Gladinet Cloud Desktop v1.4.2 Supports Windows Azure

In an earlier post, we wrote about Gladinet, a provider of cloud storage solutions. Gladinet's motto is, "The Browser was designed for delivering web contents to your desktop.
Gladinet was designed for delivering web services to your desktop. It goes a step further than the web browser by integrating web services into the Operating System." Recently, Gladinet announced the release of Cloud Desktop v1.4.2. This version adds the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Windows Azure platform (scheduled to go live in January  2010) to the list of cloud storage providers that the service platform supports. Cloud Desktop, which provides an Internet-based virtual disk drive for users, also supports AT&T Synaptic Storage, Amazon S3, Google Docs and EMC Atmos, among many others.

Founded in 2008, Gladinet launched its cloud services to the industry in spring 2009. Gladinet aims to change the way small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access and use cloud storage through its open-platform cloud storage services. Gladinet Cloud Desktop, leverages the power of the Internet as a virtual PC, providing users the convenience of a virtual disk drive.

"Gladinet's mission is to provide our customers with what they need at the moment they need it," stated Jerry Huang, co-owner of Gladinet. "That's why we are out in front and ready for the introduction of Windows Azure. Our newest version of Cloud Desktop enables users to mount Azure storage and many other cloud storage services as a virtual drive or folder on their computers."

The platform upgrades Windows Explorer into a cloud storage portal, and users can map each service as a network drive directly accessible from Explorer. Instead of users managing numerous accounts and interfaces for various cloud services, Cloud Desktop provides a unified interface for a user's selected cloud storage providers.

Microsoft plans to transition its Windows Azure cloud computing platform from preview to full production capacity on January 1 next year, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie announced at the annual PDC conference. The service, currently operating as a free Community Technology Preview (CTP), will remain no-cost throughout January; from February 1 it will start accumulating charges. The cost schedule was previously announced in July.

SMBs use Cloud Desktop's capacity for integrating multiple third-party cloud storage services into individual desktop operating systems on an open platform. Cloud Desktop also allows for both drag-and-drop and set-it-and-forget-it file backup to Azure and other cloud storage services.

"Moreover, Cloud Desktop facilitates cross-storage backup among providers," said Huang. "The virtual drives allow for backups to a redundant array of cloud storage so that users do not have to rely on one provider for backup. With our interface, users simply drag and drop files and folders from providers such as Amazon S3 to Azure."

Wolfram Alpha - Worth Another Look

Upon its much-hyped debut, Wolfram Alpha, despite its technical sophistication, was not exactly the mouse that roared. It still isn't, but it's getting more interesting. 

Microsoft quietly is integrating Wolfram Alpha in presenting the results of some search requests, especially in the area of nutrition, so things might change. 
Right now, Wolfram Alpha is still a tiny droplet of moisture in the cloud. Compete Data says its got 288,161 visitors in November 2009. This compares with Google's 146,063,379 in the same period, and Microsoft Bing's 51,992,440. 
For some searches, however, the results are another story entirely.


I tried them all out by typing "1 cup penne pasta" into all three engines. 


Google gave me back 1.5 million results using 1 cup of penne pasta.

Bing had 261,000 similar results. 

But Wolfram Alpha was very different, much more useful and to the point. It gave me all the nutritional facts (calories, carbs, etc.) including comparisons to recommended daily allowances. 

The promised integration of Wolfram Alpha and Bing didn't work for me (it may be rolling out gradually).

But the concept is interesting especially since in an interview with WebProNews,  Javed Panjwani, the Business Development Executive at Wolfram Alpha hinted that deals with others [Google?] might be forthcoming. He also explains what makes Wolfram Alpha shine in the video below (or go here) .


Certainly, integration of Wolfram Alpha's powerful computation engine and data banks can greatly enhance the quality and  utility of many results.

Alas, typing in "cost of cloud computing" into Wolfram Alpha disappointed. "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure how to compute an answer from your input," it replied. Typing in just "cloud computing" yielded the message, "Development of this topic is under investigation." Hopefully, the investigation will lead them to "EyeOnTheCloud."

