Welcome!

Once again we have a great lineup for the New England Cloud User Group meeting:

5th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group

Date: February 10, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7
Meeting: 7-9

NEW LOCATION!!!

Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Directions:  Microsoft

Each meeting we try to have two presenters. The January meeting had two great presenters - Greg Arnette, CTO at Sonian (http//www.sonian.net) and a Cloud vendor Sun, represented by Angelo Rajdurai. We finally figured out how to post the meeting summaries, slides, and podcasts in the cloud! They are linked here: Sonian and Sun.  The conversation continueus to evolve and we are always finding new ways to leverage the cloud as we listen to entrepreneurs, investors, and established vendors share their views and ask great questions.

This months meeting we have two interesting speakers - Mike Pitaro, Found and CCO from SnapLogic and John Fawcett, CTO  from Tamale Software. 

SnapLogic provides the glue to tie Enterprise applications to Cloud SaaS offerings such as SalesForce. Tamale Software provides a shared research space for financial services organizations  that includes work-flow and collaboration tools.

 Speakers Bio’s:

Mike Pittaro
Founder and Chief Community Officer, SnapLogic

Mike started SnapLogic with Gaurav with the goal of simplifying data integration through a fundamentally new approach.

Mike has worked in the data analysis and data integration space for the past 12 years. He built his first financial data mart in 1996, and later worked on pool selection analysis for the asset-backed securitization industry. Mike joined Informatica in 1997, where he worked on product advocacy and developed the support infrastructure for the Global Support Organization, which used a mixture of commercial and Open Source software to enable collaboration and resource sharing across five distributed support centers. Before Informatica, Mike worked in the high performance computer industry, optimizing Fortran and C programs for massively parallel computers. Mike graduated from the Sligo Institute of Technology in 1983.

John Fawcett
Chief Technology Officer, Tamale Software

John is a Tamale founder and its first employee. Launching Tamale in September 2002, John led the development of Tamale RMS, the class-defining research management solution that also broke ground as a truly packaged enterprise solution. Before starting Tamale, John worked in Boston as a hedge fund analyst covering the software industry. Prior to joining the hedge fund, John worked as a consultant building combined data and video systems. His work included the design of an integrated live stats and video system for Major League Baseball. John graduated Cum Laude from Harvard College with a degree in Mechanical Engineering

  We had two speakers at the January 13, 2009 cloud user group meeting in Boston. The first speaker was from Sonian (yes - they chose a nickname from Smithsonian) was Greg Arnette their CTO. Sonain is a startup company that built a cloud based service offering to archive email to the cloud. The complete stack lives in the cloud and they use Ruby-on-rails and Erlang for their IDE.

•  Started in 2006 http://www.sonian.net/
• They only have 10 employees and only needed $1M in angel funds because they claim they didn’t need the other $4M in technicians and infrastructure that startups traditionally used. This allows them to focus on their intellectual property and getting those key reference accounts before they even have to consider venture capital or other financial instruments (and give up the equity to go with it).
• They have 75 customers, 7 Vars signed, and 5 OEM agreements.
• The 75 customers range from 200 to 10,000 email boxes.
• Sonian runs on Amazon Web Services using EC2, SDB & MySQL, EBS and S3, SQS, UI is served via Apache (on AWS), and ERlang, RabbitMQ,, and Map Reduce for the ESB and processing.
• Their service supports all major email engines: Exchange, GroupWise, Notes, IMail Server, Zimbra, Scalix….
• $36/year/mailbox compared to standard offerings in the $120+/year/mailbox range. Each mailbox gets 2GB/User/year for that fee.
•  All data is stored with an MD5 hash and encrypted and is fully searchable for eDiscovery.
•  All data is replicated to 8 AWS datacenters for access and protection

             Greg’s presentation was very interesting … and he got lots of questions from the crowd! Security and architecture were the hot topics as was how the service works - customer (email/system administrator) configures the policies for extracting and sending emails in a batch to Sonian Services on AWS via SSL. Administrator has a client that runs in the cloud that uses SSL and all Sonian components are in the cloud allowing Sonian to rely on AWS for security and robustness.

             For security they use the data encryption services provided by AWS with .509 certificates. They also only use their own AMI images and do not use or advocate using the public ones due to the potential of trojans or leaks. One thing they do in addition is they have their AMI’s reviewed using Ouncelabs or Vericode to make sure their code is “certified” as secure.

             Greg did a great job presenting the companies service offer and it was useful to see the value in shifting from a traditional “product” acquisition to a cloud SaaS model for enterprise email archiving.

