Splunk, the San Francisco-based startup that makes software to search through huge volumes of IT log data, has named Godfrey Sullivan as CEO. Sullivan, who revamped business intelligence software heavyweight Hyperion before selling it to Oracle for $3.3 billion, is quick to point out that Splunk isn’t, however, another turnaround. “The gorillas have aggregated or acquired the mid-caps they need,” he said. “Life is too short to spend it rescuing the chumps that the gorillas left behind.” [Read more]

We speculated on vertical stratification of clouds at Interop Unconference back in May: demand for specialized cloud platforms will arise despite the availability of highly centralized low cost utility computing (i.e. Google, Amazon) since specific requirements of privacy or business process will require value added services and specialized architectures. Could one imagine a cloud provider specializing in HIPAA compliance?

Well an example just hit our radar: Fedcloud offers “Federally Compliant Trusted Cloud Computing.” (thanks Data Center Knowledge!) “A Trusted Cloud Computing Environment: Apptis and ServerVault combined our capabilities to provide you computing in an on-demand infrastructure that enables you to acquire, utilize, and disengage without contractual dependency (subscription fees, licenses, or long-term commitments). This extraordinary capability offers a utility bundle inclusive of hardware, software, personnel (24×7x365 engineering and operations, and application management) all with federally compliant security, processes, and procedures.”

Why this verticalization? Architecture and operations can matter a lot when specific requirements are introduced. There is an opportunity for premium margins for utility computing that addresses specific industries. You may need to be in a very narrow geographical area, or need technologies specific to your trade to be running in the cloud data center. Perhaps you aren’t allowed to share a hypervisor with other organizations? Or you might need on-site staff trained in particular arcane skills. Some types of vertical clouds could theoretically rest on top of infrastructure service clouds in the same way that Rightscale and Elastra sit on top of AWS, others will need to have an entirely difference architecture. Look for wide diversification and layering of these “vertical clouds” in the next few years, and a healthy ecosystem of options for cloud consumers!

While on the topic of cloud computing, Todd Hoff has an excellent short list of other cloud computing blogs to check out!

Amazon has publicly released a new Amazon web service called Elastic Block Store providing up to a terabyte per volume of persistent storage and allowing you to run your database in their cloud with the advantages of snapshots and flexible attachment to servers.

Rightscale, who offers a management and automation system based on AWS, has an excellent article explaining how Amazon’s Elastic Block Store works. In testing they report over 70 MB/s (that’s over half a gigabit per second) and over 1000 IOPS or input/output operations per second which is the ballpark equivalent of a dozen 7200rpm hard drives serving your data in tandem. They also report “it is possible to mount multiple volumes on the same instance such that file systems of 10TB are practical.” No doubt much more detailed performance and feature analysis will ensue shortly.
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I know I’m a little late with this, considering the fact that Unconference was last Tuesday. And I already got the lecture on relevance and blog timing from Mr. Bitcurrent himself, but my current experiments on creating the 25th and 26th hours of a day are not as successful as I’d like, so this is really the first chance I’ve had to put something down.

It appears that Unconference in general was a big success at Interop. The Web Operations track was definitely interesting and included a bunch of probing discussions around our topics.

Some highlights:

During the Maximizing Web Performance session, we had good discussions around what web performance really is, how we can accelerate it, and what some of the realities of deployment are. Kent Alstad from Strangeloop Networks brought up the web performance equation which is a good way of examining all the components that go into end user performance in a web application.

One interesting point here was how the “client compute time” has become increasingly important with new web2.0 apps that have actual client processing (javascript, etc). That’s probably a component that we didn’t really take into account a few years ago.

In the Beyond Web1.0 discussion, Brian Albers from Kaazing gave us a good overview of what new technologies like Ajax and Comet were going to mean to the network and how some of the protocol behaviors that we’ve taken for granted for the last few years (particularly with HTTP) are different when it comes to these cutting edge technologies.

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