Blue skies… the cloud is here

Cloud Storage

A while back i blogged about Big Data and what it means, well you need somewhere to store all that data, introducing The Cloud.

Fifteen years ago i worked for a startup in Sydney which is now a hardware company called bCode, we went from being hosted in Australia to Intel in America, we went from having half a million users to about 6 million users. To scale like this in Australia wouldn’t have been possible and this was way before the term ‘The Cloud’ was coined.

The three benefits of Cloud services are:

1. Infrastructure as a service
2. Platform as a service
3. Software as a service

When the Rolling Stones played Hyde Park, the tickets were all sold in minutes, to have a service that can cope with the volume of users with the expected service level.

What we are talking about here are Open activity systems, Open activity systems are systems that exchange feedback with external systems

Systems with:

• Boundaries
• External environments
• Equifinality
• Inputs
• Outputs
• Goals
• Assessments
• Evaluation and learning

Equifinality is the principle that in open systems a given end state can be reached by many potential means. The term and concept is due to Hans Driesch, the developmental biologist, later applied by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founder of General Systems Theory.

Amazon have a cloud web service, with step by step instructions in deploying your application plus, lots of software you can use on a 30 day trial basis

Too easy?

Introducing the VMAX

Another company that has come to my attention is EMC, based here in Cork.

EMC make the Symmetrix VMAX Enterprise storage units which are:

Whos uses the VMAX?

The band U2 have one, 320 TV shows in the US, all major banks use the VMAX and most Fortune 500 companies

Four lads from North Dublin have one

The VMAX has a Service level of 1 minute of down time per year

Take a tour

Four major benefits of the VMAX lies in the:

• Performance
• Provisioning
• Replication
• Service level provisioning

The VMAX runs on a Hypermax OS, which is the industries first open converged real time non disruptive storage hypervisor OS; which enables the VMAX to do traditional OS management, plus:

• Cloud access
• Protection
• Management
• Backup (databases can be backed and restored to a point in time every 6 hours)
• Data mobility

With no single point of failure through and nine health constantly running, this guarantees:

• Reliability
• Serviceability
• Availability

VMAX 3 High Availability Architecture

One cool thing i like is the blue light on the front, if you need to go to a machine and there are many, the light flashes at the machine you need to go to

In short this is the kind of technology that makes the cloud possible.

The people at EMC also like to blog about what they work on, take a look.