Cloud Expo New York

A cloud spot market allows commercial cloud service providers the ability to announce surplus or idle processing and storage capacity to a cloud exchange. The exchange allows buyers to locate available cloud processing capacity, negotiate prices (within milliseconds), and deliver the commodity to customers on-demand.

Cloud processing and storage spot markets can be privately operated, controlled by industry organizations, or potentially government agencies. Spot markets frequently attract speculators, as cloud capacity prices are known to the public immediately as transactions occur.

The 2010 cloud spot market allows commercial cloud service providers to support both franchise (dedicated service level agreement) customers, as well as on-demand customers to participate in a spot market that allows customers to automatically move their applications and storage to providers offering the best pricing and service levels based on a pre-defined criteria.

I don't really care who's CPUs and disk I am using, I really only care that it is there when I want it, offers adequate performance, has proximity to my end users, and meets my pricing expectations.

Cloud Storage Using SSDs on the Layer 2 Switch
Content delivery networks/CDNs want to provide end users the best possible performance and quality – often delivering high volume video or data files. Traditionally CDNs build large storage arrays and processing systems within data centers, preferably adjacent to either a carrier hotel meet-me-room or Internet Exchange Point/IXP.

Sometimes supported by bundles of 10Gigabit ports connecting their storage to networks and the IXP.

Lots of recent discussion on topics such as Fiber Channel over Ethernet/FCoE and Fiber Channel over IP/FCoIP. Not good enough. I want the SSD manufacturers and the switch manufacturers to produce an SSD card with a form factor that fits into a slot on existing Layer 2 switches. I want a Petabyte of storage directly connected to the switch backplane allowing unlimited data transfer rates from the storage card to network ports.

Now a cloud storage provider does not have to buy 50 cabinets packed with SAN/NAS systems in the public data center, only slots in the switch.

IPv6
3tera got the ball rolling with IPv6 support in AppLogic. No more excuses. IPv6 support first, then add on IPv4 support as a failover to IPv6. The basic criteria to all other design issues. No IPv6 – then shred the design.

Cloud Standardization
Once again the world is being held hostage by equipment and software vendors posturing to make their product the industry standard. The user community is not happy. We want spot markets, the ability to migrate among cloud service providers when necessary, and a basis for future development of the technology and industry.

The IP protocols were developed through the efforts of a global community dedicated to making the Internet grow into a successful utility. Almost entirely supported through a global community of volunteers, the Internet Engineering Task Force and innovators banded together and built a set of standards (RFCs) for all to use when developing their hardware and applications.

Of course there were occasional problems, but their success is the Internet as it is today.

Standardization is critical in creating a productive development environment for cloud industry and market growth. There are several attempts to standardize cloud elements, and hopefully there will be consolidation of those efforts into a common framework.

Included in the efforts are the Distributed Management Task Force/DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator, Open Grid Forum's Open Cloud Computing Interface working group, The Open Group Cloud Work Group, The Open Cloud Manifesto, the Storage Network Industry Association Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, and others.

Too many to be effective, too many groups serving their own purposes, and we still cannot easily write cloud applications that find the lower levels of cloud X as a Service/XaaS proprietary.

What is on your 2010 wish list?

Happy Cloud New Year!

• Cloud Expo New York Call for Papers to Expire January 15, 2010