91d437f0fb56cfb5b64de81b60bd6738

Part of the following comes from: http://www.comparewebhosts.com/…htm

Rackspace’s cloud strategy is supported by three core offerings, all part of Mosso, Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting Division. The company’s existing Hosting Cloud and CloudFS storage offerings have been re-branded to reflect the company’s newly integrated approach:

· Cloud Sites — Rackspace’s flagship cloud offering, The Hosting Cloud, is now Cloud Sites. Developed by Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud division, it offers a scalable platform for handling huge traffic spikes and a pay-as-you-grow pricing model. Cloud Sites is a heterogeneous environment, supporting both Windows and Linux.

· Cloud Files — Rackspace’s internet-based storage service, CloudFS, is now Cloud Files. Cloud Files gives developers instant access to an enterprise-grade storage infrastructure and reduces overall investment and IT costs while providing infinite scalability. Cloud Files offers an industry leading SLA and a highly competitive pricing model with replicated storage starting at $0.15/GB. Also later this year, Limelight Networks will team with Rackspace to allow developers to easily distribute content to millions of end users around the world and bring scalable content delivery and application acceleration services to the masses. While continuing to support the Amazon S3 platform, Jungle Disk will port to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system in the coming months. Jungle Disk comes in both desktop and workgroup editions across the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

· Cloud Servers — This new hosting solution, which will deliver on-demand server capacity to businesses of all sizes, will leverage key technology developed by Slicehost, which uses Xen virtualization software. Slicehost will remain as the company’s developer brand, creating innovative new features driven through shared intellectual property in conjunction with development initiatives from Rackspace. As part of the announcement, Slicehost also announced new, larger slices for high performance computing, lower prices as well as IP sharing for high availability computing.

…

To understand Mosso > http://www.mosso.com

Mosso architectures > http://www.mosso.com/cloud.jsp > look at “Benefit” @ bottom left.

The selling point to our customer >
Step One: Load it up
You can create a new Mosso-powered site – and even add some email accounts – in less than five minutes. Load-Balancing, clustering, and redundant storage are all inherited by your application automatically, without any effort.

Step Two: Watch it scale
From the first byte served, your site is hosted on advanced clustered technology designed for high- traffic, high- performance websites. When your site grows bigger than what it’s included, you pay inexperience scale pricing for exactly what you use and nothing more.

• Scale your bandwidth
• Starts at 500GB/mo. As much as you need for 25¢ per GB
• Scale your SAN storage
• Starts at 50GB/mo. As much as you need for 50¢ per GB
• Scale your compute
• Starts at 10,000 compute cycles/mo. As many as you need for 1¢ per compute cycle

Closer watch with screenshots > http://www.mosso.com/screenshots.jsp > this describes the ease of process when a client requests a host.

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http://www.slicehost.com is equal to Cloud Servers. This pretty much looks like VPS – virtual private server on Xen.

• Included in Every Slice™
• Full root access and rebooting
• Choice of Linux distro
• Dedicated IP address and Tier-1 redundant bandwidth
• RAID-10 disk storage
• Reserved RAM
• Guaranteed CPU share and more when available
• 4-core servers running Xen virtualization instances
• Slicehost management portal for reboots and software installs
• Mobile management portal for smartphones
• Ajax console access
• Bootable rescue mode
• Private IPs for inter-slice communication
• HA capabilities via shared IPs
• Machines running with fixed usage limits, below full capacity

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JungleDisk http://www.jungledisk.com/ uses Hadoop with friendly UI to provide backup/ redundancy. For security, all personal data is encrypted by personal key known only to you.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10076377-92.html

Author: Peter Judge

Copyright: ZDNet

I’m looking for the comparison between Xen and VMWare. I believe this interview tells some result and I highlight the key points in italic and bold from my understanding.

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Citrix aims to beat VMware at virtualization. A year ago it bought XenSource, the company created by the founders of the Xen open-source hypervisor, and switched the Citrix business focus to virtualization.

Ian Pratt, vice president, Citrix

Citrix made XenServer, the commercial system based on Xen, central to its strategy, and applied a Xen brand to other Citrix products involved in delivering applications to desktops. XenSource staff gained senior positions at Citrix and have been setting the company’s future direction.

Ian Pratt, the original project leader of Xen and a founder of XenSource, remains a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, but is now also vice president for special products at Citrix–and remains chairman of Xen.org.

ZDNet UK spent a day at Citrix’s U.K. headquarters with Pratt and his colleague, Simon Crosby, who has moved from chief technology officer of XenSource to become chief technology officer of Citrix. After lengthy briefings on Citrix products and the future of virtualization, we sat down with Pratt to understand where Citrix is going and why.

In the first of what will be a two-part interview, Pratt discusses how Citrix hopes to make headway in the virtualization market.

At the moment there is a lot of publicity for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Is there a danger XenWare will be overlooked–especially as it is difficult to measure market share in virtualization? Could XenWare become the Liberal Democrats of virtualization?
Pratt: In the market, there is obviously a big incumbent player, VMware, and Microsoft has a very basic product that covers the low end. And then there is XenServer, which is going head to head with VMware, with an enterprise feature set.

If you look toward the cloud, all the cloud vendors use Xen. It gets used in all the largest deployments, by folks like Amazon and other large providers, because of all the features it offers.

