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Management Middleware: The Future of Virtualization and Cloud Marketecture

Steve Jin — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:08:14 +0000

While installing and configuring vCloud Director recently, I kept thinking how to simplify it by removing un-necessary concepts and steps. To be fair, vCloud Director as of version 1.5 does a decent job to provide a high level abstraction for cloud infrastructure. Still it can be significantly improved just like every other new technology. Note that I pick vCloud Director as an example for the following discussion simply because VMware is the leader in virtualization space and what it does has ripple effects on other vendors.

To make things simpler, we have to answer a fundamental question on the marketecture: how should VMware position vCenter and vCloud Director in its product portfolio? Should their relationship be like application to application? Or should it be middleware to application?

I don’t think anyone has a clear answer, at least not yet reflected in the vCloud product itself. On one hand, it’s like and in fact intended to be middleware to application because vCloud Director depends on vSphere; on the other hand, it’s like application to application because you have to use vCenter to do all the basic configurations before vCloud Director can be installed and configured.

The current situation reminds me of early days of database as middleware: before you run your application, you first need to install your database separately and configure it manually to meet the requirements of the application, which includes manually run SQL scripts to create database tables in the database. You may wonder why not hide the database from the application administrators and users. Well, that is part of the history. Before it’s clear to everyone that database should be middleware, it’s natural to do that way.

I think we are at the similar turning point today in the virtualization management space where we should clearly divide the layers: hypervisors, middleware, and applications. For the hypervisors, there is little doubt. For the upper two layers, there could be confusions about what should go which layer, and more importantly where should be the right boundary of the virtualization management middleware and application.

Luckily we have a good example here. In my opinion, vCenter should be a middleware, and vCloud Director should be an application along with other applications.

The change of mindset is important. With that, we should first hide vCenter and any other related building blocks like vShield, just like in vCenter you don’t feel the existence of a database unless you intentionally dig into it.

Of course, you still need to install and configure vCenter, but do so within vCloud Director installer. Let me borrow an example from database world: your application installs a database and connects to it programmatically for creating new database tables and whatever preloaded datasets.

Following the same idea, vCloud Director should do the same: silently install a vCenter and create whatever provider datacenter programmatically. When that happens, I think the complexity exposed to the cloud administrators can be significantly reduced.
Although I used VMware as an example here, the principles are also applicable for other vendors like Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Oracle in their virtualization management stacks.

With the right separation of virtualization middleware, there could be a rich portfolio of applications merging in the marketplace, and driving virtualization and enterprise IT management to next level. Companies that do it right can further penetrate the market and win more market shares.

Note: this article talks about virtualization management middleware, not the middleware virtualization which is a different topic.

Management Middleware: The Future of Virtualization and Cloud Marketecture originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Cloud Innovation: Interesting Use Cases

Steve Jin — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:19:36 +0000

As I predicted for 2011, the cloud will be the ultimate powerhouse for mobile devices. The reason is simple: although fancy and stylish, the mobile devices typically do not have enough computing power and storage space for certain applications.

While reading BusinessWeek magazine not long ago, I got to know that a company called Elemental Technologies in Portland Oregon is spearheading in that direction. The company develops a box that trans-codes videos to fit receivers’ seen size, resolution, OS, plug-ins, etc, which total up to 250 technological formats. According to the article, the company “plans to introduce a cloud based product so that smaller websites can use its technology without having their own datacenters or owing a video processing box outright.” That makes a lot of senses both technically and business wise.

Video processing is a great example that takes advantages of the computing power of the cloud. There are other domains as well.

I have a friend who ran a company who develops setup boxes (they don’t move as mobile phones but have similar limitations). To save cost, they want to use commodity CPUs in their setup boxes. But they still want their users to play advanced games that require significant amount of computing power. They finally decided to use servers back in their datacenters for computing and render the screen to users’ TVs.

If it sounds a little abstract, think it as another version of remote desktop where setup box is a thin client remotely connected to a desktop running at the back. By doing so, they can achieve significant advantages with lowered setup box prices and flexibility in upgrading their computing power in datacenter alone.