             One other note is that from the four cloud meetings we’ve had so far – we’ve had two startup companies speak so far – both of which (Sonian and Pixily) have built services that “sell” to their customers (one enterprise and one consumer/SMB) storage/archiving in the cloud.  Security was a common theme during the Q&A’s. It will be interesting to see if the trend of startups, SaaS, Archive/Storage, and security continue to be the early issues and services chosen by entrepreneurs.

 Here is the sonian Podcast (MP3) and here is the sonian_cloud_archiving presntation (PDF).

 -wayne

On January 13, 2009  we had another great New England Cloud User Group meeting! We had two great speakers - both providing a view into what a startup is doing to change the way we do email archiving (www.soniannetworks.com) and what Sun is thinking about – how to integrate what they build and sell today with the cloud

                Sun’s speaker was Angelo Rajadurai who is one of their evangelists for all things cloud working with startups. According to Angelo they are trying to reproduce their success in the dot.com era by being successful with cloud companies. Angelo spent the first part of his discussion on how great the cloud was for the future in terms of the business model - removing the capital investment requirements, reducing a startups focus on infrastructure and allowing startups to invest in their Intellectual Property and business readiness instead.

                Part II of the discussion was truly brilliant in that Angelo started talking about AWS specifically and got the heads nodding in the room. He talked about how great S3, EC2, and EBS were in terms of providing a great solution to the startups - easy to use, low cost of entry, and very rich in terms of services. Now he had the room hooked.

                Part III - Angelo started talking about ZFS … and at first I was confused - what does ZFS have to do with the cloud? ZFS is a file system that has some very interesting features in it. For one - it can automatically tier storage based on the storage type. Angelo explained that ZFS is designed with the equivalent of an MMU in it that takes blocks and places them in the appropriate memory location - only instead of an MMU it is a DMU (disk management unit) that can put high read data on an SSD and data that is more general on slower storage such as Tier1 or Tier2 and manages file system storage pools. Angelo’s tie in to the cloud was that he created a ZFS to S3 bucket file system - or a FUSE (file system in user space). Now you may be scratching your head - but consider this … what if you could marry localized file system and storage tiering to the cloud as the slowest (cheapest) tier?

                Part IV - Angelo then told us that what they have found is that the $/TB cost are one dimension but the IOPs cost for the cloud are also important. IOPs in the cloud need to be looked at differently because if the IOP results in the data being transferred into and out of the cloud the cost model changes dramatically based on the direction the data is headed. Sending data to the cloud is pretty cheap whereas getting data out of the cloud is very expensive. What SUN has been proposing is a TCO model that positions a SUN Unified Storage Array at a local datacenter (non-cloud) that is used to present cached data to the customers for high volume read and the cloud is used for the archive. For example Angelo referred to a popular photo storage/sharing site that used their own storage, then realized the cloud was cheaper, then found out that the downloads were killing them in AWS costs - so they now used a local cache by storing heavily read photo’s on a local array and use the cloud to persist the archive.

                Personally I think this is a great strategy to use existing storage technology and marry it to the cloud - allowing ILM to now include the cloud as one of the data stores.  Any thoughts or reactions from all you cloud folks?

Here is the presentation sun-cloudstorage and this is the sun-cloud-storage PodCast.

-wayne

Once again we have a great lineup for the New England Cloud User Group meeting:

4th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group

Date: January 13, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7
Meeting: 7-9
Location: Papa Razzi Wellsley MA (private room)
16 Washington St
Wellesley, MA 02481

Directions: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=16%20Washington%20Street,02481&hl=en

Last meeting we had two presenter - a vendor who is looking at the cloud (RSA) and a startup that is using the cloud to offer their service (Pixiliy). The conversation was lively and enlightening in what these companies viewed were their challenges - current and future.

This months meeting we have two interesting speakers - Greg Arnette CTO and co-founder from Sonian (http://www.sonian.net/) and Angelo Rajadurai is a Senior Technical Evangelist for Sun helping startup companies use SUN’s technology which includes the cloud.

 Speakers Bio’s:

Greg Arnette is the CTO and co-founder of Sonian, a two year old cloud compute application start-up that provides enterprise archiving services for compliance, e-disocvery and storage management. Sonian
has built it’s entire hosted infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, and was recently awarded a finalist position in the 2008 Start Up Challenge. Sonian uses AWS EC2, S3, SDB, SQS and EBS web services.

Angelo Rajadurai is a Senior Technical Evangelist specializing in application optimization at Sun Microsystems. Angelo has been with Sun Microsystems for over 15 years  where he has held various technical roles.  Angelo’s areas of focus have varied from working on the Solaris x86 kernel, to supporting Sun’s strategic partners and customers on various engineering and optimization projects.  More recently Angelo is addressing the technology challenges experienced by the Startup Community.  He has presented on web technologies to audiences worldwide.