MGT 7-1.indd - KMI Media Group

to be spread across commodity hardware
and software grids to enable its near realtime
completion and delivery,” said Cuppan.
“Cloud architecture concepts may allow us
to address processing transients and the
fluid plug-and-play objectives of coalition
operations.”
VIRTUALIZATION MIDDLEWARE
Meanwhile, industry innovations and
implementations plow ahead, not waiting
for the standards. One example is the way
in which GeoEye and Appistry are working
together to cloud-enable key applications
using Appistry’s Enterprise Application Fabric
(EAF) to create a fault-tolerant cloud.
“We’re using the Appistry EAF fabric to move
to a distributed processing system,” Helmering
said.
GeoEye supplies the algorithms and key
software, while Appistry provides the EAF
software. “We built frameworks on top of
EAF that are customized for geospatial use.
GeoEye is using it in production now for
sensor data coming from a variety of satellites,
taking raw data and creating refined
product,” said Lozano.
“We’ve gone from prototyping to building
real software,” he said. “We’re cloudenabling
GeoEye’s product that massages
incoming data so they can run their applications
on private clouds to achieve higher
scales more quickly at lower infrastructure
and operational costs by using off-the-shelf
hardware.”
EAF is virtualization middleware that
is highly scalable and aggregated, pulling
together different views of hardware
to appear as one. “A key to cloud-enabling
applications is how to aggregate the underlying
resources, whether physical or virtual,”
Lozano noted.
EAF achieves fault tolerance by automatically
reassigning work in the event of a
processing problem.
Lozano said EAF can cloud-enable applications
easily in some cases by simply adding
application metadata to tell EAF what the
target application is doing. “When the situation
is more complex, it includes [application
programming interface] calls that are
independent of the cloud,” he said.
Lozano believes a missing ingredient that
is essential to the success of cloud computing
is the ability to make applications feel native
to the world of the cloud.
Using EAF is one way to cloud-enable
applications. Another is Hadoop, an open
source software platform for writing applications
that process massive amounts of data
on large clusters of commodity hardware.
Hadoop uses the Hadoop Distributed File
Systems (HDFS) to implement MapReduce,
which divides applications into many blocks
of work, while HDFS creates multiple replications
of data blocks to achieve reliability.
HDFS then places replications of data on
nodes in a cluster.
NGA has studied Hadoop as a blueprint
by which to take an OGC geospatial metadata
standard called Catalog Web Service (CSW)
and distribute it broadly. “CSW backend
implementation details that enable clients to
discover data and related processing services
might be implemented using HDFS, which
are central cloud processing constructs for
Google and Yahoo. The CSW indices may be
distributed across a broad computational lattice,”
said Cuppan.
Both Amazon and Google have technology
similar to Hadoop to cloud-enable
applications, but it is kept proprietary as a
way to encourage customers to bring their
data to Amazon or Google’s cloud computing
platform. Google’s Big Table is a compressed,
high-performance RDMS built partly on
the Google File System, which Google App
Engine customers can access.
However fast and petabyte-scale the
Google Big Table database is, developers
could need to rewrite their Big Table applications.
“If you write your application to make
use of Big Table, it’s proprietary and you can’t
redeploy the application extensively without
rewriting it,” Lozano said, adding that
Appistry is working on a standard approach
to minimize source code changes made in
order to cloud-enable an application.
FILE MANAGEMENT
File management and security are essential
issues with large global geospatial files.
To ease existing file management issues
resulting from complex, multiple network
attached storage (NAS) or storage area network
(SAN) systems that might not scale
well, it is usually necessary to integrate storage
and file systems.
Establishing a common file system that
is shared by Windows, Linux and Unix users
can achieve seamless interoperability that
carves a path to cloud computing. “In Windows,
you would see a shared drive, like a D
drive, that looks the same to one as another
regardless of the underlying platform,” said
IBM’s Ames.
In one example, IBM’s existing, tested
technology, the Scale Out File System
(SOFS), accomplishes this objective. The
SOFS is an NAS/grid system that manages
and broadly scales out NAS environments,
in part by optimizing storage. SOFS utilizes
the company’s General Parallel File System,
a highly secure, long-tested and established
high performance computing system.
IBM middleware, the Websphere Federation
Server, contains an embedded RDMS
and integrates remote, diverse data and content
sources, making them appear as if
they were the same database. The technology
contains security management and user
authentication. The SAIC Common Criteria
Testing Lab successfully tested the security
of Websphere Federation Server running on
AIX and Red Hat Linux.
“Using Websphere Federation Server, a
user writes a single query, WRS then optimizes
the query, sends the request across
the heterogeneous information stores, which
then joins the necessary information and
sends it back to the user,” explained Ames.
There is no question that the desire to
achieve improved exploitation of available
intelligence is leading to consolidated cloud
strategies for geospatial information.
“We have all these intelligence capabilities
across the globe. It makes sense to integrate
by cross-tipping or cross information
providing so analysts could discover other
capabilities. One example is combining imagery
intelligence with signals intelligence. If
you have a fixed high resolution image from
a given time and a moving, lower resolution
image, then it’s stronger to have the fixed
image plus the moving image to acquire a
much richer intelligence view,” said Ames.
“By putting the information silos into an
integrated information cloud, you can make
the information much more usable, as it is
easier to get to.”
While NGA takes cloud computing seriously,
the agency doesn’t have any unrealistic
expectations about how easy it
will be to deliver. “Placing GEOINT in an
agile, high-performance computational
cloud is certainly part of the strategy. However,
that objective remains a vision and
not yet committed to through the establishment
of tangible acquisition programs,” said
Cuppan. ✯
Contact Editor Harrison Donnelly at
harrisond@kmimediagroup.com. For more
information related to this subject, search our
archives at www.MGT-kmi.com.
www.MGT-kmi.com MGT 7.1 | 13