Broadband Developments

I cornered Doug Gourlay Senior Director of Product Marketing of Cisco’s Datacenter Business Unit, at the Infrastructure 2.0 event to answer my question about what he means when he says “The Modernization of the Datacenter”.

Question (John Furrier): What do you say to all the skeptics who say that you’re promoting the modernization of the datacenter because you’re in that business and that it really isn’t a problem? Is this just virtualization or is there another issue?

Answer (Doug Gourlay): It’s absolutely a systems approach. There are multiple factors. Lets take Moore’s law for instance which has proven true over the past 30 years. In datacenters you want it to last at least 10 -15 yrs. With 750x processor improvements under Moore’s law in the last 12 years yet cooling efficiencies has only grown 64x for IT assets - that is an 11 or 12x disparity. That’s why you see datacenters with racks designed to cool 4000 to 6000 watts. If I took a set of blades today I would need to cool it with only 30,000 watts. The reality is that we can draw more power then we can efficiently cool today. You either run out of space so — we made denser equipment; you ran out of cooling capacity — you bought more crack units; you ran out of power and the power company will NOT give you more. So when we talk about a modernization were talking about the underlying physical facilities that we built are being obsoleted almost every 5 yrs.

Question (John Furrier): It’s not just a Cisco issue it’s more of an environmental issue around the datacenter themselves ..the raw infrastructure the physical plant or whatever to equipment.

Answer (Doug Gourlay): That’s the biggest compelling event. how do i enable the IT infrastructure to make that facility infrastructure last longer.

To View the Entire Infrastructure 2.0 video feed click here (sorry registration required).

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, will become part of Sun’s Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

This is an interesting announcement because cloud computing is very “cloudy” in that it’s very ‘hot’ right now but there are some major security and reliabiity issues with cloud computing.  Just this week Amazon crashed my server on a project and we lost all of our code - we have backup but the hassle factor is high.  Cloud Computing is not ready for primetime so I’m interested in finding out how this annoucement might cause some “needed” SUN to shine in this cloud computing area.

Here is more info on the SUN acquisition.  The Q-layer technology simplifies cloud management and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s strategy to enable building public and private clouds. As businesses continue to rely more on technology to drive mission-critical processes, the agility of the datacenter determines the flexibility of the entire company. The Q-layer software supports instant provisioning of services such as servers, storage, bandwidth and applications, enabling users to scale their own environments to meet their specific requirements.

“Sun’s open, network-centric approach coupled with optimized systems, software and services provides the critical building blocks for private and public cloud offerings,” said David Douglas, senior vice president of Cloud Computing and chief sustainability officer, Sun Microsystems. “Q-layer’s technology and expertise will enhance Sun’s offerings, simplifying cloud management and speeding application deployment.”

Cloud computing brings compute and data resources onto the Web and offers higher efficiency, massive scalability and faster and easier software development. Sun is an ideal advisor and partner for companies that want to build cloud computing facilities within their organizations, and for companies and service providers that want to build publicly available cloud computing services. Sun has the open technology, expertise and vision to help companies build, run and use their own clouds. For more information on Sun’s cloud computing strategy, please visit: http://sun.com/cloud.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is not material to Sun.

VMWare is adding a new executive to the stable - Tod Nielsen.  This on the heals of Diane Greene being forced out.

VMware Inc., (VMW: NYSE) the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, announced today the appointment of Tod Nielsen to the newly created role of Chief Operating Officer. Nielsen will report directly to President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz.

Nielsen, 43, joins VMware from Borland Software Corporation where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer since November 2005.  Prior to Borland, Nielsen held several key executive management positions at leading software companies including Microsoft, BEA and Oracle.

“I am delighted to have Tod join VMware and bring his passion for software and wealth of leadership experience to our executive team,” said VMware’s President and CEO, Paul Maritz.  “In this newly created role, Tod brings unique skills and capabilities that will help us improve our operational focus and enhance our execution across all areas of the business.  With Tod on board, I will be able to devote more of my time to the product strategy and development, while Tod focuses more on business, marketing, and operations.  Having worked closely with Tod in the past, I know that we will work effectively together and complement each other.”