I am sure there are many more interesting examples you may know of. Please feel free to share them in comments.

Cloud Innovation: Interesting Use Cases originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Random Thoughts on IT Automation

Steve Jin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:00:32 +0000

IT automation is key to IT efficiency, agility and control. Here are some of my recent thoughts on this topic. Please feel free to share yours.

People and Automation

All automations ultimately start from people, not the other way around.
Although automation has a role, it never takes the place of a good system administrator.
Not everything can be automated, and not everything is worth being automated.
Automation is never a self-propelled perpetual motion machine. It needs a driver – the human being.
While system administrators in the driver seats, good feedbacks from the IT system are like dashboard and therefore indispensable.
Good automation should empower system administrators to do works more efficiently and more consistently.
An automated workflow is like a recipe. The goal is to repeat it in a consistent way regardless of cook.

Automation and APIs

Automation is possible if and only if the target is programmable. Therefore APIs are crucial to automation.
Reactive automation is possible only if the target is observable with metrics via APIs.
Unified management APIs are helpful for a unified view of underlying infrastructure therefore simplify the automation development.
API interoperability is a must to avoid automation islands in large scale IT systems.

Policy vs. Script

Policy is easier to understand and author, but less flexible to extend beyond what’s already supported than scripting.
Policy is good for most common use cases that don’t change much over time, while scripting is good for less common use cases that are hard to define their structures.
With many automation scripts in place, the question of how I can get a work done becomes which script I should run.
The “cloudier” an IT system, the more scripting for automation.

Random Thoughts on IT Automation originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Top 5 Predictions on Cloud Computing for 2012

Steve Jin — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:06:49 +0000

After finishing up my reflection of 2011 predictions , it’s time to make my predictions for 2012 as today is the last day of 2011.

1. Virtualization war will be heated between VMware and Microsoft. The trigger will be the Hyper-V 3.0 which is expected to ship in the middle of 2012 with the Windows 8 server. According to many people, the 3.0 release will bring it on par or better than latest VMware hypervisor.

Gartner predicted that by 2012 “Hyper-V will account for 27% of the market, up from 11% two years ago. Within that projected 27%, Gartner says Microsoft will have captured 85% of all businesses with less than 1,000 employees that use virtual servers.” The last 85% is a bit alarming because Microsoft is known for growing market share from small to big, and then to dominance.

The license change in vSphere 5 in 2011 also has a profound and lasting impact on the competition besides the improvements of Hyper-V. While the diversification continuing, VMware continues to lead in terms of technology and market shares. The coming 2012 will be a real test for VMware whether it can effectively defend against competition from Microsoft.

In longer term, I think the competition landscape of VMware and Microsoft in virtualization is probably like that of Oracle and Microsoft in database. Whatever tricks Oracle has used should work for VMware to defend its market share because they are all market leaders and target enterprise customers.

2. More Packaged Applications will be delivered as SaaS. Traditional software vendors simply cannot ignore cloud story even though it may cut into the current revenue of existing license sales. Embracing cloud model may also open doors to new customers and new market opportunities.

Technically, vendors don’t need to redesign software for the cloud but repackage it as a virtual machine or a set of virtual machines. For most ISVs, redesigning software for cloud doesn’t justify the extra cost of not sharing resources like databases, operating systems.

3. PaaS market will be flat. While PaaS made great progresses in 2011 and continues to appeal much to the developers, it won’t have significant growth in 2012.

I think that three factors limit the PaaS as a substantial business opportunity. First, developers like the convenience but still prefer the ultimate freedom to control underlying platforms, which is not only impossible but also somewhat against the PaaS ideology.

Second, most PaaS is not ready for real production systems, where the big money is today. Most production systems are so complicated and demanding that they are not feasible via PaaS model. Also, once a production is set up, it’s not likely needing a PaaS.

Thirdly, most enterprise is not yet ready to run business applications outside their premises due to various concerns like security, compliance, etc.

Generally speaking, the PaaS will largely remain as a testing and development platform in short term until the 3 factors are effectively resolved.

