There are two main additions in this release. The First is is integration with Apache Hadoop in which Hadoop jobs can now be submitted to Grid Engine, as if they were any other computation job. The Grid Engine also understand Hadoop’s global file systems which means that the Grid Engine is able to send work to the correct part of the cluster (data affinity).

The second is dynamic resource reallocation which also includes the ability to use on-demand resources from Amazon EC2. Grid Engine also is now able to manage resources across logical clusters which can be either in Cloud or off Cloud. This means that Grid engine can now be configured to “cloud burst” dependent on load which is a great feature. Integration is specifically set up with EC2 and enables scale down as well as scale up.

This release of Grid Engine also implements a usage accounting and billing feature called ARCo, making it truly SaaS ready as it is able to cost and bill jobs.

Impressive and useful stuff, and if you are interested in finding out more you can do so here.

- REST and Java API’s

- Instance-independent storage

- RHEL 5.4 base image

- IP address reservation.

Currently you have boot a RHEL image i.e. there is no notion of using your own image and storing it, but IBM confirmed they are working on this.

The beta is free so anyone can sign up and launch some servers and get to grips with the big blue cloud offering.

Previously XAP version 6 had benchmarked 276,000 updates per second and 453,000 retrievals per second on the best previous Intel processor. 

The summary of the tests are:

- GigaSpaces Write and Take operation from their in-memory data cache are about 3-4 times faster (300-400%) with the Nehalem chipset (in absolute numbers).

- Read operations perform much better with the Nehalem (3-6 times better with 1-4 threads). As much as there are more concurrent threads the difference is increasing. According to Shay Hassidim, one of the reasons for this is the non lock read capability added to XAP 7.0.

- Nehalem+ XAP 7.0.1 shows better scalability than Dunnington+XAP 6.2.2. About 30 % better with write and take operations and growing numbers with read operations (90% with 10 threads).

GigaSpaces continues to push the speed and performance envelope with its product, and I’m informed that the 7.02 version of GigaSpaces has again been highly performance tuned and is even faster than the 7.0 platform that was used for this benchmark.

It will be interesting to see if other vendors in this space publish results of their product on Nehalem, which looks set to deliver a huge performance jump.

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GigaSpaces have a number of hybrid deployments in which their application stack is hosted in the cloud and the data or services are hosted on premise which have had some notable successes.

The GigaSpaces product provides a strong Cloud middleware stack which encompasses Logic, data, services and messages in memory underpinned by a real-time Service Level Agreement enforcement which functions at the application level enabling the stack to scale up and out in real time based on SLA’s set by the business. As everything is held in memory, it is faster than alternative ways of trying to build enterprise scale applications in the cloud, and it has sophisticated sync’ services that enable async (or sync) of data to a DB or persistent store.

There are restrictions in using PHP on Azure, with the main one being   that file manipulation has to be done using AzureBlobs i.e. you cannot use write to regular PHP files. It is also not possible to execute regular SQL queries to access data in Azure Tables, you have to use the PHP Azure SDK classes to compose and execute queries.

There are also benefits, namely that  Azure is built to handle extreme volumes providing greater security and availability. PHP applications can also  easily share information other .NET applications and vice-versa which could lead for some interesting integrations and applications.

Using PHP on Windows Azure is free at the moment for the Community Technology Preview edition and it is expected normal Azure pricing will eventually apply.

Those interested in PHP and .Net may also be interested in Phalanger, which  is a PHP compiler for .NET that makes creates .NET assemblies from PHP code, enabling it to be used with other applications.

In supporting PHP Microsoft are showing their hand in the way they are targeting the market (and PHP has a large market and online application presence) and developers. For example in providing support for PHP they have got one over on Google App Engine, where PHP is not natively supported. It is possible to use PHP to Java compilers to run PHP applications in Google App Engine, but this is more of a hack.

We have quickly seen other providers such as RIM, and Google quickly adopt the same model, with Nokia lagging behind and then news filtering out that they would launch an App Store at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona and when they did,  well lets just say that it was not exactly a success.  Microsoft, late to the party as always, are also jumped on the bandwagon with the launch of their “My Phone” service . Samsung have also now launched their own Mobile Applications MarketPlace. This shift has hugely changed the whole model of the Telco market. Nokia, the 100 pound gorilla, is losing market share hand over fist as it struggles to get to grips with this new model. Motorola has lost $3.6 billion as they too struggle to get to grips with this new consumer model.