“VMware is an impressive company that is in the enviable position of giving customers a significant return on their IT investment which is becoming only more important in these challenging economic times,” said Nielsen. “As an admirer of the company’s strong track record of software innovation, I’m excited about working with my new colleagues at VMware to help our customers truly transform the way they manage their IT resources.”

Nielsen brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in enterprise software and application development to VMware.  Prior to Borland, Nielsen served as senior vice president, marketing and global sales support for Oracle Corporation. Prior to Oracle, Nielsen was the chief marketing officer and executive vice president of engineering at BEA Systems, where he had overall responsibility for BEA’s worldwide marketing strategy and operations, as well as all research and development operations. Nielsen joined BEA after the acquisition of his private company, Crossgain Inc., where he served as its chief executive officer. Nielsen also spent twelve years with Microsoft Corporation, in various roles, including general manager of database and developer tools, vice president of developer tools, and, vice president of Microsoft’s platform group.

There is a great post going on over at F5 devcentral by Lori MacVittie.  She calls it  How VM sprawl will drive the urgency of the network evolution.

The bottom line is the the network infrastructure is capable of being smarter.  The opportunity (for companies) is to create or enable the “Dynamic Enterprise.”.   Like Web 2.0 did for web sites and web apps, Infrastructure 2.0 will do for networks - addressable, discovery, intelligence, and policy will be at the center of the Infrastructure 2.0 equation.  The network needs to be smarter and automated to new functionality and benefits.

Lori writes:  “VM sprawl is predicted to be one of the outcomes of early adoption and excitement over virtualization. Just as IT struggled to manage the explosion of PCs and servers across the enterprise, it is predicted that now it will need to find a way to manage the explosion of virtual machines as they pop up all over the enterprise with surprising alacrity.

Part of the difficulty in managing new technology is the rogue deployment of X. Whether that’s physical or virtual servers is irrelevant, the challenges associated with managing what are essentially unmanaged applications and servers deployed outside normal organizational processes are the same.

One of the reasons these rogue deployments are so difficult to manage is that they are, effectively, invisible to the management systems and IT staff tasked with controlling them. They simply come into existence in what appears to be a whim, taking over network resources such as IP addresses and ports. This spontaneous existence is problematic, because those network resources may be needed for other, business critical uses.”

The CTO of Amazon is blogging the new service from Amazon called CloudFront. I love this approach for obvious reasons but the question remains about reliability and security. In talking to Mendal Rosenblum this past weekend he and I both agreed that many are afraid of pushing information in the cloud. Mendal is the leader in pushing large scale computing and his observations ring true for many corporate enterprises. No doubt Amazon is great for startups but the open question remains for reliability and security.

When those two issues are lock solid then the era of cloud computing will be mainstream.

Here is the information on Amazon CloudFront.

Hello Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.

Amazon CloudFront has been designed to be fast; the service will cache copies of the content in edge locations close to the end-user’s location, significantly lowering the access latency to the content. High sustainable data transfer rates can be achieved with the service especially when distributing larger objects.

Amazon CloudFront will be useful for many different application scenarios such as giving your customers low-latency access to popular objects and protecting your site from popularity surges; other popular examples are low-cost delivery of rich media and sustainable fast transfer rates for software distributions.

See also the posting on the AWS Developer weblog and at Rightscale.

Amazon has seen success with the scalability, reliability and cost-effectiveness of Amazon S3 and now with the integration with Amazon EC2 it is easy to distribute Amazon S3 content world-wide. The combination of the two services is really powerful: Amazon S3 will give you durable storage of your data, and the network of edge locations on three continents used by the Amazon CloudFront will deliver the content with low latency from the most appropriate location.

The network of edge locations

To ensure low-latency delivery, Amazon CloudFront uses a network of edge locations world-wide:

• United States: Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis
• Europe: Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and London
• Asia: Hong Kong and Tokyo

These edge locations work together to direct customers’ requests to the edge location that can provide the response with the lowest latency.

Simplicity

Because Amazon CloudFront follows the core principles of all Amazon Web Services it is a unique content delivery service. The simplicity in getting started has been described by many of our early customers as a very important feature.

