Abiquo Visits the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Last wednesday we had the chance to visit the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where the supercomputer MareNostrum is hosted. It’s one of the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and the number 40 in the world, according to the last Top500 list.  MareNostrum has reached 94.21 Teraflops (94.21 trillions of operations per second). It has now 10.240 processors with a final calculation capacity of 94.21 Teraflops.

Jordi Torres Viñals and Ricard Galvadá invited us to visit the facilities. They are researchers in the areas of distributed computing, and of course it includes Cloud Computing. We wanted to meet each other to know more about our activities, and learn, learn, learn. We explained what abiCloud is and what is our value for the companies implementing our solution, and they explained their projects and objectives. I was impressed with their deep knowledge of the Cloud and specially about metering and metrics.

The pictures below where taken inside the MareNostrum datacenter. The datacenter is located inside an ancient chapel. It makes you feel like being inside a superheroes movie visiting the villians’ lair. From left to right, Ricard Gavaldá (BSC), Diego Parrilla (Abiquo), Xavier Fernández (Abiquo), Helena Torras (Abiquo).

Thoughts about Webhostingday’09 and CloudCamp in Cologne

Last week I spent a couple of days in the WebHostingDay event in Phantasialand in Brühl, near Cologne. Within the WebhostingDay held a ‘special’ CloudCamp, as it was not associated with any particular city (The event was not Cologne CloudCamp).

The first thing that impressed me was the size of the event. It was big. And the place, Phantasialand, was big too. It is an amusement park, Port Aventura style, Terra Mitica and these, but with a cold from hell. The park was closed for the event, and each area had different conferences and activities. So for next year three days instead of two, and probably two people instead of one. Although I signed to several speeches, the truth is I could not go to any, since almost all the time on the first day I spent in the area called ‘hosting.Fair’, which was where the business booths were. Upon arrival, Manuel Jaffrin from Sun Microsystems offered to their plasma screen to show AbiCloud to the audience (we are members of the Sun Startups Essentials), so that’s what I did as you can see in this video:

One of the things that got clear of the event is that Cloud Computing is the way of the future for hosting providers. But, how to go that road is still something of visionaries. The most advanced have taken the path Virtual Private Servers (VPS), but this is not Cloud Computing, but it may be a start. As someone commented to me at the event, also depends on how each country evolves. UK, Germany and USA for example the VPS has matured, but Spain, for example, is something that is not yet mature enough.

Of the people I met, which impressed me most was Tom Leyden, Product Manager of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems, and former Qlayer. I was talking to him broadly about the future of Cloud Computing, and the truth is that I was delighted that my vision of what is fit quite well with their vision. It means that the vision of Abiquo is aligned with the visionaries of the industry (Obviously Sun bought Q-layer for a reason, right?). By the way, they gave me the chance in the Lighting-Talks to talk about Abiquo: five minutes presentation of companies that do Cloud Computing in the CloudCamp. Unfortunately, I had to go to the hotel to make the presentation, so I missed the party (a big mistake).

Next day was held the CloudCamp WHD, a CloudCamp especially for the WebhostingDay. The event was held at Joe’s Bar, a bar that seemed to come out of a Spaghetti Western movie. What you can see it in the following video:

Max Robbins asked how many customers of Cloud Computing were in the room, and few raised their hands. Max findings were that less than 1% of the IT world had jumped into the Cloud Computing wagon. The problem is not security, it is of timings. The adoption process has to mature and evolve. It is a matter of confidence. Something I noticed was how all the speakers spoke of success stories very close to the world of startups, and only talked about startups. Well, I think the audience for the event was not the usual one in a CloudCamp, so I think that the message was not correct. By the way, in the next video you can see my lighting talk at 15.30 minute:

Among the speakers I would recommend the presentations of Kristof Spiegel about the future of Cloud Computing and William Louth on metrics collection and analysis. And among the products I recommend Terremark and aiCache. I also discovered OpenQRM, an opensource platform for Cloud Computing that differs of AbiCloud in several ways.

To conclude, I think the event was very interesting to validate of Abiquo proposal in Cloud Computing and confirms my ideas about what should be the future of Cloud Computing. The others suppliers have proposals as public cloud providers (Terremark, Sun Cloud, Amazon Web Services), and although most say they will sell their products as private clouds in the future (no date given), for now the only we have taken the opposite route and have offered first private clouds clouds before public ones is Abiquo.

Abiquo Lighting Talk about AbiCloud at CloudCamp WHD 2009

This is the video of the CloudCamp WHD lightning talk I gave at the CloudCamp WHD. The talk starts at 15.30:

More about what happened in the CloudCamp WHD and in the WebHosting Day events soon.

Abiquo at the WebhostingDay in Cologne

Tomorrow March 18th and 19th I will be at the Webhosting Day in Cologne, Germany. As one of the major events in Europe about hosting technologies, they will offer an adequate setting for the first CloudCamp Europe. The list of speakers is really brilliant and I hope to learn and connect with a lot of members of the Cloud hosting community. I would like to meet hosting providers and ISPs all around the globe that cares about Cloud hosting and want to know what can Abiquo can do to help them.

We will show our new version of Abiquo, our open source cloud computing management platform. Sun Microsystems will allow me to use some room of its booth for live demos. So don’t be shy and come and visit me. Still, if you are shy but want to know about the product, please send me an email to dparrilla [AT] abiquo.com to schedule a demo somewhere, or just wait for a couple of days to download it from our revamped website soon.