and deliver access to Internet Infrastructure as and when your company requires it (HaaS - Hardware-as-a-Service), such as for seasonal peaks, or torture-testing your new application deployment.

Why use Cloud Computing?

Let me preface this by assuming their is an organisation need for Internet Infrastructure - be that a requirement to delivery services to customers (IE a web application your company has built), or to provide resources to staff such as email, file storage, collaboration, database and ERP applications. Assuming an Infrastructure requirement exists, there are two ways it may be currently at the moment. You may have infrastructure in-house (typically for office applications) or you may have server hardware co-located or leased in a Data Centre (typically for web applications).

Enter Cloud Computing. First of all, the most tangible benefit of Cloud Computing is that it offers an Enterprise-grade solution, on a very affordable basis. Unlike a single server, an enterprise cloud offering will have massive amounts of fault tolerance built in, and should be architected using high-end network, server and storage kit. You can therefore outsource your company’s infrastructure to a Cloud Platform and benefit from reduced cost AND increased services. (This is why Cloud Computing is such a hyped area!).

Some other rationale for choosing Cloud Computing over traditional deployments include:

• Scalability : Grow and your deployment rapidly, as required, without huge capital costs or operational time.
• Flexibility : Add and remove resources on-the-fly (or script tolerances!) to cope with peaks in your requirements. Only pay for what you need.
• Reliability : Take advantage of a massive computing platform, without having to build and buy your own. Improve your organisations infrastructure SLA’s by using a highly redundant and resilient platform that has no single points of failure (i.e. that server in the corner of your office!)
• Fast Setup : React the decisions or requirements quickly and deploy complex architecture’s rapidly.
• Affordable Enterprise Solution : Economies of Scale. Utilise a multi-million euro platform for even a single server deployment to get best-in-class service for an entry level price.
• Environmentally Efficient : Cloud Platforms maximise infrastructure utilisation per server and per square foot in the Data Centre. Standard servers only use 15% of their resources.

The 3 Levels of Cloud Computing

1. Hardware Independence
2. Service Not Reliant on single Data Centre
3. Platform Agnostic Application Delivery

(more information about the 3 levels of slides 10-12)

Vision for the Future

Cloud Computing has yet to finds it way into the boardroom. There is a lot of innovation happening in this area, and at the moment there is uncertainty and confusion around what the Cloud Computing really is, and no single provider has emerged as the ‘one to bet on’.

I think in the short term we will see a standard emerge (like x86) for Cloud Computing resources, and then application vendors will create packages for deployment and management around this. Standardised ‘Cloud API’s’ will emerge and users of cloud computing services will be able to select providers without fear of platform lock-in.

In the future it should be possible to move your infrastructure deployment between suppliers and you will be able to select criteria for this to happen automatically. For example, maybe you want your infrastructure to only reside in suppliers that have an SLA (and proven track record) of 99.999% uptime; perhaps you would like to keep your service within a defined latency of your users (this might mean moving your infrastructure ‘following the sun’ to place it nearest people in office-hours); you might want to keep your service within a price range while maintaining decent SLA’s (higher SLA’s for day-time with more tolerance for speed / latency at night while taking advantage of cheaper providers). Ultimately, a Cloud Computing standard will drive adoption from business as well as providing for innovations the whole industry can benefit from.

Resources

Defogging Cloud Computing - GigaOm

How Cloud Computing and Utility Computing are Different - GigaOm

Reaching for the Sky through the Compute Clouds - ReadWriteWeb

With the growth of the Internet for personal use (e.g. Facebook, Amazon, Google, Gmail) and business purposes (i.e.file storage, web applications, collaboration and communication, VOIP) I thought it would be useful to talk about what actually powers all these things. I have a secondary reason for this too - when a non-technical person asks me what I do for a living, I have yet to come up with a short simple answer that actually explains it!

First of all, let me define what I mean by ‘Internet Infrastructure’. All the hardware and services required to make this web page appear in your browser, or an RSS feed download into your reader, or VOIP calls / emails get to your desktop. All the underlying technologies that are unseen, but ‘make the Internet go’.

I see Internet Infrastructure consisting of a ‘Top 5′ areas :

• Data Centres
• Network Connectivity
• Computer Equipment
• Storage Services
• Server Applications

Data Centre

A Data Centre is basically a specialist building that has the ability to power (and cool) massive amounts of computer equipment. Typically a Data Centre would also have a very large amount of network bandwidth to accommodate data transfer in and out of it. Data Centres are built as highly redundant and resilient facilities - at the base level - you would expect a Data Centre to have at least N+1 power (this likely comes as a local feed from the national electrical grid as ‘N’, and a backup generator for the ‘+1′).