Using Amazon CloudFront is dead simple:

1. Put your objects in an Amazon S3 bucket.
2. Call the CreateDistribution API with the name of the S3 bucket, which will return your distribution’s domain name.
3. Use the new domain name in urls on your web or in your application. Whenever these urls are accessed CloudFront will determine the optimal edge location from where to serve your content.

The second Amazon Web Services principle that sets Amazon CloudFront apart is that no upfront commitments are necessary and you only pay for what you have used. There are no upfront fees or high volume requirements and no negotiations are necessary because we have published low prices from the start. This brings content delivery in the hands of all businesses, and you can exploit the benefits of Amazon’s world-wide network of edge locations, regardless of whether you are a highly popular website, a small blog, a complex enterprise application or a developer doing some prototyping.

A core distributed systems component

It is not uncommon to think about a service for content delivery such as Amazon CloudFront only in the context of media distribution for web sites, but it actually plays a more fundamental role.

There are two main technology components to such a service; the first is intelligent request routing, which routes requests to the location that can best serve the user given a series of requirements and the status of the network. The second technology component is that of object caching, which is a fundamental building block in both operating systems and in distributed systems.

Caching is an essential technique that is used to make sure that components can operate at the fastest speed possible, to overcome the performance differences that exist in systems. For example CPU’s have caches that are much faster than memory, memory works as caches for disks, local disks can function as caches for remote disks, etc.

In distributed systems caching is primarily used to provide fast access to popular objects that are located in remote storage servers. These systems of caching servers often cooperate to create massive aggregate world-wide capacity to provide low latency access. And by using globally decentralized cache servers for distribution, very high data transfer speed can be achieved.

Caching technology has long been the center piece of computer systems research and in Amazon CloudFront we use the type of highly advanced algorithms for reliability and scale that you have come to expect from our Amazon services.

The Measurement Factory, experts in performance testing and protocol compliance, today announced results from the fourth-annual survey of domain name servers on the public Internet.

Top-line results indicate that despite the fact that most organizations are running recent versions of BIND and no longer using Microsoft DNS Servers for their external DNS servers, many organizations have not taken the necessary precautions to limit access to recursion or secure zone transfers. In addition, many still have not upgraded to the latest DNS software to protect against the recently discovered Kaminsky vulnerability and associated risk of DNS cache poisoning.

“Given the heightened awareness of DNS server vulnerabilities due to the recent Kaminsky discovery, it is surprising to see how many organizations are still leaving their DNS systems as potential victims of attack,” commented Cricket Liu, Vice President of Architecture at Infoblox and author of O’Reilly & Associates’ DNS and BIND, DNS & BIND Cookbook, and DNS on Windows Server 2003. “Even if an enterprise has gone to the trouble of patching against the Kaminsky vulnerability, there are many other aspects of configuration, like recursion and open zone transfers, that should also be secured. If not, organizations are essentially locking their door to their house, but leaving the windows wide open. Organizations clearly need to pay more attention to configurations and deployment architectures that are leaving their DNS infrastructures vulnerable to attacks and outages.”

DNS servers are essential network infrastructure that map domain names (e.g., yahoo.com) to IP addresses (e.g., 66.94.234.13), directing Internet inquiries to the appropriate location. Domain name resolution conducted by these servers is required to perform any Internet-related request, whether for Web browsing, email, ecommerce, or cloud computing. Should an enterprise or organization’s DNS systems become compromised by attacks, the results can be devastating, ranging from loss of a company’s Web presence, inability of employees to access any outside Web services, and perhaps most damaging, redirection of Web and email traffic to bogus sites, resulting in data loss, identity theft, ecommerce fraud and more.

Following are the key 2008 DNS survey results, which are based on a sample that included 5 percent of the IPv4 address space, nearly 80 million addresses.

GOOD NEWS

--  90% of name servers that run BIND run one of the most recent versions
    of BIND 9; a small but significant number of administrators continue to run
    older versions of BIND on Internet-facing name servers, putting their
    organizations at risk.

--  Only .17% still rely on Microsoft DNS Server, down from 2.7% (2007);
    usage of unsecure Microsoft DNS Servers connected to the Internet is
    vanishing.

