Clouds and Grids

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) could become a hot buzz word next year or

in the coming future. IaaS lets users share and use Infrastructure or hardware

(such as processing power, storage, interconnect, etc) as a service, both on

premise and over the Internet.

This is similar to SaaS where you use Software in a similar manner. There are

two technologies which are looking very promising in this respect and we talk

about them in this article. Let's start with Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing: The story So far



This year India and the world has witnessed a plethora of vendors adapting

cloud computing as a technology. These vendors were essentially SaaS or Managed

Service providers. I just checked my mailbox for last one week and saw at least

six press releases which talked about companies going the cloud way, either as a

client or as a service provider.

And the benefits are well known to us. But here let us clarify one thing. And

that is, cloud as a technology is nothing new.

That we are still considering it as a Future tech today is because of its

recent and mammoth adoption in India and worldwide, which is changing the way

the SaaS industry works. Moreover, its impact in the industry is pretty high.

So, you must be wondering what's going to happen to this technology next

year? Well lots more adoption and if our prediction is indeed correct, then a

lot of in-house or on-premise Cloud deployment is going to be the new

development next year.

On-premise cloud



To understand what's in-house cloud computing, first we have to understand

the architecture of cloud computing. For those who use cloud computing as a

service, it is nothing but a technology which is letting the service provider

provide an application in a manner which is not restricted by resources and

depending on needs, can be scaled up or down and paid for accordingly.

But to make this work, the use of a lot of technologies such as

virtualization, clustering, job scheduling and management is required. So the

point here is that if you own an organization where you are using virtualization

on very high end servers and using it to provision server instances to your

users, you can actually go ahead and use technologies which fuel cloud computing

and can make your life more easier by making the provisioning and scaling up job

completely automated.

So, if we talk about a scenario where a bank that has consolidated 500 odd

servers into 60 very high-end hardware server boxes and are provisioning and

managing resources for the virtual server instance. Today this task is done

manually. But if they can automate this entire provisioning process, then the

overall management hassles for such a deployment can go down tremendously.

Additionally, as the entire setup is unified as a single pool of resources using

cloud like technologies or what some people call as EC (Elastic Computing)

technology, the level of granularity in provisioning the servers also increases

manifold.

This is the interface of an Open Source cloud computing application which can be deployed on premise and can be used for better provisioning of servers.

You might ask here, that why, we think this technology could be so impactful

next year. Well! Personally I am very convinced about adoption of this

technology in enterprises as I can see direct benefits which large enterprises

can harness with this. Plus, the fact that so many companies are coming out with

such products for commodity usage is also increasing day by day, is one reason

which is giving strength to my belief.

The commoditization of Cloud Computing, has started (in a very small way

though), by some Open Source products, which has made it possible for

enterprises and test labs to deploy their own cloud and see the possible

benefits. Some such products are Enomalism (http://www. enomaly. com/) and

Eucalyptus (http://www. eucalyptus.com/) which provide an Elastic Computing

platform for enterprises. And we are proud to say that we were the first and

the only Indian magazine in the country to talk about both applications along

with a guided deployment experience for the same. You can go through some of

these articles at http://tinyurl. com/ygmeug9 . And now the things are changing

in two ways. First, the Open Source products which we just talked about are

going beyond just being a free and test class application to an enterprise ready

product with support. Both Enomalism and Eucalyptus today have their range of

enterprise class products which are not available for free and come with

support. And the second significant thing is that, now companies like VMware is

also getting into this business and are bringing new products in this segment,

VMware vCloud is an application which lets you build a private cloud or have

them federated on-demand to partner-hosted public clouds.

CERN Grids



With the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) becoming a hot topic amongst masses,

the CERN grid is also becoming a topic of interest for many. Well, both the

terms the CERN and the GRID are pretty well known by the IT industry. CERN for

the primary development of World Wide Web or Internet, and GRID is a loosely

coupled cluster of computers/servers to create a processing pool. Then what's

so great about the CERN grid and why it might be something of a path breaker in

the coming future?

To understand this, first of all you have to understand how a GRID works. In

simple terms, the GRID is something similar to an HPC (high performance

computer), which uses multiple networked machines to share their processing

power. But the difference here is that, in case of a grid the interconnect is

loosely coupled. This means that these nodes are connected with a medium like

Internet, which is comparatively slower than an HPC interconnect and doesn't

provide continuous acknowledgements. And due to this reason the job handling in

grids is more complicated than in HPC. A very old and simple example of a Grid

is the SATI@Home which lets people join into a grid for sharing/donating their

processing power over the Internet.

But the speed of the Internet is very slow and this affects these grids.

Internet utilizes the interconnect which is primarily deployed for telecom needs

and there the bandwidth needs where not that high.

So, to make things more prompt in grids, CERN is working on a parallel

Internet which only connects over fiber and is around 10,000 times faster than

todays broadband and will be primarily be used for processing power and resource

sharing. The need for this grid came from the requirement put up by LHC, which

is to churn out around one GB of data every second.

Right now somewhere around 100,000 computers across 11 centers across the

world are connected to the Grid for processing this data. But if we go by

tradition, sooner rather than later, this Grid will be replacing the Internet

with a much faster and richer Internet experience, which will also be used for

IaaS or infrastructure sharing (sharing processing power, storage, etc). So we

ought to keep an eye on its development.

Next-

Robotics Changing War into a Video Game