Cloud Computing - All Comments

re: XS23 Cloud Server

Jason Wallis — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:25:17 GMT

Can you quantify the power savings (in general) of the XS23 over deploying 4 standard dual socket servers with redundant power supplies but similar local storage and computing power?

re: XS23 Cloud Server

Aaron — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:13:55 GMT

Wow, this is awesome, and looks like it deserves more attention. Pretty good article about it as well. Great work guys!

re: Cloud computing and SaaS

John Willis — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:18:44 GMT

If manual intervention is required for management or operations, then it probably doesn’t qualify as a cloud

You contradict yourself in this post. You say the above and then you agree that Amazon's EC2 is a cloud. EC2 out of the box is nothing but manual intervention to manage.

johnmwillis.com

re: Cloud Computing Model

Chris Marino — Fri, 16 May 2008 04:19:43 GMT

Jimmy, this isn't working for me. Sorry. Seems like a lot of things piled on top of each other without too much regard for what each layer actually provides. Couldn't you have at least stopped at 11?

re: XS23 Cloud Server

Todd Brannon, Dell Data Center Solutions — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:47:29 GMT

Hi Michele,

Fair question. There are definitely some economic variables in our approach. In terms of unit quantities, if we are leveraging an existing reference design it can make sense for as few as 500-1000 systems. For a blank-slate co-development effort the scale is typically 1500+. Much of this ties to the logistical elements of manufacturing, deployment and support.

re: XS23 Cloud Server

Michele — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:00:27 GMT

So how many servers would a company have to get in order for Dell to this sort of custom build?

Michele

re: Cloud Computing Model

Steve Caughey — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:18:13 GMT

Jimmy, Sorry I’ve taken so long to respond but I’ve been on the road for a couple of weeks. The fundamental problem Arjuna is addressing is how service users can specify their service requirements without having to talk about the physical resources which might be used to satisfy those requirements, and the behaviour of those resources. (This is particularly important in the cloud as service users will have no idea of the actual IT used to provide services). Our model is one of interacting peers who are Service Consumers and/or Service Providers. Service Consumers express their requirements purely in terms of the required service and the non-functional qualities of that service e.g. its availability, reliability, responsiveness etc. Service Providers may choose (guided by Policy) to enter into Service Agreements in which they contract to provide the services and to satisfy the non-functional requirements. Service Providers ensure they meet their Service Agreements by obtaining (including potentially deploying), and maintaining, the necessary resources. These resources might be hardware or software components which the Service Provider has under their direct management, but might also be further services, in which case the Service Provider, acting now as a Service Consumer, interacts with some further Service Provider or Providers. As a consequence the services, and service requirements (or SLAs), which are defined by the originating Service Consumer are decomposed and translated into supporting services, with their own service requirements, potentially through a number of steps. Whilst the original SLAs might talk exclusively about services, once physical resources have been assigned, the SLAs associated with those resources will be expressed in terms of the resources’ behaviour e.g. availability, reliability, responsiveness etc. I guess these lower level SLAs are the ones you are considering in level 4. We’ve written a white paper on our approach which you can read at http://www.arjuna.com/agility I guess our position is somewhat in line with Charlies Bess' comments.

re: Cloud Computing Model

Jimmy Pike, Director—System Architecture — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:25:36 GMT

Charlie,

Yes, I agree with you that the idea of applications may be an outdated concept, but I didn’t know what else to call it and we need to keep some familiarity and connect to the work being done. I am open to this however, servers layer seem to lack that idea. What would you say about something like .. “workload service or application service”?

re: Cloud Computing Model

Jimmy Pike, Director—System Architecture — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:29:12 GMT

Khaz,

Well… I was have to admit, I am heavily influenced by the idea of this OSI model: (Layer 7: Application layer, Layer 6: Presentation layer, Layer 5: Session layer; Layer 4: Transport layer, Layer 3: Network layer, Layer 2: Data Link layer, Layer 1: Physical layer). That said is it not obvious where the parallelism you cite exists. What are you seeing that I am missing?

re: Cloud Computing Model

Charlie Bess — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:01:24 GMT

Nice model to start a discussion, but I am beginning to think that in this age of SOA and SaaS the whole concept of application may be outdated. If the computing is really an aggregation of services and capability, calling it a services layer may be better. Those services are orchestrated into a function that delivers business value through the interface. Networking must permeate the entire model, since it is cloud based. Security must as well, since it needs to be built in at many levels.You know what they say: "all models are flawed but some are useful"