IBM Blue Cloud: Internet Style Data Centers

IBM’s Blue Cloud is a platform for cloud-based computing, expected to be available to customers in the spring of 2008, supporting systems with Power and x86 processors.

“Blue Cloud" will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet, enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms.

It is, along with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, a seminal step towards network-based computing architectures. Sun Microsystems was ahead of its time in declaring that the "network is the computer." But cloud computing is going to fulfill the prediction.

Call it "software as a service" if you like. The point is that we are nearing an era where resources will be invoked from the computing cloud using a Web browser. Policies still will be needed to authorize use of specific resources, to be sure. But the larger point is that computing, storage and application resources will reside "in the cloud," and be invoked as required by users at the edge of the cloud.

There are all sorts of practical advantages. Distributed or mobile workers can simply invoke their services and information from where they are, using a standard Web browser. Everyone always will have the latest version, the latest patch, the latest version or update.

Computationally intense activities can be handled by clusters of machines designed for such intensity. Storage can be invoked, not carried; used rather than built.

If a developer needs expensive resources, they can be gotten on a sort of "time shared" basis, rather than on a "build your own computing center" basis.

Blue Cloud will be based on open standards and open source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.

The interesting speculation is about how cloud computing might change the way enterprises think about their application and storage architectures. Given the massive increase in the scale of IT environments, one wonders how they'll assess the trade-offs between "building data centers" and "renting reources."

Up to this point, the enterprise data center has been the penultimate computing resource. Might the "cloud" surpass even local and networked data centers?

Has the Web Killed Enterprise Intranets?

Between emerging social networking tools and Web browser front ends, it is conceivable that the need for enterprise "intranets" is not so urgent anymore. As the Internet was seen as an external network, intranets were supposed to make internal data bases, information and communication available to enterprise associates.

But email, instant messaging, texting, mobile phones, Saleforce.com and other Web-based tools arguably not allow organizations to do those things without building dedicated intranets.

Instead, we've flipped everything inside out. The big movement now is towards software architectures that allow internal resources to be exposed to users with access to Web browsers.

Airline Exec for Red Hat

Sometime big has changed when a former Delta Airlines COO takes over as the CEO of a technology company like Red Hat.

Red Hat isn’t a little startup trying to convert people to Linux. It’s a business selling to big corporations. It needs leadership used to selling enterprises.Also, if Red Hat can reasonably expect to compete to supply half of the worldwide server market by 2015, it will really have to scale. Companies like Delta are about systems and logistics, the sort of things one needs to really scale.

James Whitehurst, of course, wouldn't be the first non-technology executive brought in to head a technology company. Lou Gerstner transformed IBM into a services company, using a background of RJR Nabisco and American Express.

The choice shows how mainstream open source has become. Red Hat needs to sell to enterprise executives, with huge scale.

Vonage, AT&T Settle VoIP Patent Dispute

Vonage and at&t have finalized the settlement of a dispute between the companies. No details were released. But $39 million had been mentioned earlier.

IP Multicasting Coming?

Not being a "techie," I first became aware of "IP Multicasting" in 2000, when working with some folks developing a streaming media service. As somebody who spent some time in the cable TV business, it made a huge amount of sense. Basically, the idea is that for popular content, say a TV show that millions of people want to watch, one uses multicasting to launch a single stream that all those viewers can watch, rather than millions of discrete streams. Those of you who are network engineers will appreciate the elegance of the way this conserves bandwidth, in the same way that satellites deliver a single stream that millions of viewers can watch. That's the beauty of all multicasting: highly efficient sharing of downstream bandwidth.

Carriers proved resistance to enabling multicasting, however, for all sorts of other reasons, not the least of which was the fear that control over available bandwidth would be lost. But technology journalist Mark Stephens (Robert X. Cringely) argues multicasting is the future of television. Well, at least the future for some sorts of television: the highly-viewed, synchronous sort.

Multicast was built into the structure of the Internet from the very beginning but was generally not turned on because network administrators view it as a resource hog (local storage and resources, not bandwidth, per se).

