Apple cloud vs. Google cloud

Hi all The Mad hatter again remember that Apple have been using cloud tech for a while now with mobile me, and if you have an iPhone like me. Then this is nothing new Apple is just making mobile me better.

Have a read below

Takeaway: Google and Apple are taking fundamentally different approaches to cloud computing. It’s important to understand the differences. Here’s a quick summary.

At the end of TechRepublic’s live commentary of the Apple WWDC keynote on Monday, after Apple had unveiled iCloud, I had a conversation with the participants in our live chat in which I explained that Apple’s cloud was a “store and forward” cloud as opposed to an “All your base are belong to us” cloud. Goofy Internet memes and technical jargon aside, that’s a pretty good description of the difference between the Apple cloud and the Google cloud — even though I was half-joking at the time.

Let’s look closer.

The Google cloud

Google’s entire strategy and approach to the cloud is based on the future, and not the Internet as it is today. Google is betting that the world will have low-cost, ubiquitous Internet access in the not-too-distant future, including fiber connections in offices and homes and super-fast mobile broadband in virtually every nook and cranny of the planet.

It is building its cloud for that world, and it’s hoping that by the time it has its application stack refined and running like clockwork that broadband will be everywhere. That’s absolutely necessary, since all of Google’s apps are connection-dependent and all of the data is stored on Google’s servers in the cloud. You’ve got to be online to take advantage of many of the best features, like simultaneous editing of Google Docs where you can see your co-workers’ edits happening in real time.

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I love Google’s optimism about the future of broadband, but it’s not going to magically happen on its own solely based on free market forces. There are too many places where it’s just not financially profitable to deploy high speed access — and probably never will be. In order for Google’s vision to come to light, there will need to be more competition in the big markets and much stronger public-private partnerships in the smaller markets.

Google has started talking about making critical apps available offline, especially for Chromebooks. The company has already taken a few baby steps in that direction with Google Gears. However, the fact that offline access is an afterthought and not an intrinsic component of Google’s solution tells you where offline and local syncing rank on the company’s priority list.

The Apple cloud

Apple’s approach is not to use the cloud as the computer-in-the-sky the runs all the cool stuff. It doesn’t want or need everything to happen in the cloud. Instead, it views the cloud as the conductor of Grand Central Station who makes sure all of the trains run on time and that they make it to the right destinations.

With iCloud, announced on Monday at WWDC 2011, Apple uses the cloud to orchestrate data streams rather than control them. This is the cloud as a central repository for apps, music, media, documents, messages, photos, backups, settings, and more. A decade ago, both Apple and Microsoft talked up idea of the Mac and the PC, respectively, as the central hub of our digital life and work, with a variety of devices relying on it to coordinate content. On Monday, Apple clearly stated that’s no longer the case. For it, iCloud is now the hub.

“We are going to demote the PC to just be a device,” Steve Jobs said.

In this way, Apple is taking an approach unlike Google (which essentially mimics the old mainframe approach). Instead, Apple is doing something similar to what the popular startupDropbox does. It is allowing users to sync their personal data and media purchases from their computers and mobile devices up to a personalized central repository. Then, that central repository on the Internet syncs all of the data and media files back down to all of the user’s devices, so that all of them have the same data. Users no longer have to worry about constantly managing their files and music libraries in order to keep them up-to-date across a bunch of different machines and devices - a computer, a tablet, and a smartphone, for example.

Geeks, technophiles, and IT pros tend to love this approach because they still control their own data and have local copies of everything. However, syncing can also get a little complicated, especially if you choose to not automatically sync all of your devices (to save on performance and bandwidth). It remains to be seen whether mainstream users and business professionals will grasp the syncing concept and easily make it work.

Still, Apple’s approach is probably more practical for the Internet as it exists today. But, in a world with ubiquitous ultra-fast broadband, will syncing still matter in 5-10 years? That will depend on whether users prefer to have local copies of their data for performance, security, and peace of mind.

Naturally, there have been heated debates about Apple iCloud in social media since WWDC. The most poignant comment I saw came from Lessien on Twitter, who said, “In Apple’s vision, the cloud makes native apps better. Others see the cloud as a substitute for native apps.”

Final analysis

All that said, let me try to boil this down into two sentences that shouldn’t surprise you. For Google, the Web is the center of the universe. For Apple, your device is the center of the universe.

Can they both be right?

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery planning has become a war cry in many organizations as the result of high profile natural and manmade disasters and increasingly strict regulations and laws mandating the protection and long-term retention of data -- an organization's most irreplaceable asset second only to skilled personnel.

For the next four columns, I will present an in-depth treatment of what's involved in disaster recovery planning from a practical standpoint. For those who have not previously worked on a planning project, it is hoped that this series will dispel the myths and help you focus on what needs to be done to develop an effective recovery capability.

DR planning methodologies are often branded to specific consulting practices and represented as complex and convoluted processes known only to a few privileged practitioners. But in fact, the DR planning methodology is a straightforward application of common sense that follows a pragmatic project plan similar to systems development lifecycle methodology.

