opus:interactive | If These Servers Could Talk

Friday, September 28, 2007 at 10:53 am by Jeremy Sherwood

HostingCon 2007 - Distributed/Grid Computing vs. Virtualization

There was a lot of buzz about Grid Computing vs. Virtual Machines and the combination of them together. As many of you may know Amazon (Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3) like many others, such as Google (Google Page Creator) and Microsoft (Microsoft Office Live,) has released online hosting/storage services using this technology in one form or another. The technology has been out since 1990s as a metaphor for making computer power as easy to access as an electric power grid in Ian Foster and Carl Kesselmans seminal work, “The Grid: Blueprint For A New Computing Infrastructure.”

My experience with Grid Computing goes back to the late 1990s with distributed.net in helping making encryption that much secure. With the technology originally designed to harness unused CPU cycles to solve complex problems, to now being used to hosting an infinite number of hosting environments. It is amazing the level of reliability and scalability options that are available with the system. The ability to grow in resources at an unlimited rate -on the fly- with little to no exposure to change, is outstanding. The other great aspect of this system of technology is the ability to contribute to a sustainable mindset. If done properly, you can reuse old servers and hardware that in a normal life cycle would be recycled, now can be reprovisioned back into a production environment with little concern of impact of hardware failure. This rejuvenation of hardware opens up a great opportunity to get that-much-more out of your initial investment as well as being able to pass those saving onto the customer. Do I see Grid and Virtual environments replacing all hosting environments? Not likely. In theory they have great potential to revolutionize the price, uptime, and growth opportunities of hosting. However I don’t see the replacement of dedicated environments with dedicated resources. Really, the way I look at it is: the continued growth in Grid and Virtual systems is really an improvement like public light rail has been for transportation. It has become cheaper, more reliable and continues to expand where it can go. However most of us still buy our own cars customized the way we like; from rims, stereos, number of seats, 4×4, biodiesel, the list goes on. Just like the vehicles you want to own, the same holds true in hosting. As a light rail can’t take you everywhere when you need to be, grids and virtual solutions can’t host every complex environment.

The question always seems to come up with this technology, will the Corporate Giants with the large pocket books and nearly limitless resources wipe out the little local hosting companies? In my opinion – not likely. Although the large corporate empires can deliver good products and great hardware, one thing they will always struggle with is: relationships. There is something to be said with local support and the face-to-face relationship with your hosting partner that you don’t get with the Giants. Having the ability to pick up the phone and call your solutions executive-engineer-local-host 24/7 and have them know who you are by name and the solution you utilize says a lot about the type of local provider you have. Additionally, there is something to be said about the warm fuzzy feelings we all get when we can go down to the local Data Center and see the pretty lights flashing and say to yourself, “There is my site.” The fact is, what Amazon as well as other do for the industry is what helps get the exposure to the general public about technology and drive more business to local providers as well. I think it is great. It will be interesting to see how the community responds to the technology. One thing is for sure my eyes will be watching.

Hosting Con 2007 also brought information about web 2.0 applications: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Friendster, and Xanga community. Others refer to this as a social networking movement. I find it interesting that half of Myspace users are over the age of 35.

So what does that say? To me it says there is a opportunity harness some of the power of user driven content. There is over 180,000 active and unique visitors in these communities as of Aug 2006 and they continue to grow. One way I see harnessing the power of these users is to create a community of customers for your hosting business that can help each other. They are all in one form or another doing the same thing and can use each other’s resources/knowledge to grow together. This type of value add and communication tunnel that not only your customers can contribute and drive the conversations but also your engineers and technicians can contribute ideas or solutions to drive more business. In summary, hosting is a communication vehicle to drive your customers content.

Post Comment (0)