William Vambenepe's blog

The DMTF has recently released a draft of the OVF specification. The organization’s newsletter says it’s “available (…) for a limited period as a Work In Progress” and the document itself says that it “expires September 30, 2008″. I am not sure what either means exactly, but I guess if my printed copy bursts into flames on October 1st then I’ll know.

From a very quick scan, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of changes. Implementers of the original specification are sitting pretty. The language seems to have been tightened. The original document made many of its points by example only, while the new one tries to more rigorously define rules, e.g. by using some version of the BNF metasyntax. Also, there is now an internationalization section, one of the typical signs that a specification is growing up.

The old and new documents occupy a similar number of pages, but that’s a bit misleading because the old one inlined the XSD and MOF files, while the new one omits them. Correcting for this, the specification has grown significantly but it seems that most of the added bulk comes from more precise descriptions of existing features rather than new features.

For what it’s worth, I reviewed the original OVF specification from an IT management perspective when it was first released.

For now, I’ll use the DMTF-advertised temporary nature of this document as a justification for not investing the time in doing a better review. If you know of one, please let me know and I’ll link to it.

[UPDATED 2008/10/14: It's now a preliminary standard, and here is a longer review.]

The Oracle IT Service Management Suite (meaning the combination of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Siebel Service Desk) has earned a V2 certification for ITIL from Pink Elephant. More specifically, the Suite covers six of the seven processes: Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Release and SLM.

Here is the “Pink Verified” list.

[UPDATED 2008/9/9: Here is the corresponding press release.]

Oracle recently released a set of VM templates (aka images) for OVM (Oracle Virtual Machine). In addition to being interesting news for OVM users, it’s also potentially useful for EM (Enterprise Manager) users: one of the images contains a full install of Enterprise Manager Grid Control. It is a patched Grid Control 10.2.0.4 installation and associated DB 10.2.0.4 repository pre-configured. This is running on Oracle Enterprise Linux. It also has a local Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 Yum repository for Grid Control usage.

You can get the files through the Linux side of edelivery.oracle.com (select “Oracle VM templates” as the “product pack”).

More templates are available here. You can now impress your friends and family with a full Oracle demo/development environment and they won’t need to know that you didn’t have to install or configure any application.

On a recent drive to work, I heard another echo of the Grid world in the context of Cloud computing: I was listening to the Cloud Cafe podcast with Enomaly’s Reuven Cohen when he mentioned (near the 27 minute mark) that they use Ganglia for monitoring their environment.

I am familiar with Ganglia from some HP Labs projects around PlanetLab that I was involved in. Ganglia is used quite a lot for monitoring in the PlanetLab environment.

So Ganglia is one. Is any other project/tool/product coming from the Grid/HPC efforts of the last 10 years now used by the cool Cloud kids? Globus? SmartFrog? Platform? Condor? Others?

A few seconds later in the podcast, Reuven provides this juicy quote: “is the cloud an excuse for bad code”. But that’s a topic for another post.

Grid computing is moulting and, to no surprise, the new skin has “cloud” written all over it.

That’s one way to interpret the announcement today that HP, Intel and Yahoo are going to launch a compute cloud. Seeing Intel and HP work together on this is no surprise. Back at HP I had some involvement with the collaboration between HP Labs and Intel on PlanetLab.

I have only read the Gigaom article and Steve’s, so this post is not an analysis of the announcement. Just a few questions that come to mind. They can be most concisely expressed by trying to understand the difference with Amazon’s EC2. The quotes below all come from the Gigaom article.

“six physical locations” -> Amazon has availability zones, including the choice of three geographies.

“between 1,000 and 4,000 mostly Intel cores” -> According to this well-publicized story, Amazon can deliver 5,000 servers (each linked to at least one physical core) to one customer without breaking a sweat.

“We want, unlike other partnerships including Google and IBM’s where the lower-level stacks are not provided in a open manner to the world, open access to all levels of the hardware” -> The quote seems to conveniently avoid comparison with EC2 which provides a much lower abstraction level: virtual machines with mountable raw block storage devices. How much lower can you go without handing out access cards to physically walk into the datacenter? Access to the BMC on the motherboard? Access to some internal bus? Remote-controlled little robots that will slide cards in and out of a chassis?

“researchers will be able to access the cloud through a proposal process later this year” -> Ec2 offers pay-as-you go, which tends to be a good driver for people to use the infrastructure efficiently. And of course someone can always give researchers a grant in the form of EC2 rent money.

Just to be clear, I am not belittling the announcement because for one thing I haven’t read much about it and for another I probably know many of the HP Labs people involved and they are part of the “mucho sapiens” branch of “homo sapiens”. I know they wouldn’t bother putting this out if it was nothing more than giving researchers some free EC2 time.

But these are the questions I’ll be trying to answer for myself as I read more about this project.

[UPDATED 2008/9/19: Russ Daniels (who was HP Software CTO when I was at HP and is now CTO of Cloud Services Strategy) comments on the announcement.]

The original proposal for a “WS Resource Access Working Group” mentioned that WS-Eventing might later join the party. It’s now done, and the proposed name for this expanded W3C working group is “WS Resource Interaction Working Group”.