As shown in this diagram, the initial DR planning project involves 10 tasks, and these may be further refined

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To be clear: an app – or application – is a piece of software built to perform one function, such as sending emails or playing a game, and is separate from ‘system software’, such as Windows or Android. The current ‘app revolution’ is built mostly on selling cheap, downloadable apps to iPhones and Android phones, but also to PCs. The app can be a one-touch route to a train timetable, or popular game like the No 1 app, Angry Birds, or a newspaper website, or a dating service. A typical cost is 59p, paid through an existing account such as the Apple store, though many are free or have free ‘lite’ versions.

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Vince (The Mad Hatter)

For cloud automation, think flat networks and Ethernet fabric

The goal of the cloud—whether public or private—is to make business services immediately available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. To do that cost-effectively, cloud automation—or the provisioning and deprovisioning of servers, storage, networking and applications on demand—is crucial. For networking, cloud automation will mean the move to Ethernet fabrics and potentially open network software.

Cloud computing is a different economic model and a different 'technology destination' that depends on greater flexibility by standardising and simplifying. "You can't innovate until you've optimised and automated," said analyst Jonathan Steel, founder and CEO of The Bathwick Group.

Cloud networks require going flat and using Ethernet fabrics

Networking vendors argue that an important part of that simplification and optimisation is to make the network as flat as possible, for example, by collapsing it to a single Layer 2 tier in the data centre, plus another tier for aggregation. This is generally done using Ethernet network fabrics that borrow the almost peer-to-peer concept of the storage area network (SAN) fabric.

"The cloud requires a dramatic change in the way of looking at the data centre," said Renaud Larsen, chief cloud architect for Juniper Networks. "First, you want to collapse the network to a single tier; then the problem is how to manage that single tier. You need a unified Layer 2 hook to the system management layer."

For most vendors, this means the move toward automated network management. Some examples are Juniper with its QFabric architecture, which lets network administrators manage the networking infrastructure as a single switch with a single view of the fabric; Cisco with its FabricPath technology for scalable and flexible networks; and Force10 Networks with its Open Cloud Networking initiative, which uses standards to add interoperability, thereby easing the task of automating workload allocation within the data centre network.

Simon Pamplin, UK and Ireland systems engineering manager at Brocade, said that "providers are all heading towards massive hyper-environments, so they have to simplify and automate the management because they can't afford to manage it otherwise."

More on cloud networks
Cloud computing network primer
Inter-networking data centres for the cloud
Cloud computing networks: Architecture goes flat
"It plays into Ethernet fabrics—large, flat Layer 2 networks with the same ease of management and self-healing capabilities as SANs that are designed to make cloud infrastructures easier," Pamplin said. "Storage networks are just large clouds, and the cloud concept is very similar to storage virtualisation." In this model, he said that each device on a Brocade-based cloud would have a virtualised ID, decoupled from the infrastructure.

In cloud networks, it's not about switches, but open management systems

"When people want to build a cloud, the next question isn't what switches to use, it's what cloud management system," said Doug Gourlay, VP of marketing at cloud networking specialist Arista Networks. "The cloud is an operating model, not a topology. It's a model predicated on services, and on automated provisioning through programmatic interfaces."

Where the vendors differ is in just how much their automation tools and interfaces depend upon their hardware, and in particular on their proprietary switch operating systems. Cisco, for instance, describes FabricPath as "a set of capabilities within the NX-OS software" that runs its Nexus 7000 switches.

But that's why networking is the laggard when it comes to auto provisioning within the data centre, said Jeff Baher, senior director of product marketing at Force10 Networks. "There is a significantly larger open infrastructure on computing and storage [than on networking]," he said, arguing that most network gear lacks the control-level interoperability that has evolved in other areas of IT.

"In networking there's a similar number of vendors, and the forwarding plane works so boxes can communicate, but once you start to peel back the layers, for example on Juniper or Cisco, there is a lot of optimisation, which tends to imply a degree of lock-in. It's a control plane issue, rather than the forwarding plane—the control plane is what glues the open network together." Baher added, "There is nothing up our sleeve. Our boxes are boxes, and our control plane is 100% standard. Nothing prevents a customer from adding other equipment."

Ken Duda, Arista's VP of software engineering, said that the issue is not just building a standards-based infrastructure—although that is important—but the ability to then reprogram and reconfigure it instantly. "Our entire EOS command interpreter is written in Python, so you can modify it on the fly," he explained. "Our router is fundamentally a big Unix server, so you can change the routing if its neighbour goes down, or dynamically modify a VLAN in response to a virtual machine migration."

For those with long memories, this approach will ring bells because the very first routers were simply PCs with two network cards and some routing software. As seems to be increasingly the case with IT, what goes around comes around.

Cloud computing: How to avoid a network bottleneck - 5/3/2011 - Computer Weekly

Cloud computing: How to avoid a network bottleneck - 5/3/2011 - Computer Weekly