4. IT in a box is the private cloud for enterprises. It’s not about converged hardware infrastructure, but also the packaged software solutions. Integration and automation will be the main themes. With the cloud box, enterprises will enjoy the benefits of cloud computing while avert much of the conventional burdens of assembling hardware infrastructures and installing software stacks.

The enterprise job market will reflect these changes. When the networking, storage, and compute converge, so will the organizations and people’s skill sets.

5. The cross powering of mobile and cloud will continue. As I predicted last year, the cloud will be the ultimate power for mobile computing. The trend will continue in 2012. New mobile devices are widely supported by enterprises. There are more to do on syncing up the contents across them.

Also, mobile devices are not powerful for some sophisticated data processing that demands CPU/GPU powers. The cloud can definitely off help there. The mobile computing makes the cloud more accessible and more appealing to average users.

That is about it. Wish you all a great 2012! Please remember to come back for the review of these predictions by the end of 2012.

Top 5 Predictions on Cloud Computing for 2012 originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Reflection on My Predictions on Cloud Computing for 2011

Steve Jin — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:01:36 +0000

Last December I made top 5 predictions on cloud computing for 2011. When the year ends soon, it’s time to review them. I won’t rate their accuracy myself because I am indeed biased. You are welcome to do so in the comments though.

“1. The focus of cloud computing will gradually shift from IaaS to PaaS which becomes key differentiator in competition. Developer enablement becomes more important than ever in ecosystem evangelism, full software lifecycle integration, IDE support, API and framework, and etc.”

Early this year on January 19, 2011, Amazon Web Services introduced AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Per the news release, “Developers simply upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.”

On April 12, 2011, VMware delivers Cloud Foundry, the industry’s first open PaaS. Then on August 24, it shipped a micro edition of Cloud Foundry which runs within a virtual machine.

“2. Many more mergers and acquisitions (M&As) will take place in cloud space for companies to build stronger cloud portfolio. For big players, it should include dual vertically complete stacks both as services and products. Whoever gets there first will gain enormous advantages over its competitors. “

On April 11, 2011, Verizon acquired Terremark Worldwide, Inc. for $1.4B, “clearing the way for Verizon to lead the rapidly evolving global managed IT infrastructure and cloud services market.” On SaaS side, SAP spent $3.4B to buy SuccessFactors which is a leading provider of human capital management.

For more deals, check out Top 5 Cloud Acquisitions of 2011 from Redmond Channel Partner.

“3. Virtualization will continue to play a pivotal role in transforming IT infrastructure toward cloud computing. 2011 will see more enterprises 100% virtualized and get onto private cloud journey as a natural next step. Automation will be critical for operational efficiency for both private cloud and cloud service providers. Big enterprises will push for diversification of hypervisors in their cloud datacenters for tier hybrid cloud where different types of workloads run on different platforms. “

According to Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure by Gartner (Note: the link points to a Citrix site but really Gartner content), “As of mid-2011, at least 40% of x86 architecture workloads have been virtualized on servers; furthermore, the installed base is expected to grow five-fold from 2010 through 2015 (as both the number of workloads in the marketplace grow and as penetration grows to more than 75%).”

While VMware continues to lead, other players like Microsoft and Citrix are also in the same square of Leaders and Visionaries as VMware.

“4. Cloud and mobile computing will cross-empower each other, and therefore generate a new wave of innovations and start-ups. The cloud will be the ultimate powerhouse for mobile devices. And mobile devices will make the cloud more accessible and user friendly. “

On June 6, 2011, Apple introduced iCloud, “a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch®, Mac® or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices.”

When Apple is here, I don’t need to name others who mostly watch and follow.

“5. Customers will demand cloud interoperability and portability, and therefore drive more adoption of open source software and open standards. I expect key standard organizations will release important standards on API, security, communication, and so on.”

DMTF released several drafts of specifications like CIMI, CIMI-CIM, etc. These are still work in process and I don’t think any of them be finalized this year. Want to find out more, try here. OpenStack recruited many companies, some of which are VI Java users.

When this review is done, I am ready to make predictions for 2012. Please stay tuned.

