We will bring a series of reports from Digital Africa – it is a very exciting group of people who truly have the best interests of Africa as their key objective. Kicked off by Dr. Gilbert Balibaseka Bukenya, Vice President of Uganda, the conference also included ministers of communications from Uganda, Niger, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso. Other nations are well represented with representatives from the private sector, government, and education.

With that many politicians, you would think protocol would prevent any level of innovation or open discussion. Not the case, it was a very cooperative environment.

Why is cloud important in developing countries?

It is a reasonable question, and a reasonable answer. The basic requirements in developing countries (beyond clean water and food) are infrastructure, education, jobs, and eGovernment (including banking). Nothing works without the infrastructure in place. In countries without stable electricity and limited telecom infrastructure, this has to be a high priority.

When building out the basic infrastructure in countries with a tremendous amount of sunlight, wind or solar energy makes a lot of sense. A lot more sustainable than running diesel generators, and as an unfortunate byproduct of global warming, more sunny days each year are available to provide power.

In rural areas we are talking about enough power to provide electricity for schools, internet kiosks or cafes, and wireless access points in city centers. 15kW would do it, and that is not unreasonable. It is not unreasonable if we are looking at low-powered NetBooks and terminals that do not have a large burden of local resources for processing power, memory, storage, and high performance video applications.

According to several presentations at Digital Africa, there is strong evidence that with each 10% of any population in Africa having access to mobile or Internet technologies, there is a corresponding 1.8% increase in that nation’s GDP. Evidence that simply bringing Internet and education to the rural and unwired population will increase the national wealth, and quality of life, by a an annual increase of 1.8%

Bring the cable to the school, wire up a NetBook-based LAN, connect via wireless to a local access point, and you have an entry-level connected school. An entry-level school that can access Stanford classes online, from rural areas of Niger. Once that is available, and children are able to diffuse wired intellectual exposure into their intellectual tacit knowledge library, and we are creating a much more level playing field.

OK, let’s drop the physical fiber runs and electricity planning for just a moment. We’ll save that for a future article.

Cloud Computing Driving the Community

If we can build a data center in a couple of national locations with stable power, and with international or local funding build out a basic data center infrastructure, then with a bit of creativity and planning we will expect Infrastructure virtualization (IaaS) as a basic component of the data center.

Utility processing, storage, and memory available for the community. With a bit of further planning, adding one or more good PaaS models on the infrastructure, and we have a resource that can be used to host academic applications, business applications, and government applications. Remember this is the early days of development – in most cases there is no infrastructure to start with, so we can design this as a best practice from Day 1.

Take the burden of infrastructure away from the schools, startup companies, and existing SMEs and offer a virtual data center utility to server both their office automation and IT needs, as well as granting access to the global marketplace.

A Novel Idea – the Mobile Data Center

UConnect is a project run by several independent souls who want to bring education to the small rural school children in Uganda. A panel truck, lined with computers, and a server hosting a wide variety of eLearning applications, UConnect drives to schools and lets the children work on computers for a couple hours each week. A project bringing education to areas where just a year ago there would be no opportunity for children to be exposed to either computer technologies, or formal education materials.

This is creativity, and a refusal to let the children grow up in a world where they are completely out of touch with their global community counterparts. A technology baby step for us, a giant leap for Ugandan children. But not good enough. We need to inspire children to succeed, and to do that children need exposure to the same intellectual tools as a child in Calabasas, California.

Cloud computing can, should, and will be part of that plan. It makes sense.

Disaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites – it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.

Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company’s data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.

“In a traditional disaster recovery model the organization must have an exact duplicate of their hardware, applications, and data in the disaster recovery location” explains Christoph. “With cloud computing models it is possible to replicate applications virtually, spinning up capacity as needed to meet the processing requirements of the organization in the event a primary processing location becomes unavailable.”

ScaleUp did in fact demonstrate their ability to replicate databases between data centers in an October 2009 test with Cari.net, where ScaleUp was able to bring up a VPN appliance and replicate data and applications between Germany and Cari.net’s data center in San Diego, California.

