Ben Rockwood, the Director of Systems at Joyent, presents at the Open Solaris Summit on the topic: Cloud Computing, reminding the audience that he is there as a member of the community who would like to share his expertise on this topic.

He opens the Open Solaris Platform diagram, which outlines topics covered during the summit. Next, Rockwood plays a video interview to make his point that people might say that they do not understand cloud computing or think it is not their problem.

The video highlights the trend that we are seeing is that the cloud computing is being outsourced by smaller "start up" companies that don't have the resources. Primary advantages of cloud computing depends on the provider you choose.

Then, Rockwood proceeds with his presentation on Storage in the Cloud, which is made up of two parts: 1) What is the cloud and 2) Storage and Virtualization. Below are highlights of those slide topics covered in his video presentation. He closed the session with questions and answers from the audience.

Storage in the Cloud Presentation

Part 1: What is the cloud?

"One of my favorite comments about cloud computing actually came out of frustration during a conference call that we were having among our senior staff with a difficult client problem… and he said, Is it a cloud or puff of smoke?" Rockwood proceeds to define cloud computing and the details of this "architecture."

A cloud is …

• Highly virtualized

• Built from commodity building blocks

• Highly, easily, and quickly scalable ("elastic"); moving toward "capacity on demand"

• (Optional) API Controlled

• …Someone else's problem (outsourcing)

Cloud Perspectives

• Web Developer: Wants to scale programmatically, quickly adapting to changing traffic conditions

• Enterprise Customer: Acquire additional resource quickly and cheaply to extend existing infrastructure.

• Highlight of Topics (Part 1)-

• Evolution or Revolution?
• Soilent Green is People
• Free Your IT
• Integration/Innovation
• Example: Box.net
• Example: Amazon S3
• Appliances & Cloud Part 2: Storage and Virtualization

Virtualization Overview

• Software manages one or more virtualized environments; VMWare ESX, Xen, Zones, OpenVZ

• Delegates accesses to CPU, Memory, Storage and Network

• Hypervisors (or equiv) do a good job of managing CPU and Memory; slowly improving for storage and network.

Environment

• Increasing virtualized environment consist of 1U or 2U servers with 4-8 Cores; 8GB + RAM; 4-8 local SAS/SATA drives

• Raw local disk capacity largely sacrificed by segregation; eg, 8 Disks becomes 2 Mirrored for Boot/Root/Swap, 6 Disk RAID5/6 for Data

• Gigabit Ethernet; Infiniband extremely uncommon, Fibre Channel degraded to legacy

• RAID controllers commonplace, usually Adaptec or LSI MegaRAID (Preferred)

Highlight of Topics (Part 2)

• Centralized Storage
• iSCSI: Milk & Honey
• Distributed Disk

More Information

Storage in the Cloud - Video Presentation by Ben Rockwood, Joyent

OpenSolaris Community: Storage

Sun Cloud Computing with Q-Layer Acquisition

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Will Attract Developers [...read more...]

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