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Today's Cloud Training_Mini_Mod
is on those spooky, mysterious and powerful Server Farms....out there by big Dams....old farmer McCoy called 'em the "back
40".....this is the "hidden" side of Mobile Cloud Computing.......investigate, get involved...make money too....too.....yeah.....
Clear-Cloud, LLC
Please
understand that there's a massive change underway - no, we're not talking about Obama....it is about Cloud Computing
- its rise...its growth....that's why so many millions of jobs are gone forever....this talk about the so-called "jobless
economic recover" is all B.S. - because with Cloud Computing - all the "human-like" decisions are rendered
by Cloud Based Processing CPUs - then an "answer" is returned back to a person's web
Browser...in less than 1 second! Why should coroporations hire "humans" to do this? And the fact it's so cheap
(that's why 90% of IT jobs are going "bye-bye").......it is mystifying to so many people - even "tech guys"...read
the below - as you should know what "goes on behind closed doors" or, the "back end" control centers that
manage, process, store and provide the infrastructure" of Cloud Computing....enjoy.....
Google_server_farm_oregon
...........but
cheap electricity is only one, albeit important, criterion for choosing the site of a data centre. Microsoft currently feeds
35 sets of data into an electronic map of the world, including internet connectivity, the availability of IT workers, even
the air quality (dry air makes a good coolant), to see where conditions are favourable and which places should be avoided.
Apparently Siberia comes out well.................."
Google,
for its part, seems to be thinking of moving offshore. In August it applied for a patent for water-based data centres. "Computing
centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be
captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away," says the patent application.
It is almost as easy as plugging in a laser printer. Up to 2,500 servers-in essence, souped-up personal computers-are crammed
into a 40-foot (13-metre) shipping container. A truck places the container inside a bare steel-and-concrete building. Workers
quickly connect it to the electric grid, the computer network and a water supply for cooling. The necessary software is downloaded
automatically. Within four days all the servers are ready to dish up videos, send e-mails or crunch a firm's customer data.
This is Microsoft's new data centre in Northlake, a suburb of Chicago, one of the world's
most modern, biggest and most expensive, covering 500,000 square feet (46,000 square metres) and costing $500m. One day it
will hold 400,000 servers. The entire first floor will be filled with 200 containers like this one. Michael Manos, the head
of Microsoft's data centres, is really excited about these containers. They solve many of the problems that tend to crop up
when putting up huge data centres: how to package and transport servers cheaply, how to limit their appetite for energy and
how to install them only when they are needed to avoid leaving expensive assets idle.
But containers are not the only innovation of which Mr Manos is proud. Microsoft's data centres in Chicago and across
the world are equipped with software that tells him exactly how much power each application consumes and how much carbon it
emits. "We're building a global information utility," he says. Engineers must have spoken with similar passion when
the first moving assembly lines were installed in car factories almost a century ago, and Microsoft's data centre in Northlake,
just like Henry Ford's first large factory in Highland Park, Michigan, may one day be seen as a symbol of a new industrial
era.
Before Ford revolutionised carmaking, automobiles were put together by teams of highly skilled craftsmen
in custom-built workshops. Similarly, most corporate data centres today house armies of "systems administrators",
the craftsmen of the information age.
There are an estimated 7,000 such data centres in America alone, most of
them one-off designs that have grown over the years, reflecting the history of both technology and the particular use to which
it is being put. It is no surprise that they are egregiously inefficient. On average only 6% of server capacity is used, according
to a study by McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Uptime Institute, a think-tank. Nearly 30% are no longer in use at all, but
no one has bothered to remove them. Often nobody knows which application is running on which server. A widely used method
to find out is: "Let's pull the plug and see who calls."
Limited
technology and misplaced incentives are to blame. Windows, the most pervasive operating system used in data centres, allows
only one application to run on any one server because otherwise it might crash. So IT departments just kept adding machines
when new applications were needed, leading to a condition known as "server sprawl" (see chart 3). This made sense
at the time: servers were cheap, and ever-rising electricity bills were generally charged to a company's facilities budget
rather than to IT.
To understand the technology needed to industrialise
data centres, it helps to look at the history of electricity. It was only after the widespread deployment of the "rotary
converter", a device that transforms one kind of current into another, that different power plants and generators could
be assembled into a universal grid. Similarly, a technology called "virtualisation" now allows physically separate
computer systems to act as one.
