Mine the Harvest

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!

After my previous post about installing Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) on my Aspire One, I decided to give the Indiana 2008.11 release a try. The community edition was working fine, but I wanted to play around with IPS which I had trouble making work on SXCE, and also I just wanted a Gnome base install and the opportunity to see how 2008.11 installed and worked on the Aspire One.

The install is of moderate difficulty (easy of course once you have done it.) There are a few speeds bumps you may hit however and so I wrote this how to. This takes you step by step through installing OpenSolaris and you will end up sporting Solaris on your Aspire One. Compiz, ZFS, TimeSlider, DTrace, and working wifi are all your’s to be had.

+5 Geek Bonus to any who complete this quest, so saddle up, burn that .iso and start your quest.

One particulary fun thing to do is try a remote install from another system by X Forwarding the GUI Installer. That was kind of fun. (Screenshot of this to come.)

When the 2009.06 release is out I may attempt to use the Solaris Distribution Creator and make an .iso of an Aspire One Image that is ready to roll and put it up on bit torrent.

I encourage you to test drive OpenSolaris, and hope you find the guide usefull. Please leave feedback on how it goes and I’ll try to help – if I can (I’m a Linux guy and still pretty new to Solaris). Also, do check out Dave Clack’s excellent blog. Dave has worked with the Sun engineers helping to bring us driver support for the Aspire One and helped me with with my SXCE issues.

I would also like to thank Aaron Houston (Sun: Menlo Park) for hooking me up with some OpenSolaris advocacy materials – including a great device driver guide, some metallic “Powered by OpenSolaris” stickers and other goodies – another post to come on that.

Cheers,

Pete