It is very hard to judge what the market share is. With VMware, you just look at VMware’s bank account.

But if you are looking at market share for Xen in general, you’ve got XenServer, Virtual Iron, XenApps, and products from other companies. And then there are all the Linux distributions that include Xen, most of which are free, and no one really has any idea of how many copies are in use.

Even with something like XenServer, because there’s a free version, we keep stumbling into customers–particularly people doing software as a service, where it all runs on XenServer Express Edition (the free unsupported version of XenServer).

They haven’t paid us any money as yet and they have thousands of servers running it. But we’d much rather they were running our stuff than VMware, because it’s an opportunity for us.

With the Cloud Edition we recently announced, there will be lots of people wanting to pay for support and get features added.

If cloud providers are mostly on the free XenServer, is this the whole reason for the Cloud Edition–to turn them into “real” customers and start getting some money in?
Pratt: Simon Crosby has this analogy, that Xen is an engine and needs a car built around it. (The point of the analogy is that the Xen hypervisor is open-source, with a GPL license, so users can make additional technology outside that hypervisor and keep it proprietary, building commercial products that work with Xen.)

If you are a cloud provider or a big software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, you can download the open-source engine and build your own car around it. That’s fine if you have the engineering resource to do that, but a lot of this stuff is going to become more commoditized. SaaS vendors don’t all have very particular needs. They don’t have to do this for themselves–they have just had to do it that way until now.

Cloud Edition gives them a standard framework, so they can just concentrate on the value-added bits that they are interested in.

So it’s just like many software developments in the past, where it’s become obvious that everyone is doing the same thing, and a supported version of that is produced?
Pratt: Yes. And they just switch over to the supported version.

So VMware is the big competitor, then. What is the state of things between you and VMware at the moment?
Pratt: VMware has been really successful as a virtualization vendor. But virtualization as a category will disappear. The basic use of virtualization–server consolidation–is now a commodity.

Virtualization will be included in every operating system and on every server. XenSource Express is built into every HP and Dell server, on a USB stick soldered into the box. Users can run multiple virtual machines on those machines out of the box.

This is the only thing VMware does, and it has 100,000 customers. VMware is preparing for this to happen, by building management tools. But this puts them in direct competition with huge established players, like Tivoli and HP OpenView.

Citrix’s approach is to concentrate on application delivery. The function of an IT department is to deliver applications, and we are doing it end to end, from the data center to the client device.

We don’t need to do systems management, and we don’t need to compete head on. It is all about application delivery. People won’t buy virtualization–but they will buy high availability and fault tolerance.

Citrix has 200,000 customers. That’s a pretty good beachhead to deliver more Citrix stuff to customers.

What is distinctively better about Xen’s approach compared with VMware’s?
Pratt: We don’t want to create a class of people called virtualization administrators who you need to manage your virtual machines. That’s how VMware works.

VMware is operating system virtualization–or hardware virtualization. That puts a lot of effort into a problem that is no longer there (since modern hardware from Intel and AMD has evolved to support virtualization).

What we did was to start out with the idea that hardware should support virtualization and the virtual machine should be aware. We call that para-virtualization, and Microsoft calls it enlightenment. That’s marketing.

If you employ virtualization to get a separation not just in the hardware layer, then you can compose things dynamically. That’s the way to bring down the real cost of IT.

We want to be as much of an appliance as possible. We’ve always seen Xen as an appliance that hosts virtual appliances. You want it to be an appliance and manage it like an appliance. It’s like a Netgear router–you just plug it in and go. Adding a new machine to a XenServer pool should be as easy as that.

It is also quite hard to establish the relative performance of VMware’s hypervisor and XenServer because of VMware’s licensing terms. Are you working on a way round that problem?
Pratt: The VMware EULA (end-user licensing agreement) prohibits the publication of any benchmark results to a third party. We tried to publish results in 2002, and that clause has been in the VMware EULA ever since.

As XenSource, we might have had fun and games around the policy, but as Citrix, we have to be more circumspect. It’s possible to publish comparisons against “Hypervisor A” and “Hypervisor B,” though.

How about comparisons with Microsoft? Pretty soon, Microsoft will be able to claim that all the people who have Server 2008 have Hyper-V, won’t it?
Pratt: Yes, but then there will be the question of how many people are using it, and how many people have the bits. If we wanted to measure Xen market share like that, we would be in great shape, because every Linux distro has Xen included in it.

Amazon EC2′s architecture & offerings

June 17, 2008, Red Hat has announced their second offering on Amazon EC2 – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Now available on EC2‘s flexible, pay-as-you-go computing environment, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provides developers with the most popular clustered Java EE application server and next generation application frameworks to build innovative and scalable Java applications.

…

Earlier in May, Sun Microsystems and Amazon Web Services are collaborating to offer two open source solutions on Amazon EC2: OpenSolaris and MySQL technical support. With OpenSolaris OS on Amazon EC2, you have access to a robust operating system on a scalable, cost-effective virtual computing environment. And now MySQL Enterprise customers can choose to deploy their database on Amazon EC2 and receive full database software and production support from MySQL. These new offerings extend the breadth and support of EC2′s on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing environment. Learn about OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 and MySQL on EC2.

See other partners of Amazon in EC2 offering > http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=s…36L942TSJ2AJA

Information Source > http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=…A36L942TSJ2AJA

What should IBM do when we see these logos and services there?