--  Support for Sender Protection Framework (SPF) within DNS for spam
    reduction increased from 12.6% of zones sampled to 16.7%; despite the
    complexity of SPF configuration, validating email senders is increasing in
    importance and organizations are taking email fraud seriously.

BAD NEWS

--  One in four DNS servers does not perform source port randomization --
    the "patch" for "the Kaminsky vulnerability"; the effort by vendors and the
    Internet's DNS community to encourage administrators to upgrade their name
    servers after the announcement of the Kaminsky vulnerability paid off;
    however, a surprising number have not been upgraded and are very vulnerable
    to cache poisoning.

--  More than 40% of Internet name servers allow recursive queries; there
    are still millions of open recursors on the Internet, a danger both to
    themselves and others -- they are vulnerable to cache poisoning and
    Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

--  30% of DNS servers surveyed allow zone transfers to arbitrary
    requestors; this leaves servers as easy targets for denial-of-service
    attacks.

--  Only .002% of DNS zones tested support DNSSEC; administrators have not
    been convinced of its importance -- perhaps intimidated by its complexity
    -- but new mandates could mean a significant change in the near future.

MISC.

--  Usage of IPv6 name servers continues to increase from .27% to .44%;
    while enterprises are investigating IPv6 and concerned about increasingly
    scarce IPv4 address space, adoption of IPv6 is still low -- address
    scarcity isn't yet considered a serious concern and they feel no urgency to
    adopt IPv6.

Call to Action

Based on these statistics, there are some clear calls to action for organizations with external DNS servers. Instead of waiting until they are attacked, all organizations should assess their DNS infrastructure and immediately take the necessary steps to make them more reliable and secure. Infoblox provides a number of free, automated tools that enable organizations to test their DNS infrastructure and identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

I am waiting for the enterprise keynote on Cloud The Apps.

Now this is a huge development in Broadband (Broadband Developments). As you all know I am a huge supporter of the white space intitiative.  Now that the broadcasters are migrating up to the digital channels this freed up spectrum will enable MASSIVE innovation in wireless broadband.  Why?  Two major reasons (there are many others but these are the most relevant imo) 1) battery capacity and 2) antenna technology.

Both of those areas will be able to thrive in the white spaces.  Signals range and strenght are critical to capacity and the white spaces and other frequencies are key.  I can’t wait to see the startups come out of the woodwork to deliver on this new area.

Kudos for Google (and others) to really support this and get behind this to make it happen.

BROADBAND FREEDOM !!

Here is Larry Page’s Post

Posted by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products

All eyes are on the presidential election today, but another important vote just took place at the Federal Communications Commission. By a vote of 5-0, the FCC formally agreed to open up the “white spaces” spectrum — the unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels — for wireless broadband service for the public. This is a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications.

The FCC has been looking at this issue carefully for the last six years. Google has worked hard on this matter with other tech companies and public interest groups because we think that this spectrum will help put better and faster Internet connections in the hands of the public. We also look forward to working with the FCC to finalize the method used to compute power levels of empty channels adjacent to TV channels (we have a number of public filings before the commission in this area and it is a vital issue in urban areas).

I’ve always thought that there are a lot of really incredible things that engineers and entrepreneurs can do with this spectrum. We will soon have “Wi-Fi on steroids,” since these spectrum signals have much longer range than today’s Wi-Fi technology and broadband access can be spread using fewer base stations resulting in better coverage at lower cost. And it is wonderful that the FCC has adopted the same successful unlicensed model used for Wi-Fi, which has resulted in a projected 1 billion Wi-Fi chips being produced this year. Now that the FCC has set the rules, I’m sure that we’ll see similar growth in products to take advantage of this spectrum.

As an engineer, I was also really gratified to see that the FCC decided to put science over politics. For years the broadcasting lobby and others have tried to spread fear and confusion about this technology, rather than allow the FCC’s engineers to simply do their work.

Finally, I want to applaud and thank FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the other commissioners, and the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology for their leadership in advancing this important issue. And, thanks to the more than 20,000 of you who took a stand on this issue through our Free the Airwaves campaign, the FCC heard a clear message from consumers: these airwaves can bring wireless Internet to everyone everywhere.

Posted by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products