Recently there has been some momentum in the migration of an application/service’s compute environment from one cloud (private or public) to another (in this context refers to a public cloud provider). Implementing such an architectural strategy of using multiple cloud providers makes sense in the events of:

1. Planning and execution of service resumption due to a disaster
2.    Moving your business to a new cloud provider
3.    Cost economics and flexibility in the context of moving a private enterprise cloud to public cloud when handling spikes in traffic among other reasons.

When a services’ compute environment is running on multiple clouds hosted by different providers then the immediate needs are:

1. How can such environments be managed efficiently?
2. How can applications or services be provisioned easily across cloud providers?

At last year’s VMWorld conference, VMWare and Citrix announced VDCOS (now called vSphere) and Citrix C3 that support application delivery and orchestration services for applications/services hosted in a cloud. (See my coverage here. The visual representation of this announcement and how this would fit into an enterprise is depicted in the architectural diagram above). In addition to vSphere and C3, there are two more great services: Appistry Cloud IQ Manager and Cloudkick, that attempt to answer these challenges of easy cloud management, service provisioning, cloud environment migration and configuration management (currently Appistry IQ Manager supports service provisioning, cloud environment migration and configuration management).  Mentioned below is a brief summary of their offerings.

Cloudkick Offerings:

1. Cloudkick provides a single pane for server management called a virtual control center.
2. Alert when a server is unavailable. The delivery of alerts can be through email or voicemail.
3. Provides analytics on network bandwidth, load averages and other system related performance metrics.
4. Currently supports Amazon EC2 and Slicehost cloud providers. However, the company plans to add more providers to its list.
5. Service is Free.

Appistry Cloud IQ Manager Offerings:

1. Offers more powerful features such as migrate existing applications to be packaged and deployed to a cloud without rearchitecture.
2. Application life cycle management (i.e. start, stop and update) across multiple instances in a cloud.
3. Provides a single rich GUI based console to manage applications and the cloud.
4. Enables easy creation of private cloud environments.
5. Allows an API which can be integrated for alerting.
6. Currently supports cloud providers such as: Amazon, GoGrid and Skytap.

As TechcrunchIT mentions here “as technology companies roll out their cloud platforms, like Microsoft will be doing soon with its platform, Azure, and businesses begin to become increasingly reliant on the cloud, these management tools will become even more useful. And Cloudkick could gain good traction in this space if they integrate their application with more than just two types of platforms.” However, it makes me wonder when migrating from one public cloud to another, would the data transfer between them be optimal? In the event of a private cloud moving to  a public cloud, such limitations can be addressed using, for example Citrix Repeater (formerly Citrix WANScaler).

Oracle announced today of acquiring Sun Microsystems for a total price of $7.4 billion. This transaction has long lasting and possibly game changing impact on several market segments in the IT industry. My analysis per market segment is listed below.

Open Source segment focusing on Java and MySql Database

By acquiring Sun, Oracle is probably the largest open source player in the market. This acquisition makes Oracle the biggest proprietary database maker and also the biggest open source database owner. Java will survive the acquisition. Because Oracle has a revenue making product line (Oracle Fusion Middleware and Weblogic among others) using Java and will continue to support Java. However, the future of MySql is not clear. Sun has made MySql enterprise ready from an acquisition of $1 billion earlier this year. By bundling MySql with Hyperion and Oracle Business Intelligence suite as a total package which can tout lower deployment and ownership costs can generate new market opportunities or in penetrating into Microsoft SQL Server’s market share. However, it will be interesting to watch this space.

Community Initiatives such as JCP

Java Community Process, the community development of Java Technology Specifications and Reference Implementations (RI) that has fostered the evolution of the development of Java platform with the international developer community, will receive a setback because the focus of the integration would be to generate revenue.

Software and Middleware Market Segments

The products such as Glassfish application server (open source), Java Web Server, Open DS, Open SSO, Open Portal, Open ESB would possibly be integrated and consolidated with Oracle Fusion Middleware unless these products have large deployments with support contracts. It is unclear how Oracle would approach software products such as Java System Messaging Server, Sun Calendar Server and N1 provisioning system among others. Again these might be maintained as long as there is revenue from support contracts. IDEs’ (Sun’s NetBeans and Oracle’s Weblogic Workshop) will be consolidated possibly to Weblogic Workshop.

Storage Market Segment

This acquisition transaction deal is game changing in the storage landscape. Database and storage markets complement each other.  It will be interesting to watch this space and possibly we might see new acquisitions among other players such as EMC and NetApp in the near future.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing Market Segments

By acquiring Sun, Oracle can position itself as an aspiring leader in the cloud computing and virtualization market segments. Sun’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is a strong performer and is a good asset to Oracle. Sun’s cloud computing platform has already received good reviews among the cloud enthusiasts and is a welcome addition to Oracle’s portfolio because Sun’s cloud computing platform would lead to new markets.

Operating System and Hardware Market Segments

Oracle is interested in Solaris OS for two reasons: Oracle can make money from the support contracts on Solaris. Solaris also hosts a large portion of its database installations in the enterprises. If IBM would have bought Sun, then these installations would have been impacted and possibly migrated to IBM DB2 and possibly why Solaris and Java were mentioned in the announcement rather than, MySql. Oracle might continue to maintain Solaris however there might not be much innovation or research work that might happen in the future.

