Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Oracle

Gluecon 2010: A Chat With Mark Carlson About the State of Cloud Storage and the CDMI Standard

May 31, 2010 / / 4 Comments

SNIA-cloud-logo I first met Mark at #CloudCampDenver on the evening before the Glue Conference (the event was also called CloudCamp @ Gluecon).  Mark volunteered to head up the breakout group on cloud storage, and he facilitated that quite well. I knew I'd want to interview him before Gluecon was over, with his great background in storage. 
MarkCarlson-Gluecon I didn't understand till later that he was also Chair of the Cloud Storage Work Group within SNIA. Mark's long career in storage includes 12 years with Sun (recently acquired by Oracle).  His title is now Principal Cloud Strategist at Oracle. Follow Mark on Twitter here: @macsun.

Mark is one of the key guys behind SNIA's relatively new Cloud Storage Initiative, the mission of which is stated as "working together toward enabling easier cloud solutions deployment." A big part of this initiative is the new Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) Standard, which was the topic of Mark's presentation at the Glue Conference on Thursday afternoon, just prior to my interview with him (link below).

The Cloud Storage Initiative has a full slate of activities planned for 2010, including one that Mark is very much involved in: the 2010 Storage Developers Conference, being held September 20-23 in Santa Clara, CA. 
SNIA-SDC-logo Now in its seventh year, this event is surely being energized by the seemingly never-ending buzz of "cloud" — which Mark's ultimate boss, Larry Ellison, once called "the orange that's the new pink." (Makes me laugh out loud every time I think of that video clip.) Cloud storage is now being touted by virtually all the traditional storage vendors, and certainly a whole bunch of startups. The SDC event brings together developers, engineers, architects, product/program managers, technical marketing managers, and C-level storage execs as well.  I sure hope I have a chance to get there and cover this event. It would be great to live-blog the proceedings, as I did at Glue.

To stay connected with what's going with SNIA's cloud storage initiative, here are some key links:

1) Join the Google Group

2) Follow the Twitter account: @SNIAcloud

3) Subscribe to the SNIA Cloud Storage blog

4) Engage with others on Google Buzz


• Download or listen to Graeme's interview with Mark Carlson about cloud storage, the CDMI standard, and the upcoming Storage Developers Conference (MP3)"


Andreessen: Any Site Can Now Be a ‘Social App’

October 31, 2007 / / 0 Comments

You say you’re feeling down, bunky, because everyone seems to have a Facebook app but you?  Well, got a web site?  Then, perk up, son!  Because you are well on your way to having a social app — one that’ll actually run on a whole bunch of social networking sites that have at least as much traffic as Facebook — and maybe even on Facebook itself soon. At least that’s what Marc Andreessen, founder of social-networking platform Ning, has to say on his blog post today.

It’s all thanks to the "Open Social" spec set to be announced tomorrow by Google, which says it already has about a dozen partners, including Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning,
Friendster, Salesforce.com, and Oracle. See this Wall Street Journal story (actually dated tomorrow!) and this one in the New York Times, which was published today.

So, how can you transform your web site into an "Open Social" app?  Andreessen says it’s even easier than developing a Facebook app. He says you "just take your current HTML and Javascript front-end pages and create a version of those pages that use the Open Social API."

Andreessen believes web site owners will soon begin maintaining multiple sets of front-end pages for their web sites, in order to get "maximum distribution across the largest number of users." And he says it’s easy. They’ll have a single back-end, but multiple sets of front-end pages.  Here’s how he defines what those multiple sets will be:

• One set of standard HTML and Javascript pages for consumption by normal web browser.
• Another set of HTML and Javascript pages that use the Open Social API’s Javascript calls for consumption with Open Social containers/social networks.
• A third set of pages in FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that use Facebook’s proprietary APIs for consumption within Facebook as a Facebook app.
• Perhaps a fourth set of pages adapted for the Apple iPhone and/or other mobile devices.

"The overwhelming good news here," said Andreessen in his blog post, "is that these pages can all be served and serviced by the same back end code."

I think this "Open Social" spec is big news.  It’s something I know a lot of insiders have been been thinking about, at least in the back of their minds, since the Facebook juggernaut took off some five months ago.  Walled gardens — proprietary platforms — just don’t last on the Internet. Like my buddy PXLated said in a previous comment, "The Internet just routes around ’em."  Indeed.  Let the party begin….

UPDATE (11/1):  Marc Andreessen did another very informative blog post with a screen cast and screenshots showing how the Open Social spec can be implemented, using three actual Ning social networks as examples.

 

 

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