Microsoft Azure and the Road to Cairo

Wednesday, August 06, 2008 (updated December 19, 2009)

“A fella told me this here road leads to Cairo
I got to get me a ride “

David Ackles, “The Road to Cairo”

It's "Back to the Future" time at Microsoft, folks. In 1992 the GoogleGazer wrote a long piece on 'The Road to Cairo" about Microsoft's plans for an Object File Store (OFS) an object-oriented database designed to make it easy to search documents and other structured data by content no matter where located which was then codenamed Cairo. It was announced by Jim Allchin in 1991 and planned for release in 1993. Ten years later, in 2002 Computerworld reported that "Windows remains uncontaminated by many of the features originally slated for Windows NT and Cairo, including OFS."

While some of Cairo made it out the door as Windows NT 4.0, its charter to build technologies for a next generation operating system that would fulfill Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips" promulgated in 1994 and made into a book published in 1995 called The Road Ahead (ISBN-13: 978-0140260403), was, sadly, never fulfilled.

Why not?

Simply put, the infrastructure and technology just was not there yet. Moore''s Law, famously first stated by Gordon Moore in 1965 predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years, a prediction that has held true for over 40 years now. Indeed, computers today are 128 times more powerful than they were back then, at least. The average connection speed over the Internet has increased at least 25-fold, and Google gives each (free) user of Google Apps over 7 GB of managed network storage, so we've made great strides in the past 14 years in these areas.

Windows has not kept pace. Its kernel has accumulated too much baggage. Windows has gotten overly complex, and scalability is a serious issue with it. Vista was universally acknowledged to be a failure. Mean time, Linux and Open Source have blossomed, and have matured to the point that venerable IBM announced at LinuxWorld that In a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical IBM will offer "Microsoft-free" personal computers with IBM's Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The Linux desktop computer comes fully equipped and sells for 30% less. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office.

As Microsoft was forced to acknowledge in its SEC filings , Linux and Open Source pose a significant threat to Microsoft's long period of domination and control of the operating system and desktop. Suffering from acute Billionaire's Agita, Steve Ballmer saw that he needed to do something radical. He seems to have turned to a veteran Microsoftie, Eric Rudder, senior vice president, technical strategy, who worked closely with Bill Gates, and headed the Servers and Tools group until 2005. His mission, and he has accepted it,was to "incubate" a project called Singularity that came out of Microsoft Research and to turn it into into Midori, a scalable, saleable product for Cloud Computing that is unburdened with the accumulated baggage of Microsoft Windows. We now know the result to be Microsoft Azure, unveiled by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief technology officer on October 27, 2008 and scheduled to be generally available on Jan. 1, 2010.

Ballmer chose well. Rudder is an out-of the-box thinker. The GoogleGazer first met him shortly after Eric joined Microsoft in 1988. He is not only a clear-thinking, very smart and hard-working fellow, he is one of a handful of really nice people in the senior ranks of Microsoft. He is rumored to be Ballmer's ultimate successor, when the time comes (really, he would be Bill's successor). The affable and usually talkative Rudder was absolutely tight lipped about Midori, and when I asked him for comment, he first said, "I'm currently out of the country (he was in the UK); Frank should be able to make sure you get a reply for your blog," handing me off to Waggoner Edstrom PR flak Frank X. Shaw. The best Frank could come up with was, “Sorry that I don’t have more for you – Microsoft not really saying much about Midori.”

· “Microsoft is always thinking about and exploring innovative ways for people to use technology.

· Midori is one of many incubation projects underway at Microsoft, as such we are not talking about it at this time.”

On the other hand while Shaw was not talking, some hard-working journalists got their hands on the real poop. David Worthington at SD Times writes that he has seen the Midori documents. He wrote, “Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic. Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones. According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

In Midori, concurrency (vital to support Cloud Computing) is a basic design principle.The technically inclined reader can work through this paper from Microsoft Research for some insight: “SCOPE: Easy and Efficient Parallel Processing of Massive Data Sets,” While the GoogleGazer thought he was alone in observing the similarities to Cairo (which at one time employed over 1,000 developers), Mary Jo Foley of ZD Net seems to have found some other old geezers with long memories. We all see Cairo written all over Midori. Everyone agrees that Midori is critical to Microsoft's long-term health, but everyone also agrees that its delivery date is still off in the future. Ms. Foley wrote: [I]t’s likely to be launched sooner than a typical Microsoft Research project, but not so soon as to obviate the need for Windows 7 (released on October 22, 2009) and Windows 8. In other words, we’re looking at a new non-Windows operating system to debut some time before CEO Steve Ballmer retires (a date Ballmer has said is nine or so years away).

