Chris’ Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about clouds and all the things that can be done in them.  I was just having a conversation the other day about how pretty soon our computers will be “dumb terminals” and even our OS will be “in the cloud”.  Google is been rumored to be close to releasing its GDrive – A cloud storage drive for your computer.  An article at foxnews.com predicts that “Google’s Rumored GDrive May ‘Kill’ the PC”.  Now I don’t think things will go as far as they say they will but I do think that we will move to what I just dubbed Mainframe 2.0 where instead of “dumb” terminals however, I think we will do part of our processing on the local machine with the more processor intensive or large scale storage happening in the cloud. We will probably still have multi-core pcs with lots of ram, but processing videos or large tasks could be made much faster. Of course this won’t be a viable solution until we have ubiquitous high speed internet. But maybe some day we will log in to our computer from any computer because the OS is in the cloud…

Isn’t it funny how things kinda tend to go full circle?  It reminds me of this quote I found:

Historical footnote: Way back in the mists of time, people not only didn’t have cell phones, they didn’t even have telephones. (It’s true; you can look it up.) To communicate over any sort of distance, people relied on the telegraph. Due to the limitations of the technology and to the costs involved, people also had to resort to using cryptic messages like this: C U 2MAR O. Talk about primitive, huh? Today, of course, you can use your fancy, high-tech digital cell phone to send really cool text messages like this: C U 2MAR O. We’ve come a long way, baby.

At the Super Computer 2008 conference a couple of months ago, Microsoft created a short video interview of one of my coworkers talking about the Hybrid Cluster solution.  This solution still seems so amazing to me that Moab can dynamically setup the best use of the system including the OS needed to run certain applications.  This doesn’t have to be just Windows and Linux.  Maybe you have some images for Red Hat, while others are Ubuntu or SUSE.  Moab can dynamically re-provision any server to the OS necessary to make it work correctly.  Here is the video:

Last night I wanted to see my google analytics on my iPod Touch, however there is currently no flash plugin available for it so I don’t get the graphs. I think I just came up with a simple solution. You can have google email you a PDF version of the analytics every day, week, or month, or even just a one time thing. I’m not going to go way into all the details, but at the top center of the dashboard there is an email button. If you click it you can schedule your automatic emails. The downside is that you don’t have the ability to drill down into the stats, but you can always still do that without the graph on the website. This is just for a quick checkup anyway. Besides, this way you don’t find yourself in there checking your stats for hours because you get the email and its too much work to get into it and look at more specifics unless you really need to or want to.

In a recent Information week blog post, John Foley discussed briefly the problem of having data spread between different cloud providers.  As I read the post I started to think about where I think a good solution to the cloud will finally settle.  My opinion is that one of the solutions particularly for enterprises will be that the organization will maintain their own “private” cloud of resources and as needed they will be able to spill their resources over into one of the Cloud solutions available.  I got to thinking about where Moab could sit in this solution and I have been told that not only can it do this (migrate data between a private cloud and a public cloud) but it has been done in a demo where it was able to manage resources on multiple public clouds as well.  I’m not saying it is a solid solution at this time, and as John mentioned, “It’s too early to know how all this will play out, but IT folks should be paying attention and, if cloud computing is part of your company’s strategic direction, looking to get involved.“  I guess only time will tell to see what will work as a viable solution, but I think that a third-party layer will be a very used solution.

I work for Cluster Resources as their Business Infrastructure Developer. Basically in my job I find ways to make our business processes more efficient, removing touch points and creating value through IT. Really love my job and specifically, the company. The more I have come to understand our product, the more I want to tell people about how amazing it is. No one else’s product does as much as our’s does and it does some amazing things. As I have interacted with different people, I’ve come to realize that our product “Moab” is so complex that I can never explain it as fully as I would like. I decided that I basically needed a landing page that I could give out that I could consolidate my thoughts and some links to help people get introduced. Although I work for Cluster Resources, the information posted here is my own understanding of the product and does not represent any stance or opinion the company currently has. As I mentioned, I love talking about our product, but I am not a sales person. If you have questions or are interested in our product you can contact me through my contact page or by leaving a comment here (comments are posted for everyone to see) and I will put you in contact with someone who can answer your specific question. I may create some more advanced follow up posts to this if there is interest – if I do, I will edit this post and put the links at the end.