Reflection on My Predictions on Cloud Computing for 2011 originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Book: The Art of Scalability

Steve Jin — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:43:44 +0000

Just finished reading the book The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin Abbott, Michael Fisher. The book draws on authors’ experiences working at PayPal/eBay and other Internet companies, and covers many aspects of scalability including people, organization, process, and technology. According to Yishan Wong, who used to work under the authors and is now an engineering director at Facebook, “the opportunity to directly absorb the lessons and experiences presented in this book is invaluable to me now working at Facebook.”

The authors made a good point that people, and sometimes processes as well, are more important than technology to deliver scalability. I think it’s probably true for other engineering disciplines as well.

The book even has two pages on CMM/CMMI(Capability Maturity Model Integrated). When a book or article includes an introduction on it, I think it’s an indication that it may be a bit verbose or too theoretical for pragmatic practitioners. That is why I didn’t read the book from cover to cover. Instead, I find the conclusion and key points sections at the end of each chapter are pretty helpful. So I read all of the conclusions and key points, and whole chapter when I need to.

As a technologist, I am more interested in technology than anything else. I found the AKF’s Twelve Architecture Principles in the book worth mentioning here.

N+1. It means you always have redundancies for everything. Even better is you can have three, which is the Rule of Three.
Design for rollback. When a new version doesn’t work, you can always to roll it back to the previous working version.
Design to be disabled. Then you can turn off individual features as needed to isolate problems.
Design to be monitored. You can only take actions only when you know something goes wrong or out of range.
Design for multiple live sites.
Use mature technologies.
Asynchronous design. The caller of a service should not have to wait for a process, therefore can improve parallelism.
Stateless systems. When a system is stateless, you can easily bring up or down a system easily. Note: it’s true for cloud computing as well. Check my aritcle: stateless VM.
Scale out not up. It’s much higher chance to hit an up limit than an out limit.
Design for at least two axes of scale: (AKF Scale Cube: X-All Work Evenly Distributed; Y-Work Distributed by Type of Action; Work Distributed by Customer Location.)
Buy when non-core. It basically says don’t invent your own wheel, as you know in software.
Use commodity hardware.

Please note that as the book title suggests, these principles are for the Web architectures. They may or may not apply to enterprise infrastructure and applications. If you work on IT for enterprises, you need to think more before adopting them.

Book: The Art of Scalability originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

New Book: Enterprise Java Applications Architecture on VMware

Steve Jin — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:52:16 +0000

My former colleague Emad Benjamin at VMware has just published a new book on running Java on vSphere. When I was still there, I had the opportunity to review the Chapter 5 of his book.

As many of you know, Emad is a well-known expert on this subject who has spoken at various events like VMworld and helped numerous customers. You can buy his book at Amazon or from publisher directly. Remember to bring it to next year’s VMworld for his autograph.:-)

Book Abstract:
This book is the culmination of seven years of experience in running Java on VMware vSphere, both at VMware and at many of VMware’s customer sites. In fact, many of VMware’s customers run business critical enterprise Java applications on VMware vSphere where they have achieved better TCO and SLAs. This book covers high level architecture and implementation details, such as design and sizing, high-availability designs, automation of deployments, best practices, tuning, and troubleshooting techniques of enterprise Java applications on VMware.

Table Of Content:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Why Virtualize Enterprise Java Applications?
Chapter 3: Enterprise Java Applications on VMware
Chapter 4: Design and Sizing of Enterprise Java on VMware
Chapter 5: High-availability Designs of Enterprise Java
Chapter 6: Enterprise Java on VMware Best Practices
Chapter 7: UNIX-to-Linux Migration Considerations
Chapter 8: Run Effectively in Production
Chapter 9: Performance Study
Chapter 10: Application Modernization and vFabric
Chapter 11: Troubleshooting Primer
Chapter 12: FAQ—Enterprise Java Applications on vSphere

Target Audience:
This book is targeted at IT professionals who are in search of implementation guidelines for running enterprise Java applications on VMware vSphere in production, and QA/Test environments. The first three chapters are beneficial to CIOs, VPs, directors, and enterprise architects looking for key high-level business propositions of Virtualizing enterprise Java applications. The remaining chapters are for developers and administrators looking for implementation details.