Virtually new
The origins of virtualisation go back to the 1960s, when IBM developed the technology
so that its customers could make better use of their mainframes. Yet it lingered in obscurity until VMware, now one of the
world's biggest software firms, applied it to the commodity computers in today's data centres.
It did that by
developing a small program called hypervisor, a sort of electronic traffic cop that controls access to a computer's processor
and memory. It allows servers to be split into several "virtual machines", each of which can run its own operating
system and application. "In a way, we're cleaning up Microsoft's sins," says Paul Maritz, VMware's boss and a Microsoft
veteran, "and in doing so we're separating the computing workload from the hardware."
Once computers
have become more or less disembodied, all sorts of possibilities open up. Virtual machines can be fired up in minutes. They
can be moved around while running, perhaps to concentrate them on one server to save energy. They can have an identical twin
which takes over should the original fail. And they can be sold prepackaged as "virtual appliances".
VMware and its competitors, which now include Microsoft, hope eventually to turn a data
centre-or even several of them-into a single pool of computing, storage and networking resources that can be allocated as
needed. Such a "real-time infrastructure", as Thomas Bittman of Gartner calls it, is still years off. But the necessary
software is starting to become available. In September, for instance, VMware launched a new "virtual data-centre operating
system".
Perhaps surprisingly, it is Amazon, a big online retailer, that shows where things are heading.
In 2006 it started offering a computing utility called Amazon Web Services (AWS). Anybody with a credit card can start, say,
a virtual machine on Amazon's vast computer system to run an application, such as a web-based service. Developers can quickly
add extra machines when needed and shut them down if there is no demand (which is why the utility is called Elastic Computing
Cloud, or EC2).
And the service is cheap: a virtual machine, for instance, starts at 10 cents per hour.
If Amazon has become a cloud-computing pioneer, it is because it sees itself as a technology
company. As it branched out into more and more retail categories, it had to develop a sophisticated computing platform which
it is now offering as a service for a fee. "Of course this has nothing to do with selling books," says Adam Selipsky,
in charge of product management at AWS, "but it has a lot to do with the same technology we are using to sell books."
Yet Amazon is not the only big online company
to offer the use of industrial-scale data centres. Google is said to be operating a global network of about three dozen data
centres loaded with more than 2m servers (although it will not confirm this). Microsoft is investing billions and adding up
to 35,000 servers a month. Other internet giants, such as Yahoo!, are also busy building huge server farms.
In some places this has
led to a veritable data-centre construction boom. Half a dozen are being built in Quincy, a hamlet in the middle of America's
Washington state, close to the Columbia River. The attraction is that its dams produce plenty of low-cost power, which apart
from IT gear is the main input for these computing farms. On average, cooling takes as much power as computing. Microsoft's
new data centre near Chicago, for instance, has three substations with a total capacity of 198MW, as much as a small aluminium
smelter.
But cheap electricity is only one, albeit important,
criterion for choosing the site of a data centre. Microsoft currently feeds 35 sets of data into an electronic map of the
world, including internet connectivity, the availability of IT workers, even the air quality (dry air makes a good coolant),
to see where conditions are favourable and which places should be avoided. Apparently Siberia comes out well.
Google, for its part, seems to be thinking of moving offshore. In August it applied for
a patent for water-based data centres. "Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from
which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling
pumps to carry heat away," says the patent application.
Many chief
information officers would love to take their IT infrastructure out to sea and perhaps drown it there. Even as demand for
corporate computing continues to increase, IT budgets are being cut. At the same time many firms' existing IT infrastructure
is bursting at the seams. According to IDC, a market-research firm, a quarter of corporate data centres in America have run
out of space for more servers. For others cooling has become a big constraint. And often utilities cannot provide the extra
power needed for an expansion.
Fewer, bigger, better
So IDC thinks that many data centres will be consolidated and given a big makeover. The
industry itself is taking the lead. For example, Hewlett-Packard (HP) used to have 85 data centres with 19,000 IT workers
worldwide, but expects to cut this down to six facilities in America with just 8,000 employees by the end of this year, reducing
its IT budget from 4% to 2% of revenue.