While there may be issues with personal data being in compliance with European Data Protection Laws, nearly every company and organization around the world participates in a global market place. This means applications and data serving the global market cannot be considered local, and the next logical step is to extend access and presentation of the company’s network presence as close to the network edge (customers) as possible.

Some companies may have physical network capacity in multiple geographies, others may look to companies such as ScaleUp to develop relationships with other cloud service providers to allow “federated” relationships.

Until a true industry standard is determined to define data structures and protocols to use between cloud infrastructure and platform providers, it is probably easiest for relationships to develop between companies using the same cloud platform as a service (PaaS) application. Such is the case with ScaleUp and Cari.net, who used a common platform provided by 3Tera’s AppLogic.

The cloud service provider industry will provide a tremendous service to small and medium businesses which normally cannot afford near zero recovery time and recovery point objectives. Whether it is real-time replication of entire data bases, subsets of data bases, or simply parsing correlated data from edge locations at regular intervals, disaster recovery modeling is changing.

A backup location can be made in some cases by logging into a cloud service provider and opening an account with a credit card – or through a very fast negotiation with the service provider. Certainly not without cost, but potentially at a much lower cost of operation than in models requiring physical data center space, hardware, and operations staff at each location.

The important lesson for small companies is that both disaster recovery and a company’s ability to recover from either a physical disaster such as a fire in their data center, or data corruption, may limit or prevent a company’s ability to continue operations. Adding cloud services to the disaster recovery model may provide a very powerful, simplified, and cost-effective model to protect your business.

Der IPv4 Adress Raum wird immer kleiner. Der schon lange propagierte Wechsel zu IPv6 wird also immer wichtiger. Bisher sind aber nur die wenigsten User in der Lage, IPv6 zu nutzen. Wie Sie in unserem aktuellen Blog Post unter http://bit.ly/dy6uKk lesen können, wird der Bedarf an IP Adressen durch die zunehmende Nutzung von Cloud Computing noch weiter steigen. Aber wo soll man mit der Nutzung von IPv6 anfangen? Auf einem Vortag im Rahmen des IPv6 Kongress in Frankfurt am Main zeige ich Ihnen, wo Sie anfangen können. Sie finden die Agenda auf der Website des Kongress unter: http://www.heise.de/events/2010/ipv6-kongress/programm/

Das Global Cloud Computing Framework, das wir gemeinsam mit unseren Kollegen von Xseed Co., Ltd. aus Japan entwickeln, schafft einen einheitlichen Standard, um diese Freiheit auf technischer Ebene zu unterstützen. Es wird erstmals Clouds-Infrastrukturen von unterschiedlichen Anbietern über eine einheitliche Schnittstelle miteinander verbinden. Unternehmensanwendungen werden dann über die standardisierte API des Global Cloud Computing Framework weltweit ausgerollt und skaliert.

Hier geht es zur offiziellen Mitteilung zu unserer strategischen Partnerschaft.

IP addressing is the method used to identify devices and applications on the Internet, including everything from laptop computers, to mobile phones, to network routing devices.  Rule of thumb is if you can connect to something via the Internet, it has an IPv4 address.  And the available addresses (around 4.2 billion) are forecast to be exhausted in 2012.

The answer is implementation of Internet Protocol version 6, which extends the potential Internet address expansion by trillions.  For people who really care, the difference between IPv4 address space and IPv6 address space is the difference between a 32 (2³²) bit number and a 128 (2¹²⁸) bit number.

Cloud Computing and IPv6

Cloud computing allows dynamic, on-demand, and elastic generation of both virtual infrastructure, and virtual machines running over the infrastructure.  Whether physical, or virtual, each machine or application still requires an IP address. 

Add all the new mobile phones, VoIP phones, intelligent GRIDs (imagine every electrical device in your home being Internet-enabled), and anything else that can be electronically tagged, you can see why we need to consider the relationship of clouds and IPv6 as a high priority for the cloud computing industry.

The trick is to make implementation of IPv6 easy not only for the end users – it should be near transparent, but also for network administrators and applications developers.  End users don’t want to know, or need to know the complexities of network and device addressing.  They just want their device to work over the Internet. 

