Previously, in S3 re-pricing commentary, I wrote about the good news that Amazon’s EC2 service was hitting capacity limits.
Sun has built it, but will they come? talks about Sun’s lackluster sales with its utility computing effort.
I’m wondering why there is this disparity. In my opinion, there are two major differences between Sun and Amazon’s offerings:
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With Sun’s offering you need to port your program to Solaris.
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Sun’s costs a dollar an hour, Amazon’s costs 10 cents an hour.
I think the porting problem is a much bigger limitation and this bodes well for the workspace concept in grid computing. There is a similar problem with the big grids in that they usually expect scientists to port their code to a homogenous platform — this is sometimes a near-impossible proposition.
Add “On Appliance” to Your “On Premise” and “On Demand” Strategies
I saw this session in person, it was good. I don’t need convincing of the benefits that the software/virtual appliance model brings: I think the benefits exist for many scenarios and they most all stem from the presence of a strict separation of complexity concerns (not a reduction in overall complexity of software). But hearing what the panelists had to say about deployment scenarios and challenges in the commercial software business world was good for me.
I liked the idea of using a VM deployed at a customer’s site to be a sort of customer facing front-end in a SaaS model — a hybrid of over-the-WAN “on-demand” and “on-premise”. This session also moved me to evaluate Zimbra which looks pretty helpful for replacing some mail/collaboration daemons I run (though moving to their clients full time and abandoning Sylpheed/Claws seems unlikely).
Looking to try one of the many virtualization platforms on Linux without altering your install?
virtualization.info draws attention to the latest Knoppix release which includes:
special feature virtualization:
* qemu including accellerated kernel module kqemu,
* kvm for CPUs supporting hardware-accellerated virtualization,
* VirtualBox OSE
* Xen 3.0.4
* VServer
* OpenVZ 2.6.18-028test018.1
In this month’s Globus Consortium Journal is an article by Kate Keahey giving an update on VTDC 06 (she was the PC). She discusses adoption issues, especially current missing links. Highly recommended if you are interested in the intersection between Grid computing and virtualization!