The Data Centre is the home for Internet Infrastructure. It is the central point of aggregation and distribution of data and network services. These facilities tend to include:

- 24 x 7 Staffed Operations Centre (typically called a NOC, the staff monitor all activities of the Data Centre and ensure smooth operation as well as deal with equipment issues)
- Building Management System (the BMS normally monitors and alerts on temperature zones, power and cooling usage, outside temp., access control and CCTV)
- Secure Access Controls (i.e biometrics on all entry and DC floor doors)
- Fire Alarm and Suppression (ie. VESDA for detection and Inergen gas for suppression)

The unit of measurement for a Data Centre is space and power. How much space will the equipment require and how much power will it draw (which is effectively double that, as cooling a server takes about as much power as just having the device operating).

Network

Possibly to most important foundation block of Internet Infrastructure is the Network. Without a network connection no data can pass between Data Centres, over the Internet, and ultimately onto your Desktop, Laptop or Mobile Handset. For the purpose of this post, let’s talk about the network infrastructure in a Data Centre, where data passed in to computer equipment, is processed and/or stored, and passed back out of the DC.

So you would expect at least N+1 network connectivity into a Data Centre in the form of at least 2  Fibre Cables from telecommunications providers on diverse rings. Therefore if one had service cut, the Data Centre’s network connection would not be affected. Some data centres (Hosting365’s is one) are Carrier Neutral - which means a number of carriers have a Point-Of-Presence in the facility, so the Data Centre is not affected by any commercial or technical issues of a single carrier.

Next you would expect redundant switch gear in the Data Centre in separate racks so again if the switch gear failed, the other set of it would simply take over and no service interruption would be experienced.

The unit of measurement for network connectivity is megabits per second and available megabits on the carrier connection. There may be 1 Gigabit available but the DC may only be using, and paying for, 100 megabits. The ability to meet peak demand is important though, so Data Centres will have a lot more connectivity available than is required for daily operations.

Computer Equipment

Now that the two basics of Internet Infrastructure are in place - the ability to power your equipment, and the ability to connect it to the Internet, the next thing is the computer hardware that uses this to process and store the applications and data.

By computer equipment, for this basic post, I really mean Servers. A Server is a more complex and high-end version of a desktop PC. An average server might consist of 2 power supplies (for redundancy), 8-12 RAM slots, anything from 2-10 hard drive bays and multiple processors (not just multi-core!).

Servers are housed in Racks in a DC which are typically 42u in height.  (1U is 1-unit and a low-end server takes up just 1 of these units, other servers scale within these racks to multiple ‘U’). Racks are normally powered by 2 PDU (Power Distribution Units) which connect to (if available) multiple power supply units in the server.

A low-end installation may be only a single server, which is the simplest form of Internet Infrastructure. The server would be connected to the DC Power, the Network,  an OS and other required applications installed on it. Then it is ready to ‘power and push’ data on the Internet. More complex deployments would include pools of servers, with different applications on each one, or clusters of pools for multiple clusters with dedicated application requirements.

The unit of measure for Servers is Processor Power and RAM. Although there is a lot more to selecting a server such as expandability, reliability, network ports, BUS speed, Cache size and speed. Personally I would like the unit of measure in Servers to change, I think for buyers and users it should be rated in ‘MIPS’ - which is ‘Millions of Instructions Per Second’ which is effectively all that matters, and how today’s Mainframe computers (IBM BlueGene is a high end Mainframe) are measured.

Storage Services

Data Storage is a huge part of Internet Infrastructure. All those emails accessible online, all the web pages on your favourite web site, all those photos on Facebook … are all stored on a hard drive in a DC somewhere. The basic level of storage is on-server storage, which means the hard drives in the computer server. This can cause not just performance and capacity issues, but also redundancy ones - local storage is inherently as prone to failure as the server it is in.

It is common to use specific storage devices - such as Direct Attached Storage (a dedicated and dumb storage appliance connected direct to your server), Network Attached Storage (a storage device that can be accessed by multiple machines over a network connection, and independent of the server itself) and Storage Area Networks, which are high-end, resilient and redundant set-ups that give high performance levels and are very scalable. A Storage Area Network may be shared among many services, applications, servers and customers.

The unit of measure in storage is gigabytes (getting to be more commonly terabytes now) and IO’s per second (input-output read/writes the device can perform per second).