About the Author:
Emad Benjamin has been in the IT industry for the past twenty years. He graduated with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Wollongong. Earlier in his career, he was a C++ software engineer, then in 1997, he switched to programming with Java, and has been focusing on Java ever since. He has extensive software development experience with companies such as, Cisco, Oracle, Citadel, BHP Steel, and others. For the past seven years, his main focus has been Java on VMware vSphere. Emad is currently at VMware focusing on all aspects of Virtualizing Java. He has presented at many conferences and workshops around the world on the topic of Virtualizing Java, where he has shared his experience and best practices. You can connect with Emad on LinkedIn.

New Book: Enterprise Java Applications Architecture on VMware originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Best Practices for Best Practices

Steve Jin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:50:37 +0000

Like many other industries, IT industry has all sort of best practices, from how to use a product to how to design software. I have personally contributed top 10 best practices on how to use VMware vSphere APIs (part 1, part 2).

Given the complexity of IT systems, it makes sense to capture the expert knowledge in the format of best practices. I think there are just too many of them and not all of them are of high qualities, thus I have a mixed feeling about best practices these days.

On one hand, some best practices do help design and run a good IT system. If you follow these best practices, you will have an effective and efficient system, be it software, hardware, or service. On the other hand, there are sometimes too many to pick from, and too many pages to read through, not to mention the bad advice under the name of best practices.

What should be best practices? It takes for sure lot of domain expertise to answer this question. I am not expert in all domains, so I would try its opposite question: what should not be best practices?

In the following, I list three categories of them:

Bad best practices. These are namely best practices, if followed faithfully, lead to confusion and bad consequences. After all, everyone can claim best practices for what they have come up with. I’ve seen many cases in which lousy programmers talk about best practices writing code.
Common sense best practices. It’s good to guide by common sense in IT world. Writing down these people already know about it just does not help much, but a waste of time. Having said that, the definition of common senses may vary from person to person, depending on education and experience. Something obvious to one may not be so to others. It’s up to the author to do more homework to understand audience.
Programmable best practices. These are best practices indeed, but should never be documented on paper. Rather they should be coded in applications. Not all the best practices are easy – some actually involve quite some analysis and steps to switch on this, tune that, which requires good understanding of a system. Although you should have all the basics when you read the best practices, it doesn’t mean you should go through these which can be best implemented in the software.
If the software can do it, it should! Don’t bother human in the form of best practices. Besides the existing software that can include best practices, I see the rise of best practice software tool on its own soon.
As expected, software cannot do everything, for example, the big picture beyond the software, how to use the APIs. So there are plenty of chances to blog about best practices.

I hope these rules are helpful. Aren’t they best practices for best practices? You decide.

Lastly, one simple but probably the most important best practice for readers: only read and follow best practices from the best practitioners. I couldn’t emphasize it more.

Best Practices for Best Practices originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Learning Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud

Steve Jin — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:49:48 +0000

Yesterday I went to Microsoft Azure DevCamp in its Silicon Valley office. Like other developer events organized by Microsoft, it featured awesome presentations with nice overviews and demos by top evangelists like James Conard, Wade Wegner, Nick Harris, etc.

As you’ve probably known, Microsoft has been betting heavily on cloud computing. Anyone who is interested in cloud computing simply cannot ignore its Windows Azure, which is a comprehensive platform for developing cloud applications. Note that, the focus is applications, not virtual machines as offered by Amazon and other IaaS providers.

I read a book about Windows Azure a little while ago, but haven’t got my hands dirty because I was still using Windows XP by then. The DevCamp event got me back to the topic again. I won’t summarize what I learnt from the presentations here, but list some key terms and technologies here: Windows Azure Compute (roles: Web, Worker, Virtual Machine), Windows Azure Storage (Blobs / Drives / Tables / Queues), SQL Azure, Service Bus, Windows Azure Connectivity, Azure Marketplace, Access Control, Caching, CDN, Traffic Manager. I hope you are not confused with these without further explanations. If you are, here is a link to the Windows Azure Home which can
help clarify everything the services, features, and prices.