Administrators need to know this is not a punitive or limiting requirement, but rather a improvement enabling more rapid development of new applications and network architectures.  And of course offer better than existing network and data security.

Future applications and services within clouds will require a much broader use of Internet-enabled resources.  Whether it is automatically spooling additional servers, adding disk, or more complex functions such as global distributed processing, load-balancing, disaster recovery, and follow-the-sun dynamic resource allocations – IPv6 implementation is required to meet that demand. 

Cloud computing as a concept supports all such processing models, and IPv6 will extend the ability of the global Internet to support the concepts and vision.

Perhaps the most intimidating requirement facing network administrators is the requirement to “restack” their entire infrastructure as an IPv6 network, while still supporting legacy IPv4 within their architecture. 

The goal of all cloud providers is to insulate application administrators from the complexity of understanding IPv6, thus further encouraging aggressive adoption of IPv6 addressing.  If the administrator is relieved to concentrate efforts on designing the application, scaling compute, network, and storage for his market or users, then the cloud service providers have done their job.  And that job is ensuring the Internet continues to serve the needs of a global connected community.

ScaleUp Technologies is an early innovator implementing IPv6 as a standard feature in cloud deployments. Using 3Tera’s AppLogic VPN appliance, ScaleUp Technologies is able to deliver an advanced infrastructure that allows not only on-demand automatic configuration of IPv6 within the customer system, but also near transparent distribution of both processing and backup capacity which spans geographies.

 A first step in the big picture, but an important step in providing industry leadership promoting not only adoption of IPv6, but also ensuring the transition to IPv6 is less intimidating to the cloud user community.

In June 2010 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to launch new guidelines for data centre efficiency.  Falling under the umbrella of the

EPA’s “Energy Star” program, the guidelines will give data centers a tool which rates data centre efficiency on a scale of 1~100, awarding an Energy Star certification on a score greater than 75.

While similar to the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPDN), and the more recent Code of Conduct on Data Centres Energy Efficiency, the objective of all guidance is to “inform and stimulate data centre operators to reduce energy consumption in a cost effective manner without hampering the critical function (of data centres).”

Other standards for data center design and construction, such as the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) data centres and EU Ecolabel supplement Energy Star as a method European consumers and data center operators can use to ensure that at the individual hardware level they are purchasing equipment at the most efficient energy rating.

The Problem with Data Centers

“Historically, data centres have been designed with large tolerances for operational and capacity changes, including possible future expansion. Many today use design practices that are woefully outdated. These factors lead to power consumption inefficiencies. In most cases only a small fraction of the grid power consumed by the data centre actually gets to the IT systems.” (Code of Conduct)

The Energy Star certification for data centers will use a variation of Power Utilization Efficiency (PUE) and UPS output for determining the data center grade.  PUE measures the amount of power consumed by a data centre, divided by the amount of power actually being directly applied to processing, and the result is a factor of power efficiency being used by processing equipment vs. support equipment such as UPS and air conditioning.

As with any new standard, calls of unfair generalizations and demands for compromise are expected.  However if the data center industry is indeed consuming nearly 2% of Europe’s energy, as noted in the “Green Grid Energy Policy Research for Data Centres,” then data centers throughout Europe are producing as many pollutants as the airline industry – an unacceptable condition.

Servers in traditional data centers often run at a low utilization levels of 10% ~ 15%. In particular, industries with seasonal or event-driven markets and applications may only use their full design capacity a few times during the course of a year.  The result is often significant waste of resources supporting data centres through purchases and operation of redundant hardware, memory, network devices, and power supplies.

Today, enterprises must deploy excess processing and storage capacity to meet both seasonal or event demands, as well as for data security and disaster recovery.  Adding the financial stress of a tough economy to this mix, with an emphasis on managing OPEX/CAPEX, organisations are forced to consider strategies to reduce data centre operational costs.

How Outsourcing Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Contributes to Green ICT

Cloud computing, with access to computational power and storage space hosted by a third-party service provider such as ScaleUp Technologies, lowers or eliminates demand for physical servers in your data centre – or eliminates the need to operate an internal enterprise data centre entirely.  

Cloud service providers construct their data centers with the latest technologies in hardware, data centre design, and compute/storage resource management, relieving the enterprise of the burden and cost of operating their own facility.

