CDN, Mathematica, MatLab – Easier to Set up in Amazon Web Services than Corporate Data Center

December 1, 2008 Dave Ohara

Here is a blog entry about the use of Amazon’s new CDN service by Mike Culver. Mike makes a good point that CDNs are a pain many times, because of the sales channel. As part of the bad economic times it will be interesting what the long term effects are to sales processes.

Content Delivery Service Flying High

It’s fun to look at buzz and activity right after a new Amazon Web Service gets launched – in this case the service I’m thinking about is Amazon CloudFront, which is our new Content Delivery Service. Jeff Barr blogged about CloudFront’s features and benefits when the service launched last week.

What prompted this particular blog post was a Twitter message (“tweet”) that Jeff saw and forwarded to me. “Thanks to Amazon CloudFront, small websites can take advantage of a CDN. I don't think Photos.aero will spend $10 ‘til November 30.” The post was about www.photos.aero, which is an aircraft enthusiasts’ site. (I’m a pilot, so Jeff knew that I’d be interested.)

That is indeed amazing! Until Amazon CloudFront came along, setting up content distribution was a real pain, in my opinion. You had to contact the service provider, do the whole “sales cycle” dance, and then wonder if in fact your prices were market price, or whether you signed up to pay a premium. The AWS approach is very egalitarian, and while I am certain that sales folks are nice people, it’s not a scalable approach for the vendor and the fact of the matter is that many technical folks don’t want to put a process between them and deployment.

Joining the Amazon Web Services effort is Mathematica.

Wolfram Research announced last week that they will be embracing the Cloud and providing a "Cloud Computing Service" with help ofNimbis Services, Inc

The Mathematica cloud computing service will provide flexible and scalable access to HPC from within Mathematica, simplifying the transition from desktop technical computing to HPC. "The two largest challenges in using HPC are programming the HPC application itself and ensuring that you can get enough computing power to do the job," says Tom Wickham-Jones, Wolfram Research Executive Director of Kernel Technology. "Mathematica answers the programming challenge by providing an integrated technical computing platform, enabling computation, visualization, and data access. Cloud computing offers consistent access to large-scale computing capabilities.

A Screenshot from recent demonstration at SC08:

And MatLab as well.

Mathworks released a whitepaper on how to run MATLAB parallel computing products -Parallel Computing Toolbox and MATLAB Distributed Computing Server on Amazon EC2. This step by step guide walks you through the steps of installation, configuration and setting up clustered environments using these licensed products from MathWorks on Amazon EC2. It shows how you can create an AMI with MATLAB products bundled in and run them in the cloud.

Whitepaper is available free on Mathworks website:

MATLAB users will learn about the key aspects of using the EC2 service from their desktop MATLAB session and using Parallel Computing Toolbox to send parallel MATLAB computations to the EC2 service.

System administrators will learn the key technical details required for setting up MATLAB Distributed Computing Server on the EC2 service, including licensing and network setup. They will also learn how to configure their users’ desktops to enable the use of the EC2 service for MATLAB computations.

What do all of these have in common. They are all easier to get started than if users had gone to their own IT department. So, AWS are cheaper and easier to use.

I am very excited because this is going to open up powerful MATLAB tools to any developer for not only research but also production applications. Students might be able to do their lab exercises without a lab and impress their professors by turning in the assignments before time. Professors will be able to teach courses using MATLAB by "turning on" a switch that creates their "Instant Labs" for the duration of the course without even contacting the College IT department for resources. Enteprises might be able to crunch the complex BI data over the weekend for a monday morning meeting.

Amazon is probably one of the only data center operators who is growing faster than expected while others are slowing down.

HyperMiling, HyperPUE, and now Hyper-Green

November 19, 2008 Dave Ohara

HyperMiling was selected the 2008 word of the year by New Oxford American Dictionary.

Making jest I wrote about HyperPUE.

But then I found Hyper-Green, Microsoft’s effort with virtualization.

One nice thing Microsoft did was add a link to donate to a NPO

Do something for the environment
Microsoft has donated $20,000 to TechSoup - a nonprofit organization dedicated to refurbishing computers for use by underprivileged communities. This donation will help meet technology needs and reduce e-waste. You can support the movement for cleaner, more accessible technologies by donating to TechSoup as well.

Donate to TechSoup

I wonder if HyperGreen will be a new term as well for the fanatical green efforts and to the extremes of Ed Begley, and Bill Nye the science guy.

Eco-Friendly Competition: Who Can Go Greener?

Actor Ed Begley and 'Science Guy' Bill Nye Vie for Lowest Carbon Footprint

By DAVID KERLEY
July 25, 2007

In Hollywood, where the streets are supposedly paved with gold, actor Ed Begley is all about green. His passion about energy use and the environment serves as the plotline for his new reality show, "Living With Ed," videotaped at his California home.

(abc news)

But something is happening in his little corner of the Hollywood Hills, and Begley is feeling the heat. And it's not from his thermostat.

Reducing Spam Saves Energy

November 6, 2008 Dave Ohara

Here is a case study of a realtor eliminating 95% of its spam.

Using Postini Perimeter Manager, APR hasbeen able to:
• Eliminate more than 95 percent of spam messages were blocked before they reached APR’s network, reducing the volume of incoming email traffic by nearly 75 percent (more than 30,000 messages a day), freeing agents to concentrate on their sales activities.
• Avoid the planned purchase of additional servers to handle growing spam traffic. Gain a significant reduction in the labor required to manage its email system, saving the IT Director from having to dedicate a full time position to email administration.

This company Postini was acquired by Google a year ago.