I went back today for the hands-on labs, but couldn’t get my laptop’s wireless adapter work. Therefore I copied the courseware, and got a card with free trial account lasting for 5 days. I think that will keep me busy for a week.

As I checked the site, anyone can sign up a free trial, which allows you to run a Small Windows Azure instance with a 1GB SQL Azure database for free for the first 90 days of your trial. The Get Started page has pretty much all you need to, well, get started.

Last but not the least, Windows Azure does not limit its support only to Microsoft .NET. It also supports other popular stacks like Java, PHP.

Learning Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

Diversified Devices Plus Cloud Data: Future of Client Computing

Steve Jin — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:19:29 +0000

In my previous articles, I mainly cover server virtualization and cloud computing. Client computing, although less enterprise focused, is also a very important part of whole story. In this article, I am going to share some thoughts on this topic, mostly about the future development of how users will use computers and what it takes to get there. I know it’s a big topic, but let’s give a try.

I’ve heard many times that PC era is now over. I think it might be too early to declare that. Yes, iPad and iPhone are all cool, but they cannot yet match the richness of PC today, probably never as PC evolves as well. If you are doing anything serious like programming, you still use PC mostly. OK, programming is probably not a good example because most of us don’t program at all. How about writing a document or work with a spreadsheet? I bet you would prefer to do on your PC rather on your iPad and iPhone.

Having said this, I am not implying in any way that iPad and iPhone do not have values. In fact, they do, and sometimes they are even more important for some people in certain circumstances, for example on road.

Here comes the trend of client computing: Each of us will have multiple devices including PC, smart phone, tablet PC, e-reader, etc. It’s about diversification, and will not be the same as the revolution from mainframe to PC. The diversification with multiple devices serves different needs/tasks at different occasions.

Not convinced? Let’s take a look back at the history. How many pairs of shoes did a typical person have hundreds of years ago? Probably only one or two for all purposes. There were exceptions like royal families but they were not typical.

How many shoes does a typical person have today? I think at least several. A typical person may have shoes for home, office, beach, sports (could be many like running shoes, tennis shoes, soccer shoes, if you are lucky enough golf shoes), party, and so on. You wear the shoes that match what you do and where you are, and sometimes how you feel, for example wear different colors of same style shoes.

Same thing will happen to every user who will have PC for serious works, tablet for Web browsing and light games like angry bird, smart phones for text messaging, checking email, and tweets. The conditions and motivations for this diversification are almost here: lower costs, networking, fashionable designs. For one thing, the $99 HP touch pad has set up the standard for low cost devices.

What matters the next?

With diversified client devices, users will enjoy utmost conveniences of accessing information and communication. At the same time, they will have data scattered around these devices, which may result in frustration while trying to share them. We will need new technologies for data which is the key asset for users, therefore deserves more focuses in the future.

Here are things we need to take on with data:

Data sharing and synchronization: You would like your data in multiple devices to be shared and synchronized so that you can access it from any of your devices. Centralized data storage may be a good candidate for this as well. Ideally the sharing and synchronization should be transparent to you so you don’t need to worry about details.
Data targeting: all data is stored in one format or the other. It works well on some devices but not necessarily on others. For example, you may enjoy a video on your smart phone, but will you with the same resolution and size on your PC? Probably not. You will store one copy of video, but it should be trans-coded to different targets. Same thing for other types of data which may need reformatting.
Data security: With data shared, you want your data as secure as before. It involves encryption and communication. More importantly, don’t make it too cumbersome.
Data protection: you want your data to be backed up regularly so that you don’t lose much if you happen to break your devices or lose them.

Again, cloud computing can play a significant role in these areas. You know now why I am interested in this topic.

What do you think? Did I miss anything?

Diversified Devices Plus Cloud Data: Future of Client Computing originally appeared on DoubleCloud by Steve Jin, author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall) and creator of VMware vSphere Java API. Follow Steve on Twitter and receive future articles via RSS or Email.

DoubleCloud.org » Cloud Computing

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