Server Applications

The final piece of underlying Internet Infrastructure is the server applications themselves. In order for an web application to be delivered from a server, that server requires an Operation System (typically Windows or Linux), a Web Server application (like Apache or Microsoft IIS), and a Database (such as MySQL, MS-SQL or Oracle). There any many more variations here, but the basic web server has these 3 things. From here you can install blog software, an ecommerce site, your new web 2.0 application, or any Internet capable piece of software (more include - Instant Messaging Server, File Storage Server, Message Board)

More complex applications tend to have dedicated servers, or pools or servers, for specific things - like a cluster of Database Servers, or a pool of Web Server to serve those ‘www.’ page requests. These may also have more complex network setup such as dedicated routers, load balancing and firewall devices (for traffic management and security respectively).

Further Information

This post is only scratching the surface and (hopefully!) providing a very basic overview of what Internet Infrastructure constitutes. The actual deliver of power and cooling infrastructure is a very technical field and has professional disciplines dedicated to it. Very much so also on the network side as well as computer equipment (including storage) and applications. If you would like more information, come into Hosting365 for a tour of our Internet Infrastructure setup!

Over the past few years, any time I come across a one-liner or short paragraph that really resonates with me, I have been putting them into a Keynote presentation file I titled ‘This I Believe’. (This I Believe was an NPR Radio Show in the 50’s)

Most of the slides are not written by me, some are edited, and most do not have the original author named. Hopefully I’ll edit this in the future, if I can find the original source! A lot come from Tom Peters works, other sources include Hugh MacLeod, Seth Godin and some of the ChangeThis works.

Each of these slides triggers some kind of idea or story in my mind. I find it great every now and then to run through them, one snippet always has something or relevance to what I’m working on at the time and helps get the mind creative.

I define BrandMe as the business, ideological, and subject matter that people associate with me when thinking about certain topics, or when my name is mentioned. Everyone has their own ‘BrandMe’, it’s about how you control it, propagate it, and utilise it that matters. I’ve decided this web site is a good place for me to centralise my BrandMe.

What BrandMe means to me:

Personal Data Store

I want to be able to store my thoughts on-line, I want to write down some of the things I talk to my colleagues about, and some of the things I think about while reading the news or blogs. We all do this - I have notes in Moleskin pads, in folders full of paper, in Word docs, in Notes and not written down at all. So I want to centralise all these notes, so in the future I can reference back to them. What better place to do this than on my web site?

Public Repository

This site is meant to be a repository of my ideas and comments on business, technology or media matters. It is not meant to be a blog that builds a regular readership, I am not a blogger or a media-type, so I am not trying to build BrandMe to get speaking or writing gigs. I believe putting these posts on an open, publicly accessible site, is a great way for anyone to find out more about me. I always want to know more about people I meet - so this site is a response to a need I see for business people in general to address.

My SoapBox

I think it is important to have your own soap-box from time to time. Even if I never need it, the fact that I can, from my personal perspective, make comments on topical issues, is worthwhile.

BrandMe - The Specifics

What do I want to achieve then with this ‘BrandMe’? I want anyone interested to know that I am excited by new business and technology companies and ideas, that I am out and out a Hosted IT evangelist, that I’m fascinated by the move to Enterprise 2.0 and Cloud Computing. I don’t want to be one of the people that write about these things, I want to be part of the change. I think Hosting365 has the people, the passion and the platform to ‘change the world’ in IT, and that’s exciting!

Reference Material:

• Tom Peters - The Brand Called You - FastCompany
• Hugh MacLeod - Global Microbrand

Welcome to new my web site!

I’ve debated setting up a blog many times, and over the years have done so on a couple of occasions, but I find it very difficult to keep a regular blog while also building and running a successful company. I am re-launching this site with a personal target of keeping it up to date with one or two posts a month, as well as uploading content I’ve created and delivered elsewhere.

Topics I intend to post about here include:-

• Business - strategic planning, interesting experiences of running a business, implementing and running an operational business plan. (I think this is one thing many entrepreneur’s blogs miss - the day-to-day challenges of a business).
• Internet Infrastructure - particularly Hosted IT, Data Centres and Cloud Computing.
• Technology - the ‘Hot IT’ areas I’m tracking right now are - Mobile, Enterprise 2.0, On-line Collaboration, SaaS, Cloud Computing and Search.
• Innovation and Invention - Ideas are easy, implementation is hard. I’ve given up the thought that you should protect your ideas and that they are your real asset. YOU are your real asset. It’s also fun to think and talk about new ideas!

To find about more about me read my profile page.