Cisco long has been a huge supporter of multicast because it requires ever bigger and more powerful routers. That might be true, but multicasting still makes eminent sense as a way to distribute highly-popular video. Sure, there are other sorts of video that have to be unicast because demand is low. But multicasting is quite efficient of bandwidth for highly-popular streams.

Stephens uses a simple example. Say a user wants to see Seinfeld episode 60, and is entitled to do so. That event gets assigned a multicast address.
When the show is made available on a server anywhere on a part of the net that supports multicast, the user receives it. All the routers between here and there look for multicast subscriptions and enable them and the episode is is cached locally.

In order to lower their bandwidth bills, ISPs are trying to take greater control of the way we, their customers, use our "unlimited" bandwidth, says Stephens. But IP multicast offers another tool to do so, and is less bothersome.

Both Comcast and Verizon are rapidly rolling out IP multicast, Stephens notes. The reason is that IP multicast remains a highly-efficient to deliver popular programming, and means most of the linear cable channels. ESPN demands as part of its contracts that much of their programming on MPEG-2-equipped cable systems must delivered at 5 Mbps to 8 Mbps, compared to the 2 Mbps used for most other channels.

Contracts are similiar for premium cable services such as HBO or Showtime.

Internal audience studies at Comcast have shown that 90 percent of the customer base watches 10 percent of the available channels.The problem is that each of use might have a different seven favorites. Also, even if few people actually are watching, cable companies can't turn them off because programming contracts with the studios require carriage.

Multicast solves this problem because it allocates no bandwidth to channels that aren't being watched. It's an interesting business issue: the signals are "carried" but maybe not "broadcast" to consumers who aren't actually "tuned" to the channel.

IP Multicast is an alternative to P2P, in other words.

Has Apple Sold 5 Million iPhones?

Cleve Nettles at Mac9to5 thinks so. Nettles expects Apple to say so in January, at Macworld. The issue is how those sales relate to the announced goal of selling 10 million iPhones. Some people recollect Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, promising sales of 10 million phones in calendar year 2008 alone. Others seem to think he meant 10 million by the end of 2008, in total.

Rivals at Nokia and Research in Motion probably aren't excessively worried either way, given the installed base of devices each of those firms has, and the number of new devices they ship every month. Of course, Apple has a distinct advantage. It gets recurring revenue from the sales of each of its phones.

RIM and Nokia do not. So one iPhone sale is worth a lot more revenue than the sale of a new BlackBerry or Nokia handset.

Cable Targets Small Business

The coming year is when we see just how formidable U.S. cable companies will be in the small business communications market. To be sure, many veterans of the business communications market don't think cable will much of a factor in the enterprise market. Maybe not. That's not where cable companies are going to focus, which is the small business customer.

Comcast Corp. apparently plans to spend $3 billion to sign up 20 percent of small companies in its territories by 2012. Time Warner Cable Inc. is also pursuing businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees. And Cox Enterprises has been signing up lots of business customers for years.

Phone companies dominate the $25 billion annual market, which can generate profit margins about 10 percent higher than services offered to consumers or enterprises.

On the other hand, large telcos don't generate nearly as much money from phone lines and calling as they used to. In fact, small business lines provide only about five percent of at&t's revenue these days.

Cable providers, with less than five percent of the small business market, may seize one-third by 2012, saus Sanjeev Aggarwal, AMI-Partners VP.

So two things are going to happen. In some cases telcos will cut their own prices to match the discounts cablers are expected to offer. They'll keep share but sacrifice margins. Or, telcos can simply accept the loss of some share to maintain margins for a while longer.

Anticipating the onslaught, Verizon and at&t seem to be prepared to cut prices and bundle services to keep small-business customers who sign up on contracts.

Verizon offers 20 percent off Internet access for companies taking unlimited local and long-distance calling plans for one year. Customers buying voice services from at&t pay roughly 40 percent less with an annual Internet service contract.

About 54 percent of AT&T's small and mid-sized-business customers in areas where cable may compete have might already have signed new contracts, some observers suggest.