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Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) - Servers Built for the Future - Video

One webmaker: Zainab. Image: Courtesy of Mozilla

The service currently supports hubs for about 50 cities and towns. In theory it can support thousands. Will it get there? That depends only on my ability to build the right service, show the benefits of the loosely coupled syndication model Im evangelizing, and convince key stakeholders in cities and towns to adopt it. It depends not at all on my ability to deploy and manage servers, operating systems, or networks, for which I am deeply grateful.

Thats because Ive been there and done that. For my first web project, which I documented in a monthly column for BYTE starting in 1995, I wore all those hats. At first it was fun, and I guess for some folks it still is fun, but for me the novelty wore off long ago. The infrastructure is just a means to an end. I want to focus on the destination, not the vehicle.

Its true that, in one sense, todays infrastructure feels less personal. My first server, a DEC Alpha machine called BYTEWEB, sat under my desk where I could hear how busy it was. Now my servers are virtual machines with names like RD00155D31705A, sitting in data centers I will probably never visit.

In another way, though, the modern arrangement is more personal. I have an idea. Its expression requires me to write and deploy software. Writing the code was always hard, still is, and maybe always will be. I think thats the nature of writing, whether youre writing code or prose.

Deploying the code was always hard too, but it never should have been, and now it isnt. If I can think it, and write it, I can put it where you can use it without having to sweat the infrastructure details. In his now-classic talk Inventing on Principle, Bret Victor argues that creators need a direct connection to what they create. If youre a developer of web apps and services, cloud infrastructure helps you forge that direct connection.

Most of us, of course, arent developers. But all of us, nowadays, can find ways to feel that direct connection. The elmcity project, in fact, is partly about that. Im providing a cloud-based calendar syndication engine. But its useless without cloud-based calendars to syndicate. Thats a service that you can provide, and more frictionlessly than you might think.

Nowadays I talk to a lot of folks who publish calendars on their websites. The vast majority of these calendars, as Ive mentioned before, dont support the internet standard for the exchange of calendar data, and dont provide online data feeds that are open to syndication. When I explain this to people in schools, libraries, businesses, chambers of commerce, and arts councils, they invariably want to refer me to their webmaster, IT person, or resident geek. Because providing a machine-readable data feed on the web just seems like it ought to require somebody like that.

Well it used to, but no more. Now I show people how they can simply create a new calendar, in a cloud-based app like Google Calendar or Hotmail Calendar, that can serve both as a webpage for visitors to their site and as a data feed for syndication. If they can think it, and write it, they can put it where any person (or any computer) can use it. In so doing they become creators, not just consumers, of cloud-based services. Its wonderfully empowering.

This sort of personal empowerment is available in many other ways. When you adopt a consistent naming and tagging scheme for a set of web resources you control, for example, you become more than a producer of content you become the creator of a service that enables people (and machines) to use your stuff in ways you might not have anticipated, and to combine your stuff with other stuff you might not know about. Cloud infrastructure is a godsend for those of us who make software, and equally for all who aspire to be webmakers.

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The Personal Cloud's Third Dimension: Webmakers

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RightScale User Conference NYC 2011 - Rolling Your Own ServerTemplates - Video

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RightScale Webinar: Managing RightScale on RightScale - Video

This Buying Guide looks at four ways to achieve faster storage in the cloud. It deals with several different issues within storage and the companies that are offering up a solution: SolidFire on flash in the cloud; Riverbed on backup centralization/WAN optimization; iWave on cloud automation; and Ciena on moving data rapidly to the cloud.

Ciena is all about the enterprise data center to cloud connection, moving peak workloads from one data center to the cloud and back. Interestingly, this company is a networking company, not a storage player. But the rise of Big Data and the need to move large quantities of information around leads straight into its core competence -- carrier grade network connectivity.

Here is the basic value proposition: If an IT administrator must make a platform change on a single server loaded with 10 VMs of medium size, with each VM having 5 GB of memory and 1,000 GB of storage, the total data to transfer would be about 10 terabytes (10x5 GB memory + 10x1000 GB storage). To transfer 10 TB of data over a typical 40 Mb/s MPLS connection takes approximately four weeks, assuming full bandwidth utilization, no re-transmissions and 80 percent utilization of the network.

"Ciena can accomplish the same data transfer in around five hours," said Jim Morin, Product Line Director at Ciena.

The company recently demonstrated a live vMotion of more than 100 km, and storage virtualization between EMC VPlex clusters over a high-performance network in a hybrid cloud environment.

iWave Software has released Storage Automator v6 as a means of automating provisioning and reclamation in the cloud. According to the company, it enables users to create their own private or public storage cloud out of the box using their current storage environments. It allows end users to provision their own storage via a service portal.

iWave Storage Automator includes: policy-based storage selection; a multi-tenant, self-service portal and catalog; end-to-end automated storage services; change control, scheduling and notification; various service level options and chargeback.

"Before iWave, storage automation resided within management consoles and custom storage scripts along vendor and product lines," said Ron Smith, vice president of marketing at iWave Software. "It ships with more than 50 pre-built adapters that provide connectivity to storage arrays, SAN switches, host operating systems, host hypervisors, network devices and ITIL service support."

iWave Storage Automator provides a multi-tenet portal and service catalog to provide an out-of-the-box private storage cloud solution for service providers and large enterprises. In the case of existing private cloud integration, iWave supports two options. The iWave Storage Automator Restful API allows integration into an existing cloud service providers' portals and processes. It can leverage the general-purpose iWave Orchestrator platform for delivering automation/orchestration of the storage workflows. This platform can be extended using iWave cloud services management services (self-service provisioning, automated disaster recovery, workload management and self-healing) to deliver a public or private cloud. General availability is planned for September 2012.

SolidFire is offering an all solid state storage system that has been built to scale out for large-scale could environments. But isn't that the same thing Texas Memory, Violin Memory and ExtremeIO are proposing? Jay Prassl, vice president of marketing at SolidFire, seeks to differentiate SolidFire's by drawing attention to the degree of control provided by SolidFire.

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4 Options to Make Your Cloud Storage Faster