If you are looking for your own solution to reduce spam another company to look at besides Postini is http://mailchannels.com/ product Traffic Control.

MailChannels Traffic Control provides innovative email traffic shaping solutions for organizations of all sizes, enabling customers to simultaneously solve their spam problems and reduce their email infrastructure costs.

Innovative approach

Traffic Control takes a new approach to stopping spam. It evaluates the sender of the email instead of the content, and slows down any suspicious email. Legitimate email is let through right away but during the slow-down, spam often gives up and filters have more time to react.

Highly effective

MailChannels customers are much better equipped to deal with increasing volume and severity of spam attacks. With our patented SMTP multiplexing technology, organizations of all sizes are protected at a fraction of the cost of the problems caused by spam over-sized infrastructure, help desk and related costs, and reduced productivity.

Here is mailchannels case study.

Before adopting the MailChannels solution, he considered and rejected several different options to solving his problem including:

Buying more servers with higher CPU power
Using an outsourced service such as Postini or MessageLabs
Installing a dedicated email appliance or appliance cluster
Deploying greylisting

IBM’s Management and Testing Software Updated for Energy Efficiency, Finally

November 3, 2008 Dave Ohara

ZDNet has a blog post regarding IBM’s latest SW announcements, and as the author exclaims, Finally. I agree.

IBM’s management and testing software updated with energy conservation in mind

Posted by Heather Clancy @ 1:20 pm

IBM has said and done plenty about tweaking its server and storage hardware for energy efficiency. Last week, it released some changes to its Tivoli management platform as well as its content management software designed with energy efficiency in mind. The company (finally!) has also started a new program that will help educate its business partners about how to aid their own customers with green technology and data center design projects.

- The Tivoli update layers the Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management module into the Tivoli Usage and Accounting Management Software. This will allow companies to collect energy and power consumption information (sliced and diced by individual, application, service, machine or department) and to assess usage trends.

- A new product from IBM’s software development and testing group, IBM Rational Test Lab Manager, can be used to better-configure both physical and virtual machines as better power consumption citizens. Another new product, Telelogic System Architect, ups the ante when it comes to reporting and managing the impact of technology on a company’s overall green agenda. The latter will be available later this year.

Here is the Tivoli update.

Rational Test Lab.

Telelogic for the Systems Architect.

Telelogic® System Architect® for Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Analysis

Telelogic System Architect enables you to build a Business and Enterprise Architecture- a fully integrated collection of models and documents across five keys domains: Strategy, Business, Information, Systems and Technology.

Telelogic System Architect's comprehensive solution provides a shared workspace for all team members to understand how to improve the company's architecture and overall business. Telelogic System Architect promotes:

Increased Organizational Agility

Alignment of Business Processes and IT Systems to Business Objectives

Planning, Modeling, and Execution of Business Processes (BPM)

Rapid, Effective and Positive Response to Business Change

Office in the Cloud, Avoiding Demo Hell

October 30, 2008 Dave Ohara

Nicholas Carr has a post on Microsoft’s Office in the Cloud.

Microsoft to offer Office-in-the-cloud

October 28, 2008

Microsoft's long awaited push into cloud computing continues today, as the company announces plans to offer fully functional, if "lightweight," versions of its popular Office applications as web services that will run in people's browsers. The move signals Microsoft's intention to defend its massive Office business against incursions from Google Apps, Zoho, and other online competitors. Versions of the apps will be available in both ad-supported and subscription models, according to Microsoft's Chris Capossela:

We will deliver Office Web applications to consumers through Office Live, which is a consumer service with both ad-funded and subscription offerings. For business customers, we will offer Office Web applications as a hosted subscription service and through existing volume licensing agreements. We will show a private technology preview of the Office Web applications later this year.

I’ve worked with Chris Caposella, and Chris is infamous for a demo with Bill Gates when he was Bill’s speech writer.

Chris has passed on the demo duties for Office in the Cloud to Takeshi Numoto. The good thing is Takeshi’s demo didn’t have the blue screen of death. Which maybe is the good thing about cloud computing demos with built in redundancy. Here is a post on his demo.

Microsoft Office 14 To Include Web Apps

The software maker has yet to set a release date, but industry watchers say the online suite could be available next year.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek
October 29, 2008 12:59 PM

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s plan to offer a Web-based version of its Office productivity suite will debut with the release of Office 14, the successor to Microsoft Office 2007, a company executive said Tuesday.

Office Web, as the online version is called, is part of Microsoft's "vision for delivering great user experiences across the PC, phone, and the Web in Office 14," said Microsoft Office general manager Takeshi Numoto, speaking Tuesday at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Numoto did not specify a release date for Office 14. Bloggers at some tech sites, however, have said the suite is likely due out in 2009. Office 2007 debuted in January 2007.

Numoto said that the Web-based versions of Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote would allow users to collaborate with others and across multiple devices more efficiently. "This is a great example of Office enabling dynamic collaboration across the PC, phone, and the Web," said Numoto.

Numoto did not offer insight into pricing details, such as whether users who purchase the boxed version of Office 14 will get free access to the Web version.

In launching the suite, Microsoft is looking to protect its flank from Google -- which last year launched a host of free and low-cost office productivity applications under a brand called Google Apps. For a single monthly fee per user, enterprises can roll out Google Apps to as many employees as they like.

Takeshi is a great guy, and I watched his demo at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02/ minute 134.

Takeshi doesn’t look a day older than when I met him his first day on the job which is over 10 years ago. It is a small world. I also used to work with Takeshi’s wife when she was at Sony.