As released, Microsoft Azure is not Cairo by a long shot. Microsft Azure does not [yet] have an Object Filing System, but it’s getting there, as the diagram below shows.

The three kinds of Windows Azure storage are:

· Blobs: allow storing large binary objects, such as videos and images.

· Tables: provide highly scalable entity-based storage (not relational tables).

· Queues: allow sending and receiving messages, such as between an application’s Web role instances and Worker role instances.

Microsoft Azure consists of four “pillars”: Storage (like a file system); the “fabric controller,” which is a management system for modeling/deploying and provisioning; virtualized computation/VM; and a development environment, which allows developers to emulate Azure on their desktops and plug in Visual Studio, Eclipse or other tools to write cloud apps against it.

Azure services including .Net Services and SQL Azure sit on top of the Windows Azure operating system)

As Mary Jo Foley reported on ZDNet, at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) held on November 17, 2009, Microsoft introduced three new codenames related to future Azure development efforts:

Project Sydney: Technology that enables customers to securely connect their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IPSec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers, for example.

Dallas: Microsoft’s “data-as-a-service” offering. Dallas is a new service built on top of Windows Azure and SQL Azure that will provide users with access to free and paid collections of public and commercial data sets that they can use in developing applications.

AppFabric: AppFabric is a collection of existing Azure developer components, including the “Dublin” app server, “Velocity” caching technology, and .Net Services (the service bus and access control services).

“The Road to Cairo” the song by David Ackles, is the first song from his eponymous album (Elektra Records,1968). Like Microsoft’s Cairo, it did not achieve [commercial] success, but it was influential among singer-songwriters; tragically, Ackles died from cancer in 1999. Microsoft shareholders hope that unlike the still-born Cairo, Microsoft Azure will be both a commercial and artistic success.

Ackles’ song ends like this:

I know this road; it leads straight into Cairo
Twenty-two miles straight ahead
I can't, I can't walk down this road to Cairo
They're better thinking I'm dead.
I've been traveling,
Gone a long, long time,
Don't know what I'd find
Scared of what I'd find
I can't I just can't walk down this road

Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 Migration

Vasily Vasinov has an interesting two-part post on migrating from Web 2.0- to Web 3.0.
Part 1 and Part 2. He also posted a podcast providing an Introduction to HTML5 and CSS3.
Warning: The style is a little bit technical.

Cloud Computing - The Parody

Hat tip to Barbara Occhiogrosso, a talented artist and "closet geek" who drew my attention to
"IT'S CLOUD COMPUTING," the latest parody by "Loose Bruce" Kerr re Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now."

"IT'S CLOUD COMPUTING"-parody by "Loose Bruce" Kerr Re Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" - Awesome video clips here

"It speaks of the next wave of computing: remotely accessing resources, applications, and your data storage via the intertubes, I mean, Internet (the "cloud")...instead of owning and using everything locally," he says. Bruce works for Sun Microsystems as Assistant General Counsel.

Loose Bruce Kerr performs irregularly on the Dr. Demento & Jim Bohannon nationally syndicated radio shows. During Kerr's earlier career as a musical performer and comedian, he opened for "Weird Al" Yankovic.

email Bruce at: BKerrLaw@aol.com

Ten Years Out

The Blur Group published its prognostications for the year 2020.
Here are some excerpts relating to our world.

• TV, movies and video in general will be distributed over the Web. Subscription and free ad models will both exist. Micro payments will thrive.
  
• Music and eReader devices will be things of the past overtaken by full media smartphones, tablets and Netbooks. Apple will still have less than 20% of the US market for such devices except for the smartphone.
  
• The mobile phone market will be the smartphone particularly in the Western world. Apple, Blackberry and Google will dominate. Microsoft or Nokia will own Blackberry.
  
• Web 3.0 will be nearing its conclusion. Websites will be clusters of Web apps. Every Website will ask ‘what do you want to do today?’ – no longer what we need to tell you. Social media and the ‘Social’ Web will be givens. Facebook will be the way we communicate and stay in touch. It will be the worlds telephone directory.
  
• Facebook will own Twitter. Microsoft will own Linkedin.
  
• The semantic Web will be reality. Everything will exist in the Cloud, including large corporate systems.
  
• SME’s will use Google Apps and large corporations will hang onto Microsoft.
  
