DownloadableOnDemand Data Center Vendor: QLayer ?
In an email response to my post on Amazon's EC2 offering, where I suggested it wouldn't get interesting until the next layer of cluster management/deployment was rolled out, an observant blog reader pointed me to QLayer - a vendor of a data center on demand service, that sounds suspiciously similar to 'something that would make Amazon EC2 extremely compelling'.
QLayer manages
OS images (QImage),
storage (QSan),
network topology (QNetwork) and
replication for deployment/failover (QReplicate)
so that you can instantiate a VM-based data center topology by clicking some buttons on a web page ( I think ).
Viewing their flash intro, they even have a control panel slide with checkboxes for "Click here for Mail Server, Click here for Database".
Awesome.
Lazy sysadmins (and developer's who are occasionally press-ganged into system administration like myself ) can rejoice.
The Belgium-based firm raised $9M last week in a second round of funding -- they are definitely someone to keep an eye on.
Related Thought #1:: the missing piece in all this is some sort of meta-distribution or vendor that can certify/support clusters that work in harmony - making sure all the ports/network address/authentication/file paths etc line up. Clustered apt-get? MetaYum? I haven't even read about anything like this, so please let me know if you have. I know that there are grid management tools, but I don't think they cope with the heterogeneity of a data center (vs the clone-army regularity of a compute farm). It's possible that you have to go to someone like Opsware and sign away your first child to get this, but I'm hopeful for something simpler/developer friendly.
Related Thought #2: It would be nice if Windows were invited to this party ... but consider the licensing complexity of using non-OSS software in the above scenarios: Instead of 'Check here for Mail Server' it would probably take you several hours to figure out what combination of Exchange+AD+w2k3 Server CPU-based licenses, per -seat or device access licenses, a-la-cart vs. silver level support contract vs gold level, etc ... ARG! That's not where you wanted to go today.
9:42:23 AM 
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