It takes me no effort to imagine the discussions that turned “access” into “interaction”. Which means I am not cured yet, after a year of post-standards therapy.

IBM hurried to “clarify” how, in their view, this proposal relates to the existing WS-Notification standard. The logic seems to be: WS-notification is a great general-purpose pub/sub spec, WS-Eventing is a pub/sub spec used in the device management spec, to prevent confusion we will make them overlap completely by making WS-Eventing another general purpose pub/sub spec.

Someone who’s been paying attention asks how this relates to the WSDM/WS-Management convergence. IBM’s answer is a model of understatement: “other activities in the WS community should not delay their work in anticipation of new documents being produced”.

As the sign at New York’s pier 59 might have read in 1912: “visitors expecting to great RMS Titanic passengers should not delay their activities in anticipation of the boat arriving in the harbor”.

A few silly trivia questions for everyone out there who has drunk the Kloud-Aid.

Q) When was the cloudcomputing.com domain registered?

A) February 28, 2007. Yes, less a year and a half ago it could have been yours of 10 bucks. A nice reminder of how quickly the buzzword took over. For comparison, utilitycomputing.com was registered in July 2002 and gridcomputing.com in February 2000. By the way, fogcomputing.com got snapped up a month ago today and is currently parked…

Q) who owns cloudcomputing.com?

A) Dell. Ironically, one of the companies that has the most to loose from it… Of course they don’t see it that way and they redirect that domain to a dell.com page that explains all they have to offer in this area.

Q) Where does the name come from?

A) According to Wikipedia, “the term cloud computing derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet or IP availability, using an illustration of a cloud”. OK, then are databases now called Cylinder Computing?

Q) How does one make money in Cloud Computing?

A) By registering the domain name and re-selling it at the peak of the hype. CylinderComputing.com is still available…

[UPDATED 2008/8/3: For the record, that last answer was supposed to be a joke. It seemed pretty obvious at the time, but one week later the news comes out that Dell is trying to get a trademark on the term "cloud computing"... More analysis here.]

I have nothing against Animoto. From what I know about them (mostly from John’s podcast with Brad Jefferson) they built their system, using EC2, in a very smart way.

But I do have something against their story being used to set the benchmark for infrastructure flexibility. For those who haven’t heard it five times already, the summary of “their story” is ramping up from 50 to 5000 machines in a week (according to the podcast). Or from 50 to 3500 (according to the this AWS blog entry). Whatever. If I auto-generate my load (which is mostly what they did when they decided to auto-create a custom video for each new user) I too can create the need for a thousands of machines.

This was probably a good business decision for Animoto. They got plenty of visibility at a low cost. Plus the extra publicity from being an EC2 success story (I for one would never have heard of them through their other channels). Good for them. Good for Amazon who made it possible. And who got a poster child out of it. Good for the facebookers who got to waste another 30 seconds of their time straining their eyes. Everyone is happy, no animal got hurt in the process, hurray.

That’s all good but it doesn’t mean that from now on any utility computing solution needs to support ramping up by a factor of 100 in a week. What if Animoto had been STD’ed (slashdoted, technoratied and dugg) at the same time as the Facebook burst, resulting in the need for 50,000 servers? Would 1,000 X be the new benchmark? What if a few of the sites that target the “lonely guy” demographic decided to use Animoto for… ok let’s not got there.

There are three types of user requirements. The Animoto use case is clearly not in the first category but I am not convinced it’s in the third one either.

1. The “pulled out of thin air” requirements that someone makes up on the fly to justify a feature that they’ve already decided needs to be there. Most frequently encountered in standards working groups.
2. The “it happened” requirements that assumes that because something happened sometimes somewhere it needs to be supported all the time everywhere.
3. The “it makes business sense” requirements that include a cost-value analysis. The kind that comes not from asking “would you like this” to a customer but rather “how much more would you pay for this” or “what other feature would you trade for this”.

When cloud computing succeeds (i.e. when you stop hearing about it all the time and, hopefully, we go back to calling it “utility computing”), it will be because the third category of requirements will have been identified and met. Best exemplified by the attitude of Tarus (from OpenNMS) in the latest Redmonk podcast (paraphrased): sure we’ll customize OpenNMS for cloud environments; as soon as someone pays us to do it.

Forrester’s Jean-Pierre Garbani wrote a short report last month about the current offering and future plans of Oracle’s IT management group (where I work).

As the report points out, Oracle’s IT management products don’t always enjoy a level of industry attention commensurate with the value they deliver. This report will hopefully help fix this.

Forrester: “Oracle Focuses On Business Value”.

Two months ago, HP announced the acquisition of EDS.

One month later, HP Software announced a slew of new service management products, including an updated version (7.5) of Universal CMDB (from the Mercury acquisition).

One month later (today), according to BMC (with supporting quote from an EDS exec), “EDS Asia Pacific Standardises on BMC Software Atrium CMDB to Improve Service Delivery”.

As an ex-colleague pointed out to me, the acquisition isn’t closed yet. Still.