• Software will be services and Freemium the globally established consumer and SME model.
  

While EyeOnTheCloud wouldn't make exactly the same predictions, they are thought-provoking nonetheless.

What do you think?

New Cloud Computing Video Bar Debuts on EyeOnTheCloud.Com

EyeOnTheCloud.com has added a new video bar that continually displays YouTube Videos related to Cloud Computing, including basic topics, Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, SalesForce.com and other timely content. The bar show four videos but it is updated every 15 seconds with new offerings. We hope you enjoy this new feature.

Cloud Computing For Beginniners: The Song

Jonathan Mann "Rock Cookie Bottom") posts rap songs on unusual topics on a nearly daily basis.
This one is a very good [initial] introduction to cloud computing: What it's not, and then what it is.It's also quite humerous.

Major Players Join New Cloud Computing Consortium

TM Forum bills itself as the world’s leading industry association focused on improving business effectiveness for service providers and their suppliers.
IT vendor members, such as Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and EMC have formed the eW(ECBC), a group created by TM Forum to remove the challenges that are making it difficult for the larger enterprises to adopt cloud computing. Also on the council are CA, Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T.

Included in the ECBC are also Amdocs, British Telecom, CA, Nokia Siemens Networks, Telecom Italia and Telstra. Participating industry organizations include DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) as well as enterprise buyers Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deutsche Bank.

The group will work to understand the needs of enterprise buyers and will launch specific work programs to address various issues, including cloud security issues, cloud-to-cloud interoperability, and cloud network performance and latency issues.
Cloud computing holds a lot of promise, according to TM Forum, but challenges around such issues as security and privacy will hinder adoption.

The ECBC is tasked with understanding the needs of the largest enterprises and addressing the top challenges to adopting a cloud computing model.

According to eWeek, Forrester Research said in a report this month that in a survey of businesses in North America and Europe, 49 percent of respondents from enterprises and 51 from smaller and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) said security and privacy concerns were the primary reasons for not using cloud computing.

“The demand for cloud services holds significant potential for the industry, and it’s just at the start of its evolution,” Keith Willetts, chairman and CEO of TM Forum, said in a statement. “However, there are a number of barriers that must be overcome before cloud can become a mass-market success.”

EyeOnTheCloud see the formation of ECBC as a recognition that cloud computing is here to stay, real, and growing quickly.

Today, large organization primarily use private cloud technology, while smaller ones use public cloud technology such as Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Eventually businesses are expected to use a combination of public and private clouds in a hybrid fashion.

NAND Flash Storage Arrays To Give Push to Cloud Computing

Data Base access limits what applications will work well in the clouds. Until now, data base access has been primarily through physical disk drives with moving heads. While solid state "drives" have been around for a long time, and more recently have been used in high-end Netbooks and Laptops, their high cost precluded their use on server for database access.
 

Now, that will change. IBM announced that it has teamed up with Fusion IO (which sports Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple as its chef scientist.

On Dec. 9, IBM made a strategic move into the enterprise solid-state storage market, casting its lot with newcomer -- solid-state server and storage array maker Fusion-io.

IoXtreme and ioXtreme Pro
The ioXtreme and ioXtreme Pro PCI Express solid state storage devices boost productivity for I/O intensive workstation applications. The ioXtreme Pro adds proprietary X-Link layering technology that allows you to scale performance by adding one or more ioXtreme Pro cards to your ioXtreme base for ultra-demanding work such as cinema quality rendering, high-resolution video playback, and scientific computing. It has exciting features:

• Average bandwidth of 520 MB/s
  
• Throughput of 700 MB/s
  
• 80GB of high performance, non-volatile NAND Flash storage
  
• copy, edit, save massive files 5x faster
  

With ioXtreme Pro, Multi-card performance scaling is supported. IBM High IOPS Adapter The new IBM High IOPS Adapter will help database, application and system administrators architect their data centers to meet performance goals that could not be realized with traditional, disk-based storage solutions. For example, by utilizing the server-deployed storage tier, known as Flash Memory Tier (FMT), data-heavy graphics and 3-D renderings from medical research could be processed in minutes instead of hours. Additionally, the power and cooling costs of these solid-state technologies are less than one percent of traditional spinning drives. Since the High IOPS Adapter is deployed directly in the server, storage rack space requirements can be reduced to zero in some applications. A technical guide is available here The new IBM High IOPS Adapter can be purchased through IBM. To learn more, visit here. Each SSD Card has a maximum capacity (at present) of 80GB. It speeds up database access 100-fold, which makes a great difference up in the cloud. At Amazon.com, every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales according to Sumeet Bansal, Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io. Solid-state storage technology is driven by advances in computer processors which, so far, have followed Moore's Law, and their performance has grown exponentiall. Mechanical disks, on the other hand, follow Newtonian Dynamics and have experienced lackluster performance improvements, introducing a performance gap that has limited the gfrowth of cloud applications.

