Private Data Cloud: 'Do It Yourself' with Eucalyptus

Why are Enterprises implementing Private Clouds if the Public Cloud deployment model is gaining in popularity day-by-day? Guy Rosen summarizes Public Cloud growth within the user base of the  Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Since its debut in 2006, 8.4 million EC2 instances have been launched. Impressive as these statistics are, many enterprises still consider the Public Cloud as currently a no-go area. Reasons include data security  and SLA concerns, data compliance/governance regulations and the complexity of migrating legacy applications. This is where Private Clouds step-in.

Private Clouds provide many of the benefits of the Public Cloud, namely elastic scalability, faster time-to-market and reduced OpEX, all within the Enterprises own perimeter that complies to its governance. Leading commercial Private Cloud products include VMware, Univa UD, Unisys. Open source solutions include products like Globus Nimbus, Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform, RESERVOIR and Eucalyptus.

Yesterday, I attended the Webinar “Convergence of Physical, Virtual and Cloud, during which Dr. Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer of  Eucalyptus Systems, described Eucalyptus as Private Cloud data storage. This interested me and I set about learning more.

Infinispan narrows the gap between open source and commercial data caches

Recently I attended a lecture presented by Manik Surtani, JBoss Cache & Infinispan project lead. The goal of the talk was to provide a technical overview of both products and outline Infinispan's road-map. Infinispan is the successor to the open-source JBoss Cache. JBoss Cache was originally targeted at simple web page caching and Infinispan builds on this to take it into the Cloud paradigm.

Why did I attend? Well, over the past few years I have worked on projects that have used commercial  distributed caching (aka data grid) technologies such as GemFire, GigaSpaces XAP or Oracle Coherence. These projects required more functionality than is currently provided by open-source solutions such as memcached or EHCache. Looking at the road-map for Infinispan, I was struck by its ambition – will it provide the functionality that I need?

What's new in Oracle's 11g release?

As probably most of you are already aware, Oracle have just released the second version of Oracle 11g ( known as 11gR2 in Oracle circles) for Linux. Solaris and Windows versions will follow later this year. This is no surprise for me as I was informed about this event almost one year ago in the Oracle Partner Network newsletter.

It is great news for all administrators who complained that Oracle took a step backwards when it released 11gR1, citing that the previous version (Oracle 10gR2) had better stability and faster performance in some functionality as explained here.

Manifesto for secure data sharing

Last year in a project meeting in Dagstuhl, Germany I explained complex security scenarios for remote sharing of databases among multiple teams. My peer Breanndan from the University of Amsterdam commented: 'Why did you make it so complex, when we need it simple? Look: I have a database, my colleague has even more data, and you have the data mining software. We want to run your software over our data, that’s it! Optimally, we need to form a dynamic secure data sharing group on-the-fly. We give each other the access rights, we run the job, and then we immediately disband the group. '