Mine the Harvest

Sago Cloud Computing

by on Mar.30, 2009, under Sago Labs

Cloud computing is receiving increasing attention and shows great potential in the correct application. At Sago we are in a perfect situation to deploy clustering and cloud solutions and are currently conducting a feasibility analysis using a few different technologies and we wanted to let you know a bit more about these projects.

Virtualization has done a great deal of good in enterprise and data center environments, consolidating server footprints, increasing power efficiency, reducing hardware investment and maintenance costs and offering low priced virtual private servers to customers who do not require dedicated hardware. Despite the many advantages of virtualization however, it remains true that no virtual machine can exceed the resources of the underlying hardware. This is where dynamic or cloud computing can come into play, provisioning additional resources dynamically to meet changing requirements.

We are currently deploying a cluster of Linux servers using Rocks Clusters. This allows for easily adding nodes to the cluster and managing them. Cluster solutions in the past have been fairly complicated affairs and the stability and manageability was not optimum – and I am happy to say we have been extremely impressed with Rocks. If you have any clustering projects, or would like to learn more about clustering I would encourage you to check out this project. We are also experimenting with Eucalyptus cloud computing, which holds significant potential in flexible computing that can open the door to our offering completely new services to suit our customers needs. In the future, you might be able to run your servers as Virtual Machines in a cloud – responding to higher load demands and increased traffic by smoothly provisioning additional resources, without incurring the long term cost of permanently adding new hardware.

Eucalyptus is going to play a central role in the October release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, the release announcement of which caused a stir of interest in the Ubuntu community. There is a distinct buzz in the IT community about the possibilities of Cloud Computing and how it can help businesses in many ways, integrating with SaaS and SOA platforms, etc. Being able to leverage Cloud Computing in your business, or offer it to your customers could be a distinct advantage in the near future.

We will continue to build out our existing cluster, testing it in a variety of scenarios and deploying Amazon AMIs on our internal Eucalyptus cloud and will tell you more about this in the near future and let you know about what Cloud services we may be offering soon. See you up there!

2 comments for this entry:
  1. Kyle

    Virtualization can’t exceed the resources of the underlying hardware???? What about all these ROI and TCO graphs I keep looking at?! I’m pretty sure Virtualization is magic and turns my servers into White and Silver. I’m pretty sure the Gods of Apple invented it for us.

  2. admin

    Hi Kyle,
    Thanks for your comments. It might be helpful to remember that ROI and TCO graphs are usually created by sys admins and IT managers using advanced algorithms which prove the hardware they want will actually create money from the ether thus convincing the CFO that big, expensive IBM blade servers are a wise expenditure. (Soon, IT managers will be able to use quantum algorithms to demonstrate the actual creation of money in parallel universes, thus literally creating money for the company out of thin air.) However, with cloud computing it is now possible to convince CFOs that it is now possible to accomplish anything with nothing. That I believe is the key difference between mere mortal virtualization and the reality of cloud computing.

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