What is your opinion? Post them in the comment section below.

Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

Vordel 5 Cloud Edition enables an enterprise to connect with the cloud providers (such as Amazon, Salesforce and Google) easily and securely. For example, Vordel 5 ships with readymade policies and out of box connector to Amazon Web Services. This out of box connector enables a developer to connect to Amazon Web Services visually through a drag and drop operation saving on coding. Some of the key features in Vordel 5 Cloud edition are listed below:

1.    Integrate local application with cloud services such as Amazon SQS or S3
2.    Monitor cloud service availability and responsiveness using Service Level Agreements (SLA)
3.    Safeguard confidential data
4.    Monitor the cloud usage and costs
5.    Alert on misuse of services or when the SLA’s are breached
6.    Cache frequently accessed data thereby increasing performance
7.    Audit and archive interactions with cloud service providers
8.    Secure data transfer

Embarcadero Technologies, the maker of popular database modeling toolset and Integrated Development Environments such as JBuilder, J Optimizer and ERStudio among others, offers many of its products online called All-Access. A complete list of products offered in All-Access is listed below:

A. Design and Architecture
1. ER/Studio - A Data modeling tool for designing and understanding your databases
2. Embarcadero Schema Examiner - An automated error checking for database schema
3. Embarcadero® EA/Studio - A Real-world process and conceptual modeling

B. Web Development
1. Delphi for PHP - An IDE to build PHP applications
2. 3rdRail - Ruby on Rails IDE

C. Application Development
1. Delphi - An IDE to build native Windows applications
2. C++Builder - A RAD for C++ development environment for Windows
3. Delphi Prism - A Delphi development tool for .NET and Mono
4. JBuilder - An IDE to develop enterprise Java applications

D. Database, Database Management and Monitoring
1. InterBase SMP – A highly scalable, powerful, embeddable database
2. DBArtisan - Cross-platform database management
3. Rapid SQL - Integrated cross-platform SQL IDE for database development efficiency
4. Rapid SQL Developer - Eclipse-based, SQL IDE for application developers
5. Embarcadero Change Manager- Powerful set of tools to simplify and automate the database change management lifecycle

E. Tuning and Performance
1. Embarcadero Performance Center - A 24×7 database monitoring solution
2. Embarcadero DB Optimizer - A SQL profiling and tuning IDE

The company has designed All-Access to help an enterprise reduce both the costs and complexity of acquiring, using, and managing the tools. All-Access is offered under three types of licenses:

Workstation License: “A workstation license provides a named individual the right to use All-Access on a single machine.”

Networked Named User License: “This floating user license provides All-Access license(s) that are assigned to named user(s) but can be used on any machine on the network or checked out for remote usage such as travel or onsite work. This license type lets you manage your licenses easily with the All-Access license server.”

Network Concurrent License: “This shared license type can float to any authorized user on the network. Like Network Named User, this license type enables you to manage your licenses via the All-Access license server while at the same time maximize usage of your tooling assets.”

Writing applications using Java on Google App Engine provides portability than when developed using Python. While Google App Engine (GAE) uses Google’s magic infrastructure, however, limits the portability if the application uses the Bigtable data store. In Java this tight coupling to the Bigtable data store can be alleviated by making your application use JDO or JPA to access the Bigtable data store. The JDO/JPA implementation in GAE is provided by Data Nucleus Access platform, an open source Java data persistence, analysis and management platform. The Data Nucleus Access Platform supports all popular data stores such as RDBMS and LDAP among others. The other services in GAE shown in the image above such as Memcache and Mail can be accessed  using JCache API, Java Mail API respectively. Coding an application to such standard Java API’s maximize portability to any vendor product that supports these API’s.

Other articles of possible interest:

1. Overview of Java support in Google App Engine
2. What you cannot do using Java in Google App Engine

Microsoft offers some data mining functionality of SQL Server 2008 with no local analysis services server in the cloud. The service is offered in two flavors:  a cloud service and as a plug-in for Excel. The analysis tools available for the cloud are mentioned below.

1. Analyze Key Influencers Tool: The Analyze Key Influencers tool detects the influence of the other columns on the values of the target column. An influencers report is generated in a separate sheet, and ranks the key influencers based on their importance. See a sample report below generated from sample data.

Sample Data Snapshot:

Sample Key Influencers Chart generated from above data:

2. Forecast Tool: This tool performs forecasting on a selected table. The forecasted values are added to the original table and highlighted. A chart is generated in a separate sheet, and displays the present and the forecasted evolution of the series. See a sample below.

Sample Forecast Chart:

3. Prediction Calculator: This tool detects the patterns that predict a specific value (the Target) of a column based on values in the other columns. The patterns are presented in a scorecard format that allows assigning scores based on the values of the other columns. The tool also generates a set of Cost/Profit tuning diagrams that allow you to select your scorecard threshold.

The tools such as Categorizer, Scenario Analyzer, and Market Basket Analysis are currently available in the Excel plug-in version only.