A cloud service provider then provides an on-demand compute and storage resources scaled to meet existing – as well as processing spikes and future growth of your business.  Physical servers are added to the compute resource as needed to meet a shared customer demand in a single location – or interconnected locations, centralizing processing into larger, more energy efficient pools of compute resource.  With servers in data centres using virtualization across the infrastructure running at greater than 85% CPU utilization, the result is a much more favorable PUE.  A favorable PUE= energy efficiency = green.

Whether an organization simply accesses on-demand infrastructure and platform resources, or takes advantage of outsourcing their applications (through software as a service/SaaS) providers), the result provides organizations with both a better economic model, in addition to reducing their expenses through potential elimination of physical data center infrastructure within the organization.

One less data center, one less potential source of inefficient power consumption, one less source of carbon dioxide producing energy consumption – a good economic, green outcome for business and community.

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ScaleUp Technologies will continue using this blog and forum to bring the latest news in cloud computing, cloud computing thought leadership, advice, and cloud visions to our customers and community.  Join us, and give us your thoughts and opinions on all things cloud.

ScaleUp Technologies’s Christoph Streit and Gihan Behrmann Live from Santa Clara on SYS-CON.TV
— In this SYS-CON.TV interview, recorded live in Santa Clara, CA at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Christoph Streit and Gihan Behrmann, Founder, Managing Directors at ScaleUp Technologies, speaks with conference chair Jeremy Geelan.

Welche spannenden Ergebnisse in den geplanten Workshops zu den Themen SaaS-Gütesiegel, Recht und Compliance, Interoperabilität und Standards und in dem von ScaleUp co-moderierten Workshop Cloud Managed Services entstehen, werden wir hier berichten.

3Tera was selected as Best SaaS Provider, as well as Best Cloud Service, for the AppLogic cloud computing platform, which enables new market opportunities for hosting companies to offer cloud computing and virtual private datacenter solutions. For the full HostReview Top 10 Web Host Awards list, please see http://www.hostreview.com/awards/2009_annual_awards.

For over a year, the ScaleUp Technologies founder & technical teams researched, analyzed & tested cloud computing platform solutions. After more than 10 years supporting managed server infrastructures for internet4YOU GmbH & Co. KG, ScaleUp’s parent company, we knew the needs of the market – our clients & similar companies throughout Germany & Europe. We are continually happy with our decision of 3Tera’s AppLogic after working with it every day throughout 2009. News such as this is just further proof that we made the right decision!

I’m wondering when researchers at MIT are going to turn their attentions to the security problems inherent in the size and structure of buildings and cities?

It’s not widely known that, by studying architectural blueprints and familiarizing themselves with routine security processes typically followed by businesses, hackers could break into your offices and access highly sensitive data. Indeed, say researchers, it’s theoretically possible to download the entire contents of a corporate database onto a solid-state drive so small that it can be smuggled out of the building concealed in a back pocket. Yet most businesses remain blissfully unaware — some would say, wilfully negligent — of the ease with which their on-premise data can be compromised.

Meanwhile, there have been many examples of entire cities losing all access to computing functions after extended power blackouts because of a shared dependency on a single utility grid. Only a small proportion of businesses protect themselves against a total loss of computing capability by turning to cloud providers whose multi-geography infrastructures aren’t dependent on a single power supplier.

But we don’t read that. Instead, we have an article which is little more than a diatribe against the notion of relying on an expert provider to operate computing on your behalf. Except, that is, for a revealing passage halfway through, in which the author cites the case of an unnamed bank that, distrusting the cloud, has instead co-located its servers at “a nondescript data center in Somerville, MA … owned by a small company called 2N+1, which offers companies chilled floor space, security, electricity, and connectivity.” Unaware of the implicit irony, the writer concludes that the bank “chose to keep its own servers rather than hire a cloud. And for security, the bank chose the tangible kind: a steel fence.” Yes, because of course, cloud providers, as the name suggests, protect their facilities with dry ice and cotton wool, don’t they?

BRAVO!!

Posted via web from Scaleup.it – ScaleUp Technologies