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Monthly Archives: March 2011
GridGain joins CRN’s “The Top 20 Cloud Platform Vendors Of 2011″
We are very pleased to be part of CRN’s “The Top 20 Cloud Platform Vendors Of 2011″
More to come – stay tuned!
Functional Programming in Java – Lessons Learned by GridGain
I’ve just uploaded the slides from my JavaOne 2010 presentation “Functional Programming in Java – Lessons Learned by GridGain”.
Enjoy!
GridGain Presents at TriJUG
Dmitriy Setrakyan will be speaking about GridGain and its Scala usage at TriJUG on March 21st, Raleigh, North Carolina. Topic is about “Cloud Computing with Scala and GridGain”. As always – plenty of live Scala coding. World’s shortest MapReduce app in 5 minutes in Scala as well as Data Grid access using Scala. See it to believe it 
Hope to you see there!
GridGain 3.0 – Ideal OEM Cloud Application Platform?
Since the release of GridGain 3.0 last year we’ve seen a surge of interest in OEM licensing of GridGain. We’ve been caught a little bit off guard here – and I’ll try to rationalize this dynamic in this blog.
When we started GridGain project 5 years ago the OEM wasn’t even something we considered as a viable licensing option. In fact, why would anyone want to black-box the entire cloud middleware to use in their own software products?
After talking to our customers I see now three critical reasons that make GridGain probably the only OEM friendly cloud computing software:
1. SPI Architecture
If there is one single feature that drives rapid OEM adoption of GridGain it would be our unique SPI (Service Provider Interface) based architecture. Similar in ideas to OSGi or CSA but tightly integrated into the core of GridGain – it allows for unprecedented customization of GridGain.
In fact, GridGain has 11 subsystems that can be totally replaced by user-provided implementations without affecting the rest of GridGain operations. From auto-discovery to communication protocols, from failover management to collision resolution, from deployment to tracing, from advanced load balancing to bootstrapping – GridGain is the industry only cloud computing middleware that has these capabilities.
For OEM usage this capability is critical. For example, the inability to customize the discovery and communication protocols is essentially a deal breaker for most of the OEM usage as cloud middleware should be able to blend into the hosting environment. GridGain allows to reuse existing networking/protocol infrastructure or adopt it via its advance SPI architecture.
2. Integrated Compute and Data Grids
GridGain remains the only distributed middleware of any kind that provides full integration between state of the art built from the ground up compute and data grid technologies. No need to awkwardly emulate compute grid with data grid or vice versa. No need to integrated desperately different projects or sacrifice on features.
For EOM users this is critical. They projects and requirements will undoubtedly change over time and they need middleware that will support them going further. From OLTP to OLAP processing, from BigData to near real-time MapReduce, from few to thousands of computers in the cluster/grid/cloud – GridGain provides cohesive platform for high performance distributed OEM applications.
3. Enterprise Edition & Commercial Licensing
OEM license is available for GridGain Enterprise Edition. Not only it includes enterprise features not available in Community Edition but it also includes support making OEM licensing safe and simple choice: you get the software that you can private label, unlimited usage and you get the original support from people who built that software and not a 3rd party provider.
Simple, effective and to the point – just the way we like it!
And our OEM license is based on our commercial license – so our customers don’t have to deal with Apache or GPL consequences for their own software. It also removes any legal exposures potentially associated with open source licenses.
GridGain User Group started…
“GridGain Daily” is out…
GridGain Tutorial Video: Functional MapReduce in Java
I’ve just uploaded this newly updated video on our FP-based MapReduce in Java. Scala version’s coming shortly…
Investing into Cloud Computing: A Chasm of Understanding
I’ve started this blog while seating at the AlwaysOn Silicon Valley Venture Capital conference at Half Moon Bay, CA about few months ago. I was actually listening to a panel of VCs and CEOs talking about investment trends in clouds computing…
What did strike me as odd is how confused some of the people on the panel were about the basics of cloud computing – yet these people tried to look substantive with some level of knowledge on the subject. Topics like SaaS/PaaS, multi-tenancy, hardware virtualization, data center virtualization, compute and data grids were thrown around without much care or consideration. It’s ironic, for example, that most SaaS-based providers have absolutely nothing to do with cloud computing, and multi-tenancy has little relevance, if any, for private clouds that account for the lion share of the cloud computing…
It just reinforced for me the industry’s little dirty secret: most VC don’t know what cloud computing is and misunderstand it (even though each and every one of them think that they absolutely do – and act that way). But what is expected and accepted of VC crowd (acting like they know) was, however, a bit unsettling to have it coming from actual entrepreneurs.
Let me explain my point about cloud computing using social media and semiconductors – two well established areas of investment (absolute majority of companies seeking investment on this conferences, by the way, were in social media related segments).
When it comes to social media most ordinary people will understand almost any new ideas and some of the technologies since… most of us, including VCs, use these technologies daily. A lot of social media is ad supported and this has been “massaged” for a decade now and extremely well understood by investors. We’ve also seen number of successful social startups done by people with little technical experience at all. In other words, many, if not most, of social startups ideas have roots in well understood “daily” social dynamics – and therefore can be easily grasped by garden verity of associates and partners in VC firms.
On another tip of the scale – the semiconductors. Nothing can be more arcane or requiring substantial special knowledge and education to even remotely understand it (pharmaceuticals are close second). The whole sector has seen substantial downturn lately but fortunately VCs have built a significant understanding and knowledge base over almost four decades of heavy investment in semiconductors. Almost every respectable firm on Sandhill road has a partner or two with deep semiconductors background. And therefore, as with social media – but for very different reasons, the semiconductors can be easily grasped by most VC firms (that have this practice).
Enter the cloud computing… Not only no one is using cloud computing in their daily lives but absolute majority of VC firms don’t have anyone on staff to help them understand it either. Partners come to VC firms often through associateship coming from successfully exited businesses (to sit out non-compete terms, etc.) and cloud businesses are still too young for this transition.
So, we are left in situation when young upstart cloud computing companies need capital to grow and yet most traditional institutional VCs are incapable yet to understand/appreciate ideas – are therefore are unreasonably gun-shy.
The answer for many companies in this area: angels. Angels tend to take more risk easier but most importantly usually are much more up to speed with the latest technologies and trends allowing them better appreciate the new ideas before traditional VCs have their risks hedged. Furthermore, angel investment overall is slowly squeezing out traditional VCs from early stage investments – and that’s a good thing in my opinion.
Enjoy!