In driving everything to the Cloud, database access has been a major gating factor.

No more.

Cloud Computing a Once-in-decade Disruption in the Computing Industry, says Microsoft India's Chief

Ravi Venkatesan, chairman of Microsoft Corp.'s Microsoft Corp. (India) Pvt. Ltd. unit, recently engaged in an email discussion with Wall Street Journal New Delhi Bureau Chief Paul Beckett. Among the topics discussed, there was this interchange:

WSJ: What does cloud computing mean for Microsoft's business in India and around the world?

Mr. Venkatesan: Cloud computing, which refers to the delivery of computing services over the internet as an alternative to running software and hardware on your own premises, is a once-in-decade disruption in the computing industry. Customers -- businesses, governments, consumers -- are very excited about cloud computing because it holds the promise of reducing IT costs, converting capital expenditure into operating expenditure and "outsourcing" complexity. Like most disruptive innovations, it represents both an opportunity and a threat. As a leader in the industry, Microsoft has embraced cloud computing with vigor and our CEO, Steve Ballmer, likes to talk about our strategy as "three screens and the cloud" -- a scenario where people access rich experiences seamlessly across small screens (like the mobile phone), midsize screens (PC or more specialized devices like e-book readers) and large screens such as the TV -- all powered by services delivered over the Web. Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in R&D and capex to create the global infrastructure required to deliver cloud computing and to give customers a choice of using all our software on premise (as they currently do), partner hosted or as a service (such as Microsoft Online Services, Windows Azure) from Microsoft for an affordable monthly fee. Cloud computing is one of our biggest bets as a company and an essential one to retain our industry leadership.


Cloud computing is likely to be adopted very fast in India -- perhaps even faster than in developed countries -- because of low levels of IT usage and lack of legacy IT systems. This means businesses and governments have the opportunity to leapfrog directly to cloud computing just as India leapfrogged landlines directly to mobile phones. The ability to pay for IT on an affordable monthly charge per user, the abstraction of all hassles and complexity and the ability to defeat software piracy, all make cloud computing a very attractive model for India. We've found small and midsize businesses particularly excited about our cloud computing services and in just a few months over 1,800 businesses have become trial users of our Microsoft Online Services. I expect cloud computing to also find favor with government as an effective way to deliver all types of citizen services reliably and affordably. Our partners like Infosys, Wipro and HCL are eagerly embracing cloud computing as a way of extending their leadership in the global IT services arena. It's a very exciting time indeed.

The CloudGazer agrees.

New Guide to Possibilities and Risks of Cloud Computing Available.

Maria Spínola, a Researcher and Strategic IT Marketing And Innovation Adviser has authored a White Paper called "An Essential Guide to Possibilities and Risks of Cloud Computing." The paper has a nice list of links for follow-on research.



She states, "The goal of this White Paper is to provide a realistic perspective of the possibilities, benefits and risks of Cloud Computing; what to look for, what to avoid, and also some tips and best practices on implementation, architecture and vendor management strategies. It is important to consider all those aspects before you decide either to move (but without putting the carriage before the horse) or not to move your systems, applications, and/or data to to the “Cloud”, in a “hype free” approach."

EyeOnTheCloud believes that she has met her goal.

Skytap Offers Virtual Labs-as-a-Service for Rapid Testing in the Cloud

PC World has a nice (and pithy) write up of four major Cloud Computing platforms. Amazon, Google, Skytap, and VMware. While Amazon, Google and VMware are well known, Skytap is a startup offering virtual labs-as-a-service software. It lets development teams create multiple test machines in various configurations without tying up much hardware. Read more here or on the Skytap Website. Skytap also offers a virtual training solution, also as a cloud-based service. A video demo is available here

Skytap was initially known as Illumita). It is funded by a Who's Who of Venture Capital investors, an alphabet soup of partners, and and experienced management team. Looks promising.