Other large organisations are
following suit. Using VMware's software, BT, a telecoms firm, has cut the number of servers in its 57 data centres across
the world from 16,000 to 10,000 yet increased their workload. The US Marine Corps is reducing the number of its IT sites from
175 to about 100. Both organisations are also starting to build internal clouds so they can move applications around. Ever
more firms are expected to start building similar in-house, or "private", clouds. The current economic malaise may
speed up this trend as companies strive to become more efficient.
But
to what extent will companies outsource their computing to "public" clouds, such as Amazon's James Staten of Forrester
Research, a market-research firm, says the economics are compelling, particularly for smaller firms. Cloud providers, he says,
have more expertise in running data centres and benefit from a larger infrastructure. Yet many firms will not let company
data float around in a public cloud where they could end up in the wrong hands. The conclusion of this report will consider
the question of security in more detail.
It does not help that Amazon
and Google recently made headlines with service interruptions. Few cloud providers today offer any assurances on things like
continuity of service or security (called "service-level agreements", or SLAs) or take on liability to back them
up.
As a result, says Mr Staten, cloud computing has not yet moved
much beyond the early-adopter phase, meaning that only a few of the bigger companies are using it, and then only for projects
that do not critically affect their business. The New York Times, for instance, used Amazon's AWS to turn Hillary Clinton's
White House schedule during her husband's time in office, with more than 17,000 pages, into a searchable database within 24
hours. NASDAQ uses it to power its service providing historical stockmarket information, called Market Replay.
Stefan van Overtveldt, the man in charge of transforming BT's IT infrastructure, thinks
that to attract more customers, service providers will have to offer "virtual private clouds", fenced off within
a public cloud. BT plans to offer these as a service for firms that quickly need extra capacity. So there will be not just
one cloud but a number of different sorts: private ones and public ones, which themselves will divide into general-purpose
and specialised ones. Cisco, a leading maker of networking gear, is already talking of an "intercloud", a federation
of all kinds of clouds, in the same way that the internet is a network of networks. And all of those clouds will be full of
applications and services.
With all the talk about cloud computing,
it’s easy to label it as the latest fad, especially when everyone whose application talks Internet is trying to rebrand
themselves as a cloud. But the long view shows that this really is an important change, one of several major shifts in computing
that have taken place over the last 40 years, each of them driven by costs and shortages.
Once upon a time, computing was expensive. As a result, programmers carried
their stacks of punched cards into basements late at night, and ran them on the mainframe. The CPU was always
busy; humans were cheap.
When computing became cheap, bandwidth
and storage remained expensive. The CPU was idle, but the links were full. This gave us the PC and client-server
architectures. A wide range of clients on a variety of networking protocols kept things complicated, and WAN prices meant
most network traffic was local.
Eventually,
we settled on browsers, HTTP and TCP/IP. This was web computing, with a simple, standard edge and a tiered
core. Client-side broadband access and persistent storage were relatively cheap. (Don’t believe they’re cheap?
Go into an enterprise and you’ll find their networks and storage systems have plenty of extra capacity. The same is
true for the Internet — if you ignore the impact of spam and P2P traffic.)
Now here’s the cloud. It’s driven by five big things, none
of which are hype, and all of which are changing the way we compute.
Power
and cooling are expensive. Today, it costs far more to run computers than it does to buy them in the first place. To
save on power, we’re building data centers near dams; for cooling, we’re considering using decommissioned ships.
This is about economics and engineering.
Demand is global. Storage itself may be cheap, but data processing at scale is hard
to do. With millions of consumers using a service, putting data next to computing is the only way to satisfy them.
Computing is ubiquitous. We’ve lost our desktop
affinity. Most of the devices in the world that can access the Internet aren’t desktops; they’re cell phones.
Keeping applications and content on a desktop isn’t just old-fashioned — it’s inconvenient.
Applications are built from massive, smart parts.
Clouds give developers building blocks they couldn’t build themselves, from storage to authentication to friend feeds
to CRM interfaces, letting coders stand on the shoulders of giants.
Clouds let us experiment. By removing the cost of staging an environment,
a cloud lets a company try new things faster. This is also true of virtualization in general, but by billing on demand the
cloud means anyone can experiment.
This truly is a fundamental change in computing, even if its
title has been diluted by marketing agendas. And Mobile Device Brokers will make out very fine indeed!