What is Moab?

From our website: Moab Cluster Suite is a policy-based intelligence engine that integrates scheduling, managing, monitoring and reporting of cluster workloads. It guarantees service levels are met while maximizing job throughput. Moab integrates with existing middleware for consolidated administrative control and holistic cluster reporting. Its graphical management interfaces and flexible policy capabilities result in decreased costs and increased ROI.

Solutions Moab Provides:

HPC (High Performance Computing):

In the past clusters of computers were most often used in academic and government facilities to perform huge calculations and manipulation of data. Moab was originally setup to work in these environments sitting on top of the cluster managing the resource managers that are set up to accept and control jobs. Moab’s unique scheduling capabilities give it the ability to increase the use of hardware and allow for less manual intervention necessary by administrators to keep the system working smoothly.

As the information age has come upon us, huge amounts of data have become prevelant in all parts of society. Many companies have to utilize large IT budgets to manage the hardware and sofware necessary to manipulate the data that they receive and make it usable for the business. With this in mind, Moab has been modified through its development to work well in other situations. These include both Cloud Computing and Data Center environments.

Adaptive Computing for Clouds and Data Center:

At Cluster Resources we sell a solution tailored to fit these environments. This solution is our Adaptive Operating Environment—Powered by Moab. In this environment Moab can intelligently manage your resources to utilize as much or as little of your hardware as necessary at any given time. Moab looks in the queue of upcoming jobs and can dynamically power on or off hardware as necessary to accomodate those jobs. For instance if your data center provides web hosting and one of your customer’s websites gets to the front page of digg and their bandwidth increases, instead of having a denial of service, or needing to turn on new hardware, Moab would recognize this increase as it was happening and would power on nodes to handle the workload seemlessly providing the bandwidth and server power necessary to handle the workload. If all of the servers that you own are utilized, Moab can utilize servers “in the cloud” and push jobs as needed to hardware carved out specifically for your organization. Here is a link to a video we have created that gives a brief overview of this solution.

Green Computing:

Green is the new thing these days. In fact if your company hasn’t figure out some way to show you’ve gone green you are behind the times. If you have or if you haven’t, here is yet another way you can show you care about the evironment (if not the bottom line). The Green Computing solution uses moab to do things like power off unused hardware, locate high processor intensive jobs in cooler parts of the data center to allow the temperature to become more uniform throughout, consolodate jobs to as few servers as needed and even hold off performing non-essential jobs if possible until there is space on the available hardware so it doesn’t have to start up and shutdown servers more than necessary. Here is a link to a video on green computing.

Hybrid Computing:

Is your IT budget larger than it needs to be because you need to run both Linux and Windows servers? How often are all of your servers in use at the same time? With Hybrid Cluster – powered by Moab you can buy less servers and have them dynamically re-purposed based on the current need of your “cluster”. I personally think this is one of the coolest solutions we have. Think about it, if the main time you need to run windows servers is when your accounting jobs run at the end of the month, you can have the system DYNAMICALLY change the OS on the servers to meet the need of those jobs for that period of time. After the need is passed, the servers can either be turned off to save power, or switched back to the original operating system. How cool is that?! Here is a link to a video on the Hybrid Cluster solution.

Ok, I’ve written more than I thought I would, but I think this page now serves the purpose that I wanted it to. If you found this page from a link online, feel free to visit the Cluster Resources web page at http://www.clusterresources.com for more informaion. If ypuvwould rather as I mentioned you can ask me a question and if I can’t get the answer for you, I’ll get you to someone who can answer it.

One last note:

If you have actually read down this far you might be interested enough to know that we will be holding our 2nd annual Moab•Con Conference June 17 – 19. More information can be found on the information page.