In 1 year Apple has become the eighth largest mobile phone vendor in the world (source: strategy analytics). This whilst only competing in the smartphone market and, at the time of the report, not selling into markets such as China. Overall during the past March quarter mobile phone sales fell 13% worldwide, the fastest rate of annual decline since record began, but in contrast sales rose 10% in the US, largely because of Apple. The top 5 handset vendors saw their market share fall from 83.5% to 78%, a decline that is predicted to continue as Android comes of age and Apple continues it’s dominance with low-end entry points into the consumer market.

The whole notion of how to sell to an individual has changed, it has become from the edge and back rather than the reverse i.e. it has proved that users are wiling to not only pay for real-time services and just-in-time applications, but will actually choose their handset provider based on the perceived value and breadth of those services. How many times have you read of a competitive phone review, “In some ways it is a better handset than the iPhone but it just cannot match the App Store for breadth of Appllications”. Interestingly not everyone agrees. MobileCrunch recently ran an article, “Not every Company needs an App Store“.  I believe they miss the point. The rules have changed and the humble phone has changed to become a platform to deliver services aided by on-demand cloud applications and services.  

I agree that ideally we would be able to write against one platform for services delivered. Unfortunately the mobile phone OS market is very segmented with lots of players such as Symbian (Nokia), Microsoft, Google, iPhone etc. Having said that their are some initiatives to try and provide some abstraction to allow code / services written for one platform to run on others, such as PhoneGap, which supports iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Ultimately the Genie is out of the bottle and new mobile companies can see the carrot that is new revenue and business models that Apple has made reality. Ultimately the will have no choice, with an Open Source OS model in Android squeezing them from one side, and Apple on the other, the landscape is being changed and the 100 pound gorilla is starting to look like an endangered species. Figures compiled by Gartner show that Apples Market share more than doubled in 2008, whilst Nokia’s Market share of the global smartphone Market fell from 47% in 2007 to 31% in 2008, and based on projections in the Gartner analysis, this would make Apple the leading global smartphone provider by 2011.

Software that purports to scale the applications on the cloud is not new, have a look at our prior blog post on this topic, and you will see some of the usual suspects such as RightScale, and Scalr. A new offering in this space is by Tibco with its Tibco Silver offering. Tibco Silver is trying to solve the problem of not whether cloud services can scale but whether the applications themselves can scale with them. This problem is addressed by Silver through ’self aware elasticity’. Hmmm….sounds good but what exactly does that mean ? It means the system can automatically provision new cloud capacity (be that storage or compute) dependent upon fluctuations in application usage.

According to Tibco, unlike services in a service-oriented architecture cloud services are not aware of the SLA’s to which they are required to adhere and Tibco Silver is aimed at providing this missing functionality. Tibco claim that “Self-aware elasticity” is something no other vendor has developed. I would dispute this. GigaSpaces XAP with it’s ability to deploy to the cloud as well as on-premise using the same technology has very fine grained application level SLA control that when breached allows the application to react accordingly, whether this be to increase the number of threads, provision new instances or to distribute workloads in a different way. GigaSpaces Service Grid technology enables support for this real-times elasticity.  The GigaSpaces Service Grid originated from Sun’s RIO Project. (interestingly it seems GigaSpaces are doing some work on enabling their cloud tools to deploy to and manage VMWARE images on private clouds as they do with AMI’s on Amazon’s public cloud) 

Without a doubt the ability to react in real-time to application level SLA’s rather than just breaches of an SLA at an infrastructure level is something that will find a welcome home in both private and public clouds.

- Compute @ $0.12 / hour
- Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
- Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:

- Web Edition – Up to 1GB relational database @ $9.99
- Business Edition – Up to 10GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:

Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB.

The Windows Azure blog details a service-level agreement that covers service uptime, connectivity, and data availability. The Azure SDK can be downloaded here.

It remains to be seen how Azure pans out but I am sure it will be a serious cloud player and it is nice to see a little pressure put on Amazon not only in terms of pricing but also for the intellectual ‘one-man upmanship’ this is sure to bring which can only be good for all companies working with cloud.